Deccan wars

• 1. Introduction

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  The Deccan wars were a series of military conflicts between the Mughal Empire and the Marathas that ground on for more than two decades, ending only when the man who started them finally died. Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb personally led the largest army ever assembled in the subcontinent to crush a relatively small highland kingdom. He never succeeded. When it was over in 1707, the question was not whether the Mughals had lost ground but how much they had lost, and who would pick up the pieces.

  The wars grew out of a world where the lines between loyalty and rebellion were not fixed. In late 17th-century India, it was common practice for rulers of small principalities to both collaborate with and fight against the Mughal state. Shivaji, the Maratha king whose death in 1680 set off the chain of events, had spent his career doing exactly that. His insurgency against the Mughals was well-known enough to earn its own historical label. What no one anticipated was that his successors would outlast the greatest empire in India.

  Three Maratha rulers steered the resistance over those twenty-six years: Sambhaji, who was captured and executed; Rajaram, who escaped south to the fort-city of Gingee; and Tarabai, a queen who took command after her husband's death and fought on for seven more years. Each chapter in this documentary follows a different strand of that long war, from the treason that undid Sambhaji to the Maratha cavalry raids that finally broke the Mughal treasury.

• 2. Aurangzeb Moves South

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  On the 8th of September 1681, Aurangzeb set out from the north toward the Deccan, a journey that would keep him away from his imperial capital for the rest of his life. His immediate trigger was not the Marathas but his own son, Sultan Muhammad Akbar, who had fled to the protection of the Maratha king Sambhaji after a failed bid to assert power against his father. The prospect of a Mughal prince allying with a Maratha king was intolerable, and Aurangzeb responded by moving his entire court, household, and army south.

  He arrived at Aurangabad, the Mughal headquarters in the Deccan, and made it his new capital. The force he assembled there numbered around 500,000, making it a disproportionate war in all senses. Yet size alone could not translate into swift victory. By the end of 1681, Mughal forces had laid siege to Fort Ramsej but could not take it; the siege dragged on for seven years.

  Sambhaji, meanwhile, was not waiting to be surrounded. He attacked the Portuguese at Goa to deny Aurangzeb a sea-supply route, forcing the Portuguese back to their coastal headquarters. When one of Aurangzeb's generals, Husain Ali Khan, struck the northern Konkan, Sambhaji abandoned the Goa campaign, turned north, and pushed Khan all the way back to Ahmednagar. The Mughal army had numbers; the Marathas had speed and local terrain.

  Aurangzeb then tried a pincer strategy. In late 1683, he sent his two sons, Shah Alam and Azam Shah, to encircle Maratha territory from south and north simultaneously. Shah Alam crossed the Krishna river and entered Belgaum, then turned north through the Konkan. Continuous Maratha harassment destroyed his supply chains and reduced his men to starvation before Aurangzeb had to send Ruhulla Khan to rescue him. The pincer failed. Aurangzeb's general Shahbuddin Khan then aimed directly at the Maratha capital, Raigad, and was defeated there too, with Maratha commander-in-chief Hambirao Mohite inflicting heavy losses on the Mughal relief force at Patadi. Sultan Muhammad Akbar eventually gave up waiting for an alliance to materialize and left for Persia in 1686.

• 3. The Execution of Sambhaji

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  In January 1688, Sambhaji convened his commanders at Sangameshwar in Konkan for a strategic meeting aimed at delivering a final blow to drive Aurangzeb out of the Deccan. After the meeting, he sent most of his men ahead and stayed behind with a small group of trusted companions, including his poet-adviser Kavi Kalash.

  Ganoji Shirke, one of Sambhaji's own brothers-in-law, turned traitor. Shirke guided Aurangzeb's commander Muqarrab Khan to Sangameshwar while Sambhaji was still there. The small Maratha force fought back but was overwhelmed. Sambhaji was captured on the 1st of February 1689. A rescue attempt by the Marathas was repelled on the 11th of March. That same day, Sambhaji was tortured and executed in Aurangzeb's camp. He was 31 years old.

  The aftermath was swift and severe. Sambhaji's wife Yesubai and their young son were taken into Mughal custody, where they would remain captive for twenty years. His death was later described as marking the end of the golden era of the Maratha Empire.

  Yet the execution produced an unintended consequence that shaped everything that followed. Sambhaji's death gave the Marathas a common cause and a galvanizing anger. Aurangzeb had assumed that killing the king would break the kingdom. Instead, his younger brother Rajaram took the title of chhatrapati, and in March 1690, the Maratha commander Santaji Ghorpade led the boldest raid of the war: a strike on the tent where Aurangzeb himself slept. Aurangzeb was elsewhere, but his private bodyguards were killed. The Mughal emperor had misjudged the Marathas badly, and the cost of that error was still mounting.

