The Sagas
The Maratha Empire
The scale of it, the wars that made it, and the machinery underneath — the navy, the cavalry, the weapons and the frontier at the Indus.
9 films · Hindi narration · English title cards
How big was it, actually
Two and a half million square kilometres, three hundred forts, and eighty-five years from coronation to high-water mark. Most Indians have no picture of the scale at all.
Sarkhel Kanhoji Angre
Thirty years, three European navies, and not one of them ever took a ship of his at sea. They called him a pirate to make the failure easier to write down.
Maharani Tarabai
Rajaram dead, the treasury empty, and Aurangzeb himself in the Deccan to finish Swarajya. She was twenty-five. She crowned her infant son, took command, and outlasted him.
Assaye, 1803
He beat Napoleon at Waterloo. Asked for the finest thing he ever did in war, the Duke of Wellington gave a one-word answer, and it was not Waterloo.
Attock to Cuttack
In 1020 the Indus frontier was lost. No Indian power held it again for seven centuries — until 1758, when the saffron stood on the banks of the Sindhu.
Marathas and Sikhs
Abdali's Afghans had taken Amritsar. What happened after Lahore was liberated is the part the textbooks leave out: two peoples restoring the Harmandir Sahib side by side.
The real dam battle
Bhatvadi, 1624. Shahaji Raje Bhosale used water as a weapon and destroyed a far larger army. The scene you have seen in a film happened here first.
The weapons
From the vaagh nakh to the dandpatta. Every weapon the Marathas carried answered a specific problem, and the choices tell you how they intended to fight.
The Bhimthadi horse
They did not build their warfare around the biggest horse available. They built it around the right one, and the campaign map is the result.