Tanjore Marathas: The Forgotten Delta Dynasty

There is something quietly astonishing about Thanjavur. The city sits in the middle of the Cauvery delta in Tamil Nadu, surrounded by paddy fields that stretch all the way to the horizon. It gave India the Brihadeeswara Temple, one of the greatest works of human architecture ever built. It gave classical music its Carnatic tradition. It gave the art world the glittering Tanjore painting. And between 1674 and 1855, it was home to a dynasty nobody expected to end up there — the Marathas.

The Tanjore Maratha Kingdom was one of the most unusual states in South Indian history. A Maharashtrian warrior family, thousands of kilometres from their homeland, ruling over a Tamil land. And yet, within a few generations, they became deeply rooted in the soil. They built libraries, patronised poets, supported classical dancers, and left behind a cultural legacy that Thanjavur still lives inside every day. This is the story of how that happened — from a battlefield decision in 1674 to the silence of a British annexation decree in 1855.

The Thanjavur Maratha kingdom was never just an outpost of the Deccan; it was a new experiment in ruling a Tamil land through a multilingual Maratha cour

To understand why Thanjavur was so precious, you need to go back further than the Marathas. Much further. The city had been the imperial capital of the Chola dynasty from the ninth to the thirteenth century — a period when Thanjavur was arguably the most powerful city in the entire Indian subcontinent. The Cholas built the Brihadeeswara Temple here, sent their navies to Southeast Asia, and made Tamil culture a civilisational force that touched kingdoms from Sri Lanka to Cambodia.

When the Chola empire collapsed around 1279, the Pandyas moved in and added Thanjavur to their domain. But peace was short-lived. Malik Kafur’s devastating invasion in the early fourteenth century shattered the political order across the whole of South India, and the Pandyas were no exception. The region fell into disorder. The Delhi Sultanate’s influence reached the far south for a brief, brutal period, but it could not hold. Local chieftains and then the rising Vijayanagara Empire stepped into the vacuum.

The Vijayanagara kings were shrewd rulers. Rather than governing the distant Tamil country directly, they appointed local governors — called Nayakas — to manage each region on their behalf. These Nayakas came from the Telugu-speaking Balija community, trusted allies of the Vijayanagara court. Thanjavur got its own Nayaka dynasty, and for well over a century, the Thanjavur Nayaks ruled the region capably, building temples, maintaining irrigation systems, and keeping the famous Cauvery delta productive.

But by the seventeenth century, the Vijayanagara Empire itself had broken apart after the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Talikota in 1565. The Nayaka governors became independent kings, and with independence came rivalry. The Madurai Nayaks and the Thanjavur Nayaks, once part of the same political family, became bitter enemies. That rivalry would eventually open the door for the Marathas to walk in — and stay.

The Family Quarrel That Changed Everything

The immediate trigger for Maratha involvement in Thanjavur was a family dispute that turned bloody. Vijayaraghava Nayaka was ruling Thanjavur in the mid-seventeenth century. His nephew, Chokkanatha Nayak of Madurai, invaded the kingdom and killed him. It was a brutal end to the Thanjavur Nayak line. Chokkanatha then placed his own brother, Alagiri, on the Thanjavur throne — essentially turning it into a puppet kingdom under Madurai’s thumb.

Within a year, however, Alagiri threw off his allegiance. He had no interest in being Madurai’s vassal. He declared himself independent. Chokkanatha was furious, but there was little he could do immediately.

Meanwhile, a son of the murdered Vijayaraghava decided to fight for his father’s throne. He turned to the Sultan of Bijapur for military help. Bijapur was then one of the major Deccan Sultanates, and it had a powerful Maratha general in its service — a man named Venkoji, also known as Ekoji. In 1675, the Bijapur Sultan sent Venkoji south with an army to recapture Thanjavur from Alagiri and restore Vijayaraghava’s son to the throne.

Venkoji, also known as Ekoji I, was the half-brother of the legendary Maratha Emperor Chhatrapati Shivaji.

Venkoji defeated Alagiri without much difficulty. He occupied Thanjavur. And then — and this is the moment that changed South Indian history — he simply did not hand the kingdom over as he had been instructed. Instead, he kept it for himself and declared himself the Raja of Thanjavur.

It was a moment of pure, calculated opportunism. The Bijapur Sultan was far away and already dealing with the growing pressure of Mughal expansion. Vijayaraghava’s son had no real army of his own. Alagiri was defeated. Nobody was in a position to force Venkoji out. So he stayed. And thus, in April 1674, the Maratha rule over Thanjavur began.

Venkoji Bhonsle — The Unlikely Founder (1674–1684)

Venkoji was a half-brother of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the legendary Maratha king who was then building his empire in the Deccan. They shared the same father — the Bhonsle nobleman Shahji Bhonsle — but had grown up in very different worlds. While Shivaji was raised in Maharashtra and became the face of Maratha resistance against the Mughals, Venkoji had spent his formative years in the Deccan south, in the service of the Bijapur Sultanate.

