Chauth, Sardeshmukhi, and the Fiscal Architecture of the Maratha Empire, 1674-1761 CE

Abstract

This article examines the fiscal architecture of the Maratha Empire between the coronation of Chhatrapati Shivaji in 1674 and the defeat at Panipat in 1761, with particular attention to the twin revenue instruments of chauth and sardeshmukhi through which the Maratha confederacy extracted surplus from territories outside its direct administrative control. Drawing on the administrative correspondence preserved in the Peshwa Daftar, the revenue records of the Deccan districts, and the analytical frameworks developed by V. S. Bendrey, Stewart Gordon, and Sumit Guha, the study argues that the Maratha fiscal system was neither the predatory tribute extraction that British colonial historiography described nor the proto-national revenue administration that nationalist scholarship claimed, but a sophisticated and internally differentiated set of fiscal arrangements calibrated to the political and ecological diversity of the subcontinent. The article traces three phases of Maratha fiscal development: the Shivaji period characterized by direct agrarian administration through the ryotwari assessments of his revenue minister Annaji Datto, the early Peshwa period under Balaji Vishwanath and Baji Rao I in which chauth collection was systematized into a quasi-diplomatic instrument of subcontinental power projection, and the mature confederacy period under Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao in which fiscal fragmentation among the confederate chiefs produced structural instabilities that contributed to the Panipat catastrophe. The article concludes that the Maratha fiscal system represented a distinctive response to the challenge of governing an expanding territorial domain without the administrative infrastructure of a centralized bureaucratic state, and that its institutional legacy shaped the fiscal geography of peninsular India well into the colonial period.