3.9 Summary
Key Points
- As the Mughal Empire weakened, the Marathas rose from the western Deccan to become, for a time, the most powerful force in India.
- Shivaji (born 1630) was driven by the ideal of Swarajya, “self-rule”: political, economic and cultural independence. He captured hill-forts, used guerrilla warfare (ganimi kava), and built a navy.
- In 1674 Shivaji was crowned Chhatrapati at Raigad with Vedic rites and began his own calendar era, declaring the Maratha state a sovereign kingdom.
- Shivaji built a strong administration: he paid officials salaries instead of land grants (a centralised, merit-based system), and created the Ashta Pradhan, a council of eight ministers. A network of forts and a fair revenue system supported the state.
- After Shivaji’s death (1680), his successors resisted Aurangzeb for nearly 27 years: Sambhaji (executed 1689), Rajaram, and especially Tarabai, who led offensive campaigns. The long war exhausted the Mughals.
- After Aurangzeb’s death (1707), the Peshwas (based at Pune, e.g. Bajirao I) led a rapid expansion. Power was shared in the Maratha Confederacy of great families, Scindia (Gwalior), Holkar (Indore), Bhonsle (Nagpur), Gaekwad (Baroda), who reached as far as Delhi, Lahore and Attock.
- The Marathas were great patrons of culture, protecting temples and traditions and supporting arts such as Bharatanatyam at Thanjavur, and promoting Marathi and Sanskrit.
- They declined due to the devastating defeat at the Third Battle of Panipat (1761), internal disunity among the Confederacy, and the rising power of the British, who defeated them in the Three Anglo-Maratha Wars (1775–1818). The ideal of Swarajya, however, lived on to inspire India’s freedom movement.
One Sentence to Remember From Shivaji’s dream of Swarajya to the vast Maratha Confederacy, a regional power reshaped all of India, and its fall, driven by disunity and the British, shows that unity matters as much as strength.