I AND MY WORDS

Saurabh Mukherjee who was peddled as an ABVP Activist by the Hindu (Postcard News) Just because I am silent does not mean I do not observe. Over the past week and a half, we have been celebrating another drama of ABVP ‘goons’ protesting violently against an event that was scheduled to have Mr Umar Khaled and Ms Shehla Rashid of the JNU fame in attendance and even as speakers. Needless to say, when the event was canceled by the college principal at the protest of ABVP, a whole bunch of left affiliated All India Students Association (AISA) and Students Federation of India (SFI) started protesting without any permission within the college premises, and within a few minutes, led by the members of the leftist dominated Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA), decided to call for azadi of Bastar, Kashmir, Manipur and every other part of the country (god knows if they realize if we could do with some azadi from their daily regurgitation of nonsense, and there is evidence that cann...

Peshwa Baji Rao I (Wikipedia Commons) With the death of Chhatrapati Shivaji, a period of uncertainty had hit the Maratha kingdom. The Mughals under Aurangzeb’s leadership had left no stone unturned in hitting the Marathas hard. Shivaji’s son Sambhaji was taken captive, and the torture leading to his death eventually has been well documented. His brother Rajaram ascended the throne in order to stabilize the sinking confidence of the Maratha power, though for all practical purposes it was Rani Tarabai who held the reigns of the throne, given how ill Rajaram was. Sambhaji’s son Shahu ji was still a prisoner of Aurangzeb at the time when Rajaram passed away, and Tarabai officially took over the regency. To keep the jagirdars loyal to the throne in this delicate political time, Shahu ji scrapped the key provision of not making jagirdari and other offices hereditary. When Shahu declared himself the king of the Marathas at Satara in 1708, he had to recognize these Maratha chiefta...

While much has been discussed about the decline of the Marathas in such a short span of time, one has rarely focused on the economic picture of the time as a major attribution of the weakening of the Marathas. In this multi-part series, I shall explore the economic scenario of India in general and the Marathas in particular to argue that the Maratha state was founded on a weak financial footing from the beginning, and never allowed Marathas to be strong enough to assert their control.  At the time of the rise of the Maratha power under Shivaji, historians have noted a not so favorable economic condition of the rural areas of Deccan. Fukazawa (1987) notes the decay of agriculture as the key to the rise of the Marathas, a direct result of a combination of factors like the incessant fighting between Mughal, Qutbshahi and Adilshahi kingdoms. One has to remember as Srinivasan (1944) notes that the Marathas had been since the times of the Rashtrakutas and all the way to the Qu...