Civilian administration, revenue, justice and trade

Detail

Shivaji's centralised model — salaries, not land

• Shivaji abolished hereditary posts and land assignments. Under the Deccan Sultans and the Mughals, this was the normal way to pay an officer: give them a piece of land and let them keep its revenue.
• Problem with that system: the officer slowly becomes the real master of that land. His son inherits the post. The king loses control.

• Shivaji's fix: every official drew a salary from the state treasury in cash.

• Officials were transferred from place to place at regular intervals. Reason: if a man stays long in one district, he builds his own power base there. Transfers meant no official grew strong enough to dictate terms to the king.

• Welfare for soldiers' families: the state paid pensions to the widows of soldiers killed in battle, and offered military posts to their sons.

The teak-tree letter — governance values in Shivaji's own words

• Shivaji's navy needed timber. His officials were told they could cut teak trees, but only with forest permission.
• Mango and jackfruit trees were not to be touched. The reason given: villagers rear these trees "like their children". They give food and income year after year.
• The letter's warning line: "if you accomplish something by oppressing others, it perishes soon, along with the oppressor."
• Officials were forbidden to seize even "a blade of grass" from the people without payment.
• Why this matters for the exam: it is a rare written record of state policy on both forests and official conduct, not just a story told later.

Ashta pradhana mandala — the council of eight

• The ashta pradhana mandala was a council of eight ministers that helped the king run the state. It was an advisory and administrative council, not a body that could overrule the king [2].
• Peshwa — the 'prime minister'. The word is Persian.
• The Peshwa (also called mukhya pradhan) looked after general administration and held the state seal [2].
• Under the later Marathas the Peshwa became more powerful than the Chhatrapati himself. The office passed into the hands of the Bhat family, who became the real controllers of the Maratha state [3].

• Pune became the capital of the Peshwas [3].

• Amatya — the finance minister. The famous holder of this post was Ramachandrapant Amatya, who wrote the Adnyapatra, a manual of statecraft.

• The amatya (also called mazumdar) and the pant sachiv together handled finance [2].

• Other posts in the council and their work: the sumanta handled foreign affairs, and the mantri handled intelligence and police reports [2].

Revenue from outside the directly ruled area — chauth and sardeshmukhi

Levy	Rate	Where from
Chauth	25% (one-fourth)	Provinces not directly ruled by the Marathas, in the Deccan and in north India
Sardeshmukhi	an extra 10% on top of chauth	The same provinces

• What the payer got in return:
• The Marathas protected those provinces.

• The Marathas did not interfere in their internal administration — the local ruler kept running his own government.

• The Mughals approved this arrangement through treaties. So it was a legal claim, not just raiding.

• Over time some of these provinces merged into the Maratha Empire.
• Chauth was a levy of one-fourth of the revenue demand (or the actual collection) of a district over which the Marathas claimed rights of passage or overlordship [4].
• In practice chauth often worked as a fee paid by a Hindu or Muslim ruler to make the Marathas either stay away from his land or withdraw from a district they had already entered [4].
• The Marathas often claimed chauth and sardeshmukhi as agents of Delhi — that is, as officers collecting on the Mughal emperor's behalf [3].
• The tribute-gathering practice was systematised by the later Peshwas, Balaji Vishwanath and Baji Rao I [3].

Land revenue inside Maratha territory

• The Marathas took over methods of assessing and collecting land revenue from the Mughals and made them regular [3].
• Much of the revenue vocabulary in the Peshwa's own documents is Persian — the language of Mughal administration. This shows the Maratha revenue office was far closer in practice to the Mughal one than people once assumed [3].
• Original Peshwa-era administrative papers survive — for example the printed collection Decisions from the Shahu and Peshwa Daftar, containing watan-patras (grant deeds) and nivad-patras (judgment deeds) [5].

Justice

• The Maratha justice system was efficient and showed remarkable moderation in capital punishment — death sentences were rare.
• The panchayat was the main justice-delivering body.
• Here panchayat means a local gathering of officials and prominent men of the place.

• It is not the modern governmental Panchayat of today's local self-government.

• Appeal from a panchayat's decision lay to a Maratha chief.

• The kotwal was the police officer who kept law and order in prominent towns, such as Pune and Indore.

Trade and transport

• Shivaji encouraged maritime trade and took part in it himself.
• He and his officials owned ships.
• These ships sailed to Mocha (Yemen), Muscat (Oman) and Malacca (Malaysia).

• Cargo included gold and textiles.

• Land transport was built up by the state:

• Roads were built and maintained.
• Bridges were thrown across rivers.
• An 18th-century ferry network in Odisha carried people and goods across the rivers there.

Prelims Hooks

• Peshwa is a Persian term meaning 'prime minister'; the Peshwa was also called mukhya pradhan and held the state seal [2].
• Ramachandrapant Amatya, the finance minister (Amatya), wrote the Adnyapatra.
• Chauth = 25%; Sardeshmukhi = an additional 10% charged on top of chauth.
• Chauth and sardeshmukhi were taken from provinces not directly ruled by the Marathas, and the Mughals approved it by treaty; the Marathas gave protection and did not touch internal administration.
• Balaji Vishwanath and Baji Rao I systematised Maratha tribute-collection [3].
• Shivaji abolished hereditary posts and land assignments; officials got cash salaries and were transferred periodically.
• The panchayat (local gathering of officials and prominent men) was the chief court; appeal lay to a Maratha chief.
• The kotwal handled policing in towns like Pune and Indore.
• Shivaji's ships sailed to Mocha (Yemen), Muscat (Oman) and Malacca (Malaysia).
• Pune was the capital of the Peshwas [3].
• In the teak-tree letter, teak could be cut with forest permission but mango and jackfruit trees were protected.

Mains Points

• Shivaji's pay reform was a deliberate anti-feudal step. Salaries from the treasury plus periodic transfers cut the link between office and land. This kept power with the Chhatrapati and stopped the rise of hereditary nobles — the very weakness that hollowed out the Sultanates and the Mughals. Yet the later rise of the Peshwa, whose office became hereditary in the Bhat family and overshadowed the Chhatrapati [3], shows the reform did not survive its author.
• Continuity versus break with the Mughals. The scaffold shows Shivaji breaking with Mughal practice on land assignments. But the Peshwa-era revenue papers use Persian terminology inherited from Mughal administration [3], and chauth was collected partly under Mughal treaty sanction as "agents of Delhi" [3]. The Maratha state was therefore both a rejection of and an heir to Mughal governance.
• Chauth as state-building, not plunder. Because chauth was one-fourth of a district's revenue demand [4] backed by treaty, with protection given and internal administration untouched, it functioned as a protection-for-tribute arrangement. Over time such provinces merged into the empire — tribute became territory. The counter-argument is visible in the same source: chauth was often just a fee to buy off invasion [4], which fed the charge that the Marathas were raiders.
• Governance ethics and environmental policy in a pre-modern state. The teak-tree letter — teak only with permission, mango and jackfruit never, officials not to take "a blade of grass" — is usable as early Indian evidence of state restraint on resource extraction and of a ruler tying his legitimacy to not oppressing cultivators.