Peshwa Baji Rao I Led a Maratha Army to the Gates of Delhi in 1737 and Won Malwa by Treaty in 1738, While His Brother Chimaji Appa Took Vasai in 1739

Baji Rao I was Peshwa, the chief minister who ran the Maratha state for its king, from April 1720 until his death on 28 April 1740. In those twenty years the Marathas made the Nizam, the Mughal viceroy of the Deccan, accept their right to chauth (a levy of a quarter of the land revenue) and sardeshmukhi (a further tenth) across the six Mughal provinces of the Deccan. A cavalry army reached the walls of Delhi in 1737, Malwa came to the Marathas by a convention the Nizam signed in 1738, and in 1739 Baji Rao’s brother Chimaji Appa captured Vasai from the Portuguese.

The king was Shahu, son of Sambhaji and grandson of Shivaji. V. G. Dighe, whose 1944 study carries a foreword by the historian Jadunath Sarkar, sums up Baji Rao’s career as Maratha supremacy in the Deccan and political hegemony in the north.

A Peshwa at twenty, with a Deccan to win back

Baji Rao was born on 18 August 1700, according to a horoscope Dighe prints, the eldest son of Balaji Vishwanath, Peshwa since 1713. Balaji had negotiated the 1719 treaty with the Mughal viceroy Husain Ali Sayyid that confirmed Shivaji’s old territory to Shahu and granted chauth and sardeshmukhi. Shahu named the twenty-year-old Peshwa over the objections of other ministers when Balaji died in 1720 (Gordon), and Sardesai dates the investiture to April 1720.

Within a year the Sayyid brothers who signed the 1719 treaty were overthrown at Delhi, and Nizam-ul-mulk, the ablest Mughal noble in the south, took the Deccan and had no wish to honour their grants (Dighe). At Kolhapur a cousin of Shahu claimed to lead the Marathas. Along the coast, the Sidi of Janjira and the Portuguese held stretches of land.

Palkhed, February 1728: the Nizam out of water

By 1727 the Nizam had stopped paying. Baji Rao, Gordon says, convinced Shahu that the Nizam’s offer to arbitrate between Shahu and the Kolhapur claimant really meant putting the Maratha throne in the Nizam’s gift. Fighting began in August 1727. While the Nizam’s army entered the Pune district, Baji Rao, who had no artillery, took his horsemen through the Nizam’s own lands: Jalna in November, then Berar, Khandesh and eastern Gujarat, reaching Betawad in Khandesh on 14 February 1728 (Sardesai).

In the middle of February the Nizam left Pune to catch him on open ground, leaving his heaviest guns behind so that he could move faster. By Sardesai’s account he found himself on 25 February in broken hill country near Palkhed, about 20 miles west of Aurangabad, with Maratha bands on every side and neither water nor provisions.

Dighe calls the fighting on 25 February an engagement in which the Nizam was worsted but which was not decisive, and both he and Sardesai put the surrender down to the army’s lack of water and food. Popular accounts differ on the day: The Week puts the surrender on 28 February. The treaty at Mungi Shevgaon is dated 6 March 1728 by Dighe, Sardesai and Gordon alike. Gordon lists four concessions: recognition of Shahu as the sole Maratha king, the right to chauth and sardeshmukhi across the Deccan, the return of the Maratha collectors the Nizam had driven out, and payment of arrears. Baji Rao, in Gordon’s judgement, had defeated the best-equipped Mughal army of the day under its best general. Shahu had ordered his Peshwa in writing not to injure the Nizam, Sardesai adds.

Palkhed set the pattern. Knowing his weakness in artillery, Baji Rao avoided closing with the enemy, drew him out of cover, surrounded him with horsemen and cut off his supplies, Dighe writes. Sarkar called him “a heaven-born cavalry leader”, in Dighe’s quotation. Grant Duff, who wrote in 1826 and had worked in the old Maratha papers at Satara, preserves a story that the Nizam sent a painter to draw Baji Rao as he first saw him. Back came a picture of the Peshwa on horseback, spear on shoulder, eating ears of ripe jowar (a millet) as he rode.

Malwa and Bundelkhand, 1728 to 1736

After the monsoon of 1728 Baji Rao sent Chimaji Appa into Malwa. At Amjhera on 29 November 1728 Chimaji met the Mughal governor Giridhar Bahadur, and after six hours of close fighting the Mughal force was destroyed (Dighe).

