Class 8 Social Science Chapter 3: The Rise of the Marathas

A kingdom does not start from nothing

It is tempting to begin this story in 1646, with a teenager taking his first fort. But a political movement needs something to stand on: a language people share, a memory of having been governed before, and a sense that the people of a region belong together. All three existed in Maharashtra long before anyone thought of a Maratha empire. This topic is about that groundwork.

Who the Marathas are

The Marathas are a people of the Deccan plateau, and more exactly of what is now Maharashtra. What identifies them is the language they speak. Marathi has an unbroken written record stretching back to the twelfth century, which is a long time for any language to have been carrying poetry, scripture and argument.

Why a long literary record matters

A language with centuries of writing behind it can hold ideas that reach beyond one village. Songs travel. Arguments get repeated. A ruler who later wanted to address a whole region in its own tongue had something ready to use, and did not have to invent a vocabulary for government out of nothing.

Who ruled before

Through the thirteenth century most of Maharashtra belonged to the Yadava dynasty, governing from Devagiri. That place is the same fort we met in the last chapter under a different name, Daulatabad, the city Muhammad bin Tughlaq made and unmade his capital. Early in the fourteenth century the Khilji Sultanate of Delhi overcame the Yadavas.

What survived a change of rulers

A conquest changes who collects the taxes. It does not automatically change what people sing, read or believe, and in Maharashtra the cultural traditions carried on. The strongest of them was bhakti, which means devotion directed at the divine, or at one chosen deity.

What the bhakti saints actually did

Between roughly the seventh and the seventeenth centuries, saints and seekers all over India chose devotion over outward ritual. They came from every layer of society. Here is the decision that mattered: they composed their songs and poems in the languages people actually spoke, not in a learned language only a few could read.

Writing in the language of the street

Choosing the ordinary language meant the message could travel. A poem in Marathi could be sung by a farmer who had never been taught Sanskrit, and carried to the next village by somebody who liked the tune. That is a very efficient way to spread an idea in a world without printing.

The saints of Maharashtra

Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Tukaram and Ramdas are among the names that became widely known in this period. They also helped bring major texts, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita among them, into Marathi, so that the philosophy in them was available to anyone who spoke the language.

Devotion that touched organisation

Some of these figures went further than teaching. They gave attention to how society organised itself and to political awareness, in a way the chapter compares with the Sikh gurus. The result was that the region acquired a firm cultural footing, and a firm cultural footing is exactly what a scattered people need before they can act as one.

Earlier attempts, and why they are worth knowing

By the seventeenth century several Maratha chiefs had already tried to make themselves sovereign. Every one of those attempts failed. Knowing this changes how the next part reads: what followed was not the first idea of its kind but the first one that worked, and the difference between them is the interesting question.

A boy born in 1630

Shivaji was born in 1630 into the Bhonsle clan, to Shahaji and Jijabai. Shahaji was in the service of the Deccan sultans, which kept him away from his family for long stretches. The boy grew up at Pune, in his father's jagir, watched over by his mother and a few trusted officials. He was given both an education and a set of values.

What a jagir was, exactly

This matters, because it is often misread. A jagir was a piece of land handed over by a ruler to a noble or a soldier, in payment for service given. The holder could collect the taxes of that land and use the money for his own needs or to help the ruler when asked. It was a grant inside somebody else's state, not a kingdom of one's own.

What the Pune of his childhood was like

The Deccan sultanates that the Marathas served spent much of this period fighting one another. Pune sat in the middle of it. Constant infighting between those sultans fell hardest on ordinary people, and a child growing up there would have seen the cost of a region with no settled authority of its own.

Sixteen, and the neglected forts

At sixteen he began military campaigns, and the first object was the Pune region itself. The method was unglamorous and effective: take the forts nobody was looking after, the neglected and unoccupied ones, and put their defences back in order. A fort that is already standing is cheaper than a battle.

Swarajya, and how wide the word grew

Out of this came the idea of Swarajya, a kingdom of one's own. It did not stay a narrowly military idea. Over the years it stretched to cover economic and cultural self-reliance as well. That is why a mint, a word list and a trading ship belong in the same story as a hill fort.