This background gave Venkoji a more pragmatic, less ideologically driven character than his famous half-brother. He was a capable military commander and an astute political operator, but he was not a man consumed by the idea of a Maratha homeland. When he seized Thanjavur, he was simply taking an opportunity that presented itself. What he created — consciously or not — was the beginning of a dynasty that would last nearly two centuries.

His reign started with complications. Shivaji himself invaded Gingee and Thanjavur in 1676 and 1677, clearly uncomfortable with his half-brother’s independent kingdom in the south. He made Venkoji cede the lands north of the Coleroon River to another relative, Santaji. Venkoji was left with a reduced but still substantial kingdom centred on Thanjavur itself.

Despite this awkward start, Venkoji proved to be an able ruler. He showed an early interest in literature, composing a Dvipada Ramayana in Telugu — a telling sign of how quickly the Maratha rulers adapted to the multilingual culture of the Tamil south. He allied with Chokkanatha of Madurai when needed, especially to repulse an invasion from the Kingdom of Mysore in his later years. He ruled until 1684, when he died, leaving the throne to his eldest son Shahuji.

Shahuji I — The Patron King (1684–1712)

Shahuji I inherited the throne at the age of twelve, which meant the early years of his reign were managed by regents. But when he came into his own authority, he grew into one of the most culturally significant rulers in the early history of the Tanjore Maratha line.

His reign was not without difficulty. The Mughals under Aurangzeb were pressing southward across the Deccan, determined to bring the entire peninsula under imperial control. By the 1690s, Mughal armies had occupied much of the Coromandel coast and even reached Tiruchirapalli. Shahuji was forced to pay tribute — a humiliation for a king who considered himself independent, but a pragmatic choice that kept his kingdom intact while much of the surrounding region descended into conflict.

There were also constant skirmishes with the Madurai Nayak rulers and the Ramnad chieftains over border territories. These were low-level but persistent conflicts that drained the kingdom’s resources and kept the army perpetually mobilised.

But it is in the realm of culture that Shahuji I truly left his mark. He was an enthusiastic patron of learning and literature, and the majority of what we call Thanjavur Maratha literature was produced during his reign. Most of these works were versions of the Ramayana, written as plays or narrative poems.

Sanskrit and Telugu were the preferred languages of the court, though Tamil compositions — particularly koothu performances, a form of classical theatre — were also supported. An important philosophical text from this period is the Advaita Kirtana, reflecting the intellectual sophistication of Shahuji’s court. In 1693, he renamed the village of Thiruvisanallur as Shahaji-raja-puram and established a scholarly assembly of 45 poets and intellectuals there — a remarkable institution that brought some of the finest minds of the region under royal patronage.

Shahuji I ruled for nearly three decades and died in 1712. His legacy was not built on battlefields but on manuscripts, performances, and the intellectual culture that he deliberately cultivated.

Serfoji I and Tukkoji — Years of Warfare (1712–1736)

Shahuji I was followed by Serfoji I, a younger son of Venkoji, who ruled from 1712 to 1728. His reign was turbulent. The Madurai Nayaks were a persistent threat, and the border between the two kingdoms was rarely peaceful for long. Serfoji I spent much of his time managing these conflicts without achieving any decisive victory. His reign is not remembered for great cultural achievements — it was simply a period of holding the kingdom together against external pressure.

After Serfoji I died in 1728, his younger brother Tukkoji took the throne. Tukkoji’s years in power — from 1728 to 1736 — brought a more dramatic external threat. trichinopoly-1752/" class="sial-auto-link">Chanda Sahib, an ambitious nobleman with French support who would later play a major role in the Carnatic Wars, invaded the Thanjavur region. Tukkoji managed to repulse the immediate threat and is also credited with sending forces that helped defeat a Muslim invasion of Madurai — a significant military achievement that stabilised the southern part of the peninsula for a time.

But Tukkoji’s death in 1736 plunged the kingdom into a crisis that nobody in the royal family seemed capable of resolving.

The Years of Anarchy (1736–1739)

What followed Tukkoji’s death was an embarrassing period of instability that exposed the worst of dynastic succession politics. In quick succession, three rulers sat on the throne and none of them could hold it.

Ekoji II, a son of Tukkoji, ruled briefly from 1736 to 1737. Then a woman named Sujana Bai held power from 1737 to 1738 — a rare instance of female rule in the kingdom’s history. Then came Shahuji II, who lasted from 1738 to 1739. Each of these rulers faced internal opposition, factional fighting within the court, and the impossibility of governing a kingdom that needed a strong hand at exactly the moment when no strong hand was available.

The anarchy ended when Pratapsingh, a strong claimant with support from a significant faction within the court, seized power in 1739. He would prove to be one of the most consequential rulers the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom ever had — not because of what he built, but because of the choices he made in a rapidly changing political landscape.

