Bajirao I: the Maratha Peshwa who fought 40 battles and never lost

Bajirao's run of victories was not luck; it grew from a clear idea about how to fight. The Mughal and Nizam armies of his day were huge but slow — burdened with heavy artillery, elephants, treasure, camp followers and long supply trains. They were built to win set-piece battles on a chosen field. Bajirao simply refused to give them that battle. His horsemen carried little, lived off the country, and moved two or three times faster than any imperial column. Instead of meeting the enemy head-on he would slip around them, raid the towns and supply routes at their back, seize water sources and river crossings, and let hunger, thirst and confusion do the work. Cornered, cut off and unable to feed themselves, even much larger forces chose to negotiate rather than be destroyed piecemeal. This is 'manoeuvre warfare', and Bajirao practised it with rare instinct. The British field marshal Bernard Montgomery, writing much later, singled out the Palkhed campaign as a masterpiece of strategic mobility, noting that the Marathas moved unencumbered by guns or baggage. The lesson beneath the legend is simple: speed, surprise and control of supply can defeat size — and Bajirao understood that better than almost any commander of his century.

Bajirao I (1700–1740) — the young Peshwa and cavalry general whose campaigns are the spine of this story. Chhatrapati Shahu — the Maratha king who trusted a twenty-year-old with supreme command and backed his northern strategy throughout. Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah I — founder of the Hyderabad state and Bajirao's chief rival in the Deccan, beaten at Palkhed in 1728 and again at Bhopal in 1737. Chimaji Appa — Bajirao's younger brother and trusted lieutenant, who led his own campaigns, including the capture of Bassein from the Portuguese. Chhatrasal — the aged Bundela king whom Bajirao rescued from a Mughal siege in 1729; in gratitude he gave the Marathas territory, wealth and, by tradition, his daughter Mastani. Kashibai — Bajirao's first wife, from a wealthy banking family, remembered in accounts as his devoted and dignified companion. Mastani — the woman Bajirao loved and took as a second wife, of mixed Rajput and Muslim parentage, whose bond with him defied orthodox Pune society and became the heart of the later legend. Together these figures frame both the conqueror and the man.

Born on 18 August 1700, Bajirao Ballal Bhat became Peshwa in 1720 at about twenty — and held the office for roughly twenty years, from 1720 until his death in 1740. Admiring tradition credits him with around forty (some accounts say forty-one) battles fought without a single defeat; treat that as a beloved claim rather than an audited ledger. The best-documented milestones stand on firmer ground. At the Battle of Palkhed (February 1728) he encircled and starved the Nizam's larger army into surrender, the Treaty of Mungi-Shevgaon following on 6 March 1728; Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery later called the campaign a 'masterpiece of strategic mobility.' His horsemen were said to cover 40 to 50 miles a day, living off the land. In March 1737 he rode the length of Hindustan and struck at the outskirts of Delhi. At Bhopal (December 1737 to January 1738) he again cornered the combined Mughal-Nizam force and secured Maratha rights over Malwa. He died of a sudden fever near the Narmada on 28 April 1740, aged just thirty-nine — the undefeated record intact after two decades in the saddle.

When Bajirao took charge in 1720, the Marathas were still, in most eyes, a regional Deccan power — heirs of Shivaji, respected and feared in the south, but hemmed in by the Mughal empire that claimed all of Hindustan. Delhi was the centre; the Marathas were a frontier problem. By the time Bajirao died in 1740, that map had begun to invert. His campaigns had planted Maratha authority across Malwa, Bundelkhand and Gujarat, won the right to collect taxes over vast territories, and shown the whole subcontinent that the Mughal capital itself could be reached and shaken. The empire had not fallen, but its aura of invincibility had. Looking back, Bajirao's twenty years are the hinge on which Maratha history turns: the moment a southern kingdom set its sights on all of India. Within a generation his successors would extend Maratha influence to the gates of the north-west, until the disaster at Panipat in 1761 checked it. Today he is remembered less for any single treaty than for that shift in scale — the general who first made an all-India Maratha ambition look not just possible but nearly inevitable, and who is now studied in military academies as a model of mobile warfare.

Honesty matters here, because Bajirao's fame mixes hard record with warm tradition. The claim: he fought about forty battles and never lost one. This is repeated everywhere and it is broadly true that he suffered no major defeat — but the neat figure of 'forty battles, zero losses' comes from admiring popular history, not a verified campaign ledger; treat it as an honestly-held tradition, not an audited stat. The military core is solid. Palkhed (1728), the raid on Delhi (1737) and Bhopal (1737–38) are well documented, and his mastery of mobile cavalry is recognised even by foreign military writers. The Mastani romance is where legend takes over. A real Mastani existed and was genuinely dear to Bajirao, but the sweeping love story most people know comes from the 2015 film Bajirao Mastani and earlier folklore, which compress, dramatise and invent detail; contemporary records about her are thin. 'He was like Napoleon' is a later comparison by historians, not a fact about him. What is unarguable: a Deccan Brahmin became Peshwa at twenty, ran a brilliant run of campaigns, expanded Maratha power enormously, and died at thirty-nine. Everything more cinematic than that should be read as plausible, deeply loved, and only partly proven.

Bajirao matters because he shows what a single clear idea, pursued relentlessly, can do to history. He did not have the biggest army, the most gold, or the grandest court; he had speed, nerve and a strategy of mobility, and with them he bent an empire. The lesson military academies still draw from Palkhed — that manoeuvre, surprise and control of supply can defeat sheer size — is one reason his campaigns are studied far beyond India. But his story matters in a second way too: it is a case study in how a nation remembers. The temptation is to flatten him into either a flawless comic-book hero who never lost, or a mere film romance in a jewelled coat. The honest picture is more valuable — a gifted, exhausted young man who took a real gamble, won astonishing victories, loved unwisely by his society's rules, and burned out at thirty-nine. Holding both the military genius and the human cost together is what keeps him real rather than mythical. His twenty years remind us that empires turn on individuals, that the undefeated record was paid for in a short life, and that the most useful way to honour a legend is to keep asking, gently, which parts of it are actually true.