Where this leads

So the ground was prepared: a language with a long record, a memory of earlier rule, a shared devotional culture, a base at Pune and a string of repaired forts. The next topic is what was built on it, and the four opponents who tried to pull it down.

Scenario:

Two students are arguing about the sentence Shahaji held a jagir at Pune. One says this means the family already ruled Pune, so the kingdom was inherited rather than founded. The other says a jagir was granted by a higher ruler and could be taken back. It carried the right to collect revenue, not the right to govern as a sovereign. Their teacher asks them to settle it from what a jagir actually was. Then they must say what did pass from father to son, and what did not.

Analysis:

A jagir was a grant inside somebody else's state. Sovereignty was the thing that had to be made, which is why the founding is dated from the capture of forts and not from a birth.

Activity:

Find out whether any land near you was once held as a grant from a ruler, and who could take it back.

Title:

Make a timeline of two lives

Safety:

No cutting is needed; fold the strip rather than trimming it.

What You Notice:

The cultural line runs for centuries before the political one starts, which is the point of the first part of this topic.

Devagiri, the Yadava capital, is the same fort that appears in the previous chapter as Daulatabad, the city Muhammad bin Tughlaq made and then unmade his capital.

The bhakti movement spans roughly a thousand years, from about the seventh century to the seventeenth.

Shivaji's first military objective was not a battle at all but a set of forts nobody was occupying.

What was ready before 1646 — LANGUAGE, MEMORY, DEVOTION — Marathi with a long record, the memory of Yadava rule, and centuries of bhakti writing in the spoken tongue.

What a jagir was not — TAXES YES, THRONE NO — It carried the right to collect a land's revenue, and no sovereign authority whatever.

Two decisions nobody around him had made

The kingdom grew west towards the coast, and holding a coast is a different problem from holding a valley. Shivaji answered it with two things his neighbours had not thought worth the money: a great many forts, and a standing navy. Everything in this topic follows from those two decisions and from a third, which was how he chose to fight.

Why a navy was a genuinely new idea

Reaching the coast meant reaching the resources of the coast, and those needed protecting from the sea. Bijapur, ruled by the Adil Shahi dynasty, kept merchant ships but had no full-time naval force to guard its own shoreline. Even the Mughal Empire used a navy very little. Founding one in 1657 was therefore a step nobody nearby had taken.

What guerrilla warfare actually requires

Against enemies with much larger armies he used guerrilla warfare: small groups striking with speed and surprise, using exact knowledge of the ground to beat a bigger force. This is not disorganised fighting. It needs discipline, local knowledge and somewhere to withdraw to, which is what all those forts were for.

Bijapur sends a veteran

His successes annoyed the Bijapur Sultanate, which sent an experienced general, Afzal Khan, to deal with him. Shivaji and his advisers persuaded the Khan to meet him alone, at the foot of Pratapgad fort, in thick forest. Shivaji killed him there, and the Marathas, hidden in the hills, broke the Khan's army with guerrilla attacks afterwards.

Reading that episode carefully

Two things are worth separating. The killing was the act of a man who expected to be killed if he lost; the rout afterwards was the work of an army waiting in ground it knew. The second part is the part that can be planned, and the choice of a forested hillside for the meeting was part of the plan.

Three years of invasion, and one night

Soon afterwards a Mughal nobleman, Shaista Khan, invaded the territories with a large army and stayed three years. The answer came with very few soldiers: a night raid on the Khan's own camp. He escaped by a margin, losing some fingers, and left Maharashtra promptly. The chapter compares this with what would now be called a surgical strike.

Surat, and what was spared

In return for those three years of attacks, Shivaji sacked Surat, a rich Mughal port in what is now Gujarat. The treasure taken was worth close to a crore of rupees, an enormous sum then. Places of worship he deliberately left untouched, and the home of Mohandas Parekh, a man known for giving, was passed over. He came back and sacked it again some years later.