In March 1729 Baji Rao answered a call from Chhatrasal, the Bundela chief, whose last stronghold the Mughal governor Muhammad Khan Bangash was besieging. From Satara on 27 November 1728 he had set out with 25,000 horse, Dighe says, met Chhatrasal on 13 March 1729, and surrounded Bangash at Jaitpur with an allied army that grew to 70,000. Rustam Ali, the Persian chronicler, puts Baji Rao’s force at 100,000 horse. Bangash left Bundelkhand on terms in both accounts, and Chhatrasal, Dighe adds, left Baji Rao a share of his kingdom as a jagir (a revenue grant). By 1736 the Delhi court was bargaining: an imperial farman (order) of 29 September made Baji Rao deputy governor of Malwa, though Gordon and Irvine say talks on a wider settlement broke down because he kept raising his demands.

Delhi, 1737: forty miles a day

Baji Rao set out on 12 November 1736 with a force Dighe puts at 50,000 horse. Bhadawar’s Rajput chief paid 20 lakh rupees and ten elephants. Then Saadat Khan, the governor of Awadh, routed a detachment under Holkar that had crossed the Jumna near Jalesar, and wrote to the Emperor that he had destroyed the Maratha army.

A letter from Baji Rao to Chimaji Appa, printed by Irvine and Sardesai, says what he did next. Leaving his baggage in Bundelkhand and bypassing the Mughal armies gathering near Agra, he covered forty miles a day and reached Delhi in two marches, by his account, “to prove that I was still in Hindustan, and to show him the Mahrattas at the gate of his capital”, in Irvine’s translation. Sardesai gives the arrival as 28 March and Dighe as 29 March, while Irvine, working from the Persian chroniclers, writes 9 April.

In the letter as Sardesai gives it, he dropped the idea of burning the suburbs because he thought it sacrilege to outrage the ancient city. About 8,000 Mughals came out, and Dighe and Sardesai both say they were beaten. Rustam Ali writes that Mir Hasan Khan and Raja Shiv Singh fought bravely and that Baji Rao fled the next morning when Saadat Khan’s arrival was reported. On 31 March, as the combined Mughal armies closed in, he left, in the accounts of Sardesai and Dighe, and Dighe notes that four armies of over 100,000 men in all never brought him to a fight. Gordon calls the campaign indecisive. Nizam-ul-mulk was then summoned from the Deccan by the Emperor.

Bhopal, January 1738: the Nizam’s army boxed in

From Delhi in October 1737 the Nizam marched with about 30,000 men and a large artillery train, and Rajput and Bundela contingents joined him on the way (Dighe, Sardesai). Late in November Baji Rao crossed the Narmada with a force Dighe puts at 80,000, while Chimaji Appa held the Tapti to stop the Nizam’s son Nasir Jang marching north from Aurangabad. Near Bhopal in mid December the armies met. Pulling back into the town, the Nizam found the Marathas closing round it, cutting off grain and grass and firing rockets into his camp. Irvine’s translation of Baji Rao’s letter says the Nizam’s Muslim troops ate the draught oxen of their own guns.

Under cover of his artillery the Nizam broke out, creeping along at a few miles a day with the Marathas harassing him the whole way, and at Doraha Sarai he signed a convention. Dighe and Sardesai date it 7 January 1738, and Irvine, converting the Hijri date, 16 January. The Nizam promised the whole of Malwa, sovereignty over the land between the Narmada and the Chambal (Sardesai writes the Jumna), confirmation from the Emperor, and help in raising 50 lakh rupees for Baji Rao’s war expenses. Sardesai quotes Baji Rao telling his brother he had accepted lower terms than he could have forced.

Gordon puts the treaty in January 1739, a year later than the other three. Rustam Ali, who is hostile to the Nizam, records starvation in his camp but credits Yar Muhammad Khan, the ruler of Bhopal, with turning him out. Nadir Shah of Persia crossed the Khyber Pass in November 1738 with the Emperor’s sanction still pending (Dighe).

The coast: Janjira held out, Vasai fell

Janjira’s island fort, held by the Sidi, was besieged by Baji Rao in 1733, and Gordon and Dighe agree that he did not take the island. A treaty of 1736 put eleven of the Sidi’s mainland districts under joint rule; Dighe calls it a complete triumph for Maratha diplomacy and Gordon says it gave the Marathas some control over virtually all the Sidi’s lands.

