The Marathas, Part 9 - The Last Sovereigns

Mahādjī Śinde

The wounded survivor of Panipat who made the Marathas paramount again

He had been left for dead at Panipat. A wound taken in the rout crippled his leg for life, and he escaped the field carried by a water-bearer. Mahādjī Śinde (Scindia) of Gwalior went on to become the most formidable Indian statesman of the later eighteenth century and the man who twice made the Maratha name paramount in Hindustan after it had been written off.

He understood what Panipat had taught, and he was the only Maratha leader who acted on it fully: that light cavalry alone could no longer decide battles against disciplined infantry with modern artillery. He engaged the Savoyard officer Benoît de Boigne and built trained infantry brigades on the European model — drilled battalions, a large modern artillery park with its own foundries at Agra and Gwalior, and a professional supply system. By the 1780s Mahādjī commanded the finest army in India, and it was an Indian army under Indian direction, using European methods because they worked. Settled

With it he restored Maratha supremacy in the north. He controlled Delhi and the person of the emperor Shāh Ālam II, who in 1784 appointed him Vakīl-i-Mutlaq — Regent Plenipotentiary of the Mughal Empire — with the Peśvā as his superior in the title. The Marathas were now, formally and in fact, the government of the empire they had been founded to resist. At Lalsot (1787) he was checked by the Rajputs; at Merta and above all at Patan (1790) de Boigne's brigades destroyed the combined Rajput–Mughal armies, and Mahādjī's authority over northern India became unquestioned. He avenged the Rohilla role at Panipat by defeating Ghulām Qādir, who had blinded the emperor, and had him executed.

Wadgaon

January 1779 — when a British army surrendered to the Marathas

The English East India Company, having taken Bengal, moved on the Marathas by the method it used everywhere: backing a claimant. Raghunāthrāo, implicated in the murder of his nephew the Peśvā Nārāyaṇrāo, sought British help; by the Treaty of Surat (1775) the Bombay government agreed to install him in exchange for Salsette and Bassein. Against them stood the regency at Pune — the infant Peśvā Sawāī Mādhavrāo and the extraordinary minister Nānā Phaḍnavīs, whose diplomacy held the confederacy together for two decades.

In late 1778 a Bombay force of some 3,900 troops with a vast train — nineteen thousand bullocks — set out to march on Pune. Mahādjī Śinde and Tukojī Holkar did not offer battle. They harried the column continuously, cut its supply lines, and burned the country in front of it — a scorched-earth campaign in the Ghats. The British reached Talegaon, found nothing to eat, and tried to withdraw by night. They were caught at Wadgaon on 12–13 January 1779, surrounded, and forced to surrender.

The Convention of Wadgaon required the Company to give up all territory acquired since 1775 and to hand over hostages. It is one of the very few occasions in Indian history on which a British army in the field capitulated outright to an Indian power, and it is remembered locally still — a victory pillar was raised at Vadgaon Maval in 2003 and the anniversary is observed. Settled The war dragged on until the Treaty of Salbai (1782), which restored the pre-war position; the Company's sole gain from seven years of war was Salsette. The First Anglo-Maratha War was a Maratha victory, and it bought the confederacy twenty years.

Yaśwantrāo Holkar

The last commander the British could not beat

The generation after Nānā Phaḍnavīs's death in 1800 produced one more soldier of the first rank. Yaśwantrāo Holkar of Indore — whose brother had been executed and whose family had been hunted by rivals within the confederacy — raised an army from nothing, defeated the combined Scindia and Peśvā forces at Hadapsar near Pune in 1802, and occupied the capital.

It was that defeat which drove the weak and treacherous Peśvā Bājīrāo II into British arms. By the Treaty of Bassein (December 1802) he accepted a subsidiary alliance — surrendering the confederacy's foreign policy and stationing a Company army at Pune in exchange for his restoration. Bājīrāo II had signed away Maratha independence to recover a throne he could not hold. The other houses — Scindia, Bhonsle, Holkar — refused to accept it, and the Second Anglo-Maratha War (1803–05) followed. Scindia and Bhonsle were beaten at Assaye and Argaon by Arthur Wellesley — who called Assaye the bloodiest action he ever fought, harder than Waterloo — and at Delhi and Laswari by Lake.

