The Maratha age of eastern India, taken here as the Bargi raids of 1742 to 1751 and the rule of the Bhonsles of Nagpur over Odisha from the early 1750s to 1803, is a well recorded chapter of political history, but the Kudumi are not named in any of the sources reviewed for this article. The article therefore does what the earlier articles in this series did: it reads the surrounding history and asks where a farming community of village headmen would have stood in it. It sets out the raids on Midnapore, Burdwan and Birbhum, the Maratha settlement of Odisha with its twenty-four tributary chieftaincies, the revenue system that rested on cultivated land and hereditary revenue officers, and the position of Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Sundargarh. It finds that the Kudumi of the Bengal border and of northern Odisha lived in lands over which the Marathas fought and collected revenue, but that no source reviewed describes their villages, their headmen or their dealings with Maratha officers. Whether the name Kurmi has any relation to the Kunbi cultivators of the Maratha country is not taken up in the sources read, and it is left as an open question. The Odisha view, with the Mahanta of Kendujhar and Sundargarh and the Mohanta of Mayurbhanj, has its own section.
Keywords: Kudumi, Maratha, Bhonsle, Bargi, Odisha, Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Mahato, Mahanta, Mohanta.
1. Introduction
The Marathas came to eastern India as horsemen and stayed as rulers. In April 1742 an army from Nagpur invaded Burdwan, and for about nine years the countryside from Midnapore to Birbhum knew the raids of the Bargi, the Maratha cavalry; from the early 1750s Odisha was held by the Marathas for half a century, until 1803 [1][2]. These events touched the districts where the Kudumi live today, and a reader may fairly ask what happened to the community in them. The honest answer is that the records we have were written about armies, governors and revenue, and that none of the sources reviewed here names the Kudumi, the Kurmi, or the titles Mahato, Mahanta and Mohanta in this period [1][2][3][4][5].
This article continues the series on this website after the article on the medieval period. It follows the same rules: simple language, long paragraphs, a plain line between a record, a scholar’s view and a community belief, and an Odisha perspective in which the Mahanta of Kendujhar and Sundargarh and the Mohanta of Mayurbhanj stand beside the Mahato of Jharkhand and West Bengal. No encyclopaedia-type wiki pages are used as sources, in line with the standing rule of this website.
2. Sources and Method
Three kinds of source are used. The first is political history of the Maratha period: a page on Maratha rule in Odisha on historyofodisha.in, which is the personal website of the author of this article and is therefore not an independent source [1]; an entry on the Maratha raids in Banglapedia, the national encyclopaedia of Bangladesh [2]; a local history page of the Burdwan Central Co-operative Bank, which names no author [3]; an article by Mahimohan Tripathy in the Odisha Review of the Government of Odisha, on the administration of the Jagannath temple under the Marathas [4]; and the Odisha Review census page on Sundargarh district [5]. The second is the district histories of Kendujhar and Mayurbhanj on the websites of the Government of Odisha [6][7]. The third is the writing on the Kudumi themselves, which supplies the village order and the use of the title Mohanta in Odisha: a 2024 journal paper written in support of the community’s claim for Scheduled Tribe status [8], and two short papers of 2026 and 2025 [9][10]. All of these were read as page or paper summaries, and none is a substitute for the Maratha records, the revenue papers and the Persian and Marathi chronicles themselves.
The method follows the earlier articles. The article does not write that the Kudumi did a particular act in the Maratha age unless a source says so, and it says “may” where it is reasoning from the surrounding history. A strict limit must be stated at the start. The sources reviewed for the raids, for Maratha administration and for the district histories do not mention the Kudumi, the Kurmi, or the titles Mahato, Mahanta and Mohanta [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. The only source that connects the community with Odisha and with village office is modern and written to argue a case [8]. A paper of the Odisha Review on the Oriya-speaking feudatory states is listed in the references for the reader to open, because the site blocked automated reading and it could not be used [11].
3. The Maratha Advance into Bengal and Odisha
The raiders called Bargi were Maratha cavalry, linked to the rivalry between Raghuji Bhonsle of Nagpur and the Peshwa, and Banglapedia says that they ravaged the country and brought untold miseries to the people [2]. In April and May 1742 a Nagpur army invaded Burdwan, Bhaskar Pandit cut off the supplies of the Nawab Alivardi Khan, and Murshidabad was plundered; by July the districts from Rajmahal to Medinipur were under Maratha control [2]. Katwa became the Maratha headquarters, and the local page of the Burdwan bank quotes an eyewitness, the court pandit of the Maharaja of Burdwan, who described the troops as killers of the helpless and expert robbers [3]. Alivardi drove Bhaskar Pandit out in September 1742, agreed to pay chauth in 1743, and had Bhaskar and twenty-one captains killed at Mankara in March 1744 [2]. The wars went on. Alivardi defeated Raghuji at Katwa in December 1745, and he defeated Janoji Bhonsle near Burdwan, in March 1747 by one page and in November 1746 by the other [2][3]. Banglapedia says that villages were burned, that weavers and merchants fled from Birbhum, that silk and cloth centres were deserted and that grain became scarce [2]. It does not mention the Jungle Mahals or Bankura [2].
