Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as a Linguistic Strategist and Administrator: Vernacular Power, Imperial Administration, and Linguistic Intelligence in Multilingual Governance and State Formation

This paper reinterprets Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as a conscious linguistic strategist whose governance demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of language as a technology of power. Challenging historiographical tendencies that foreground military innovation alone, the study argues that linguistic intelligence was central to Maratha state formation in the seventeenth-century Deccan. Shivaji Maharaj institutionalised Marathi as a language of administration and popular legitimacy while strategically retaining Persian for diplomacy and imperial bureaucracy and Sanskrit for juridical, ideological, and ritual authority. This functional differentiation of languages enabled administrative efficiency, political legitimacy, and social inclusion within a multilingual political ecology shaped by Indo-Persian bureaucratic traditions. Drawing upon administrative documents, lexicons such as the Rajyavyavahārakośa, royal correspondence, and political texts including Ājñāpatra and Budhbhūṣaṇam, the study situates the Maratha polity within broader early modern models of multilingual governance. It conceptualises Shivaji Maharaj’s statecraft as an adaptive and non-exclusivist model of multilingual sovereignty, demonstrating that linguistic plurality, when strategically managed, strengthens rather than fragments political authority. The paper contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship by foregrounding language as infrastructural and symbolic power in pre-modern Indian state formation.