Administrative System of the Marathas c23.s5.1

c23.s5.1

In Shivaji's time as well as under the Peshwas, the villages of Maharashtra were so many States within the State, self-contained and isolated. The head of the state was a despot, helped, but by no means controlled, by a council. The villages at the base were linked by a chain of royal officers with the supreme government. Such had also been the case in the past. We read in the Vishnu Samhita that the king should "appoint chiefs in every village; also lords of every ten villages; lords of hundred villages and lords of a whole district."[¹] The Mahabharata mentions lords of a single village, lords of ten villages, lords of twenty villages, lords of hundred villages and lords of thousand villages.[²] We find the same division in Manu also: "let him (the king) appoint a lord over (each) village, as well as lords of ten villages, lords of twenty villages, lords of a hundred, and lords of a thousand.¹⁵⁸ This division no longer prevailed in Shivaji's time, it had been replaced long before him by one more simple and convenient. Single villages still formed the administrative unit, but divisions of ten or hundred did not exist. A Tarf did not necessarily consist of ten villages, nor did ten, twenty or hundred Tarfs make a Prant. It is not improbable that Shivaji's division was the natural evolution of the one that existed when Manu's code had been compiled, the connecting link between the two systems being supplied by Vishnu who still retained the unit of the single village, with the lordship of ten villages. His district perhaps corresponded to Shivaji's Prant.