Beyond Myth and Hagiography: G.S. Sardesai and the Making of the Maratha State
Part 1: A century after his landmark Patna lectures, Main Currents of Maratha History remains a classic primer for understanding the anatomy of Maratha power.
It seems Chhatrapati Shivaji and Maratha history are condemned to be trapped between the Scylla of ‘liberal’ Western obloquy and the Charybdis of regional chauvinism that fails to evaluate historical processes with objective rigor.
Every so often, a piece appears in a ‘liberal’ Western newspaper casting Shivaji Maharaj as a darling of the contemporary Hindu right while bemoaning the rise of his statues as symbols of aggressive majoritarianism. Within Maharashtra, the reverse bane of Shivaji worship has raised a great historical figure of authentic genius to the level of suffocating deification that has regrettably obscured the study of Maratha history in a scientific, evidence-based manner.
To rescue the Maratha state from both shallow external caricatures and hysterical domestic hagiography, one must return to an analytical masterwork of Maratha historiography.
To rescue the Maratha state from both shallow external caricatures and hysterical domestic hagiography, one must return to an analytical masterwork of Maratha historiography.
Foundational Text
Exactly a century ago, Rao Bahadur Govind Sakharam Sardesai, at the behest of his beloved friend Sir Jadunath Sarkar, delivered a series of lectures at Patna University in 1926. These lectures later formed the basis of Sardesai’s Main Currents of Maratha History (1933), where the indefatigable historian offered a running constructive criticism and a reasoned interpretation of the larger forces that shaped Maratha history, much as Sir Alfred Lyall had done for British India.
This slim volume, little over 200 pages, remains one of the few succinct and penetrating structural analyses of the rise and fall of the Maratha state written in the English language.
Building on Justice M.G. Ranade’s pioneering The Rise of the Maratha Power (1900), which framed the Maratha state as the culmination of a centuries-long process driven by Maharashtra Dharma, Sardesai argued that the Maratha rise was rooted in a distinct regional consciousness maturing long before Shivaji appeared.
Taking this further, Sardesai argued that the rise of the Marathas was rooted in a distinctive regional consciousness that had been maturing long before Shivaji appeared on the scene.
He rejected the notion that Shivaji emerged suddenly as a solitary hero. For nearly two centuries before his birth, forces favouring Hindu self-assertion had been gathering across the Deccan. Shivaji’s great achievement lay in supplying the “adhesive element” that united scattered centres of resistance into a coherent political movement.
Quoting pioneering historian Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade, Sardesai contrasted Maharashtra’s jayishnu (or conquering spirit) with what he described as the sahishnu, or passive endurance, that had come to characterise much of the rest of India under foreign domination. While he argued that northern India had suffered repeated political subjugation and cultural devastation under successive Muslim invasions, he maintained that the Deccan was never subdued in quite the same fashion. The invasions of Alauddin Khalji and Malik Kafur, he believed, left only a temporary imprint. The South retained political traditions and military habits that later nourished resistance.
Maratha Statecraft
Sardesai located the origins of Maratha statecraft in two enduring inheritances - from the Yadavas of Devagiri through Shivaji’s mother Jijabai - and from the rulers of Vijayanagar through his father Shahaji, whose career unfolded in the South. Ancient royal traditions, symbols of sovereignty and methods of mobile warfare were preserved across generations before finding their fullest expression in Shivaji’s kingdom.
Of all the political powers of early modern India, Sardesai argued, only the Marathas mounted a sustained, organised challenge to Mughal supremacy and ultimately broke it. They delayed British expansion into western India by half a century, spread political order across vast territories and, in his phrase, “saved the soul of India and inspired it with a new hope.”
The Marathas represented not simply a dynasty or a confederacy, but the last great indigenous political renaissance before the advent of British rule.
Sardesai devotes an entire chapter to the craft of historical research in Maharashtra, paying tribute to a generation of scholars whose labour transformed scattered family papers and forgotten manuscripts into the foundations of modern Indian historiography.
These were historians who recovered that past, often against extraordinary odds. At the summit stood two men whom Sardesai regarded as complementary giants - Sir Jadunath Sarkar in the north and V.K. Rajwade in the south.
Though frequently misunderstood in their own lifetimes, the two had, in Sardesai's estimation, revolutionised historical scholarship. Their approaches differed, but together they illuminated the two great streams of Maratha history: Sarkar through Persian chronicles and Mughal archives, Rajwade through the vast and neglected corpus of Marathi records.
Rajwade’s genius, Sardesai argued, lay not merely in collecting documents but in teaching historians how to read them. He demonstrated that seemingly mundane materials like land grants, account books, judicial records, family correspondence and personal diaries could illuminate the socio-political life of an age as effectively as royal chronicles.