• 4. Gingee and the Long Escape

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  After Rajaram was established as the new Maratha ruler, the Mughals moved quickly to capitalize on their momentum. Mughal forces led by Zulfikar Khan attacked Panhala Fort; after fierce Maratha resistance that inflicted heavy losses, Aurangzeb himself came to oversee the siege and the fort surrendered. The Maratha capital at Raigad had also fallen, taken through the treachery of Suryaji Pisal.

  Maratha ministers recognized that the Mughals would push next toward Vishalgad. They persuaded Rajaram to abandon that stronghold and travel south to Gingee, the fort-city in present-day Tamil Nadu that Shivaji had taken during his southern campaigns. Escorted by Khando Ballal and his men, Rajaram made his way deep into Tamil country, placing the Maratha command far beyond easy Mughal reach.

  Aurangzeb was furious at the escape but could not spare a large force to pursue. The small detachment he sent was destroyed by Santaji Ghorpade and Dhanaji Jadhav. Back in the Deccan, Maratha commanders Bavdekar, Vithoji Chavan, and Raghuji Bhosale rebuilt the scattered army. In late 1691, a war council in the Maval region produced a new strategy: Santaji and Dhanaji would strike east to keep Mughal forces spread thin, while others would assault a corridor of forts across southern Maharashtra and northern Karnataka, splitting Mughal-held territory in two and threatening their supply lines by land and sea.

  Gingee itself became a years-long siege problem for Zulfikar Khan. Aurangzeb sent him an ultimatum: take Gingee or lose his titles. Khan tightened the siege, but Rajaram escaped once more, escorted safely back to the Deccan by Dhanaji Jadhav and the Shirke brothers. Haraji Mahadik's son then took command of Gingee and held it against both Zulfikar Khan and Daud Khan until January 1698. Seven years of siege had bled the Mughals of enormous resources, from treasury to material, while tying down a large contingent of troops far from the main theatre.

• 5. Tarabai Takes Command

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  Rajaram died in March 1700. His queen, Tarabai, was the daughter of the Maratha commander-in-chief Hambirrao Mohite. She took charge of the Maratha army and continued the war for the next seven more years without flinching.

  Her inheritance was a military situation that had become a grinding contest of attrition. Aurangzeb had taken Satara, the Maratha capital, and was now fighting for every fort in the Deccan. He won some, but at steep cost of money and lives. Satara's defender, the commander Prayagji Prabhu, held the fort for six months before surrendering in April 1700. Aurangzeb had wanted to clear as many forts as possible before the monsoon; the six-month defence foiled that timetable.

  Signs of internal strain in the Mughal command were now visible. Asad Khan, father of the general Zulfikar Khan, counselled Aurangzeb directly: the war had already taken a toll far larger than originally planned, and there was a real possibility that 175 years of Mughal rule might crumble under the drain of an unwinnable fight. Aurangzeb kept going anyway. By 1704, he had taken Torana, Rajgad, and a handful of other forts, mostly by bribing Maratha commanders. But he had spent four years doing it, and he was no closer to annexing the Maratha State.

  Tarabai's Marathas were moving in the opposite direction. In 1705, two Maratha factions crossed the Narmada river northward. One, under Nemaji Shinde, struck as far north as Bhopal. The second, under Khanderao Dabhade, hit Bharoch and the western coast. Dabhade's force of 8,000 men defeated Mahomed Khan's force of nearly 14,000, leaving the entire Gujarat coast open to Maratha raiding. By the end of 1705, Marathas had penetrated Mughal holdings across Central India and Gujarat. In 1706, the Mughals began retreating from Maratha territory.

• 6. Aftermath and Reckoning

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  Aurangzeb died of a fever in 1707, ending a campaign he had started twenty-six years earlier. He never conquered the Maratha State. By the time of his death, Mughal armies had technically retaken forts across the Deccan, but the Marathas had stripped those forts of valuables before leaving and then shifted to raiding Mughal territory in independently operating bands, a tactic that was nearly impossible to counter with conventional siege armies.

  The Mughal Empire fractured almost immediately. The Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Oudh, and the Nawab of Bengal all moved quickly to assert the nominal independence of their provinces. The Nizam, caught between the Marathas to the west and a hostile Mughal emperor to the north, adopted an unsentimental policy: he encouraged the Marathas to raid Mughal territories in the north, calculating he could direct them like a weapon. In the Maasir-i Nizami, he wrote that he considered the Maratha army his own and intended to use them to take his hands off Malwa.

  Sambhaji's son Shahu, who had spent twenty years in the Mughal court as a captive, was released after Aurangzeb's death. In 1719, Shahu received formal rights to the chauth and sardeshmukhi, annual taxes representing 25 percent and an additional 10 percent respectively of the revenue of the six Deccan provinces, in exchange for maintaining 15,000 troops for the Mughal emperor. The war that was supposed to end Maratha power had, in the end, produced a legal and financial framework that locked in Maratha dominance over the Deccan.

  By 1737, the Marathas had pushed into Malwa after the Battle of Delhi and the Battle of Bhopal. By 1757, the Maratha Empire had reached Delhi itself, the city from which Aurangzeb had once marched south to extinguish them.