The Peshwas

From minister to sovereign

The office of peshwa existed under Shivaji, but from 1713, when Balaji Vishwanath was appointed by Shahu, it became hereditary in the Bhat family, and within a generation the peshwa rather than the Chhatrapati was the empire's effective head. The Chhatrapati remained at Satara as the source of legitimacy while Pune became the working capital.

This is a recurring shape in Indian history — the mayor of the palace displacing the king — and it was replicated below the Peshwas themselves, as the great Maratha houses became autonomous in their own territories.

Bajirao I

Bajirao I, peshwa from 1720 to 1740, took Maratha power north. He raided into Malwa and Gujarat, forced the Nizam to terms at Palkhed in 1728 — a campaign of manoeuvre later studied as a model of mobile warfare — and in 1737 rode to the walls of Delhi itself. He is generally reckoned never to have lost a battle.

Under him and his son Balaji Bajirao the Marathas became the paramount power in India, collecting chauth and sardeshmukhi across most of the subcontinent and holding the Mughal emperor as a client.

Panipat and after

In 1761 a Maratha army met Ahmad Shah Abdali at Panipat and was destroyed — one of the bloodiest battles of the eighteenth century, in which a large part of the Maratha political and military leadership was killed. The empire recovered territorially under Madhavrao I within a decade, but the confederacy never regained its coherence: Scindia, Holkar, Gaekwad and Bhonsle acted increasingly as independent powers.

The British exploited that division through three wars. Nana Fadnavis held the confederacy together by diplomacy until his death in 1800; the last peshwa, Bajirao II, signed away the empire's independence at Bassein in 1802, and after the Third Anglo-Maratha War was pensioned off to Bithur in 1818. His adopted son was Nana Sahib, one of the leaders of the rebellion of 1857.