Regional Powers In India Study Materials

2018-12-15

Regional Powers In India Study Materials

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THE MARATHAS (1649-1748) :

The tale of the Marathas’ rise to power and their eventual fall contains all the elements of a thriller—adventured intrigue and romanticism. Maratha chieftains were originally in the service of the Bijapur Sultans in the western Deccan; an area that was under siege by the Mughals. The first major threat to Mughal imperial power came from a confederacy known as the Marathas. Located in the mountainous regions of the Deccan, the Marathas were mainly drawn from the lowest caste of society, but they became a powerfully militant community under theirruler. King Shivaji. who died in 1680. Under his leadership, the Marathas managed to carve out their own kingdom. in 1646. Aurangzeb, the last great conqueror of the Mughal rulers, defeated the Marathas and annexied their terrortories, but the Marathas never put down their arms. They could never be defeated by the Mughals because they adopted guerrilla warfare tactics and took to hiding ahd living in the forests. They continued to rule over their territory, even though it was under the control of the Mughals, as a separate state within a state. By 1740, the Marathas controlled more territory than the Mughals. In the late eighteenth century, the kingdom of ‘Mysore and the Maratha confederacy were the major obstacles in the British attempt to control the economy of India. The East India Company, originally started as a trading company, had become an official arm of the British Empire. Its objective was to control the economy of India and, if necessary, control the administration of its territories. It turned to the MughalEmpire for its administrative model. However, the very resistant to the British imperialism.

The British, under General Wellesley, defeated Maratha chieftains. Scindia and Holkar, but the Marath chieftains continued to rebel all throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Mission of Marathas can be summarised as an ambition to liberate India from the Muslim rule. Shivaji was the most powerful among the Maratha rulers. He conquered the forts of Torna, Rajgarh Purandhar, etc. and became an independent ruler.

THE SIKHS

The Afghan defeat of the Maratha armies accelerated the breakaway of Punjab from Delhi and helped in founding the Sikh overloadship in the north-west. Rooted in the bhakt movement that developed in the second century BC, but gaming popularity across North India during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Sikh religion applied to the hard-working peasants. The Sikh Khalsa (army of the pure) rose up against the economic and politicail repressions in Punjab towards the end of Aurangzeb’s rule. Guerrilla fighters took advantage of the political instability created by the Persian and Afghan onslaught against Delhi, enriching themselves and expanding territorial control. By the 1770s, Sikh hegemony extended from the Indus in the west to the Yamuna in the east from Multan in the south to Jammu in the north. But the Sikhs, like the Marathas, were a loose, disunited and quarrelsome conglomerate of 12 kin-groups.

Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708)

The most militarily efficient of the Sikh Gurusi was the tenth Guru Gobind Singh. He was also the last Guru. During the reign of Aurangzeb, who fanatically tried to subdue non-Muslim practices, the Sikhs, were ill-treated viciously. Responding to the situation, pobind Singh transformed the Sikhs into warriors. The Mughals and the Muslim historians considered Gobind Singh no more than a warlord having no religious credentials. He was a powerful military general who had a vision of transforming the Sikh society into a was like society. It was an absolute necessity for a community that was surrounded by a hostile empire.GobindiSingh created the fourth doctrine, the last and most important one of Sikhism, the doctrine of Khalsa or the ‘brotherhood’ of Sikhs. The khalsa offers the community a profound sense of unity based on symbolic’ acts.