CORE Late-eighteenth-century Rajputana — Maratha incursions, Pindari menace and the Battle of Tunga 1787
Aurangzeb's death in 1707 loosened the last effective Mughal hold over Rajputana and opened the field to mobile fiscal warfare. By the middle decades of the century, Maratha power pressed northward through tribute demands, and the houses of Scindia and Holkar turned Jaipur, Marwar, Mewar, and Kota into a zone of repeated negotiation, coercion, and revenue extraction. Ajmer and the routes around it became especially sensitive because control over them shaped access to eastern Rajasthan. Maharaja Vijai Singh of Marwar, who ruled from 1752 to 1793, spent much of his reign trying to protect Marwar's income lines while also coping with factional pressures inside the Rathore state. Chauth demands, military passage, and forced exactions deepened the strain. Under Mahadji Scindia of Gwalior and Tukoji Holkar of Indore, Rajput rulers faced not one uniform Maratha policy but overlapping spheres of pressure, with Holkar-linked irregulars adding a second layer of insecurity in the countryside.
That insecurity grew sharper with the spread of the Pindaris. These mounted raiders, often moving under Holkar protection or under the shadow of larger Maratha operations, attacked villages, grain routes, and lightly defended settlements across Mewar, Marwar, and Hadoti. Their method was destructive because it targeted revenue before it targeted forts. When the countryside became unsafe, rulers could neither pay tribute reliably nor maintain cavalry, and this is why Maratha leverage in Rajputana often worked through fear as much as through battlefield success. The late-eighteenth-century crisis was therefore political, military, and agrarian at once.
The central turning point was the Battle of Tunga, 28 July 1787. Sawai Pratap Singh of Jaipur, who ruled from 1778 to 1803, formed an alliance with Maharaja Vijai Singh of Marwar against Mahadji Scindia and the French-trained commander Benoit de Boigne. Near Tunga village close to Lalsot in modern Dausa district, a combined Rajput force described in contemporary tradition as about 70,000 met Scindia's army and inflicted a tactical defeat. The result did not destroy Maratha power, but it checked immediate southward consolidation and briefly restored Rajput confidence. This is why the battle matters more than a single day's manoeuvre: it marks the moment when Jaipur and Marwar still showed that joint resistance was possible. Students often confuse this engagement with Patan 1790 or Merta 1790, where de Boigne later reversed the setback; Tunga belongs specifically to 1787.
Sawai Pratap Singh of Jaipur was not only a war ruler. His court supported the Galta school of painting, and his best-known architectural legacy is Hawa Mahal, completed in 1799 and designed by Lal Chand Ustad. That monument, rising inside the walled city, belongs to the same late-eighteenth-century moment as the military crisis. Jaipur under Pratap Singh tried to project cultural refinement even while frontier pressure continued between 1788 and 1803. The coexistence of artistic revival and political danger is one of the clearest features of modern Rajasthan's transition from Mughal-era hierarchy to competitive regional statecraft.
After Bijai Singh's death in 1793 and the wider turmoil that culminated in 1803, Marwar passed into the reign of Maharaja Man Singh of Marwar, who ruled from 1803 to 1843. Succession disputes and court rivalry reduced the scope for united Rajput action. The Krishna Kumari episode 1810 exposed that weakness dramatically: a Mewar princess became the center of a marriage struggle between Jaipur and Jodhpur, and her poisoning showed how interstate rivalry had turned diplomacy into tragedy. At the same time, Pindari raids 1808-1817 intensified across Mewar, Marwar, and the Hadoti tract. By 1817, many Rajput rulers were ready to accept British arbitration because the Maratha-Pindari cycle had exhausted older balances of power. The next section takes up the 1817-1818 treaties that ended this era and placed Rajputana under British paramountcy.