Holkar fought on alone, and he did not lose. He destroyed Colonel Monson's force in a running campaign through Malwa in 1804, driving it back with heavy loss; he was besieged in Bharatpur alongside the Jat raja in 1805, where four successive British assaults were repulsed with over three thousand British casualties — one of the worst reverses the Company ever suffered in India. Lord Lake was unable to take the fort. The Company came to terms: by the Treaty of Rajghat (1805) Holkar recovered most of his territories. Settled He then attempted the strategy that might have changed everything — a confederation of all Indian powers, writing to the Sikhs, the Rajputs and others to combine — and failed to persuade them. He died in 1811, having built the last independent arms foundry in Maratha India at Bhanpura.

Assaye

23 September 1803 — the hardest battle Wellington ever fought

The Second Anglo-Maratha War produced the engagement that the future Duke of Wellington, at the end of a career that included Waterloo, named as the bloodiest and most difficult action of his life. It deserves telling because the standard account of Maratha decline rests on the assumption that these armies were easily beaten, and Assaye is the refutation.

Arthur Wellesley, with about 9,500 men, came upon the combined armies of Daulatrāo Śinde and the Bhonsle of Berar — some 50,000 men, including Śinde's regular infantry brigades trained on the European model and, decisively, an artillery park of over a hundred guns handled by gunners as good as any in the world. Wellesley was outnumbered five to one and had, by his own admission, blundered into a position he had not intended to fight in.

The Maratha gunners served their pieces to the last. When the British infantry overran the batteries, the gunners lay down among their guns feigning death, and as the British line passed over them they rose, re-manned the pieces and fired into its rear — an act of discipline and nerve that cost Wellesley heavily and that he described afterwards with something close to awe. The 74th Foot was nearly destroyed. British casualties ran to about a third of the force engaged — a proportion Wellesley never suffered again in his life, including at Waterloo.

He won it, and he won Argaon two months later. But he wrote afterwards that he had never seen artillery served better, and that if the Maratha infantry had been handled as well as their guns the result would have been different. Settled The Company's victory in that war was won against the finest Indian army of the age — and it was won because Holkar stood out of it, Berar and Śinde fought separately from the Peśvā who had already surrendered, and the confederacy never once put its full weight into a single field.

1817–1818

The last war, and the end of the confederacy

The final war was provoked by the Company's demand for the suppression of the Pindaris — irregular horse operating out of central India — which required British armies to move at will through Maratha territory. Bājīrāo II, having exhausted every humiliation, at last attacked the Residency at Pune. The Third Anglo-Maratha War was fought by the largest force the British had yet assembled in India: some 120,000 men under Hastings.

It was decided in months. The Peśvā was beaten at Khadki and Koregaon; the Bhonsles at Sitabuldi; Malhārrāo Holkar III's army at Mahidpur in December 1817. Bājīrāo II surrendered in June 1818 and was pensioned off to Bithur near Kanpur. The office of Peśvā was abolished. The Chhatrapati's line was reduced to the small principality of Satara; Scindia, Holkar, Gaekwad and Bhonsle survived as subsidiary princely states under British paramountcy, which is what they remained until 1947.

Why the fall came

The reasons should be stated precisely, because they are not the reasons usually given, and because nothing in them impugns the courage of the men who fought.

Structural, not martial. The confederal system that gave the empire its reach — Scindia, Holkar, Gaekwad, Bhonsle, each with its own army, revenue and policy — meant that the Company could fight them one at a time. At Assaye, Holkar stood out; when Holkar fought at Bharatpur, Scindia had already signed. The British never once faced the united Maratha power. Had they done so at any point before 1803, the outcome would have been different. Contested

Treachery at the top. Bājīrāo II is the single greatest cause of the collapse. He signed away the confederacy's sovereignty at Bassein to recover a throne from a rival; he intrigued continuously against his own commanders; and he surrendered at the end without a last stand. He was not typical of the men in this history — he was the exception, and the exception was fatal.

