write about economic life during the Marathas
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One of India’s favorite pastimes is having acrimonious debates about its history. These debates are often reductionist, failing to appreciate the complexity and nuance of past events and the different sociopolitical milieus of pre-modern India. Too often, commentators read their own biases into Indian history, either to overemphasize the sectarian and religious aspects of interstate warfare or to anachronistically find a progressive vision of tolerance in some medieval ruler or the other’s kingdom.
For the past few weeks, India’s latest historical debate has focused around the legacy of the Maratha Empire (1674-1818), triggered by a new Bollywood film, Bajirao Mastani. The Maratha Empire was founded by the Maratha warrior-hero Chhatrapati (Emperor) Shivaji, in response to the chaos and misrule that prevailed in the Deccans in the late 17th century. This occurred as the Mughal Empire expanded into southern India. Hindu nationalists revere the Maratha Empire, which originated among a Hindu warrior people of the western Deccan peninsula. Their reverence stems from the fact that it was this state that reversed centuries of steadily increasing Muslim political control over the subcontinent. By the mid 18th-century, it was the largest state in South Asia and the Mughal emperors in Delhi were its puppets. Bajirao Mastani follows the life and career of Bajirao Ballal Balaji Bhat, the Peshwa, or prime minister, of the Maratha Empire from 1720 to 1740. While Bajirao was an extremely successful general who won 40 battles, he faced social difficulties on the home front due to his second marriage to a Muslim woman named Mastani.
The Maratha Empire or the Maratha Confederacy was a power that dominated a large portion of the Indian subcontinent in the 18th century. The empire formally existed from 1674 with the coronation of Shivaji as the Chhatrapati and ended in 1818 with the defeat of Peshwa Bajirao II at the hands of the British East India Company. The Marathas are credited to a large extent for ending Mughal Rule over most of the Indian