Mahārathis

Chiefs under an empire

Aśoka's fifth and thirteenth rock edicts name the Rāṭhikas among the peoples of the western Deccan, alongside the Bhojas and the Pitinikas. By the Sātavāhana period the title Mahārathi denotes a rank of chief holding territory in the Ghats and the country behind them, and inscriptions show these families endowing caves and cisterns at Nasik, Karle and Kanheri.

They were not simply subordinates. Sātavāhana queens are recorded as Mahārathi daughters, and the Nanaghat inscription of Queen Nāganikā, one of the earliest and most important documents of the dynasty, records her as a Mahārathi's daughter. Marriage alliance with the leading local families was evidently how the empire held the western uplands.

The record

Nothing like a dynastic history survives. What survives is a set of names in donative records — a chief, his wife, the gift of a hall or a water cistern to the monks — which is a characteristic form of evidence for the period and tells us about religious patronage and social rank rather than about politics.

The Mahārathis disappear from the record with the Sātavāhanas in the third century CE.