Technology and finance. The Company could borrow against the revenues of Bengal at rates no Indian power could match, and could therefore sustain standing armies of disciplined sepoy infantry with modern artillery indefinitely. Mahādjī saw this clearly and built brigades to match; but after his death in 1794 that programme was not sustained across the confederacy, and de Boigne's successors were European officers whose loyalty in an Anglo-Maratha war could not be relied on.

The failure to complete the military transition. Mahādjī had diagnosed the problem correctly after Panipat and built the answer: disciplined infantry, massed modern artillery, and foundries to supply them. But the transition was expensive, it was resented by cavalry sardars whose status it diminished, and it was never carried through the whole confederacy. After Mahādjī's death in 1794 the brigades passed to European officers — Perron and others — whose willingness to fight their own countrymen was doubtful, and several simply withdrew or were bought off in 1803. An Indian army built on European lines but officered by Europeans had a structural vulnerability that Wellesley understood perfectly and exploited immediately. Settled

The absence of a navy at the decisive moment. Shivaji had understood that the sea was the strategic flank and built a fleet; Kānhojī Āṅgre had held the Konkan against three European powers for forty years. But the Āṅgre fleet was destroyed in 1756 — at Gheria, by a combined British and Maratha operation, the Peśvā's government having come to see Tulājī Āṅgre as a rival rather than an asset. The Marathas helped the Company destroy their own navy. Thereafter the western seaboard belonged to the British, who could reinforce, supply and land at will, and no Maratha campaign could ever threaten that. It was the single most consequential strategic error the confederacy made. Settled

What was never the cause: courage. Assaye was, by Wellesley's own testimony, the hardest battle of his life. Bharatpur threw back four British assaults. Wadgaon forced a British surrender. Monson's retreat was a British disaster. The Marathas were beaten by a state with better credit, a united command and no internal rival — and they were beaten only after the Company had spent forty-three years and three wars on the task. No other power in India cost them a fraction as much. Settled

"Ever-waxing like the crescent of the first day, revered by the world." The seal Shivaji Maharaj cut as a young man remained the seal of a state that, at its height, governed from the Indus to the Kaveri.

What the Marathas Did

The reckoning

Set the beginning against the end.

In 1630 there was no sovereign Hindu power between the Himalaya and the Kaveri. The Deccan had been under sultanate rule for three hundred and twelve years since Harapāladeva was flayed at Devagiri. Vijayanagara had been destroyed sixty-five years earlier and its capital quarried for six months. Hemu's brief restoration at Delhi had ended with an arrow. The Rajput houses served in the Mughal system. The coast was Portuguese and the Inquisition sat at Goa. Marathi men fought and died in other men's armies for other men's causes.

By 1760 — one hundred and thirty years, four generations — a Hindu power founded by the son of a Deccan jāgīrdār held Delhi's emperor as its pensioner, garrisoned Attock on the Indus, collected revenue from Bengal to Gujarat, protected the Mughal empire by treaty, ruled roughly a third of the subcontinent, and dated its documents by an era of its own reckoning from a coronation performed by Vedic rite at Raigad.

That transformation is the largest reversal of political fortune in Indian history, and it was accomplished against the greatest empire on earth by a people with no capital, no treasury, no artillery and no allies at the start.

And one figure belongs here who is too often left to a footnote. Ahilyābāī Holkar (1725–1795) ruled Malwa from Maheshwar for twenty-eight years after the deaths of her husband and her father-in-law Malhārrāo, and governed it so well that her administration became a byword. She heard petitions in person daily, kept the Bhil and Gond country peaceful by employing rather than suppressing it, promoted trade and founded the Maheshwar weaving industry that still exists, and refused to raise the peasantry's assessment even to fund her own works.

