Sir Jadunath Sarkar has written a foreword to GS Sardesai’s volume of Marathi Riyasat on Peshwa Bajirao I. It will be a great introduction to start with the same.
“The place of Bajirao I in India’s history comes home to us with unmistakeable force and vividness when we compare the political condition of this country in 1740 with that in 1720. These twenty years of his active career witnessed a complete revolution in the character of the Maratha national state and an entire redistribution of political power throughout India. No historian can deny the fact that both of these changes were the work, conscious and unconscious, of Bajirao.”
It is true that the edict of the Mughal Emperor declaring Shahu as heir to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s “own dominions (Swarajya) and entitled to Chauth and Sardeshmukhi in certain areas of the Deccan” had been issued before Bajirao came to power, but in 1720 it still remained a scrap of paper, its terms had to be enforced and full value realised from the royal grant-notification, in the face of persistent opposition of the local Mughal officials and other parties who were in possession. Could Balaji Vishwanath, with all his tact and diplomatic cunning, have succeeded in this executive task? No, it required a dominating man of action, a warrior such as Bajirao was.
True again, that the legal cession of Malwa and Gujarat to the Marathas was made by the Mughal Empire in a treaty with Bajirao’s successor in 1741, but this treaty was merely the formal recognition of an accomplished fact which Bajirao himself had achieved, the Marathas were already in de facto possession of these two provinces, and in 1741 Delhi merely declared them de jure owners.
In 1740, the coming masters of India’s destiny, the British, had not yet stepped into our political arena; the Carnatic Wars between the British and the French had not yet begun; and Haidar Ali had yet to raise his head in Mysore. Thus, in 1740 the political centre of gravity of India had shifted from the court of Delhi to that of Shahu. Nadir Shah had no doubt given a death blow to the dying Mughal Empire, but he had gone back like a destructive blast without annexing any territory or establishing any permanent supporters of his own in this country. Thus, above the havoc left behind by the Persian tempest, left only one paramount power, that of the Marathas.
By the year 1740, the ambitions of the house of Kolhapur and of the Peshwa’s rivals, which the Nizam’s Machiavellian policy used to foster during the first decade of Bajirao’s regency, had been extinguished forever. No Rambhaji Nimbalkar, no Chandrasen Jadhav, no Dabhade, was to raise his head again and attempt to divide and weaken the Maratha State. The Kolhapur Chhatrapatis sank into the position of feudatory princes, Shahu alone stood forth as the rightful Chhatrapati. And the system, introduced no doubt by Balaji Vishwanath, but given full effect and an India-wide expansion to by Bajirao, completely transformed the political constitution of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s state and dotted the map of India with countless centres of Maratha authority and culture. Bajirao was the creator of this “Greater Maharashtra”. Shahu, in theory at least, was no longer the king of a small, self-contained, one-race, one-language kingdom, as his father and grandfather had been; he was now a Badshah with diverse and far-flung dominions.
For such a state an oligarchy of eight ministers (Ashtapradhan) with equal and mutually conflicting powers, would have been a fatal anachronism. The Peshwa had to be a regent like Bairam Khan for Akbar, concentrating all powers of the state in his sole hands, otherwise the newly formed Samrajya (empire) would break into pieces.
These two profound changes were effected by a man who came to the helm of affairs when just out of his teens – at the age of 19. Bajirao was a younger Prime Minister than William Pitt II. And he was spared only for twenty years more. Twenty years spent in breathless activity and tireless journeys across the Indian continent, from Delhi to Shrirangapatnam and Gujarat to Hyderabad, wore out the most wonderful man of action that the Hindu race has produced since the days of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.
To be continued…
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