News that reached London

This became famous far beyond India. An English paper, the London Gazette, carried the story. Letters had gone to every European agent in the city, asking for money at once. If it did not arrive, he promised to come back and wreck the place. English merchants had agents and money there, so a threat to Surat was trade news in London.

Why the Mughals could not let it pass

Sacking Surat insulted Mughal might and prestige, and an insult of that kind demands an answer. Aurangzeb's answer was to send Jai Singh, a Rajput general of high standing. Shivaji lost to him at Purandar, a fort near Pune, and had to come to terms. A good part of the kingdom went, and Sambhaji his son was put into Mughal service.

Agra, and an insult returned

Jai Singh then persuaded him to visit the Mughal court at Agra. There he was made to stand before Aurangzeb alongside a Mughal general he had already beaten. He walked out of the court, and Aurangzeb placed him under house arrest.

The baskets

The escape was engineered patiently. He began sending gifts to holy men and Mughal officers, often fruit and sweets packed in large baskets. The guards checked them at first and then stopped bothering. That was the point of the gifts. He and Sambhaji hid in the baskets and were carried out. Aurangzeb never caught him again.

What that escape tells us about method

The escape used the same thinking as the night raid and the choice of Pratapgad. Watch what the other side does by habit, wait for the habit to settle, then use it. None of these depended on superior numbers, which he rarely had.

The coronation at Raigad

In 1674, some years later, he was crowned with full Vedic rites at the mountain fortress of Raigad. His formal title afterwards was Shri Raja Shiva Chhatrapati. Like some rulers before him he also started his own era, the Rajyabhisheka shaka, which is a plain statement that a new sovereignty had begun.

Why a coronation is not a formality

He had been ruling since 1646 and the kingdom already existed. A crowning with Vedic rites, a formal title and a new era are claims about status rather than about power. They say that this is a sovereign kingdom in its own right, not a successful rebellion inside somebody else's state.

The conquest of the south

After the coronation came the dakshina-digvijaya, the conquest of the south, taking in the then poorly defended region of what is now northern Tamil Nadu and part of Karnataka. It looked like expansion for its own sake. What it actually bought was strategic depth, room to fall back into when the Mughal invasion came.

A stand on slavery

While in the south he forbade the Dutch to trade in slaves. Europeans were then seizing Indians and selling them, and not one Indian ruler had raised an objection to it. His intervention is the first recorded opposition, and the chapter reads it as evidence of concern for his own subjects.

Fifty years old

A fever killed him at fifty, in 1680. Within his lifetime his reputation had spread well beyond India. Europeans compared him with ancient generals such as Alexander. The Bundela prince Chhatrasal was inspired enough to build an independent Bundelkhand. The Hindi poet Bhushan travelled to Maharashtra to meet him, and wrote poems still known today.

Scenario:

News of the raid on Surat travelled as far as London, where a paper of the day, the Gazette, printed it. The report says letters went to the European agents in the city. They demanded presents of money at once, and threatened that the writer would come back and ruin the place otherwise. A class is asked two things. What does it tell us that a raid on an Indian port was news in London at all? And what does the demand itself say about the purpose of the raid?

Analysis:

A raid aimed at a treasury, reported by people who cared about trade, tells us both what the Marathas wanted from Surat and how far the news of it travelled.

Activity:

Find a recent news report about your district in a newspaper published elsewhere, and note what it chose to mention.

Title:

Why that hill and not the next one

Safety:

Drawing only; no tools other than a pencil and ruler are needed.

What You Notice:

The useful hill is the one that watches a crossing, and the price of a steep approach is that supplies must climb it too.

News of the raid reached London and was printed there, in the Gazette, because English traders kept both agents and money in the port.

Four ships of Shivaji's fleet reached Muscat in 1665, and the ruler there withdrew his own ships into harbour on hearing the Maratha navy had more than a hundred.

Shivaji forbade the Dutch to trade slaves at a time when Europeans were capturing and selling Indians without opposition from any Indian power.

