- Lived:
- 18 August 1700, Dubere village near Sinnar (Nashik district) → Pune, and everywhere a horse could go between the Narmada and the Yamuna; died 28 April 1740 in camp at Rāverkhedi on the Narmada
- Field:
- war and statecraft — Peshwa (prime minister) of the Maratha state under Chhatrapati Shāhū; the general who turned a Deccan kingdom into an all-India power
- The Big Idea:
- Speed is a weapon. An army that moves twice as fast as its enemy does not need to be bigger, and a dying empire should be struck at the trunk, not pruned branch by branch.
- In their words:
- "Let us strike at the trunk of the withering tree and the branches will fall of themselves" — the argument for marching north, as Maratha tradition (recorded in Grant Duff's 1826 history) remembers him making it
- If you remember one thing:
- In twenty years of continuous campaigning, Bājī Rāo is not recorded losing a single major battle — and the campaign a British field marshal picked out two centuries later as "a masterpiece of strategic mobility" was fought by a thirty-year-old on horseback who slept where his army slept.