Odisha passed to the Marathas by stages. Bhaskar Pandit, backed by Raghuji, took the Barabati fort at Cuttack on 19 April 1742, Raghuji took it again on 12 May 1745, Alivardi reconquered Odisha by June 1749, and a treaty of April 1750 made Mir Habib governor of Odisha under Alivardi, with twelve lakh rupees as the chauth of Odisha [1][2]. The two sources describe the settlement differently. Banglapedia says that Mir Habib was killed on 24 August 1752 and that Odisha then returned to Maratha occupation, while the page on historyofodisha.in dates the treaty to 1751, fixes the Suvarnarekha river as the boundary with Bengal, and gives the Maratha period as 1751 to 1803 [1][2]. In either account Odisha became Maratha territory in the early 1750s and stayed so until 1803 [1].
4. Kudumi Villages in the Maratha Age
The Maratha system of Odisha is described in some detail. The country was divided into the Garjat, twenty-four tributary chieftaincies of the hills and forests, and the Mughalbandi, the coastal tract from the Suvarnarekha to Chilika, which had 150 paraganas, each run through officers called amils [1]. The demand of the government was based on the land actually under cultivation, and the collectors, the chaudhuris, kanungoes and talukdars, held rent-free nankar lands for their service [1]. The page says that the system copied the Mughal design, that heavy exploitation made the Maratha rule unpopular, that nine governors followed one another between 1751 and 1803, and that one of them, Rajaram Pandit, replaced the hereditary talukdars with his own men [1]. The page gives no village-level detail. For the Kudumi this has a limited meaning. Mayurbhanj is named among the tributary states, while the page does not mention Keonjhar or Sundargarh, so the revenue system it describes would apply to Odisha Kudumi villages only where they lay in or near the coastal tract [1]. What it shows is the kind of world in which a village headman worked: a revenue officer above him who could be hereditary or could be replaced, and a demand that fell on the cultivated field.
On the Bengal side the Kudumi of Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia lived in the border country through which the raids passed. Banglapedia calls Midnapore a frontier and a battleground and says that Radhanagar, a silk centre, was looted, but it does not mention the Jungle Mahals or Bankura [2]. Whether the raiders reached Kudumi villages, and whether their headmen paid, hid grain or fled, is not recorded in any source read here. Later writers describe the Kudumi village headman, called Mahato or Modal, as a hereditary officer, with a ladder of elected offices above the village [8][10]. It may be that such a headman had to deal with the amils and talukdars of the Maratha age, as his predecessors had dealt with the officers of the earlier courts, and that the village order described by later writers helped the villages to bear the demand, but this is an inference from the structure and not a finding.
One more question arises from the name of the rulers’ country. The Maratha country has a large body of cultivators called Kunbi, as is widely known, and some readers ask whether the Kunbi and the Kurmi are related. None of the sources read here takes up this question, and nothing in them shows that the Kudumi had a special tie with the Marathas, so it is left as an open question with no conclusion drawn.
5. The Odisha View: Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Mahanta and Mohanta
For the Kudumi of Odisha, the tributary states are the frame that matters. The page on Maratha rule says that Khurda was the most powerful of them and that Kanika, Dhenkanal, Ranapur, Baramba, Athagarh, Kujang, Aul and Mayurbhanj also kept importance, that the governors largely stayed out of their internal affairs, and that tribute was paid irregularly [1]. In 1795 the king of Mayurbhanj refused to hand over rebel sepoys to the British, but he later expelled them after a letter from Sadashiv Rao, the Maratha deputy governor [1]. The government page on Mayurbhanj describes the Bhanja line as unbroken from about the ninth century but does not mention the Marathas at all [7]. For Keonjhar, the government page says that Pratap Balabhadra Bhanja ruled from 1764 to 1792 and bought the small areas of Tillo and Jujhpada, and that the East India Company recognised them in a sanad of 1804 to Raja Janardan Bhanj, but it too does not mention the Marathas, so the sources read here do not show how Maratha overlordship touched Keonjhar [6]. For Sundargarh, the Odisha Review census page says that the states of Gangpur and Bonai, which make up the district, were under the suzerainty of Sambalpur, which was part of the dominions of the Maratha Rajas of Nagpur, until the British cancelled that supremacy in 1821 [5].
