Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c34.s4.1

v3.c34.s4.1

When we contemplate the career of Najaf Khan we do not know what to admire most,—his military capacity, his political insight, or his humanity. In none of these points he had an equal among the peerage of Delhi or the vassal princes of the Empire in his own day. Najibud-daulah may have surpassed him in military genius and fought greater battles against mightier antagonists, but the circumstances of his time were different, and he merely carried on the traditional Afghan system of war with supreme thoroughness. Najaf Khan, on the other hand, had received a military education denied to the great Ruhela; he had faced British troops in the field and later fought side by side with them; he knew and appreciated the new warfare which the Europeans had brought into India, and he quickly adapted himself to the change and successfully incorporated into his army alien elements and diverse instruments. He concentrated on fire arms, and assembled ten thousand sepoy musketeers trained in the European system and a heavy park of improved artillery; he enlisted European partisan leaders like Rene Madec, Walter Reinhard and the Comte de Modave, and added to these two arms the best cavalry then available in India, namely the Mughal horse. But he was never, like Daulat Rao Sindhia, the helpless slave of his foreign mercenaries. The result of this successful grafting of the new on the old was that the Marathas Ruhelas and Jats, till then considered invincible, were hopelessly out-classed in their wars with Najaf Khan and the lieutenants who carried on his legacy, till De Boigne confronted them with a still more modernised force before which nothing Indian could stand and which met its doom only from the white troops of another race.