Pratapsingh — The King Who Chose the British (1739–1763)

Pratapsingh came to the throne at a moment when the political world around Thanjavur was transforming at a speed that no previous generation had experienced. The Mughal Empire was disintegrating. The Marathas of the Deccan were expanding. The Nizam of Hyderabad was asserting independence. The French East India Company and the British East India Company were competing for dominance along the Coromandel coast, and that competition was increasingly spilling over into armed conflict.

Pratapsingh made a calculated decision: he would align himself with the British and with Muhammad Ali, the Nawab of the Carnatic who was also in the British camp. It was a choice that would define the fate of Thanjavur for generations.

In the 1740s and 1750s, the Carnatic Wars raged along the southeastern coast of India. These were proxy conflicts driven by the rivalry between France and Britain, fought out through Indian allies and local armies. Pratapsingh supported the British-Carnatic alliance consistently, providing troops and resources during critical campaigns. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), when French and British interests clashed on a global scale with India as one of the theatres, Pratapsingh remained firmly in the British corner.

The British acknowledged this loyalty. Pratapsingh was the last Tanjore Maratha king to be addressed by the Directors of the British East India Company as “His Majesty” — a title that recognised him as a genuinely sovereign monarch, an equal in diplomatic terms rather than a subordinate. That recognition would not last. In 1762, a tripartite treaty was signed between Thanjavur, the Carnatic, and the British East India Company. The treaty made Pratapsingh a vassal of the Nawab of the Carnatic. It was framed diplomatically, but the meaning was clear: Thanjavur’s full independence was over.

Pratapsingh died in 1763. He had kept the kingdom safe in a dangerous era, but the price was a formal subordination that his successors would struggle to reverse.

Thuljaji — The Last Independent Voice (1763–1787)

Thuljaji succeeded Pratapsingh and ruled, with one significant interruption, until 1787. History has not been particularly kind to him. He is often described as a weak ruler, and the arc of his reign does support that characterisation. But the situation he inherited would have tested any king.

In 1773, the Nawab of the Carnatic — using the 1762 treaty as justification — invaded Thanjavur and annexed it outright. Thuljaji was removed from power. The Nawab ruled Thanjavur directly for three years. Then, in 1776, the Directors of the British East India Company stepped in and ordered the Nawab to restore Thuljaji to his throne. The British had their own reasons for this — they were growing uncomfortable with the Nawab’s expanding power and preferred a balance of influence in the region.

Thuljaji was restored, but the restoration came with conditions that stripped the kingdom of real autonomy. He was a king in name, but the decisions that mattered — military, financial, diplomatic — were increasingly made by others. He continued to occupy the throne until 1787, when he died and was succeeded by his teenage son Serfoji II.

Thuljaji is sometimes called the last independent ruler of Thanjavur, which is technically accurate in the sense that he was the last king before the British completely formalised their control over the kingdom’s administration. The generations that came before him had sovereignty, even when they faced external pressure. After Thuljaji, that sovereignty was largely fictional.

The Palace Coup and the Scholar Prince — Serfoji II (1787–1832)

The story of Serfoji II is one of the most fascinating in the entire history of the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom — and, for that matter, in the broader history of Indian royalty during the colonial era. He was a king who lost almost everything, and then chose to respond not with resistance or bitterness, but with an extraordinary outpouring of intellectual and cultural energy.

Serfoji II came to the throne in 1787 as a teenager after the death of his father Thuljaji. Almost immediately, his uncle Amarsingh — who was serving as regent — staged a palace coup and had Serfoji II deposed. Amarsingh ruled Thanjavur in his own name from 1793 to 1798, a reign that was marked more by political manoeuvring than genuine governance.

Serfoji II, meanwhile, spent his years of exile in the care of the Danish mission at Tharangambadi (Tranquebar). His principal tutor there was Christian Friedrich Schwartz, a German-born Danish Lutheran missionary and a remarkably gifted educator. Schwartz gave Serfoji II something unusual for an Indian prince of that era: a deeply Western-influenced education combined with a genuine respect for Indian learning. The result was a man who was comfortable in multiple intellectual worlds simultaneously — Indian classical traditions and European Enlightenment thought sat side by side in his mind without contradiction.

In 1798, with British support, Serfoji II recovered his throne from Amarsingh. The British East India Company deposed his uncle and restored him to power. But the restoration was not free. Serfoji II had to sign a treaty that transferred all real administrative power over the kingdom to the British. The district collectorate system was installed to manage public revenues. Thanjavur was effectively absorbed into the Madras Presidency’s administrative machinery. Serfoji II was left in control of the Tanjore Fort and the surrounding palace complex, along with his title and a generous allowance, but he no longer governed a kingdom in any meaningful political sense.

What he did with that situation is what makes him extraordinary. Rather than wasting his remaining years in regret or political scheming, Serfoji II turned the palace into one of the greatest centres of learning in eighteenth and nineteenth-century India.

