Fall of the Mughal Empire v2.c27.s27: § 27. Consequences of the battle of Panipat
Fall of the Mughal Empire v2.c27.s27
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§ 27. Consequences of the battle of Panipat
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Since the days of Vishwanāth K. Rājwādé, it has been the fashion with Maratha writers to belittle the result of the battle of Pānipat as no disaster to the Marathas except for the death of so many chiefs and so many thousands of soldiers. Its political consequence is spoken of as nothing, and Abdali's victory as a great illusion. This view is supported by the fact that Ahmad Shah reaped no lasting gain from his victory and sought soon afterwards for a friendly settlement with the Peshwā by sending an envoy and presents to him. Māhādji Sindhiā's occupation of Delhi in 1789 is pointed out as a proof that the Maratha defeat of 28 years earlier had been completely nullified. But a dispassionate survey of Indian history will show how unfounded this chauvinistic claim is. A Maratha army did, no doubt, restore the exiled Mughal Emperor to the capital of his fathers in 1772, but they came then, not as kingmakers, not as the dominators of the Mughal's empire and the real masters of his nominal ministers and generals. That proud position was secured by Māhādji Sindhiā only in 1789 and by the British in 1803.
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∗ Fugitives molested,—Nur-ud-din 51. Kashiraj 28. Raj vi. 406 and 409 (Suraj Mal’s help.) Wendel, 81. Horse impaled on Sonepat sarai,—Manaxil 88-89, Husain Shahi 73.
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But what a change from the Indian world of 1760! The contrast can be most easily realized if we imagine that the Marathas had triumphed on that 14th of January. Then the broken Durrāni army would have been expelled from India, robbed and hunted down by the Sikhs through the Panjab, the Indus would have been closed to invasion from the north-west, the mortal enemy Najib Khan would have been crushed outright instead of reigning for the next ten years as the dictator of Delhi, and the middle and upper Doab would have been purged of every single element hostile to the Marathas. The Bhāu’s army, flushed with victory and seeing all their enemies in North India cowering in terror, would have taken up Dattāji’s interrupted plan of annexing the provinces of Allahabad and Bihār and fleecing Bengal. In 1761 the English would certainly have saved Bengal from Maratha incursion by regularly paying *chauth*, but they could hardly have fought to preserve Bihār, as their Home forces were now involved in the weary exhausting latter stage of the long-drawn Seven Years’ War. Therefore, Bihār would have remained a jumping-off ground for further Maratha adventures in the north-east, as Orissa had become by Alivardi’s cession of 1751. Shujā-ud-daulah would have sunk into obedience as a tribute-paying vassal.
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But in 1772, and still more markedly in 1789, things were not as they had been in 1761. In these eleven years, the El Dorado of Bihar and Bengal had become closed to the Marathas beyond the possibility of conquest; even the *chauth* for these provinces, though formally granted to them by the Mughal Emperor in 1746, had lapsed, and they durst not claim it (as Mahadji Sindhia found to his cost when he sent a feeler to Sir J. Macpherson on this old legal claim); Oudh was now girt round by British bayonets, and the long coveted city of Allahabad was entrusted to the same strong arms; even the Pār Ruhelas,—those last possible allies of the Marathas (either through military weakness or territorial ambition) in any invasion of Oudh,—were to be crushed only two years after Shah Alam’s return to Delhi under Maratha protection.
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In the north-west, the Panjab was for ever lost to the Marathas. A race that could not stand fast and true as the watch on the Indus, had no moral right to rule that frontier province. At the end of the eleven years that followed Pānipat, while a Durrāni viceroy held Court at Peshāwar, central and eastern Panjab had been practically abandoned to the Sikhs, and Sarhind formally to Alā Singh’s successor, and these new masters would have been no more submissive to the Maratha intruders than to the Afghan. Nay more, the Sikhs rushed into the upper and north-middle Doab to fill the void caused by the eclipse of the Maratha power there during these eleven years, and by their annual raids left the land sucked dry for any Maratha army or tribute collector that might come after them.
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What then remained to the returned Maratha dictators of Delhi in 1772? Only the Jāt country, Mewāt and Hariānā in the west, which became the cockpit of the empire during the next two decades. The ambition and arms of the revived Maratha power in the north were henceforth cooped up within the barren sands of Rajputana and the broken infinitely chequered wilderness of Bundelkhand,—all Hindu territory,—and their activities there for the forty years from 1765 to 1805 have left a legacy of hatred for the Maratha name in Rajput hearts, which has not yet died out.
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The moral effect of the disaster of Pānipat was even greater. The Maratha failure to oppose the foreign invader in 1757 and even more, with the Bhāu's vast resources in 1760-61, convinced the Indian world that Maratha friendship was a very weak reed to lean upon in any real danger. No North-Indian potentate would risk sure annihilation by siding with the Marathas in their day of difficulty, or even while the issue of their contest with the foreigner was trembling in the balance. Maratha protection was not worth purchasing by the least sacrifice, because the Marathas had clearly demonstrated in the last four years that they could not protect their dependents, any more than they had been able to protect their own selves in 1761.