Those works were the largest programme of sacred restoration in modern Indian history, and she paid for them from her private treasury rather than the state's. She rebuilt the Kāśī Viśvanātha temple at Varanasi in 1780 — the temple Aurangzeb had destroyed in 1669 — and it is her structure that stands today. She built or restored temples, ghats, wells, rest-houses and roads at Somnāth, Rāmeśvaram, Dvārakā, Badrīnāth, Kedārnāth, Gayā, Ujjain, Nasik, Puri, Haridwar, Mathura and Ayodhya, endowing them with lands for their maintenance. A Maratha queen reassembled the sacred geography of the whole subcontinent, tīrtha by tīrtha, after four centuries of demolition. Settled

What they left

They ended the Mughal empire as a functioning power. Aurangzeb's twenty-seven years in the Deccan destroyed his own state; every subsequent Mughal emperor was a client, and after 1771 he was a Maratha client.

They restored the sacred landscape. Temples rebuilt and endowed across the Deccan and beyond; the Vārkarī sites reclaimed; pilgrimage taxes abolished; Kāśī Viśvanāth's reconstruction funded by Ahilyābāī Holkar in 1780 along with ghats, temples and rest-houses from Somnāth to Rāmeśvaram — the greatest programme of sacred restoration in modern Indian history, carried out by a Maratha queen.

They proved a Hindu state could be modern. A non-hereditary bureaucracy; officers paid in cash; a ryotwārī settlement that dealt with the cultivator directly and lent him seed in famine; a Sanskrit administrative vocabulary; a navy; a standing artillery park with its own foundries. This was not a revival of antiquity but a functioning eighteenth-century state.

They set the terms of conduct. Women protected by standing order; non-combatants spared; mosques and churches unmolested; the Qur'an handed back respectfully; Muslims serving as admirals, artillery commanders and secretaries throughout. A restoration that did not become a reprisal.

And they left the memory. In 1857 the sepoys who rose declared for the old order; Nānā Sāheb, the adopted son of Bājīrāo II, led at Kanpur, and Rāṇī Lakṣmībāī of Jhansi — a Maratha woman of the Peśvā's own Pune — died in the saddle at Gwalior, and was called by her British opponent the best and bravest of the rebel leaders. Tilak, a Chitpāvan Brahmin of Pune, made Śivajī Jayantī a public festival in 1895 and used it to build a national movement, exactly as he used Gaṇeśotsav. The Vasai bells still ring at Jejuri. The forts still stand, twelve of them inscribed by UNESCO in 2025. And every child in Maharashtra still knows what was sworn at Raireshwar.

The thread runs unbroken to the freedom movement. Vāsudev Balvant Phaḍke raised the first armed revolt against British rule in the Deccan in 1879, explicitly in the Maratha tradition, recruiting from the same Māval and Rāmoshi country. Tilak built a mass movement on Śivajī Jayantī and Gaṇeśotsav from 1893–95, and was tried for sedition for what he wrote about Shivaji and Afzal Khan. Sāvarkar, a Chitpāvan of Nashik, wrote Hindu Pad Padshahi on the Maratha empire and took his revolutionary vocabulary from it. Subhas Chandra Bose named an INA brigade for Shivaji. And in 1947, when the Indian Navy needed a motto, it took Shivaji's own: śaṃ no varuṇaḥ at its formal adoption, with his doctrine that command of the sea is command of all standing behind the founding of the modern fleet. His fort at Sindhudurg still carries his handprint in the mortar.

Three hundred and fifty-six years separated the flaying of Harapāladeva from the abhiṣeka at Raigad. One hundred and forty-four separated Raigad from the abolition of the Peśvāī. And in between, for the first time since the Yadavas fell, this land was governed by its own people, under its own dharma, by its own law, from the Indus to the sea — because one man in the Māval hills decided at fifteen that it should be, and because enough people believed him.