Aurangzeb is involved in a series of protracted wars—against the Pathans in Afghanistan, the sultans of Bijapur and Golkonda in the Deccan, and the Marathas in Maharashtra.

Peasant uprisings and revolts by local leaders become all too common, as do the conniving of the nobles to preserve their own status at the expense of a steadily weakening empire.

The increasing association of his government with Islam further drives a wedge between the ruler and his Hindu subjects.

Aurangzeb forbids the building of new temples, destroys a number of them, and reimposes the jizya.

A puritan and a censor of morals, he bans music at court, abolishes ceremonies, and persecutes the Sikhs in Punjab.

These measures alienate so many that even before he dies challenges for power have already begun to escalate.

Contenders for the Mughal throne fight each other, and the short-lived reigns of Aurangzeb's successors will be strife-filled.

The Mughal Empire experiences dramatic reverses as regional governors break away and found independent kingdoms.

The Mughals have to make peace with Maratha rebels, and Persian and Afghan armies invade Delhi, carrying away many treasures, including the Peacock Throne in 1739.

Aurangzeb had reimposed the hated jizya on Hindus in 1679.

Coming after a series of other taxes and also discriminatory measures favoring Sunni Muslims, this action by the "prayer-monger," as he is called, had incited rebellion among Hindus and others in many parts of the empire—Jat, Sikh, and Rajput forces in the north and Maratha forces in the Deccan.

The emperor manages to crush the rebellions in the north, but at a high cost to agricultural productivity and to the legitimacy of Mughal rule.

Aurangzeb is compelled to move his headquarters to Daulatabad in the Deccan to mount a costly campaign against Maratha guerrilla fighters, which lasts twenty-six years until he dies in 1707 at the age of ninety.

Oppressed by a sense of failure, isolation, and impending doom, Aurangzeb had lamented that in life he "came alone" and would "go as a stranger."

The Maratha Empire or the Maratha Confederacy is an Indian imperial power that exists from 1674 to 1818.

At its peak, the empire covers much of the subcontinent, encompassing a territory of over two point eight million square kilometers.

The Marathas, a yeoman Hindu warrior group from the western Deccan (present day Maharashtra),  are credited with ending the Mughal rule in India.

Maratha chieftains were originally in the service of Bijapur sultans in the western Deccan, which was under siege by the Mughals.

Shivaji Bhonsle (1627-80), a tenacious and fierce fighter recognized as the "father of the Maratha nation," had taken advantage of this conflict and carved out his own principality near Pune, which later became the Maratha capital.

Adopting guerrilla tactics, he waylaid caravans in order to sustain and expand his army, which soon had money, arms, and horses.

Shivaji led a series of successful assaults in the 1660s against Mughal strongholds, including the major port of Surat.

In 1674 he assumed the title of "Lord of the Universe" at his elaborate coronation, which signaled his determination to challenge the Mughal forces as well as to reestablish a Hindu kingdom in Maharashtra, the land of his origin.

Shivaji's battle cries are swaraj (translated variously as freedom, self-rule, independence), swadharma (religious freedom), and goraksha (cow protection).

Aurangzeb relentlessly pursues Shivaji's successors between 1681 and 1705 but eventually retreats to the north as his treasury becomes depleted and as thousands of lives had been lost either on the battlefield or to natural calamities.

In 1717 a Mughal emissary signs a treaty with the Marathas confirming their claims to rule in the Deccan in return for acknowledging the fictional Mughal suzerainty and remission of annual taxes.

Yet the Marathas soon capture Malwa from Mughal control and later move east into Orissa and Bengal; southern India also comes under their domain.

Recognition of their political power finally comes when the Mughal emperor invites them to act as auxiliaries in the internal affairs of the empire and still later to help the emperor in driving the Afghans out of Punjab.

Mughal power withers following the death of Aurangzeb, and South Indian rulers gain autonomy from Delhi.

Akbar had been trying to cajole Sambhaji into joining him and the Rajputs (Hindus) against Agra.

Aurangzeb and the court had therefore come to the Deccan in 1681, living in a vast tent city thirty miles in circumference while Aurangzeb acted as his own commander-in-chief.

Aurangzeb was initially successful, but not against the Marathas, who raid from their forts.

Instead, he has attempted to cut off the Hindu Marathas from Muslim Bijapur and Golconda, which are, as a result of earlier Mughal offensives, similarly predisposed against Aurangzeb.

With the objective of conquering the Marathas outright, he targets the two principal successor states to the Muslim sultanate of Bahmani in the Deccan, seizing the dying Sunnite sultanate of Bijapur in 1686.

The Marathas are the single most important power to have emerged in the long twilight of the Mughal dynasty.

Initially deriving from the western Deccan as a peasant warrior group, the Marathas had risen to prominence during the rule in that region of the sultans of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar.

The most important Maratha warrior clan, the Bhonsles, had held extensive jagirs (land-tax entitlements) under the 'Adil Shahi rulers; these were consolidated in the course of the 1630s and '40s as Bijapur expanded to the south and southwest.

Sahji Bhonsle, the first prominent member of the clan, had drawn substantial revenues from the Karnataka region, in territories that had once been controlled by the rulers of Mysore and other chiefs who derived from the collapsing Vijayanagar kingdom.

One of his children, Sivaji Bhonsle, had emerged as the most powerful figure in the clan to the west, while Sivaji's half-brother Vyamkoji had been able to gain control over the Kaveri delta and the kingdom of Thanjavur in the 1670s.

The death, in 1680, of Shivaji Bhonsle, had brought to the throne his son Sambhagi, whose experience as a Mughal hostage had made him briefly defect to the Muslim side during the Marathan-Mughal War of 1670-80.

It had also brought a new element into the conflict: the defection of Crown Prince Akbar, son of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, to the Hindu side during the ongoing Rajput rebellion against his father.

Aurangzeb seizes the Shi’ite Sultanate of Golconda in 1687.

Aurangzeb accidentally captures Sambhaji and other leaders; he executes them barbarously after severe torture.

Maratha resistance proves stubborn, however, and the war continues under Sambhaji’s brother Rajaram.

Jinji, also spelled Gingi or Gingee, an almost inaccessible fortress constructed by the Hindu rulers of the Vijayanagar Empire and located about eighty miles (one hundred and thirty kilometers) southwest of present-day Madras in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, had been captured in 1638 from the Maratha chief Shahji by the Muslims of Bijapur.

 Shahji's son, the famous Shivaji, had recaptured the fort in 1677.

Besieged by the Mughals from 1690, the fortress's chief claim to fame is that it will immobilize an army for eight years.

Fort St. David, an English stronghold near the town of Cuddalore, about one hundred miles (one hundred and sixty kilometers) south of Madras on the southeastern coast of India, is sold by the Marathas to the English East India Company in 1690.

It was named for the patron saint of Wales because the governor of Madras at this time, Elihu Yale, is Welsh.

It is purchased because of increasing political instability in southern India, which makes a second fortified trading station (besides that in Madras) desirable.