Sardesai devotes an entire chapter to the craft of historical research in Maharashtra. He paid tribute to a generation of scholars whose obsessive labours transformed scattered family papers and forgotten manuscripts into the bedrock of modern Indian historiography.
At the summit stood two complementary giants: Jadunath Sarkar, who revolutionized the field through Persian chronicles and Mughal archives, and V.K. Rajwade, who decoded the vast corpus of Marathi records.
Sardesai similarly honours D.B. Parasnis, whose collections of manuscripts and Nana Phadnis’s archive at Menavli formed the nucleus of Satara’s Historical Museum, and Vasudev Vaman Shastri Khare, the Sanskrit teacher from Miraj, who painstakingly edited the Patwardhan family papers.
A Long Duel
For Sardesai, Shivaji’s rise was not an isolated event but the culmination of a much longer contest between two worlds. The historian saw a remarkable parallel between the careers of Shahaji and Shah Jahan, the fathers of Shivaji and Aurangzeb. The two men, contemporaries in age and ambition, fought their own battles before their sons continued the struggle that would define the second half of the seventeenth century.
The foundations of this conflict lay in the turbulent politics of the Deccan. Shivaji’s grandfather Maloji and the Mughal emperor Jahangir had been among the first figures drawn into this contest, while his maternal grandfather Lakhuji Jadhavrao, once a powerful noble of the Nizam Shahi kingdom, eventually joined the Mughals and found himself fighting against his own son-in-law, Shahji.
In the famous battle of Bhatavdi in 1624 CE, the intrepid Malik Ambar, the Abyssinian regent of the Ahmednagar Sultanate, aided by Shahaji and other Maratha commanders, inflicted a crushing defeat on the combined Mughal and Bijapur armies through a highly developed form of guerrilla warfare - a method that would later become one of Shivaji’s greatest weapons.
But Shivaji’s true greatness, according to Sardesai, lay as much in military innovation as in the psychological and political realms in that he completely transformed the character of the Maratha people.
For more than a century before Shivaji, the Maratha clans of the Western hills had been racked by rivalries, utterly lacking in unity and a larger purpose. Under Shivaji’s leadership, these refractory clans began to fight together for the defence of their country’s independence.
The driving force behind this transformation, Sardesai argued, was Shivaji’s conception of Hindu Swarajya. His vision, however, was not simply a project of religious conquest. Sardesai was careful to distinguish between defending Hindu traditions and hostility towards Islam. Shivaji’s objective was freedom of religious practice, not persecution of another faith.
The Maratha ruler supported Muslim shrines, respected Muslim holy men and appointed Muslims to positions of responsibility in his administration and military. Among his trusted officers were figures such as Qazi Haidar and Sidi Misri, while his own escape from Agra was aided by Madari Mehtar, a Muslim attendant.
Sardesai also examined the influence of the saint Samarth Ramdas, whose teachings shaped the moral atmosphere of the period. Shivaji, he argued, drew upon the political traditions of Vijayanagar and the wider spiritual currents represented by saints such as Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya and Tukaram. Ramdas was perhaps the most practical and politically minded among them, but Sardesai found no conclusive evidence that he directly inspired Shivaji’s political decisions.
The Maratha movement that emerged from Shivaji’s vision eventually inspired resistance far beyond Maharashtra. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 CE, Shivaji’s model enthused other Hindu communities - the Sikhs, Jats, Rajputs and Bundelas - to seek greater independence.
Sardesai did not portray Shivaji’s state as a modern constitutional system. He rejected comparisons between the famous Ashta Pradhan council of eight ministers and contemporary cabinets. The ministers advised the ruler but did not possess independent authority. Shivaji remained, in Sardesai’s words, an autocrat - though a benevolent one - whose personal authority was directed towards the welfare of his people.
Sardesai believed that this was both Shivaji’s strength and the enduring weakness of Indian political systems. Shivaji’s genius was that he combined personal authority with a larger national purpose, transforming a divided warrior society into a political force that would reshape Indian history.
Instruments of Expansion
In explaining both the astonishing expansion of the Marathas and the structural weaknesses that later hastened their decline, nowhere is Sardesai’s analytical brilliance more evident than in his discussion of three institutions that defined the Maratha state: Chauth, Sardeshmukhi and the Saranjami.
Of these, Chauth was the most innovative political weapon. Though Shivaji did not invent the practice -Sardesai cites evidence from Portuguese archives showing that rulers of Ramnagar had levied it decades earlier - it was Shivaji who transformed it into an instrument of empire. A payment amounting to one-fourth of a territory's assessed revenue, Chauth was not merely a tax but a political compact. Those who paid it received protection from Maratha raids and a guarantee against further exactions. It was, in effect, the price of peace.
This regional expedient soon became the engine of Maratha expansion. As Mughal authority weakened, mobile Maratha commanders ranged across the subcontinent collecting Chauth from territories they had conquered, overrun or simply intimidated.