Serfoji II did not merely inherit a kingdom; he curated a civilisation on paper, palm leaf and print inside the halls of the Saraswathi Mahal Library.

He built the Saraswathi Mahal Library within the palace complex, housing a collection of manuscripts and books that eventually numbered in the tens of thousands. The collection was multilingual — Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Sanskrit, English, French, Dutch, Greek, Latin. Serfoji II himself was fluent in all of these languages, a fact that speaks to both his extraordinary intelligence and the depth of education he had received under Schwartz’s guidance. The library contained medical texts, astronomical treatises, musical compositions, historical chronicles, religious scriptures, and practical manuals on subjects ranging from agriculture to shipbuilding. It was, in essence, an attempt to capture human knowledge across civilisations and preserve it in one place.

Serfoji II was also deeply interested in the performing arts. He is credited with contributing significantly to the development and codification of Bharatanatyam, the classical dance form of Tamil Nadu. He sponsored performances, documented choreographic traditions, and ensured that the institutional framework for the dance — including the devadasi system that maintained it — was supported and preserved. His court was a vibrant place of artistic production, and the famous Tanjore painting style reached its peak of sophistication during his reign.

He even had a personal physician trained in Western medicine, built hospitals using European techniques, and experimented with new agricultural methods. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a polymath — a man whose curiosity reached out in every direction that the world offered.

Serfoji II reigned until his death in 1832. He did not have the political power to resist the British or reclaim his kingdom’s independence. But he left behind a legacy that has outlasted any of his predecessors’ military victories or diplomatic triumphs. The Saraswathi Mahal Library still exists. The manuscripts he collected are still studied. The cultural institutions he supported are still alive. In the end, a king who was stripped of political power created a more durable impact than most kings who kept it.

Shivaji II — The Last King (1832–1855)

Serfoji II was succeeded by his son Shivaji II, who took the throne in 1832. He was the last Maratha ruler of Thanjavur, and his reign was overshadowed from the beginning by the same limitations that had defined his father’s — he was a king without a kingdom, a royal in a palace that the British administration had reduced to an ornamental role.

Shivaji II continued to maintain the cultural traditions of the court, but he lacked his father’s extraordinary intellectual drive. He ruled for over two decades without leaving a particularly distinctive mark on history. His tragedy was not of his own making — it was structural, built into the treaty of 1798 that had handed real power to the British.

The final act came in 1855. Shivaji II died without a male heir from his first wife. As was customary in Hindu royal succession, his queen adopted her nephew to continue the dynasty. But the British East India Company, under Governor-General Dalhousie’s controversial Doctrine of Lapse, refused to recognise the adoption. The Doctrine of Lapse was a policy invented specifically to absorb Indian states into British territory by denying the legitimacy of adopted heirs. It was applied ruthlessly across India in the 1840s and 1850s, and Thanjavur was one of its victims.

The British declared the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom extinct. The palace, the revenues, the fort, and the title all passed into British hands. The dynasty that Venkoji Bhonsle had founded in 1674 came to its formal end in 1855 — one hundred and eighty one years after it had begun with a general’s opportunistic decision on a battlefield.

How the Kingdom Was Governed

The administrative structure of the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom was a blend of Maratha tradition and local South Indian practice. At the top of the system, the king governed with the assistance of a council of ministers. The most senior of these was the Mantri, also called the Dalavoy — who served as both the chief minister and the commander-in-chief of the army. Below him was the Pradhani or Dewan, also known as the Dabir Pandit, who handled day-to-day administration and revenue management.

The kingdom was divided into administrative units in a three-tier hierarchy: subahs at the top, then seemais, and finally maganams at the local level. There were five subahs in total — Pattukkottai, Mayiladuthurai (then called Mayavaram), Kumbakonam, Mannargudi, and Tiruvadi. Each subah was managed by an appointed officer who reported to the central court.

Taxation was collected at the village level through agents called mirasdars or puttackdars. The agricultural produce of each village determined the tax assessment, with rice being the primary crop across the fertile Cauvery delta. The system was built on the shoulders of large landlords who controlled the actual cultivated land, and it functioned in a way that was not fundamentally different from the revenue systems used by earlier dynasties in the same region.

Foreign trade was minimal and entirely in the hands of European traders — primarily the Dutch, the Danes, the French, and eventually the British — who paid rent to the Raja for the right to maintain their trading posts and warehouses in the kingdom’s port areas. The kingdom’s own commerce was largely internal, centred on the agricultural surplus of the delta.

The currency system reflected the hybrid nature of the kingdom. The basic unit was the chakram or pon, which was worth one-and-three-quarters of a British East India Company rupee. Other coins in use included the pagoda (worth three-and-a-half Company rupees), the big panam (one-sixth of a Company rupee), and the small panam (one-thirteenth). This mixture of local and Company currency reflects the gradual encroachment of British economic influence into the kingdom long before the political annexation was formalised.

