Fall of the Mughal Empire v2.c27.s14.27

v2.c27.s14.27

Kāshirāj’s detailed figures for the Bhāu’s muster of 18th Oct. are all in thousands, never in hundreds; and his number for the total troops of the “several smaller bodies” whose captains were too humble to deserve mention by name, is 10,000. This last is such a large and round figure that it must be discredited as based on conjecture or bazar rumour and not on actual counting; I reduce it to 4,000 actual. Kāshirāj assignss to Ibrāhim Khan (on 19 Oct.) nine thousand foot and two thousand horse; but in the battle he gives Ibrāhim only nine battalions of sepoys. A French battalion (forming one regiment) in those days had a normal strength of one thousand infantry only. [E. M. Lloyd's Review of the History of Infantry, 119] Hence, his actual strength, allowing for the wastage of the Udgir campaign, was about 8,000, or 900 men per battalion which would correspond exactly to the Marathi report from Patdur (Kharé, i. p. 32) that he started with 8,000 sepoys. I cannot explain the 2000 horse assigned to the Gārdi; no other writer mentions such a force, nor do they figure at all in Kāshirāj's detailed story of the battle. I am sure that if they reached Pānipat, they must have been reduced to ‘unmounted men’ by the privations of the siege. No doubt, he had originally contracted for entering the Peshwa's service with 12 battalions, each normally containing a thousand men.