Four opponents, four answers — FOREST, NIGHT, TREASURE, BASKET — Pratapgad's forest for Afzal Khan, a night raid for Shaista Khan, Surat's treasure against Mughal prestige, and a basket out of Agra.

What the coronation declared — RITES, TITLE, ERA — Full Vedic rites, the title Shri Raja Shiva Chhatrapati, and a new era counted from that year.

Two different achievements

What the Marathas did after 1680 falls into two halves that are easy to run together. The first was simply not being destroyed, under the heaviest pressure any Indian power faced in that century. The second, beginning a generation later, was expansion across most of India. The second was only possible because of the first, and the two needed very different kinds of state.

Sambhaji, and the worst of it

Shivaji left two sons, Sambhaji and Rajaram. Sambhaji became Chhatrapati, and by then the Marathas were the only thing standing between the Mughals and complete control of the Deccan. Aurangzeb came south, took the Bijapur sultanate and then Golconda, captured Sambhaji, tortured him brutally and executed him. Raigad, the Maratha capital, fell too.

Why that was not the end

Taking a capital is not taking a state. Rajaram became Chhatrapati and withdrew to Gingee, in what is now Tamil Nadu, which spread the Mughal-Maratha conflict into south India. The forts were defended stubbornly, and in battles and skirmishes the Marathas often had the better of it.

An emperor who could not leave

The result was that Aurangzeb could not go home. He stayed in the Deccan for the rest of his life and died there without subduing the Marathas. They came out of it as a serious rival to the Mughals rather than a local nuisance. That is the whole of the first achievement, and it took about twenty-five years.

What the two fallen sultanates lacked

It is worth asking why Bijapur and Golconda fell to the same emperor who could not finish the Marathas. The sultanates had capitals and field armies, and both could be taken. The Marathas had hundreds of forts in difficult country, a way of fighting that avoided pitched battles, and an office of Chhatrapati that survived the death of its holder.

Tarabai turns the war around

Rajaram's queen Tarabai saw the opening. With Aurangzeb and the Mughal army tied down in the Deccan, north India was unguarded. She raised large Maratha armies and sent them north into Mughal territory. No longer defending, the Marathas began conquering large parts of India, and she is fairly called the architect of that northward expansion.

The shape of the state changes

Rapid expansion changed the state itself. Shivaji's centralised administration gave way to a decentralised structure. It was still nominally centred on the Chhatrapati, but the chiefs held much more power in practice. Distance made that inevitable. A commander operating a thousand kilometres from the capital cannot wait for instructions.

The Peshwa

One office grew faster than the rest. Peshwa is a Persian word for prime minister, and the Peshwa came to wield enormous influence, in time even over the Chhatrapati himself. Turning a Deccan kingdom into a power that reached across India was chiefly the work of two men, Peshwa Bajirao I and Nanasaheb, his son.

The price of decentralisation

Much of the subcontinent came under Maratha control, and on the whole it was governed well. But as regional chiefs gained power and autonomy there was occasional indiscipline and abuse, which the chapter notes stands in stark contrast to Shivaji's own values. The same arrangement that made the reach possible made the conduct harder to control.

How far north they reached

In the northward expansion they briefly held Lahore, Attock and even Peshawar, all in present-day Pakistan. That is a long way from the Deccan plateau, and it is the measure of what Tarabai's decision and the Peshwas' campaigns had achieved in about fifty years.

Panipat, 1761

They fought the Afghans, and at Panipat in 1761 they suffered a disastrous defeat. It reads like an ending and it was not. Recovery came quickly in Peshwa Madhavrao I's time, and in 1771 Delhi was taken back under Mahadji Shinde, whose name is also written Mahadji Scindia.

Thirty years at Delhi

The city stayed under Maratha control until the British took it three decades later. That single fact is worth holding on to, because it decides who the British were actually fighting for control of India.

Three wars with the British

Through the second half of the eighteenth century it was the Marathas who stood chiefly in the way of the British. Three wars, called the Anglo-Maratha wars, were fought between 1775 and 1818. The Marathas won the first.