Timeline of the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom (1674–1855)

Literature and Language — A Four-Language Kingdom

In the Cauvery delta, Maratha power did not speak in one tongue but in four—Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Sanskrit — each language finding its own space at court.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom was its deliberate multilingualism. The Maratha rulers patronised literature in four languages simultaneously — Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Sanskrit. Each language served a different purpose and spoke to a different audience.

Tamil was the language of the people. The overwhelming majority of the kingdom’s population spoke Tamil, and any ruler who wanted to connect with his subjects had to acknowledge Tamil. The Maratha kings supported Tamil literature, Tamil temple traditions, and Tamil performing arts, even as they maintained Marathi as the language of the court elite.

Telugu had been the language of the Nayaka rulers who preceded the Marathas, and it retained considerable prestige — both culturally and administratively — long after the Nayaks were gone. Many of the literary works produced under Shahuji I were in Telugu, and Venkoji himself composed a Telugu Ramayana. The connection to Telugu culture gave the Marathas a bridge to the literary traditions of the preceding dynasty.

Marathi was the native language of the ruling family, the language of their homeland, and the language in which they corresponded with the Bhonsle courts in Maharashtra. Notable Marathi authors from the Thanjavur court include Raghunatha Pandita, Ananda-tanaya, Gosavi-nandana, and Subhan Rao. Their works were typically shorter pieces on religious subjects drawn from the Puranas, celebrations of the royal family, or descriptions of Thanjavur’s grandeur.

Sanskrit, as always in medieval Indian courts, was the language of religious authority, philosophical inquiry, and high literary prestige. Shahaji’s minister Tryambaka-yajvan wrote the Sanskrit text Dharmakuta, a commentary on the Ramayana, and the Stri-dharma-paddhati, a work on the duties and conduct of women that became a notable document in the history of Sanskrit literature.

Other members of the royal family contributed works in Sanskrit: Narayana-raya wrote Vikrama-sena-champu, Bhagavanta-raya wrote Mukunda-vilasa and Uttara-champu, Ananda-raya wrote several dramatic and philosophical works, and Nrsimha-raya wrote the Tripura-vijaya-champu. The writer Dhundhiraja, patronised by Shahaji, produced Shaha-vilasa-gita and a commentary on Mudra-rakshasa.

This was not a perfunctory or token commitment to multiple languages. The sheer volume of literary production under the Tanjore Maratha court in all four languages demonstrates a genuine and sustained engagement with South India’s rich textual traditions. The kingdom was, in a real sense, a laboratory of cultural synthesis.

The Saraswathi Mahal Library — A Monument to Knowledge

If there is one institution above all others that defines the intellectual legacy of the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom, it is the Saraswathi Mahal Library. Built by Serfoji II within the palace complex, it began as a private royal collection and grew into one of the most important repositories of manuscripts and books in all of India.

The collection spans thousands of manuscripts in palm leaf and paper, covering an extraordinary range of subjects. There are texts on Ayurvedic medicine and anatomy, treatises on astronomy and mathematics, musical compositions and theoretical works on Carnatic music, treatises on sculpture, painting, and architecture, records of temple rituals and ceremonies, chronicles of the kingdom’s own history, and translations of European scientific works that Serfoji II commissioned during his reign.

Serfoji II was himself a deeply learned man. His education under the Reverend Schwartz at Tranquebar gave him proficiency in English, French, Dutch, Greek, and Latin in addition to his native Marathi, and his mastery of Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit. This linguistic range allowed him to engage directly with European scientific literature and bring that knowledge into dialogue with Indian scholarly traditions.

He commissioned translations and summaries of works on Western medicine, mechanical engineering, and natural history. He had anatomical drawings made, some of which survive in the library collection. He experimented with new surgical techniques. He built a small hospital where both Ayurvedic and Western medical approaches were practised.

The Saraswathi Mahal Library continues to function today as one of Tamil Nadu’s most important cultural institutions. It holds approximately 49,000 manuscripts, and scholars from around the world come to study its collections. It is Serfoji II’s most enduring gift to posterity — a place where knowledge was gathered, preserved, and made available across the centuries.

The Art of the Tanjore Court — Painting, Music, and Dance

The Tanjore Maratha Kingdom’s contribution to the arts was enormous, and it touched every medium of cultural expression available to it.

Tanjore Maratha Paintings

Tanjore painting — palagai padam in Tamil, meaning paintings on wooden planks — had its roots in the Chola and Nayaka periods, but it reached its mature and most distinctive form under the patronage of the Maratha rulers. The characteristics that make Tanjore paintings instantly recognisable today — the vivid, jewel-bright colours, the use of gold foil and gesso work to create embossed surfaces, the inlay of glass beads and semi-precious stones, the cherubic faces of deities drawn with almond-shaped eyes — were all developed and refined during the Maratha period.

