Chauth (from ) was a regular tax or tribute imposed from the early 18th century by the

Maratha Empire The Maratha Empire, also referred to as the Maratha Confederacy, was an early modern India, early modern polity in the Indian subcontinent. It comprised the realms of the Peshwa and four major independent List of Maratha dynasties and states, Ma ...

in the

Indian subcontinent The Indian subcontinent is a physiographic region of Asia below the Himalayas which projects into the Indian Ocean between the Bay of Bengal to the east and the Arabian Sea to the west. It is now divided between Bangladesh, India, and Pakista ...

. It was an annual tax nominally levied at 25% on revenue or produce, hence the name, on lands that were under nominal Mughal rule. The sardeshmukhi was an additional 10% levy on top of the ''chauth''. A tribute paid to the king, it was started by Koli Maharaja Som Shah of Ramnagar. Opinions on the function of the chauth vary. According to M G Ranade, the chauth was charged to provide armed security for a state by the Marathas and is thus comparable to the system of subsidiary alliances that was used by Lord Wellesley to bring Indian states under British control. The historian Jadunath Sarkar has argued that the chauth was essentially a tax paid by those states that did not want the Marathas to enter into their realm. The chauth thus served as

protection money A protection racket is a type of racket and a scheme of organized crime perpetrated by a potentially hazardous organized crime group that generally guarantees protection outside the sanction of the law to another entity or individual from viol ...

against Maratha invasions of the chauth paying state. The tax was levied at the rate of one fourth the annual revenues of the state and was levied at the cost of the revenue paid by the state to the

Mughals The Mughal Empire was an early modern empire in South Asia. At its peak, the empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus River Basin in the west, northern Afghanistan in the northwest, and Kashmir in the north, to the highlands of pre ...

or the Deccan kingdoms. In 1719, the

Mughal emperor The emperors of the Mughal Empire, who were all members of the Timurid dynasty (House of Babur), ruled the empire from its inception on 21 April 1526 to its dissolution on 21 September 1857. They were supreme monarchs of the Mughal Empire in ...

Rafi ud-Darajat granted Chhatrapati Shahu Raje Bhonsale the chauth and sardeshmukhi rights over the six Deccan provinces in exchange for his maintaining a contingent of 15,000 troops for the emperor. The revenues from chauth were in turn divided into four parts that went to various functionaries of the Maratha empire. One fourth of the levy, called ''babti'', went to the Chhatrapati and he also had discretionary grant making authority over the ''nadgaunda'', proceeds which amounted to 3% of the total collection. Also, 6% of the chauth collections was granted to the ''pant sachiv'', the officer in charge of the royal secretariat and was called the ''sahotra'' grant. Two thirds of the collections, however, remained with the Maratha sardars, who collected the taxes and used them for maintaining their troops for the chhatrapati. That part of the levy was called ''mokasa''. The chauth, along with sardeshmukhi levies, ensured a steady and large stream of income for the Marathas and helped them expand their beyond the swarajya territories of Shivaji. The right to assess and collect this tax was asserted first by

Shivaji Shivaji I (Shivaji Shahaji Bhonsale, ; 19 February 1630 – 3 April 1680) was an Indian ruler and a member of the Bhonsle dynasty. Shivaji carved out his own independent kingdom from the Sultanate of Bijapur that formed the genesis of the ...

in the later 17th century on the grounds that his family were hereditary tax collectors in

Maharashtra Maharashtra () is a state in the western peninsular region of India occupying a substantial portion of the Deccan Plateau. It is bordered by the Arabian Sea to the west, the Indian states of Karnataka and Goa to the south, Telangana to th ...

. Durgadas Rathore harassed Mughal officers through guerrilla warfare and forced them to pay chauth during his war against

Aurangzeb Alamgir I (Muhi al-Din Muhammad; 3 November 1618 – 3 March 1707), commonly known by the title Aurangzeb, also called Aurangzeb the Conqueror, was the sixth Mughal emperors, Mughal emperor, reigning from 1658 until his death in 1707, becomi ...

.{{Cite book, first=R.C., last=Majumdar, title= An Advanced History of India, publisher=Trinity Press, year=2020, pages=494–497, url=, quote=Under the able leadership of Durgadas, the Rathors ceaselessly carried on a guerrilla warfare and harassed the Mughal outposts so that the Mughal officers were compelled to pay chauth.

Notes

History of taxation in India Maratha Empire

See also

Notes