Maharashtra historical timeline

Maharashtra’s history runs from Buddhist rock-cutting to the founding of modern India.

The caves

Under the Satavahanas and their successors, trade routes across the Deccan funded Buddhist monasteries cut into the basalt. Ajanta was worked in two phases, the second under the Vakatakas in the fifth century producing the paintings, and was then abandoned and forgotten until a British hunting party stumbled on it in 1819. Ellora continued into the ninth century, with the Rashtrakuta kings commissioning the Kailasa temple — carved top-down from the living rock in what is among the most audacious pieces of architecture anywhere.

The Marathas

Shivaji built a kingdom from the 1650s using the Ghat forts and light cavalry against Bijapur and then the Mughals, was crowned in 1674, and created an administration that outlasted him. Under the Peshwas the Maratha confederacy became the dominant power in India in the eighteenth century, until defeated by the British in 1818.

Bombay

Seven islands given to England as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry in 1661, leased to the East India Company, and progressively joined by reclamation. The American Civil War cut off cotton to Lancashire and made Bombay enormously rich in the 1860s.

Nationalism

The Indian National Congress was founded in Bombay in 1885, and the Quit India movement launched there in 1942.

Rediscovering Ajanta

A British officer hunting tiger in 1819 was shown a cave mouth by a local boy, and what had been abandoned for over a thousand years came back into the world. Early copying expeditions were unlucky — two sets of painstaking watercolour copies were destroyed by fire, in Bombay in 1866 and at the Crystal Palace in 1885 — and early restoration attempts with varnish did lasting damage. The caution around the caves today is a direct response to that record.

After 1947

Maharashtra was created as a Marathi-speaking state in 1960 after a long agitation.