Marathi

The Marathi are the Indo-Aryan people of Maharashtra, the Deccan uplands of western India between the Tapti and the Krishna, and speak Marathi, a language descended from Maharashtri Prakrit and first attested in a copper-plate inscription of 739. Their medieval literature was shaped by the Varkari Bhakti saints who sang of Vitthal in the vernacular, from Dnyaneshwar to Namdev, Eknath and Tukaram.

In 1337 Maharashtra had recently passed from the Yadava kings of Deogiri, overthrown by the Delhi Khaljis in 1321, to the Tughluqs, then falling to the Bahmani sultans and their successor states of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur, under whom Marathi headmen held hereditary revenue offices, the patil and deshmukh watans, and the Adil Shahi court kept records in Marathi.

In the seventeenth century Shivaji Bhosale welded Marathi chiefs and peasants into new power and was crowned in 1674, founding the Maratha Empire, which carried a Marathi-ruled state from the Deccan hills into the politics of all India.