Why the Marathas lost in the end

Two things did it, and the chapter names both. Internal disunity had grown as the chiefs became more autonomous. And the British had better organisation and better technology. Against a confederacy pulling in several directions, a single disciplined command has a large advantage.

Who the British took India from

The conclusion the chapter draws is blunt and worth stating plainly. What this amounts to is that the British took the country off the Marathas, and off them more than off the Mughals or anybody else. The Mughal emperor was still the formal sovereign of much of this period, but formal sovereignty and actual control had come apart long before.

A footnote worth knowing

Credit for the first anti-British alliance to span the subcontinent goes to Nana Phadnavis, who held great power as an official of the Peshwas. To build it he reached out to former enemies, Mysore under Hyder Ali and Hyderabad under its Nizam among them, which says how gravely the Maratha leadership judged the danger.

Scenario:

A reader is shown two facts and asked to connect them. The first is that Aurangzeb brought the full weight of the Mughal Empire into the Deccan. He took the Bijapur and Golconda sultanates, captured the Maratha capital and executed the Chhatrapati. The second is that he spent the rest of his life in the Deccan and died without subduing the Marathas. How can both be true at once? And what did the Marathas have that the two fallen sultanates did not?

Analysis:

A besieging empire can take the places it can reach. What defeated Aurangzeb in the Deccan was the number of places he had to reach and the time each one cost him.

Activity:

Pick any fort in your state and find out how long it held out the last time it was attacked.

Title:

Draw the shift in power

Safety:

Drawing only; no sharp instruments are required.

What You Notice:

The first arrangement controls what it holds, the second can reach much further, and each is good at what the other is not.

Aurangzeb spent about twenty-five years in the Deccan and never went back north, which is longer than many whole reigns in the previous chapter.

The Marathas briefly held Peshawar, which is about two thousand kilometres from the Deccan plateau where the kingdom began.

Nana Phadnavis got Mysore under Hyder Ali and Hyderabad under its Nizam into a single alliance against the British, and both had fought the Marathas before.

The two halves of the story — HOLD, THEN REACH — First surviving Aurangzeb's Deccan campaign, then expanding across India a generation later.

Three dates that look like endings — 1689, 1761, 1818 — Raigad falls, Panipat is lost, and only the third of the three is actually an ending.

Why a transfer order counts as a reform

Shivaji set up a relatively centralised administration, and the piece of it that matters most sounds like paperwork. He abolished hereditary posts and land assignments, which both the sultanates and the Mughals had used, and paid every government official a salary out of the state treasury instead. Many officials were also moved from post to post from time to time.

What those two changes actually do

An office that descends in a family turns that family into a fixture of its district. A land assignment makes him the man who collects from it. Put the two together and in a generation he can dictate terms to the king. Pay him a salary and move him periodically and neither can happen. The reform is about where power settles, not about accounting.

Looking after the soldiers' families

He also gave pensions to the widows of soldiers killed in battle, and in some cases offered military posts to their sons. For a state that depended on men willing to fight at close quarters in difficult country, this is both a decent act and a sensible one.

The letter about the trees

A surviving letter to his officials deals with timber. Teak is needed for the navy, so permission may be obtained and those trees cut. Mango and jackfruit have their uses as well, and those are not to be touched at all. A tree of that kind takes years upon years to come to bearing, and the family that tends it does so as it would a child. Cutting them would cause a grief that does not end.

Two reasons, and why both are given

The letter does not stop at the practical point. It says that anything achieved by oppressing others perishes soon, and the oppressor with it, and it ends by forbidding the use of force in any circumstance. A historian notices something else: this instruction was addressed to the men who would have done the cutting, which makes it evidence about conduct rather than about ideals.

The council of eight

To help him govern he had an ashta pradhana mandala, a council of eight ministers. The Pradhan was prime minister and the Amatya finance minister. The Sachiv dealt with land revenue and the Mantri with intelligence. The Senapati was commander-in-chief and the Sumant handled foreign affairs. The Nyayadhish was chief justice and the Panditrao headed religious affairs.

