Maratha Empire

The Maratha Empire or the Maratha Confederacy was an Indian power that existed from 1674 to 1818 and ruled over a large area of the Indian sub-continent. The Marathas are credited to a large extent for ending the Mughal rule in India.

The Marathas are the Hindu warrior group from the western Deccan Plateau (present day Maharashtra) that rose to prominence by establishing a Hindavi Swarajya. The Marathas became prominent in the 17th century under the leadership of Shivaji who revolted against the Adil Shahi dynasty and the Mughal Empire and carved out a rebel territory with Raigad as his capital. Known for their mobility, the Marathas were able to consolidate their territory during the Mughal–Maratha Wars and later controlled a large part of India.

Chhattrapati Shahu, a grandson of Shivaji, was released by the Mughals after the death of Emperor Aurangzeb. Following a brief struggle with his aunt Tarabai, Shahu became ruler. During this period, he appointed Balaji Vishwanath, and later, his descendants, as the peshwas or prime ministers of the empire. Balaji and his descendants played a stellar role in expansion of Maratha rule. The empire at its peak stretched from Tamil Nadu in the south, to Peshawar (modern-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan) in the north, and Bengal and Andaman Islands in the east. In 1761, the Maratha army lost the Third Battle of Panipat to Ahmad Shah Durrani of the Afghan Durrani Empire which halted their imperial expansion into Afghanistan. Ten years after Panipat, the young Peshwa Madhavrao I's Maratha Resurrection reinstated Maratha authority over North India.

Maratha

The Maratha (IPA: [ˈməraʈa]; archaically transliterated as Marhatta or Mahratta) is a group of castes in India found predominantly in the state of Maharashtra. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Marathas are people of India, famed in history as yeoman warriors and champions of Hinduism."

The Marathas primarily reside in the Indian states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhrapradesh, Goa and Tamil Nadu. Those in Goa and neighbouring Karwar are known specifically as Konkan Marathas as an affiliation to their regional and linguistic alignment.

Robert Vane Russell, an untrained ethnologist of the British Raj period, basing his research largely on Vedic literature, wrote that the Marathas are subdivided into 96 different clans, known as the 96 Kuli Marathas or 'Shahānnau Kule' Shahannau means 96 in Marathi.

The general body of lists are often at great variance with each other.

History

The history of the Marathas has been documented from the time of the Maratha empire. It has been subject to distortion, in part because of the extreme veneration of Shivaji that appeared in documents and hagiographies from the late 17th century until fairly recent times and in part because of misunderstandings that arose from inquiries relating to pre-colonial Maratha government by British Raj administrators from around the 1820s onwards. In addition, there was substantial rethinking of the past due to the British attempts to categorise the country in terms of caste and because of "debates" that emerged between Christian missionaries in the middle of the 19th century.

The Great Maratha

The Great Maratha is an Indian historical drama television series directed by Sanjay Khan and produced by Numero Uno International Limited. The drama, aired on Doordarshan National, is based on the life of Mahadaji Shinde. The show comprised 47 episodes. The music was composed by Mohammed Zahur Khayyam.

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References

History of India

The history of India includes the prehistoric settlements and societies in the Indian subcontinent; the blending of the Indus Valley Civilization and Indo-Aryan culture into the Vedic Civilization; the development of Hinduism as a synthesis of various Indian cultures and traditions; the decline of Śrauta sacrifices and the rise of the initiatory traditions of Buddhism, Jainism, Shaivism, Vaishnavism and Shaktism; the onset of a succession of powerful dynasties and empires for more than two millennia throughout various geographic areas of the subcontinent, including the growth of Muslim dynasties during the Medieval period intertwined with Hindu powers; the advent of European traders resulting in the establishment of the British rule; and the subsequent independence movement that led to the Partition of India and the creation of the Republic of India.

Evidence of Anatomically modern humans in the Indian subcontinent is recorded as long as 75,000 years ago, or with earlier hominids including Homo erectus from about 500,000 years ago. But, the Indus Valley Civilization which spread and flourished in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent from c. 3200 to 1300 BCE in present-day Pakistan and northwest India, was the first major civilization in South Asia. A sophisticated and technologically advanced urban culture developed in the Mature Harappan period, from 2600 to 1900 BCE. This civilization collapsed at the start of the second millennium BCE and was later followed by the Iron Age Vedic Civilization, which extended over much of the Indo-Gangetic plain and which witnessed the rise of major polities known as the Mahajanapadas. In one of these kingdoms, Magadha, Mahavira and Gautama Buddha propagated their Shramanic philosophies during the fifth and sixth century BCE.

Total war

Total war is warfare that includes any and all civilian-associated resources and infrastructure as legitimate military targets, and typically involves the use of weapons and tactics that result in significant civilian or other non-combatant casualties, whether collateral damage or not. American-English Dictionary defines "total war" as "war that is unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, the territory or combatants involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which the laws of war are disregarded." The term can also be applied when the war effort requires significant sacrifices by most of the friendly civilian population.

In the mid-19th century, scholars identified "total war" as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, to an extent inapplicable to less total conflicts, the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants diminishes and even sometimes vanishes entirely as opposing sides can consider nearly every human resource, even that of non-combatants, as nevertheless part of the war effort.