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Above all, to the reflective historian, the Pānipat disaster by killing the Peshwā Bālāji Rāo and removing nearly all of his great captains and able civil officers, as well as his grown up son Vishwās Rao and his expert and devoted prime minister Sadāshiv Rāo Bhāu, left the path absolutely open and easy to the guilty ambition of Raghunāth Dādā, the most infamous character in Maratha history. Other losses time could have made good, but this was the greatest mischief done by the debacle at Pānipat.
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§ 28. *Death of the Peshwā Bālāji Rāo.*
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The Peshwā’s health began to show an alarming decline towards the close of the year of his greatest triumphs in the North and the South,—his victory over the Nizam and his capture of the imperial capital. Unsuspected by doctors, the hand of death was already upon him. A wasting disease was sapping his strength, and this, coupled with the increasing worries of public business, quarrels within his family circle, and above all the bankruptcy of his Government, made him extremely irritable. Some attempt was made to divert him with dance and song, for which handsome slave-girls were imported from Delhi, and even by marrying him to a new young wife on 27th December at Paithān. He now planned to march to Northern India, taking Nizām Ali with him, in order to make a combined effort of all the loyal country Powers for expelling the alien usurper of the Padishah’s realm. On 9th January 1761, Raghunāth Dādā and Sakhārām Bāpu were deputed to induce Nizām Ali to come. The embassy failed, and the Peshwā had to continue his northward march alone.
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By this time all was over with the Bhāu, and on 24th January the Peshwā at Bhilsā intercepted a banker’s letter written from Delhi giving the fatal news of Pānipat. All his plans were now upset. He halted at Bhilsā till 7th February, and then marched by way of Sihor and Sironj to Pachhar, 32 miles north of Sironj, in the delusive hope that the rumours about the Bhāu and some other chiefs having escaped from the field might prove true. Here the survivors from Pānipat met him, and pressed him to return home. The awful catastrophe had unhinged his mind and hastened the work of consumption. He began to moan to himself alone, call for his lost son and cousin, and talk incoherently. By this time he had been reduced to a skeleton, having lost 64 lbs. Leaving Pachhar on 22 March, the Court returned to Punā in June, and here he expired on 23 June 1761. It was a dismal sunset to the glorious noon of his father's and his own reign. A new scene now opened in the tragic drama of Maratha history, with its "Theban horrors" of murder suicide and the untimely death of the young.* But the historian of Delhi is not concerned with it, as the Delhi Government practically enjoyed a respite from Maratha intrusion almost to the end of the reign of the new Peshwā Mādhav Rāo Ballāl (1761-1772.) Panipat had done its work even in the South.
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∗ Peshwa's last days,—Nur-ud-din 52. Nana Fadnis Auto. SPD. ii. 133=xxvii. 260. xxi. 204. xxvii. 260-272. xl. 137. Raj. iii. 210. vi. 415, 416. Kharé, i. 26, 28.
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I. *The Peshwa's responsibility for the defeat at Panipat.*
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Did Bālājī Rao cause the disaster at Pānipat by breaking his promise to go to the relief of the Bhāu with an army from the Deccan? No, because there is not a scrap of evidence that he made any such promise, or even that the Bhāu had appealed to him for reinforcements. The modern effort to make the Peshwā or Govind Ballāl the scapegoat for the Pānipat disaster is at once disproved by the contents and dates of the original letters of the Bhāu and the Peshwā, and the fact that it took at least four weeks in the most peaceful times for a letter to travel from Panipat to the Godāvari, while the least local disturbance on the long route would delay the letter by weeks more. The popular theory that the Bhāu put off his attack on Abdāli immediately after the rival armies had reached Pānipat because he expected that the Peshwā would come up in the rear of Abdāli and thus the enemy would be easily destroyed between two fires, is pure moonshine, because the Bhāu decided to entrench on 4th November [Raj. i. 264], when there was not the least whisper of the Peshwā having started for the north or even that he had decided on a personal campaign in Hindustan.
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On 5th September the Bhāu did indeed appeal to the Peshwā, but it was for money; he gives not the faintest idea of any military insufficiency on his side. Then followed the success at Kunjpurā (October), which elevated the spirit of the Maratha army of the North. Even on 1st November the Bhāu wrote to Govind Ballāl that he "had every hope of being able to swallow Abdāli up in a few days." [Raj. i. 261.] Another letter from his camp written four days later (by Krishna Joshi) shows his army in the same over-confident spirit. For a month after this, *i. e.*, up to the 7th of December, the Maratha troops retained their optimism ; they were daily roving round the Afghan camp and making spoils from its outskirts and distressing the enemy by cutting his supplies off, while Nāro Shankar from Delhi was successfully harrying the middle Doāb and parts of trans-Ganges by means of his detachments [SPD. ii. 197, Raj. i. 243.] Therefore, such a dominant force could have had no occasion or valid reason for demanding more man-power from the South. Money alone was needed by it, and that money could come only from the Maratha collectors in the North.