Coins as a statement

Coins were struck in his own name, in gold and in copper, and few older ways exist of announcing that one is sovereign. The lettering was in Devanagari rather than Persian, and that choice was a second announcement, this time about cultural identity. A coin is a small object that a great many people handle.

Chauth and sardeshmukhi

The Marathas often took two levies off provinces outside their direct rule, in the Deccan and in the north alike. Chauth took twenty-five per cent, and sardeshmukhi a further ten per cent on top of it. The names are worth keeping straight, because the arrangement behind them is unusual.

What the province got in return

What they gave back was protection, together with a promise to keep out of how each province ran its own affairs. A series of Mughal treaties gave the arrangement its approval, and in time several of those provinces passed into the Maratha Empire altogether. So this was not simple extortion; it was a protection agreement with a price list.

The army in three parts

The armed forces were divided into infantry, cavalry and navy. The cavalry came in two kinds, and the difference is about money rather than rank. The state bore the cost of a bargir's mount and his gear. A shiledar supplied his own horse and equipment.

Keeping up with Europe

During the eighteenth century it became clear to the Marathas that troops drilled in the European manner, with guns behind them, held real advantages. They set about raising bodies of that kind of their own. Mahadji Shinde in particular kept a large European-style army. Noticing that an opponent's method is better, and copying it, is a kind of strength.

Weapons, including rockets

Swords and lances were preferred, but guns were used in sizable numbers too. Rockets appear in Maratha campaigns from Shivaji's own time, and by 1770 metal tube rockets were in use. That is earlier than most people expect, and it sits oddly beside the preference for the sword.

Forts as the core of the state

Forts were the mainstay of the whole system. Shivaji controlled and built a great many, because they commanded the important routes and sheltered an army that fought by raiding. Ramachandrapant Amatya, his finance minister, set this out in the Adnyapatra. Without forts a land is wrecked by any invasion. Earlier kings had secured their countries by building them, and this kingdom was made from forts alone.

The argument the Adnyapatra makes

The reasoning is historical rather than abstract. A great enemy, Aurangzeb, invaded and conquered large empires such as Bijapur and Bhaganagar, which is Golconda. The Maratha state survived decades of that onslaught, and the minister's explanation is the forts. He was writing in 1715, close enough to the events to have watched them.

The navy, and a reversed insult

Through the eighteenth century Kanhoji Angre won the Marathas battle after battle at sea. He did it by clever use of the coast and of tactics, with ships behind the European ones in build. The Europeans' main strength in India was their navies. They made Indians buy naval trade passes, a cartaz in Portuguese, and confiscated any ship without one.

Who is the pirate

The Marathas challenged that practice and began demanding passes from the Europeans themselves. The European response was to call Kanhoji Angre a pirate. It is worth noticing what the word is doing there: the practice being objected to was the same one the Europeans had been running for decades.

Justice, and a word to be careful with

The judicial system was efficient and notably moderate in its use of capital punishment. Cases were decided chiefly by the panchayat, which was a meeting of local officials and leading men. This is not the present-day Panchayat, which is a body of local government. A party unhappy with a decision could carry it up to a Maratha chief. In towns like Pune and Indore order was kept by a kotwal, which is to say a police officer.

Trade, roads and ferries

Trade had his encouragement, and he went into overseas commerce on his own account as well. Ships belonged to him and to his officials, and they went out regularly to harbours a very long way off: Mocha on the Yemeni coast, Muscat in Oman, Malacca in the Malay peninsula. Gold and cloth were among the cargoes. Roads were built and maintained, bridges were put over rivers and streams, and in places such as Odisha a network of ferries carried river traffic.

Scenario:

A letter to his officials survives in which Shivaji deals with timber. The navy needs teak, so permission may be sought and such trees felled. Mango and jackfruit trees are useful too, and those are not to be touched, because they take many years to grow and families tend them like children. The letter adds that anything achieved by oppressing people perishes soon, and the oppressor with it, and ends by forbidding the use of force in any circumstance. The order went to the officials who would have done the felling themselves.

