Marathas, Sikhs and Regional States

By the middle of the 1600s the Deccan was a crowded chessboard. The Mughals pressed from the north, the sultanates of Bijapur (Adil Shahis) and Golconda (Qutb Shahis) held the south, and in between lay the hills and forts of the Sahyadri, where the Mavalas, hardy hill peasants, lived. Out of this crowded space rose Shivaji Bhonsle, who used the hills as a weapon and built the first strong Maratha state. Do not memorise him as a list of battles; read him as one idea repeated again and again: small force, strong forts, surprise, and retreat before the enemy can organise.

Shivaji's greatness is not only in winning battles but in turning a regional fighting force into a state. He began as a jagirdar's son, then used forts to hold land, a treasury to pay soldiers, and in 1674 a coronation to tell the world that he was no rebel but a lawful king. Without the coronation he would have remained a chief; with it he became a Chhatrapati who could issue grants, coins and laws.

Winning land is easy to describe; holding it is the real test. Shivaji's administration was built on one clear idea: the king must be stronger than the local strongman. Earlier, Deccan sultanates had left villages to hereditary deshmukhs and jagirdars who often behaved like small kings. Shivaji paid officers and soldiers in cash or grain from the treasury, kept the fort commands divided between several officers, and brought the peasant closer to the state. His court was guided by a council of eight ministers, the Ashtapradhan.

Think of the Kunbi peasant. In the Maratha country, the Kunbis were the farming community who also became the backbone of the army in the season when fields were idle. Shivaji's state worked because the same villagers paid the revenue and filled the ranks; therefore he took care of the peasant by measuring the land, remitting revenue in famine and discouraging the oppression of village headmen.

When Aurangzeb died in 1707 after twenty-five years of war in the Deccan, the Maratha state looked finished: Sambhaji executed, Rajaram dead, the family split. Yet within fifty years the Marathas were collecting tribute from Gujarat to Bengal and from Delhi to the Carnatic. The reason is a change of leadership. Real power moved from the Chhatrapati at Satara to the Peshwas at Pune, a line of Chitpavan Brahmin ministers who ran the empire like a confederacy of generals and bankers. This is the story from Shahu to Panipat (1761), and then the slow fall that ended in 1818.

A confederacy is strong while the leader is strong and weak when he is weak. The Marathas did not have a centralised bureaucracy like the Mughals; each chief (Scindia, Holkar, Gaekwad, Bhonsle) had his own army and treasury and obeyed the Peshwa only as long as the Peshwa could reward or compel him. After Panipat and the death of a capable Peshwa, the chiefs began to pull in different directions and the British learned to deal with them one by one.

The Sikh story is the story of a faith that was forced to learn how to defend itself. Guru Nanak (1469-1539) preached one God, equality, honest work and sharing, with no place for caste or ritual show. Over two centuries ten Gurus built a community with its own scripture, its own holy city and its own institutions. When emperors began to see this independent community as a danger, persecution turned it into a disciplined armed brotherhood, the Khalsa. You will remember the Gurus best if you attach to each one a single act of building: a script, a city, a scripture, a sword, a martyrdom.

The Khalsa (1699). On Baisakhi day at Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh asked for five volunteers willing to give their heads. Five men from different castes stepped forward; he initiated them with amrit (sweetened water stirred with a double-edged sword) and called them the Panj Pyare. All Khalsa men took the surname Singh (lion) and women Kaur (princess). This gave the Sikhs a common identity above caste, together with the five Ks. The Khalsa was therefore both a religious and a military brotherhood.

Scripture and institutions. The Adi Granth was compiled by Guru Arjan Dev in 1604 from the hymns of the first five Gurus and saints such as Kabir, Ravidas and Farid. Guru Gobind Singh added the hymns of his father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, and declared that after him the Sikhs should treat the book, the Guru Granth Sahib, as the Guru. Institutions: langar (free community kitchen), sangat (congregation), pangat (eating together), masand (Guru's collecting agents), and Akal Takht (the seat of Sikh temporal authority at Amritsar).