Coupled with guerrilla warfare, the system allowed the Marathas to project influence far beyond the limits of direct administration, extending their reach deep into northern and central India without the burdens of formal annexation.
If Chauth represented conquest, Sardeshmukhi represented inheritance. Sardesai traced its origins to the earliest settlement of Maharashtra, when successive governments encouraged frontier cultivation by granting hereditary lands, or watans, to local Maratha families.
These Deshmukhs cleared forests, settled villages and collected revenue on behalf of the state, retaining a fixed share (traditionally ten percent) as their hereditary right. This share became known as Sardeshmukhi.
Unlike Chauth, Sardeshmukhi was not tribute extracted from enemies but what Sardesai called an ancestral patrimony. The attachment it fostered was remarkably enduring. Even after establishing powerful states in Gwalior, Baroda or Dhar, great Maratha houses such as the Scindias, Gaekwars and the Pawars continued to guard their modest hereditary holdings in the Deccan with almost sentimental jealousy.
Originally, the word Saranjami simply meant ‘provision.’ Over time it came to signify grants of land made in return for military service. The holders of these estates maintained troops at their own expense and fought on behalf of the state.
Shivaji, Sardesai insisted, understood the dangers of such an arrangement better than any of his successors. Determined to prevent the rise of an independent feudal aristocracy, he systematically confiscated hereditary military estates inherited from earlier regimes and replaced them with cash salaries. He firmly held that military commanders should depend upon the state and not vice versa well aware that feudal landholders, once entrenched, became difficult to supervise as they neglected their military obligations, accumulated private wealth, defied central authority and, when expedient, changed sides.
After Shivaji’s death, Aurangzeb descended upon the Deccan with an overwhelming force, annexed Bijapur and Golconda, captured and executed Sambhaji in 1689 CE, pushing the Maratha kingdom to the brink of extinction.
When Shivaji’s second son, Rajaram withdrew from Maharashtra to Jinji (in Tamil Nadu) after Aurangzeb’s invasion, the fledgling Maratha kingdom appeared almost extinguished. The treasury was empty; Raigad, the capital, had fallen into Mughal hands. There was neither an organised army nor an effective government.
Aurangzeb, meanwhile, pursued a deliberate policy of weakening Maratha resistance by offering jagirs and rewards to commanders willing to abandon the fugitive Chhatrapati.
Faced with this existential crisis, Rajaram and his advisers abandoned Shivaji’s carefully constructed financial system and were forced to adopt the same methods. This led to the revival of the Saranjami system.
Paradoxes of Power
The Maratha court in Jinji began issuing a stream of sanads and grants promising land and rewards to military leaders who continued the struggle. These documents effectively encouraged commanders to raise armies, borrow money and conduct campaigns independently, with the assurance that territories conquered by them would eventually become their reward.
This expedient succeeded brilliantly in the short term, transforming scattered resistance into a war of mobility that exhausted Aurangzeb’s vast armies for decades. But it also unleashed the very feudal tendencies Shivaji had fought to eliminate. When Chhatrapati Rajaram returned to Satara, he faced bitter disputes over land rights that required special tribunals to settle. His widow Tarabai attempted to restrict new grants, but the momentum could not be reversed. Chiefs began treating their military assignments as personal possessions, exercising independence and redistributing land without central sanction.
The Peshwas inherited this dilemma. Their challenge was magnified by geography. Unlike Shivaji, who had operated within the compact terrain of Maharashtra, the Peshwas were attempting to govern a rapidly expanding power spread across distant regions without adequate roads or rapid means of communication.
The creation of military centres and semi-autonomous commands became almost unavoidable.
When Aurangzeb died, the political landscape of India underwent a dramatic transformation which saw regional powers rearing everywhere, and European powers competing for influence.
The Maratha leadership under Chhatrapati Shahu and the Peshwas, which embraced the ambitious ideal of Hindupad-Padshahi - the establishment of Maratha supremacy across India, divided areas of operation among their commanders and encouraged the creation of permanent Maratha settlements, each with its own military establishment and administrative base.
Sardesai notes that as a practical solution to the problem of governing a vast territory with limited resources, the system worked as long as the authority at the centre remained strong enough to supervise and discipline its commanders.
The difficulty was that the very system created to expand Maratha power also produced new centres of power that eventually challenged the centre itself. The Peshwas had to rely on ambitious commanders to defeat older factions and extend their influence. But the new leaders they created - the Scindias, the Holkars, the Gaekwars and others - eventually developed the same independence that had characterised their predecessors, thus setting up the structural crisis that would bedevil Shahu and the Peshwas.
(Part 2 will examine how Chhatrapati Shahu and his Peshwas navigated this feudal fragmentation, transforming a regional insurgency into a pan-Indian empire only to see internal rivalries and European military doctrine pave the way for final British dominance.)
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