Analysis:

An order this specific is good evidence, because it had to be carried out by somebody. It shows the state's own view that a navy's needs stopped short of what a family had grown.

Activity:

Write the rule you would give an official who had to take something from a household, and the reason you would give.

Title:

Work out what the two taxes came to

Safety:

Arithmetic only; nothing is needed beyond paper.

What You Notice:

The two together came to a good deal more than a quarter, and what the province bought with it was protection and being left to run its own affairs.

Metal tube rockets were in Maratha use by 1770, although swords and lances remained the preferred weapons.

Ships owned by Shivaji and by his officials reached harbours as distant as Mocha on the Yemeni coast, Muscat in Oman and Malacca in the Malay peninsula.

In eighteenth-century Odisha the Marathas maintained a network of ferries for river transport, besides building roads and bridges.

Why salaries beat land grants — PAY THEM, MOVE THEM — A salary stops an official owning his district, and a transfer stops him settling into it.

The two taxes — QUARTER, THEN A TENTH — Chauth at twenty-five per cent, sardeshmukhi adding ten per cent above it, both outside direct rule.

A seal is an argument

Shivaji's seal carried an inscription in Sanskrit, where the usual practice of the time was Persian. The words name it the seal of Shivaji, son of Shahaji. They say his authority waxes like the new moon, that the world reveres it, and that it reigns for the welfare of the people. A seal goes on every document a government issues, so the choice of language reaches everybody who deals with the state.

Why the choice of language matters

A state's working language decides who can take part in it. Persian was the language of diplomacy across much of India, which meant that a particular trained class held the doors. Using Sanskrit on a seal, and promoting Marathi elsewhere, moves those doors. This is what Swarajya means on the cultural side rather than the military one.

A dictionary with a purpose

He commissioned a treatise called the Rajya-Vyavahara-Kosha to promote Marathi. What it does is supply Sanskrit equivalents for the Persian words then used in diplomatic exchanges. The result was measurable: the share of foreign loanwords in Maratha diplomacy fell considerably. A word list is an instrument of policy if you look at what it is for.

Faith, and the limits he set

He held to his own Hindu faith and gave other faiths their due. His saffron flag was taken up by all the Marathas. Desecrated shrines were raised again, and his money went to writing in Sanskrit and Marathi, to religious foundations and to the older arts. The chapter is careful on this point: revival without religious discrimination is how it describes Maratha rule.

The contribution that is hardest to measure

Perhaps his largest cultural contribution was a demonstration rather than a building. He showed that great kingdoms and empires were beatable, and that Marathas could hold an empire of their own, widen it and run it. Once that has been shown, it cannot be unshown, and other people draw conclusions from it.

Modi, and the Bhonsles of Nagpur

The script the Marathas used for their correspondence was Modi, a cursive form of Devanagari. His example also carried to other branches. At Nagpur the Bhonsles threw themselves behind local custom and learning. Worship of Jagannath at Puri, in Odisha, had been broken off again and again under the Mughals, and Maratha backing brought it back.

Ahilyabai Holkar

The Holkars were one of the chief families behind the Maratha expansion in north India, and in the eighteenth century they ruled a sizeable kingdom in central India around what is now Indore. Ahilyabai Holkar belonged to that dynasty. Her husband and her son both died, and she ran the state for three decades after that, governing it with judgement and looking after ordinary people.

What she built

A devout woman, she put up or repaired hundreds of shrines, river steps, wells and roadways the length of the country, Kedarnath at one end and Rameswaram at the other. Best known of all, she raised two shrines again: Kashi Vishwanath at Varanasi, which Aurangzeb had pulled down, and Somnath in Gujarat, pulled down by Mahmud of Ghazni.

And what she made

She is credited too with getting the Maheshwar weaving trade going in what is now Madhya Pradesh, which brought the old handloom skills back, and they are at work to this day. That is worth pausing on: of everything in this chapter, a living industry is among the few things a reader can go and see at work.