Maratha artisans brought techniques from further north that transformed the existing tradition. They introduced the use of gold foil applied over raised gesso surfaces to give paintings an opulent, three-dimensional quality. They brought the technique of reverse glass painting, adapted from Chinese influences that had reached India through European trade networks. They elevated portraiture as a genre, painting not only gods and goddesses but also Maratha rulers, their courtiers, and their families — creating a visual record of the dynasty in addition to the religious imagery that had dominated earlier work.

Under Serfoji II, Tanjore painting reached what many art historians consider its golden phase. The combination of royal patronage, technically skilled artisans drawn from the Raju and Nayudu communities of the Tamil region, and the Maratha court’s appetite for artistic production created conditions in which the style flourished. Serfoji II built the Joliram Math, a repository of paintings, some of which date back over four hundred years. He constructed choultries — rest houses for pilgrims and travellers — at Tiruvaiyar, Tanjore, Orattanad, and Pattukottai, decorating their walls with murals depicting scenes from Hindu mythology.

The Maratha Durbar Hall, built in 1684, contains large portraits of all the Maratha kings beginning with Shahji, the father of Venkoji. These paintings, still visible in the Tanjore palace, are one of the most direct visual records of the dynasty’s existence and self-image. The front mandapa of the hall is painted red and decorated with motifs of grapes and vine leaves — an unexpectedly European decorative touch in the heart of a South Indian royal palace, reflecting the cultural permeability of the Maratha court.

Carnatic Music

Thanjavur’s connection to Carnatic music is ancient and deep, predating the Marathas by many centuries. But the Maratha period was significant in the music’s history as well. The Tanjore court was a gathering place for musicians and composers, and the patronage provided by the Maratha rulers helped sustain the institutional framework that kept classical music alive even as the political world around it was changing rapidly.

The court of the Tanjore Marathas is associated with the Tanjore Quartet — four brothers named Chinnaiah, Ponnaiah, Sivanandam, and Vadivelu — who made extraordinary contributions to the development of Bharatanatyam’s repertoire. They worked under the patronage of Serfoji II, helping to systematise and codify the classical dance form at a critical moment in its history.

Bharatanatyam and the Performing Arts

Serfoji II’s relationship with Bharatanatyam deserves particular attention. By the early nineteenth century, the classical dance tradition of Tamil Nadu was maintained primarily by devadasis — women dedicated to temple service who were also trained as dancers and musicians. The system had come under increasing criticism and was beginning to face the pressures that would eventually, in the colonial period, lead to its near extinction before it was revived by reformers in the twentieth century.

Serfoji II recognised the value of the tradition and worked to document and preserve it. He supported the devadasi institutions, commissioned written records of choreography and musical compositions, and gave the Tanjore Quartet the resources and space to carry out their work of systematisation. The abhinaya system — the grammar of expressive gesture that is central to Bharatanatyam — was documented and refined during this period. The sadir performance tradition that would later be reshaped into modern Bharatanatyam owed a significant debt to the institutional support provided by the Tanjore Maratha court.

Architecture — What the Marathas Built

The Tanjore Maratha rulers were also builders, though their architectural contributions tend to be overshadowed by the Brihadeeswara Temple, which the Cholas built a thousand years ago and which still dominates the Thanjavur skyline. Nevertheless, the Marathas left a distinctive architectural footprint in the city and its surroundings.

The Tanjore Palace itself — or Aranmanai as it is locally known — was expanded and modified significantly during the Maratha period. The Maratha Durbar Hall is perhaps the most distinctive Maratha addition to the palace complex. The Sangita Mahal, a music hall within the palace, was built to host musical performances and has unusual acoustic properties that made it ideal for the intimate chamber music of the Carnatic tradition.

One of the most unusual architectural projects associated with Serfoji II is the Manora Fort, built at Pattukottai on the shore of the Bay of Bengal. The hexagonal, multi-storeyed structure — 140 feet tall — was built in 1815 to commemorate the British victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Serfoji II, who was deeply invested in his relationship with the British and in demonstrating his alignment with European political culture, built this monument as a gesture of solidarity. It is an extraordinary thing — a Maratha king in South India building a monument to a European military victory, expressing a cosmopolitan identity that crossed every conventional boundary of the period.

The choultries that Serfoji II built across the region — rest houses for pilgrims visiting Thanjavur’s famous temples — are another form of architectural patronage, less spectacular than a palace hall but more deeply connected to the daily religious life of the population. Their walls, painted with mythological murals, brought fine art into spaces that ordinary people used every day.

The Kingdom and the British — A Complicated Dance

The relationship between the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom and the British East India Company unfolded over more than a century in a way that was neither straightforwardly antagonistic nor genuinely equal. It was a slow, complicated, asymmetric entanglement that ended with the kingdom’s absorption — not through conquest but through the machinery of treaty, debt, and administrative control.

The first formal alignment came under Pratapsingh, who chose the British-Carnatic side in the Carnatic Wars. The 1762 tripartite treaty that made Thanjavur a vassal of the Nawab of the Carnatic was the first formal reduction of sovereignty. Then came the Nawab’s annexation in 1773, the British-brokered restoration of Thuljaji in 1776, and the accelerating loss of independence in the years that followed.

