How Chhatrapati Shivaji binds the diverse history of the Marathas

In this four-part series, we will do a deep dive into the multi-faceted history of the Marathas and unravel some remarkable and unknown facets of the community’s evolution over the centuries.

By the time Shivaji Bhosale had crowned himself as Chhatrapati, the king of kings, in Maharashtra’s Raigad in 1674, he had successfully established himself as a fearless conqueror, making his presence felt among most of the big powers in the subcontinent at that time. He had captured several forts on the western coast of India, raided wealthy towns, including the British-controlled Surat, and fought battles against the Bijapur Sultanate as well as the Mughals in Delhi.

Shivaji’s coronation, however, was embroiled in controversies, chief among them being his eligibility to be king. Not only was his ancestry and caste identity called into question but there were several other Marathas who stood in opposition to him being declared Chhatrapati.

In the years that followed his death in 1680, Chhatrapati Shivaji’s nascent kingdom expanded into a large-scale confederacy with several smaller kingdoms occupying vast parts of the subcontinent. What tied them together, scholars would argue, is a common allegiance to the history of Shivaji’s rule.

“Chhatrapati Shivaji established what he called a ‘Swarajya’, which means a kingdom in which the power was in the hands of the indigenous people,” says author Uday S Kulkarni. He says that Shivaji carried out a commendable task of bringing together a large number of different castes under a common ‘Maratha’ identity.

A painting of Chhatrapati Shivaji being coronated in 1674.

Historian Pushkar Sohoni agrees. The Maratha kingdoms that spread across the subcontinent in the 18th century, he says, “were all united by a Maratha identity and Shivaji’s ideal of an independent Maratha state. However, it was not a confederacy… There was no central power to which everyone was reporting.”

The Maratha identity under Chhatrapati Shivaji

The history of the ‘Maratha confederacy’ is complicated by the manifold ways in which the Maratha identity evolved. Scholars have long discussed and debated who the Marathas truly were. Historian Stuart Gordon, in his extensive study of the Marathas, The New Cambridge History of India: The Marathas 1600-1818, has argued that the “story of the ‘Marathas’ properly begins about the time of the Muslim invasions of Maharashtra”.

The first raid into the Deccan region by a Muslim ruler was carried out by Alauddin Khilji in the late 13th century, and a period of intense conflict remained in place till about the 1350s. It ended with the establishment of the Bahmani dynasty, the first independent Muslim Sultanate ruling in the Deccan region, more Muslim settlers coming in from the North, and the cutting of ties with Delhi.

The Muslim dynasties that ruled Maharashtra for the next 350 years were instrumental in determining the nature of social mobility in the region. As Gordon writes, “Those who prospered in these centuries were the families which came to be termed ‘Maratha’.”

The term ‘Maratha’ though appears to have an older history. Sohoni says that the term initially referred to a regional designation. “Basically, anybody living in this part was referred to as a Maratha,” he says.

Under the Muslim dynasties though, this term came to mean a new elite, or the Maratha chiefs who brought in bands of followers to serve the Bahmani kingdom or the Sultanates that it gave rise to. The Marathas came from various castes, most of which occupied the lower rungs of the caste pyramid, including the Kunbis, Lohars, Sutars, Bhandaris, Thakars and Dhangars. What distinguished Marathas, from say Kunbis, was the martial tradition that they were proud of and the rights and privileges they acquired through it. Gordon draws a similarity between the Marathas with the Rajputs whose identity also developed through service to the Mughal Empire.

Between the 14th and the 16th centuries, the Marathas held key military and administrative positions under several kingdoms. As Sohoni points out, one of the queen mothers of the Bijapur Sultanate was a Maratha woman called Panji Khanum. Then there was Shahaji Bhonsale, Shivaji’s father, who served as the military chief of the Siddi Peshwa of the Ahmednagar Sultanate, Malik Ambar. Shahaji helped Malik Ambar capture the Ahmednagar Fort from the Mughals. “When you have reached these important positions in all these kingdoms over a course of 200 years or so, it is only a matter of time before they decide to have a kingdom of their own,” says Sohoni.

While the imperial aspirations of the Marathas had taken root under Shahaji itself, it was under Shivaji that they came to be realised. Shivaji first challenged the Bijapur administration in 1647 when he captured the fort of Torna. In the following two years, he took hold of another fort near Pune and created his own capital at Raigad.

As Gordon notes, during this period, Shivaji also struck against rival Maratha families in the region. From the mid-1650s onward, Shivaji expanded his conquests southwards. By the time he crowned himself king, he had successfully carved out a kingdom for himself from a rather marginal Sultanate of the Bijapur kings.

Some experts argue that Chhatrapati Shivaji’s rule was the most important factor that brought together these diverse castes under a common Maratha umbrella. “In Marathi, there is a common saying that Chhatrapati Shivaji brought together under his 18 kinds of different castes – Athra pagad zati,” says Kulkarni.

There are others though who point to the more complex relationship that Shivaji shared with other Maratha families at the time. Gordon suggests that powerful Maratha families who also received rights and privileges from the Sultanate rulers such as the Sawants of Sawantwadi, the Ghodpades of Mudhol, the Nimbalkars of Phaltan, among others, posed a big challenge to Shivaji’s expansionary vision. In the course of his lifetime, he adopted various measures to deal with them such as forming marital alliances or subduing them by force.