A faith that is hunted either vanishes or hardens. After Guru Gobind Singh died in 1708 the Sikhs hardened. Mughal governors of Lahore and Sirhind hunted them in the plains, yet the Khalsa survived in forests and hills, raised small armed bands (jathas), and in the chaos left by Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali captured territory themselves. By the 1760s they ruled the Punjab as twelve misls; by 1799 one young chief, Ranjit Singh, began to turn those twelve into one kingdom. This topic runs from Banda Bahadur to Ranjit Singh and the fall of the Sikh Empire (1849).

Why did the Sikh Empire fall within ten years of Ranjit Singh's death? The empire was built on the personality of one man and on an army that was loyal to him. After 1839 there were weak successors, murders at court and a powerful army (the Khalsa army) which the court could not control. The British, who had respected the Sutlej line for 36 years, saw the chaos as an opportunity, and the two wars of 1845-46 and 1848-49 ended it.

In the south, the most dangerous enemy the English East India Company met in the eighteenth century was not a Mughal governor but a soldier-ruler of Mysore. Mysore was a small Hindu kingdom of the Wodeyar dynasty. A cavalry officer, Haidar Ali, rose through the army, pushed the Wodeyar king into the background, and by about 1761 became the real ruler. His son Tipu Sultan inherited both his army and his enemies. Together they fought four Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767-69, 1780-84, 1790-92 and 1799), and these wars are the best example in the textbook of how the British built their empire: they found allies among rival Indian powers, waited for the right moment, and used their command of the sea.

Why did Mysore fall? It was not because Tipu was a poor fighter. Mysore was a land-locked state that depended on trade and a costly army, and it faced three enemies at the same time (the British, the Marathas, the Nizam). In 1792 the three joined hands. The British used the same trick again and again: sign a treaty with the neighbours of a powerful state, isolate it, then attack. Notice that this is exactly the pattern used with the Marathas and the Sikhs later.

When the Mughal emperor grew weak, his governors in the provinces did not rebel in the open. They did something cleverer: they kept the emperor's name on the coins and in the Friday prayer, but passed the governorship to their sons and kept the revenue. This is how three great successor states appeared in the early eighteenth century: Bengal (Murshid Quli Khan), Awadh (Saadat Khan) and Hyderabad (Nizam-ul-Mulk). Alongside them rose the rebel states (Marathas, Sikhs, Jats, Rohillas, Rajputs, Ahoms and others), who grew by fighting the empire. This topic gives you a one-page map of the lesser powers, since the British met each of them in turn.

The big picture is easy to remember: Mughal weakness created space; regional states filled it; the British exploited the quarrels. Bengal was the first to be swallowed (Plassey-Buxar), then Awadh was weakened (Buxar, 1801 Subsidiary Alliance, 1856 annexation), Hyderabad accepted protection (1798) and survived as a princely state, and the Ahoms lost their land only after Burmese invasions (1826). The British did not meet one India but many small ones, and they defeated them one by one.

Awadh and Hyderabad in more detail. In Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daula (1754-75) fought at Buxar (1764) and lost; his son Asaf-ud-Daula moved the capital from Faizabad to Lucknow (1775) and built the Bara Imambara (1784). In 1801 Saadat Ali Khan gave away half of Awadh under the Subsidiary Alliance, and Wajid Ali Shah, a poet and patron of music and Kathak, was removed by Dalhousie on the charge of misrule in 1856. In Hyderabad, Nizam-ul-Mulk was defeated by the Marathas at Palkhed (1728); later Nizams were the first to sign the Subsidiary Alliance (1798). The state remained the largest princely state in India. In 1948 the last Nizam resisted joining India, and the Government of India launched Operation Polo (September 1948), after which Hyderabad was merged.