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The fall of Méhéndélé (7 Dec.) completely changed the scene, but not at once. It took the Shāh about a fortnight from this date to cut the Bhāu's line of communication with Delhi, to terrorize the Maratha army into remaining passive within their trenches day and night, and to stop their provision supply altogether. Govind himself fell on 17 December. That was the date on which despair took the place of boastful confidence in the beleaguered army. But a letter sent out of Pānipat on 22nd December (the day when the Bhāu received the mangled head of Govind Ballāl), even if it could have escaped the Durrāni patrols and the hostile Baluch zamindars on the way, could not have brought a single trooper back from the Deccan, could not even have reached the Peshwā before the fatal morning of 14th January 1761.
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The Bhāu nowhere says that he was looking for armed relief from the South. He perished, not so much from insufficiency of man-power, as because his army at Kunjpurā and after "lived in the air"; it had no secure base at all. He had rejected Suraj Mal's wise advice to leave all his non-combatants and impedimenta behind in the Jāt forts, so as to render his force extremely mobile. After this it was a criminal folly on his part to make Delhi his base and yet leave there Nāro Shankar with a contemptible force of 3,000 light horse and 3,000 foot, all second line troops or raw recruits [Raj. i. 237], whom any Durrāni lieutenant could have crushed. Even a Dattāji Sindhia with fully 10,000 seasoned horse of his own, if posted at Delhi, would not have been more than what the importance of that base during the Bhāu's northward advance to the Satlaj demanded from a far-sighted general.
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The Bhāu had taken 78 days in marching from Sindhkhed to a place 20 miles short of Agra, and the Peshwā would have required at least a hundred days in covering a route 275 miles longer, from Paithān to Pānipat. The knowledge of this fact alone would have deterred the Bhāu from asking for the Peshwā's armed aid.
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Therefore, it is proved beyond a doubt that the only help which the Bhāu solicited from the Peshwa was money. Such an appeal exasperated Bālaji Rāo beyond endurance, and with every reason. He had, in order to furnish the Bhāu for the Hindustan expedition, added to his already heavy burden of debt, and cut down the force retained for the defence of the Deccan to the bones (only 10,000 men of his own.) The devoted Dattāji Sindhiā had assured him that he was thinking day and night how to relieve the Peshwā's load of debt, but Dattāji in the midst of his arduous campaigns in the North had never asked for remittance from Punā. The Bhāu had been supplied with a much larger army and orders for half the Maratha dues in the North. His task was to collect, by the demonstration of his force, the tributes and revenue outstanding there and thus help to satisfy the creditors of the Punā Government, for whom nothing could be spared from the scanty revenues of the Deccan. And yet the Bhāu was demanding more money for his own expenses ! We can now easily understand why Bālāji’s courtiers found it dangerous even to speak to him about the army under the Bhāu. As a courtier reports, “He has lost all recollection of the men in Hindustan (viz., the Bhāu and his army.) Even talk about sending help to them is displeasing to his mind.” [Letter of 26 Nov. SPD. ii. 133=xxvii. 260.] To such hints the Peshwā’s reply, expressed by silence or a grunt rather than words, signified that he had given the Bhāu a rope sufficiently long to hang himself with and would leave him there. What lashed his resentment to fury was the unforgettable fact that the same rope which Sadāshiv had placed round his own neck would strangle Vishwās Rāo also !
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In such circumstances, a born master of affairs would have asserted his will, cut his losses by abandoning all his northern ambitions (or severely curtailing them within the limits of possibility), and commanded the Bhāu at once to fall back on Agra, or even Gwālior, and thus saved his son and army, at the expense of the coveted but unattainable lordship of Delhi and the Panjāb and the unhampered possession of the Doāb. We can blame Bālāji for this failure of a supreme master’s duty ; his marriage at Paithān had nothing to do with the issue in the North.
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The military disaster to the Marathas at Pānipat was inevitable, considering the polar difference in armament, tactics, discipline, internal cohesion (by means of a dependable chain of officers) and numbers between the rival armies. There could have been no victory for the Bhāu there ; the utmost was a successful retreat with what he could save out of his army, abandoning all his accumulated plunder of six months and most of his non-combatants. His failure in that clash of arms does not excite our indignation so much as the utter blindness to the facts of the situation, the lack of a consistent far-sighted policy and of the practical give and take spirit, and above all the total diplomatic failure,—in one word, the want of statesmanship,—on the part of the master at Punā who dictated, and the doomed agent near Delhi who carried out, his North-Indian policy.
Linked texts (1)
- Selections from the Peshwa Daftar — Marathi