Journalist Girish Kuber, who has authored the book Renaissance State: The Unwritten Story of the Making of Maharashtra, says that even today, the lack of homogeneity among Marathas is visible in the social and political landscape of Maharashtra. “There is no cohesiveness among the Marathas. They are seen as warrior castes in western Maharashtra, farm labourers in Vidarbha, and as OBCs in the Konkan area,” says Kuber. This, he explains, is the reason why some sections of Maratha society are agitating for quotas.

A debatable confederacy bound by Shivaji’s ideals

In the years following Chhatrapati Shivaji’s death in 1680, a series of conflicts arose between the Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb and the descendants of Chhatrapati Shivaji. It was only after the demise of Aurangzeb in 1707 that Chhatrapati Shivaji’s grandson Shahu, under the leadership of Peshwa Baji Rao I, revived Maratha power.

The Peshwa was akin to the office of the prime minister and the second highest office in the Maratha kingdom after the Chhatrapati. Under Chhatrapati Shahu’s reign, the office of the Peshwa was invested with a lot of authority. Historian Ravinder Kumar, in his book Western India in the Nineteenth Century, notes that in the years following Shahu’s rule, “the office of the Peshwa gained in importance as the Marathas gained in strength and eventually became hereditary, while the descendants of Shivaji sank into a position of insignificance.”

While the Peshwas established their authority over the Maharashtra region from their seat in Poona, some of the Maratha chiefs were busy carving out independent kingdoms for themselves from the outlying provinces of the Mughal Empire. “The Peshwas being Brahmins were also a point of contention among the Maratha chieftains,” says Kuber, explaining their splintering away.

Prominent among these chiefs were the Bhonsles, Scindias, Gaekwads, and Holkars. The Bhonsles were established in Nagpur while the Scindias gained control over Gwalior. The Holkars and Gaekwads controlled Indore and Baroda, respectively. In his book, Kumar writes that the relationship between the Peshwas and the Maratha chiefs is “most difficult to define”. “The chiefs were to all intents and purposes independent, yet they recognised the Peshwa as the head of the Maratha polity,” he writes.

Peshwa Bajirao I and Malhar Rao Holkar c.18th century

The political system of the Marathas, in that sense, resembled that of a confederacy. The Peshwa was the head of this confederacy and ruled directly over the Marathi-speaking territories from Poona, while subordinate chiefs ruled over large parts of western, central and even eastern India after they gained control over Orissa in 1751. Taken together, the ‘Maratha confederacy’ was ruling over about one-third of the subcontinent.

Scholars, however, are divided over the nature of this confederacy or whether it can be called a confederacy at all. “This was far from being a happy, united confederacy,” says Sohoni. The Holkars and the Shindes, for instance, he says, would not see eye to eye. The Holkars repeatedly attacked Pune since he had a contentious relationship with the Peshwa. Sohoni points to an incident wherein Baroda was first taken over by a family called the Dabhades but they refused to accept the Peshwa’s orders so the latter had them replaced by the Gaikwads.

Both Sohoni and Kuber argue that there was very little that tied together the different confederate states of the Marathas, except the common historical consciousness of Chhatrapati Shivaji’s rule. “They did not belong to the same caste either and most of the newer chieftains rose to counter the older Maratha families,” says Sohoni.

Kulkarni, on the other hand, believes that the use of the term ‘confederacy’ to describe the Marathas is more of a Western construct. “The British historians are very keen to call the Marathas a confederacy but they have not been able to read into the nuances since much of the correspondence was in Marathi with details on how everything was being reported to a central authority,” he says. He argues that “for instance, if the Gaekwads needed a successor to their state, the Peshwa had to be consulted to appoint the next ruler.”

The extent of the Maratha Confederacy in 1760 (Wikimedia Commons)

Even when there was fragmentation, the different branches of the ‘Maratha confederacy’ also came together on a few occasions to fight together against a common enemy. In the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, for instance, all the Maratha states sent in their armies to fight the invading army of the Durrani Empire. The loss of the Marathas in Panipat and thereafter the repeated conflicts with the British greatly weakened the confederacy and eventually led to its demise by the early 19th century.

Though the nature of polity under the Marathas remains a matter of debate, there is consensus among scholars on the major socio-cultural political transformation that Chhatrapati Shivaji had brought about. “Chhatrapati Shivaji is the common thread that ties up all the fragments among the Marathas,” says Kuber. “He is, in fact, the common thread among different ideologies too. He is appropriated by both the Hindutva Wadis and the Communists,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Kulkarni suggests that the ideals of Chhatrapati Shivaji are what the Peshwas and the different Maratha families strove to achieve right till the very end. “They were working towards a cultural renaissance to restore the values of the indigenous people,” he says.

“Take the case of Varanasi for instance,” says Kulkarni. “It was never under Maratha rule. However, the entire city has ghats and temples built by the Marathas. That sense of a common cause was never lost on them,” he adds.

Further reading: 

Steward Gordon, The Marathas: 1600-1818, Cambridge University Press, 1993

Ravinder Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century, Taylor & Francis, 2013

Girish Kuber, Renaissance State: The Unwritten Story of the Making of Maharashtra, HarperCollins India, 2021

(Next in the series, the story of the Maratha community in Balochistan)