Justice Ranade’s 1900 classic remains a foundational text of Maratha historiography that sought to reinterpret Maharashtra’s past as a disciplined national effort.

When Mahadev Govind Ranade published ‘Rise of the Maratha Power’ in 1900, he was better known as a judge and reformer than as a historian. Yet, this book (more accurately, a collection of essays), issued in collaboration with his fellow jurist K. T. Telang, became the founding text of Maratha historiography. In a landscape dominated by colonial chroniclers such as Mountstuart Elphinstone and James Grant Duff, whose narratives, to a lesser or greater degree, essentially treated the Marathas as shrewd adventurers in the ruins of Mughal rule, Ranade offered a strikingly different account. His interpretation of the Maratha nation was one whose edifice was built of moral purpose, social awakening and collective agency.

As he explained in his preface, his aim was “to present a clear view of the salient features of the history from the Indian standpoint” and to dispel “misapprehensions which detract from the moral interest and political lessons of the story.” The rise of the Marathas, he insisted, was “a genuine effort on the part of a Hindu nationality…to achieve what had not been attempted before.”

Ranade’s thesis, steeped in nineteenth-century moralism, gave regional and Indian history an internal logic. Yet the same moral fervour sometimes led Ranade to see continuity where later historians found rupture, and religious revival where evidence pointed to political calculation.

Ranade’s career explains much about his method. Born in 1842 and educated in Bombay, he absorbed the analytic habits of the British and European liberal tradition - Gibbon’s irony, Mill’s utilitarianism, Ranke’s critical method, Macaulay’s literary flourish - but turned them to Indian ends.

In 1891, he had devised, with Telang and others, an ambitious plan for a collaborative history of the Marathas. It never materialised, but the fragments became ‘Rise of the Maratha Power.’ His judicial discipline gave his prose its measured tone while his reformist temperament, shaped by the Prarthana Samaj (the socio-religious reform movement founded in Mumbai in 1867 by Dr. Atmaram Pandurang and his brother), gave it moral weight.

In the opening chapter of ‘Rise of the Maratha Power,’ Ranade, in discussing the importance of Maratha history, rejected the idea that the Maratha confederacy was a band of marauders who prospered by accident. Freebooters, he argued, could not found empires that lasted generations. According to Ranade, the endurance of the Maratha power for nearly a century showed that it rested on deeper foundations like language, religion, local institutions and, above all, a moral sense of collective destiny.

In a subtle assertion of indigenous legitimacy, Ranade pointedly reminded readers that the Marathas, and not the Mughals, were the immediate predecessors of the Raj in India’s political hierarchy. “The fact that the Maratha power, taking its rise in western Maharashtra, attained imperial supremacy over the continent of India for a century,” he wrote, “cannot but be a matter of absorbing interest to the British rulers of India.” 

Ranade attributed the origins of Maratha power to geography and social organisation as much as to heroism. Maharashtra’s ridged landscape - the Sahyadri and Satpura ranges laced with hill-forts - had trained its inhabitants in the arts of defence and guerrilla war. Village panchayats and ryotwari land tenures had bred habits of independence unknown in other provinces. According to him, centuries of Muslim rule, far from extinguishing autonomy, had paradoxically honed it. By the seventeenth century, “a slow process of national emancipation was being peacefully worked up.”

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, in Ranade’s telling, did not create this energy; he united it. “The power had already been created, though scattered in small centres all over the country,” he wrote. Shivaji’s genius was to consolidate these forces against a common danger - the Mughal advance southward. His sense of mission, “inspired by religious enthusiasm,” distinguished him from mere fortune-seekers.

For Ranade, religion was not fanaticism but social cement. The cults of Vithoba at Pandharpur and of Bhawani at Tuljapur and Kolhapur, the bhakti poetry of Tukaram and Ramdas - all supplied the moral voltage for political unity. Shivaji Maharaj’s interactions with these saints represented, Ranade thought, “the new aspirations of the time in intensified form.” The Maratha war of independence, therefore, was the political expression of a religious and social awakening.

Later scholars would contest Ranade’s cause-and-effect chain, especially the role of religion in the rise of Maratha power. G. S. Sardesai argued in ‘Marathi Riyasat’ (1915) that the religious revival followed, rather than preceded, political consolidation. Yet, Ranade’s larger insight, which was that ideology and organisation mattered as much as arms, has remained seminal.

The book’s later chapters read less like history than like moral audit. The later Peshwas, Ranade believed, had abandoned Chhatrapati Shivaji’s inclusive nationalism for Brahminical exclusiveness. Where earlier leaders had drawn strength from the peasantry and the soldiery, the Poona court degenerated into faction and patronage. “Parties within parties,” he lamented, destroyed the sympathy that had once bound classes together. Even the Dakshina charity, founded to support learning, had become “a grant generally to all Brahmins,” turning Poona into “a centre of a large pauper population.”

His diagnosis of military decay was equally stern. The adoption of European-style infantry under later Peshwas created mercenary armies devoid of national feeling. Unlike the old hill militia, these troops served only their paymasters. He observed that in assisting the English to put down Angre’s power, the Peshwas diminished the importance of their own navy while the neglect of the hill-forts that had been Shivaji’s backbone, symbolised a deeper rot.

Ranade’s argument culminated in a moral epigram worthy of a Victorian sermon: when a state limits its purpose to “protecting the cow and the Brahmin,” virtue decays and conquest follows “as a matter of course.”

Time has not been kind to all of Ranade’s conclusions. Maratha historiography has vastly advanced since ‘Rise of the Maratha Power’. Ranade’s comparison between the Maratha chauth and Wellesley’s Subsidiary Alliance overstated the analogy. Chauth, as later scholars such as Surendranath Sen showed, promised no real protection, and its function evolved only under Shahu.

Ranade’s likening of Chhatrapati Shivaji’s Ashta Pradhan council to the Governor-General’s Executive Council also strained credibility. Modern historians note that collective responsibility was only partly recognised in Shivaji’s system.

Ranade’s reading of religion as the prime mover of politics reflected his own reformist piety more than the evidence. The Maratha movement’s appeal, as later research has revealed, owed as much to local grievances, regional trade and the opportunism of warrior elites as to bhakti zeal. His insistence on moral unity occasionally blurred the distinctions among castes, sects and interests that made Maratha politics fractious from the start.

Yet, these are the inevitable blemishes of a pioneer. “Modern researches have made some of his conclusions untenable today,” admitted Dr. Surendranath Sen in 1925, “but the credit of pointing out a new angle of vision belongs strictly to him.”

That “angle of vision” transformed Maratha historiography. Later writers like Dr. Bal Krishna Rao Bahadur G.S. Sardesai and V.V. Joshi among them either refined or contested his framework, but none escaped it. Bal Krishna’s Shivaji the Great (1940) largely accepted Ranade’s interpretations, correcting only technical comparisons. Joshi extended his method to the whole eighteenth century in Clash of the Three Empires (1941). Sardesai’s New History of the Marathas (1946) retained Ranade’s sociological lens even while revising its chronology.

Revisiting the book on its quasquicentennial anniversary, one finds that Rise of the Maratha Power still remains valuable for its interpretation. Ranade’s Maharashtra was not just a province but a prototype for India - a polity in which geography, faith and self-government intertwined.

As a jurist who believed that freedom required self-restraint, and a nationalist who distrusted chauvinism, Ranade’s history was neither a hymn to rebellion nor a paean to empire, but a study in civic virtue.