The Jagannath temple at Puri shows how the Marathas dealt with a tributary raja. Mahimohan Tripathy writes that Birakeshari Dev of Khurda asked for Maratha help against the raja of Parlakhemundi and promised one lakh rupees, did not pay, and instead gave four mahals to the Marathas, and that his son became raja on the condition of paying Rs 10,000 a year [4]. The article adds that the Marathas appointed the temple’s administrators and kept the pilgrim tax of the earlier rulers [4]. These are not Kudumi events, but they show a rule of bargains, tribute and local officers, in which the small states of the north could keep much of their own order.
No source read names the Mahanta of Kendujhar and Sundargarh or the Mohanta of Mayurbhanj for this age. The 2024 paper uses only the form Mohanta, for the Kudmi of Odisha [8]. The two titles look like forms of the Sanskrit mahant, a head or chief, but no source reviewed discusses their origin or their date. If they took their settled form under the Maratha and Bhanja states, with their hereditary talukdars, chaudhuris and village officers, the proof would lie in the village records, revenue papers and grants of that age [1]. Such papers may survive in the State Archives and in the family collections of Mahanta and Mohanta families, and a careful search of them is the most useful work that a reader in Odisha could do.
6. Discussion and Conclusion
The Maratha age gives the Kudumi a setting and no name. The setting is clear in outline: the Bargi raids on the Bengal side from 1742, the Maratha hold on Odisha from the early 1750s to 1803, a revenue system built on cultivated land and hereditary officers, and tributary states, among them Mayurbhanj, that kept much of their own order [1][2][3]. Inside this setting the Kudumi appear only through later writing, as a farming community with hereditary village headmen and a council order [8][10]. It is reasonable to think that these villages paid, suffered and adapted as other cultivating communities did, but no source reviewed describes it. The two open questions of this article are therefore plain. The first is how the Marathas and their officers dealt with Kudumi villages and headmen on either side of the Suvarnarekha. The second is whether the Odisha titles Mahanta and Mohanta took their settled form in this age. The relation of the Kurmi and the Kunbi, which some readers raise, is a third question that the sources read here leave untouched.
The limits are clear. All sources were read as summaries. One is the author’s own website and cannot count as independent evidence. One is an encyclopaedia entry and one is a bank’s local-history page with no author. None of the pages on the Maratha period mentions the Kudumi. The sources differ on the dates of the treaty and of one battle. The paper that supplies the community’s village order is written to support a claim for Scheduled Tribe status. Future work should read the Maratha and Persian records of Cuttack and Nagpur, the revenue settlements and sanads of the tributary states of Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Sundargarh, the first British settlement reports of Midnapore and Balasore, and the family papers and oral histories of Mahanta and Mohanta lineages.
References
Web pages were opened on 22 October 2026. Items marked (summary) were read through a page summary and not in full.
- Brajabandhu Mahanta. Odisha under Maratha Rule. historyofodisha.in, 2022 (modified 2023). (the author’s own website, based on secondary histories; not independent; summary)
- Maratha Raids. Banglapedia, National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh. (encyclopaedia entry; summary)
- Maratha’s Attack. Burdwan Central Co-operative Bank Ltd. (local history page; no author named; summary)
- Mahimohan Tripathy. Administration of Shri Jagannath Temple under Marathas and British Rule. Odisha Review, June 2014, pp. 46–52. (summary)
- Sundargarh District. Orissa Review (Census Special), December 2010. (no author named; summary)
- Kendujhar district: history. Government of Odisha. (summary)
- Mayurbhanj district: history. Government of Odisha. (summary)
- Manik Chandra Mahata. The Kudmi (Kudumi), a totemic community of Jharkhand State and near about parts (India): critical evaluation for inclusion in ST category. Brazilian Journal of Development 10(9), 2024, DOI 10.34117/bjdv10n9-026. (written to support the ST claim; deeper origin claims weakly sourced; summary)
- Mrinal Kanti Mahata. Revival of Kudmali language: identity politics of Kudmi community. IJCRT 14(2), 2026.
- Nagendra Nath Mahto. Social, cultural and historical status of the Kurmi/Kudmi community in the state of Jharkhand. JETIR 12(5), 2025. (brief paper)
- Oriya-speaking feudatory states. Orissa Review, August 2005. Not read: the site blocked automated access. Please open it and check.