The 1798 treaty that accompanied Serfoji II’s restoration was the critical turning point. By handing over the administration of public revenues to the British, and by accepting the district collectorate system, the kingdom effectively ceased to exist as a self-governing entity. What remained was a royal title, a palace, and a generous allowance — enough for Serfoji II to pursue his intellectual projects, but no more than that.

The British did not act purely from malice. They saw Serfoji II as a useful, educated, and cooperative figure who posed no threat and could be managed at low cost. They allowed him his cultural projects, his library, his medical experiments. In return, he gave them no political trouble. It was a bargain that suited both sides — but it was unquestionably a bargain struck between unequals.

The Doctrine of Lapse that ended the kingdom in 1855 was the final piece of a long process of absorption. Dalhousie’s policy was widely condemned even within British India, and its application to Thanjavur was particularly controversial because the adoption that was refused had followed entirely conventional Hindu royal custom. But the policy was applied regardless, and the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom disappeared from the map.

What the Kingdom Left Behind

Walking through Thanjavur today, you encounter the legacy of the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom at every turn. It is impossible to separate it from the layers of Chola, Nayaka, and earlier history that surround it, but it is very much present.

The Saraswathi Mahal Library, with its tens of thousands of manuscripts, is the most tangible legacy. It continues to serve researchers and scholars, and its collection is a window into the intellectual life of a court that took knowledge seriously across multiple languages and disciplines.

Tanjore painting, now recognised with a Geographical Indication tag by the Government of India (awarded in 2007-08), is the artistic legacy. Every Tanjore painting sold in a gallery or craft store today carries within it the influence of the Maratha period — the gold foil, the gesso work, the gems, the style of the faces. The tradition was shaped decisively by the royal patronage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and has never entirely lost that imprint.

Bharatanatyam, now performed on stages around the world, carries within its choreographic grammar the systematic work done at the Tanjore court under Serfoji II. The Tanjore Quartet’s contributions to the abhinaya repertoire and to the composition of varnam and tillana forms are still part of the curriculum of classical dance training in India and in every Indian diaspora community that maintains the tradition.

Carnatic music’s rich institutional base in the Thanjavur region owes something to the sustained royal patronage of the Maratha period. The court’s support for composers and performers across nearly two centuries created a cultural infrastructure that survived the kingdom’s end and continued to nourish the tradition under later, more diffuse forms of patronage.

Even the Tanjore Maratha dialect of Marathi — a distinct form of the language shaped by centuries of contact with Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit — survives as a linguistic curiosity, spoken by a small community in Thanjavur who are the descendants of the court functionaries, soldiers, and artisans who came south with the early Maratha rulers and never went back.

The Rulers at a Glance — Complete Dynastic Table

For easy reference, here is the complete list of Bhonsle Maratha rulers of Thanjavur:

No.	Ruler	Reign (CE)	Notable For
1	Venkoji (Ekoji) Bhonsle	1674–1684	Founder; Telugu Dvipada Ramayana
2	Shahuji I	1684–1712	Literary patronage; 45-scholar assembly at Shahaji-raja-puram
3	Serfoji I	1712–1728	Ongoing Madurai conflicts
4	Tukkoji	1728–1736	Repulsed Chanda Sahib’s invasion
5	Ekoji II	1736–1737	Brief rule during succession crisis
6	Sujana Bai	1737–1738	Rare female ruler of the dynasty
7	Shahuji II	1738–1739	Last ruler before Pratapsingh’s stabilisation
8	Pratapsingh	1739–1763	Allied with British; last king addressed as “His Majesty”
9	Thuljaji	1763–1773 & 1776–1787	Last nominally independent ruler; annexed and restored
10	Serfoji II	1787–1793 & 1798–1832	Saraswathi Mahal Library; Bharatanatyam; polymath king
11	Amar Singh	1793–1798	Uncle-regent who briefly seized power
12	Shivaji II	1832–1855	Last Maratha ruler; kingdom annexed under Doctrine of Lapse

Why the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom Matters Today

The Tanjore Maratha Kingdom is not widely known outside South India, and even within India it often exists in the shadow of more famous empires — the Vijayanagara Empire, the Mughal Empire, or the Maratha Confederacy of the Deccan. But its historical significance is disproportionate to its size.

It was a kingdom that demonstrated, across nearly two centuries, that cultural synthesis is not just possible but can be extraordinarily creative. A Maharashtrian dynasty, governing a Tamil land, supporting Telugu literature, writing in Sanskrit, building institutions in the European tradition, and producing artistic forms that now belong to the whole of humanity. The Tanjore Maratha court did not see these as contradictions. It saw them as different registers of the same civilisational conversation.