Tarabai, in her own right

Tarabai, a Maratha warrior queen who knew no fear, held power in the early eighteenth century once her husband Rajaram was dead. With the emperor and his army fixed in the Deccan, she saw that nothing stood guard over the north. She put together large Maratha forces and pointed them that way. Her strategic sense and her persistence outmanoeuvred the Mughal Empire and kept Maratha independence through a dangerous stretch.

Ekoji takes Thanjavur

Turn south for a different kind of contribution. Ekoji, Shivaji's half-brother, conquered the Thanjavur region in what is now Tamil Nadu late in the seventeenth century, and that is where Maratha rule there begins. The Thanjavur Marathas went on to help create a culture that was both rich and inventive, and several of the rulers were poets and dramatists themselves.

What a syncretic culture is

The word syncretic describes what happens when traditions mix rather than merely sit side by side. At Thanjavur the Tamil culture of the place, the Telugu one the earlier rulers brought and the Marathi one of the newcomers all met and mingled, and the court was multilingual. That mixing is what the chapter means by rich and full of innovation.

Serfoji II

Of all the Thanjavur Maratha rulers, Serfoji II contributed most. Languages came easily to him, Indian and European alike, and he wrote a Marathi play called Devendra Kuravanji which sets out the geography of the world as it was then understood. A great many gifted musicians had his backing, and it was in his reign that Carnatic music as we know it came together, with the first stages of Bharatanatyam alongside.

Medicine, and a printing press

His interests went further. He set up the Dhanwantari Mahal, a place of healing that charged nothing and drew on Indian and Western practice together. A printing press was his doing as well, and no Indian ruler had set one up before. That is a notable thing for a ruler in the south to have done at that date.

The inscription at Brihadishwara

He had the history of the Bhonsle family cut into a wall of the Brihadishwara temple at Thanjavur, in Marathi. It is among the largest single inscriptions in India, made deliberately as a record for those who came later. Stone outlasts paper, a temple wall is public, and the language states which tradition the rulers belonged to.

The Maratha legacy

Maratha rule put Mughal supremacy in question and raised the biggest Indian empire there was before the British came in, holding much of the centre and the north. It put in place a different way of governing, with an administration that worked, and it brought local Hindu practice back without shutting anyone else out. Their fight against oppressive and foreign rule was driven by the idea of Swarajya.

The seed that was planted

The last part of the legacy is the one that reaches furthest. Having seen that Indians could defeat great empires and govern an empire themselves, many later Indians came to believe they could govern themselves too. The chapter calls this an early seed of India's freedom movement, which is a claim about ideas rather than about territory, and the longest-lasting thing in the chapter.

Scenario:

On a wall of the Brihadishwara temple at Thanjavur, Serfoji II had the history of his family cut into the stone in Marathi. It is among the largest single inscriptions anywhere in India. A class is asked three things. Why would a ruler choose a temple wall rather than paper for a family history? What does the choice of Marathi say in a Tamil region? And what can the inscription not tell a historian about the family it describes, given who paid for it?

Analysis:

A record's material, its language and who paid for it are three separate pieces of evidence, and the last of them is the reason no single source settles a question.

Activity:

Find an inscription or foundation stone near you and note who paid for it and what it leaves out.

Title:

Compare two kinds of building

Safety:

Writing only; nothing sharp is needed.

What You Notice:

Forts protect a territory and temples speak to the people in it, and a ruler pursuing self-rule needed both to be convincing.

The Maheshwar handloom crafts that Ahilyabai Holkar promoted are still working today, which makes them one of the few things in this chapter a reader can go and see.

Serfoji II's printing press was the first set up in India by an Indian ruler, and his Dhanwantari Mahal treated illness free of charge using Indian and Western medicine.

The inscription Serfoji II had cut at the Brihadishwara temple is among the largest single inscriptions anywhere in India.

How language became policy — SEAL, THEN DICTIONARY — Sanskrit on the seal that goes on every document, then Sanskrit terms supplied for the Persian ones used in diplomacy.

The two queens — TARABAI SENDS, AHILYABAI BUILDS — One organised the armies that went north; the other governed thirty years and rebuilt temples across India.