The New History of Marathas – the unit – deshmukhi

Read about the Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Unlike other history books that usually follow the royal family, track the strategies of the sovereign and pay attention to wins and losses in a war, Stewart Gordon takes a different route. In an attempt to trace the social history and ‘know’ the people, he does not follow the royal families or the important stalwarts of the kingdom. The book follows the revenue generating units instead and the social fabric provides him with an opportunity to track not just the land holders but also the land managers. This unit is the system of deshmukhi found in one form or the other in Maharashtra and perhaps many other states in India.

The deshmukh and the patil

As Gordon points out, at one point in the time, Maharashtra was so sparsely populated that for a sovereign it became easy to group anywhere between 20 and 100 villages together to form a pargana. Each pargana was appointed a deshmukh to collect the revenues and a deshpande to keep records. These two entities worked together with their respective village level entities – a village headman – the patil and a village record keeper – a kulkarni.

(Incidentally, Deshmukh, Deshpande, Patil and Kulkarni are long standing last names of many people. Innumerable other last names have come from such professions.)

The elite families received about 15% of the government collection. Apart from collecting taxes, the patil and the deshmukh were also responsible for the well being of the population. The deshmukh was to remain loyal to the sovereign at all the times and his duties were laid out in a sanad and/or mansab – a contract between the right-holder and the government.

Both the patil and the deshmukh had rights to negotiate with the sovereign on tax collection and in case of famine or drought reassess the tax levels and collection. After assessing the tax, many times the deshmukh also paid the sovereign the money in lump sum and the collected it from the people later. The rights were also nested. In many cases, a deshmukh was also a patil for one or more villages in the pargana. The nested rights also included hereditary rights called watan and inam. In some cases, there are also examples of a deshmukh himself being landless, and making ends meet only based on the percentage of the collection received from the pargana. But such cases were exceptions.

One of the most important aspects of a deshmukhi was that a deshmukh could maintain an army. The main purpose of this army was to protect the people from dacoits or to deal with rouge villages that interfered in the official work.

In a way, a deshmukh was a governor of the pargana and his influence was more than the formal sanad of tax collection. A deshmukh would oversee adjudication and appeals, ritual leadership at various festivals and most importantly, development of cultivation and prosperity of his area. A deshmukh’s troops were also used by the sovereign for campaigns against kingdom’s enemies, other recalcitrant deshmukhs or even disloyal high ranking officials. Deshmukhs helping the sovereign were rewarded with honor robes at the court.

Malik Shah Amber, the head of Ahmednagar faction of the Bahamani Sultanate at the beginning of the 17th Century, is said to have brought reforms in the deshmukhi system by reviewing revenue settlement for each pargana. He also recruited many Marathas in this system and gave them important positions in the government and court. The deshmukhi system flourished and obtained more legitimacy during the Malik Shah Amber period making Marathas a hard to ignore faction in the politics of the era. This also made deshmukhi an important institution in itself.

More often than not deshmukhs showed wayward behavior. There are examples of many deshmukhs not submitting the revenue to the central government and the sovereign was forced to bring action to such deshmukhs. Since a deshmukh also maintained an army, the sovereign had to be careful before taking such a step. A sovereign would require help from other deshmukhs in such operations. And this perhaps cemented the in-fighting that plagued the polity all through its two-and-a-quarter century life. And this brings us to an important aspect of the kingdom – porous borders!

Invasion, Moving Armies and Porous Borders

The armies of Bahamani Sultanate, its factions and Moguls were typically slow moving. The armies were based on heavy cavalry requiring two or three horses to move one piece, grooms and servants for mounted fighters, elephants, treasury, cooks, dancing girls etc. in addition to the soldiers and commanders. The army bought provisions in camp bazaars. The entourage hardly moved more than 10 miles a day.

An invasion usually involved an army approaching and the highest ranking officer asking a deshmukh if he would align his loyalty to the new sovereign. If the deshmukh agreed, the pargana would naturally become part of a different kingdom. And hence, many wars were fought only at a deshmukhi level where depending on the circumstances the deshmukh just re-aligned his loyalty. The deshmukhs who capitulated to the invading king, were many times also quick to change their loyalty again making the invasion worthless.

Since the deshmukhs controlled the revenue and management of factions of troops, they became important to the sovereign. Shivaji’s father Shahaji also started as a deshmukh in the Pune and Supe parganas. Later he moved to Bangalore, and became an important officer in the Bijapur court. He left his wife Jijabai and son Shivaji in charge of the Pune and Supe areas. This inadvertently helped sow the seeds of ‘swaraj’ – self rule. Shivaji also faced problems with wayward deshmukhs as well as with deshmukhs who remained steadfastly loyal to Ahmednagar or Bijapur. In fact, the deshmukhi problem persisted as far later as Madharao Peshwa, with his own father-in-law, the Patwardhan family of Miraj, changing loyalties between the Peshwa and the Nizam. Gordon claims that Shivaji largely remained a sirdeshmukh – head of many deshmukhs – and not really a king.

In his book, Stewart Gordon, tracks the Mane family of Mhasvad and the Hingnikar Bhosale family as examples. Many more families also get tracked as a part of the polity. And their rise and fall is noted. Many families became Sardars in Shivaji’s court and were honored for their support. However, Shivaji realized the problems with the system and wanted to change it. But the circumstances did not allow him to do so. Once the control passed on to the Peshwas after the long succession battles between Shivaji’s heirs, the whole system got a shot in the arm to save the polity. But as the state formation continued, a lot had changed with maintaining the armies, collecting tributes and taxes. The state formation of conquered areas of Malwa and Khandesh after Aurangzebs’ death gave an opportunity to the Peshwas to exhibit more control of the central government rather than rely on a deshmukh family. An appointed officer, the kamvisdar, may have had powers similar to the deshmukh, but there was a tight control by the central government. A kamvisdar was not allowed to maintain an army but could ask the central government for help. His contracts were also performance based and did not have any hereditary rights to the land or collection. The results of this approach were also seen in the increase in prosperity of these areas. However, deshmukhi still remained an important institution and a basic building block of the polity.