The Portuguese campaign was Chimaji Appa’s. According to Dighe, Chimaji left Pune on 24 March 1737, his advance parties crossed to Salsette at low tide on 26 March, and Thane was in Maratha hands by 28 March. Local Hindu families such as the Naiks of Anjur, who complained of forced conversions, had long urged the Marathas to come, Dighe says, citing a Marathi chronicle of Salsette. Bassein, as the Portuguese called Vasai, was besieged into the spring of 1739, and the Bombay Council records in Forrest show the Portuguese commandants writing to Bombay for powder, rice and loans. Mines blew up two bastions on 2 May 1739 (Dighe), and about 800 Portuguese were dead before the garrison asked for terms, according to both Forrest and Dighe.

Dighe dates the capitulation 5 May 1739. Danvers, from Portuguese records, gives 16 May, with the garrison leaving on 23 May with arms loaded and flags flying, anyone who wished to stay allowed to worship as before, and three churches kept up by the Marathas. Those terms were kept faithfully, Danvers adds. Chimaji’s letter to Shahu put Maratha dead and wounded in the final fighting at nearly 5,000, Dighe reports. In Danvers’s count the Portuguese lost nearly the whole northern province, from Versova to Daman, although Daman itself stayed Portuguese. At Goa a treaty dated 2 May 1739 left Salsette and Bardes to Portugal in return for 40 percent of their land revenue, with seven lakh rupees more under a second document of the same date, and Goa stayed Portuguese until 1961. Sardesai sums up the brothers’ division of work in a line: Baji Rao handled the operations in the north and Chimaji those in the south.

The 41 battles

On 4 July 2025 Home Minister Amit Shah unveiled a statue of Baji Rao at the National Defence Academy in Pune. The Press Information Bureau release says he noted that Baji Rao fought 41 battles in 20 years and emerged victorious in all of them. None of the histories read for this article gives a count of 41. Duff, Irvine, Dighe, Sardesai and Gordon describe campaigns and a handful of set battles, and some of the best-known victories of his years as Peshwa, Amjhera and Vasai among them, were won by his brother.

The historians also record reverses and results that were not clear. Gordon calls the Karnatak expeditions of 1725 to 1727 fruitless and says Baji Rao went on the first without commanding it, while Dighe says the second raised chauth from Mysore and Arcot. At Jalesar in 1737 Holkar’s detachment was routed, and Janjira was not taken. For his last campaign, early in 1740, Rustam Ali and the Hadiqat-ul-Alam, which Dighe quotes, say the Nizam’s son Nasir Jang beat him. Sarkar’s comment, printed by Dighe, is that the same account has Nasir Jang granting Baji Rao the districts of Khargon and Hindia, and that no winner grants districts to the loser. Duff says Baji Rao miscalculated his means in that last scheme and withdrew from it in a creditable manner.

Quarrels, debts and a death on the Narmada

Dabhoi in 1731 was a fight between Marathas. Trimbak Rao Dabhade, the senapati (commander in chief), had sided with the Nizam against the Peshwa, and on 1 April 1731 Baji Rao attacked him. A bullet killed Dabhade in a battle of six hours (Dighe). Historians divide over who was the rebel, Dighe says, and nothing shows the Peshwa arranged the death by treachery.

Raids cost civilians. Firozabad and Itimadpur were burned in 1737, Rustam Ali records, and the early raids gathered whatever cash and goods they could find along the route, Gordon says. At his death Baji Rao owed the banking families sums Gordon calls substantial, though not crushing. Pune’s Brahmin community objected to his attachment to Mastani, a singer and dancer, Gordon and Sardesai both record.

Fever struck Baji Rao at Raver on the south bank of the Narmada, and he died there on Monday, 28 April 1740 (Sardesai). That date is old style. All the dates here follow Dighe and Sardesai, who print the days as the Marathi papers give them. Those run eleven days behind the dates in Danvers and Irvine: 5 May against 16 May for the Bassein capitulation, and 12 March against 23 March for the Jalesar defeat. Eleven days matches the gap between the Julian and Gregorian calendars in the 1700s, and the Bombay Council’s records mark the Portuguese commandant’s letters “New Style”. On the modern calendar the Monday of Baji Rao’s death was 9 May.

Dighe’s birth date makes him 39, and Gordon says he was forty. Duff names three sons, Balaji Baji Rao, who succeeded him as Peshwa, Raghunath Rao and Janardan, and calls Baji Rao brave, eloquent, enterprising and skilful. In Dighe’s judgement he made no attempt to reform his state’s institutions and cannot rank as a builder with Shivaji. On 14 January 1761 the Maratha army that Balaji Baji Rao’s government sent north fought Ahmad Shah Abdali at Panipat.