The kingdom also offers a window into how Indian states navigated the arrival and expansion of European colonialism. Pratapsingh’s alliance with the British was a rational choice at the time it was made. Thuljaji’s restoration by British order was a reminder of how quickly that alliance could become dependency. Serfoji II’s treaty in 1798 was the formal recognition of a subordination that had been building for decades. And the Doctrine of Lapse in 1855 was the final proof that no amount of loyalty, cooperation, or cultural brilliance could protect an Indian state from absorption once British policy turned against it.

Serfoji II, perhaps more than any other figure in this story, understood his situation clearly and made the most remarkable possible response to it. Unable to fight the British with armies, he chose to fight for his legacy with manuscripts, paintings, dance repertoires, and medical experiments. He lost the kingdom. He preserved the culture. And in the long run, the culture has proved more lasting than the kingdom.

A Maratha Dynasty That Became Tamil

The story of the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom is ultimately a story about belonging. Venkoji arrived in Thanjavur as a foreign general pursuing a military objective. His descendants stayed, learned Tamil, supported Tamil temples, wrote in Tamil and Telugu and Sanskrit and Marathi, and over time became something the world had not quite seen before — Maratha kings who were also, genuinely and deeply, South Indian.

By the time Serfoji II was running his library and sponsoring his dance performances, the question of whether the Tanjore Bhonsles were Maratha or Tamil had become almost meaningless. They were both. They were a product of the meeting between the two cultures, and they had used that position — half inside, half outside, belonging to multiple worlds at once — to create something lasting.

The Brihadeeswara Temple is still there. The Saraswathi Mahal Library is still there. Tanjore paintings are still being made. Bharatanatyam is still being performed. The city that Venkoji took by force in 1674 still carries within it the traces of everything that his dynasty built, supported, and celebrated in the century and a half that followed.

That, in the end, is what the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom was — not just a political entity that rose and fell, but a cultural moment that never quite ended.

How Do We Know About the Tanjore Marathas? A Note on Sources

Unlike the Madurai Sultanate, which left almost no records of its own, the Tanjore Maratha Kingdom generated an extraordinary wealth of documentation — manuscripts, court chronicles, temple inscriptions, and European colonial archives. Yet each source comes with its own perspective and limitations.

1. Saraswathi Mahal Library Manuscripts

• What they are: Court records, literary works (Sanskrit, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil), royal correspondence, medical and scientific texts
• Perspective & Bias: Pro-Maratha, court-centric – produced by and for the ruling elite. Tends to glorify the dynasty and downplay defeats or internal conflicts.
• Key Value: The single most important archive for the kingdom’s own self-understanding. Includes unique works like Serfoji II’s commissioned translations of European science.

2. Marathi Bakhar Literature

• What they are: Sabhasad Bakhar, Chitnis Bakhar, and Tanjore-specific court chronicles
• Perspective & Bias: Maratha patriotic – written from a Maharashtrian perspective, often focused on the Bhonsle lineage and Shivaji’s legacy. Tanjore appears as a southern branch.
• Key Value: Preserves the genealogies and legendary traditions of the Bhonsle family, including Venkoji’s separation from Shivaji.

3. Temple Inscriptions & Copper Plates

• What they are: Brihadeeswara Temple (Thanjavur), Darasuram, and other Cauvery delta temple records
• Perspective & Bias: Ritual and donative – record land grants, tax exemptions, and endowments for temple worship. Silent on political or military defeats.
• Key Value: Provides fixed dates for royal patronage and confirms the dynasty’s integration into Tamil religious life.

4. East India Company Records

• What they are: Madras Presidency correspondence (British Library, Tamil Nadu Archives), treaties of 1762 and 1798, Doctrine of Lapse files (1855)
• Perspective & Bias: Colonial and administrative – written by British officials, often patronising or dismissive of Indian sovereignty. Favours Company interests.
• Key Value: The primary source for the kingdom’s decline and annexation. Records the exact terms of subordination and British strategic thinking.

5. Danish Mission Archives

• What they are: Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) mission records, letters of Christian Friedrich Schwartz
• Perspective & Bias: European missionary Protestant – interested in conversion and “civilising” Indian elites. Admires Serfoji II’s education but views Hinduism as superstition.
• Key Value: Unique eyewitness accounts of Serfoji II’s education and personality from a European perspective.

6. European Travelogues & Paintings

• What they are: Accounts by Dutch, Danish, French, and British visitors; Company school paintings and engravings
• Perspective & Bias: External, often orientalist – fascinated by exotic Indian royalty, prone to exaggeration and stereotypes.
• Key Value: Provides visual records of the Tanjore palace, court ceremonies, and Maratha kings. The Manora Fort appears in several British engravings.

7. Tanjore Paintings & Art Inscriptions

• What they are: Colophons and donor records on Tanjore paintings themselves
• Perspective & Bias: Artisanal and devotional – records the names of painters, patrons, and sometimes the cost or occasion of commission.
• Key Value: The only direct evidence of the paintings’ production context. Helps date the evolution of the Tanjore painting style.

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