Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c44.s1: § 2. Maratha interests in North India how ruined by Tukoji Holkar's cantankerous opposition to Sindhiā and Nānā Fadnis's lack of statesmanship
Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c44.s1
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§ 2. Maratha interests in North India how ruined by Tukoji Holkar's cantankerous opposition to Sindhiā and Nānā Fadnis's lack of statesmanship
v4.c44.s1.1
The Peshwā Bālāji Rao had assigned to Holkar and Sindhiā equal shares in the *chauth* due from Northern India. At that time these two houses used to send equally large armies on the Northern campaigns of the Marathas, and make equal sacrifices. But after the death of Malhar Holkar (1766), the armed strength of the Holkars had grown less and less, while the power of the Sindhias, thanks to Mahādji's genius, had totally eclipsed their rival's. Indeed, the recent victories over Ghulām Qādir, Ismail Beg, Jaipur and Jodhpur (1788-1790) had all been won by Mahādji’s New Model army.
v4.c44.s1.2
Holkar had done nothing to put down Ghulām Qādir or Ismail Beg, and even where he fought as an ally of Sindhia, namely at Patan and Mertā, his contribution had been no trained infantry, no guns, and only 4,000 old-type light cavalry against four to five times that number of horsemen supplied by Sindhia. And yet, now in 1790, Tukoji Holkar claimed that, as the equal of Sindhia in the Peshwā’s service, he was entitled to half the territory acquired, half the tribute paid, and half the spoils taken as the fruits of these recent victories. Mahādji Sindhia could not satisfy such an absurd claim, and immediately after Mertā, the Holkar contingent withdrew from service with Mahādji’s army and Tukoji openly intrigued with every prince and minister who wanted to defy or thwart Sindhia. Thus, the Maratha power and prestige in Rajputana and the Doāb was threatened with collapse, just after such a decisive victory as Mertā.
v4.c44.s1.3
Mahādji again and again wrote to Nānā Fadnis at Punā, pointing out how the general interests of the Marathas and the Peshwā’s position in the North were being endangered by the recalcitrancy of Ali Bahādur and the hostility of Tukoji Holkar. But his appeals remained unheeded. In fact, Nānā Fadnis, the dictator of the Central Government of the Marathas, was jealous of Mahādji Sindhia’s rise to the first place in the political world of India and suspected that this general was carving out an empire for his own family in the north, and throwing his master into the shade with the help of the troops and authority supplied by the Peshwā. Nānā, therefore, deliberately kept the Holkar-Sindhia quarrel open, in order to weaken Mahādji and apply a brake to his rise. (PRC. i. 249.)
v4.c44.s1.4
No policy could have been more blind or unpatriotic. This open sore drained away all the life and energy of the Maratha power in the Mughal dominions; it paralysed the hands of Mahādji and made it impossible for him to impose Maratha suzerainty over North India as a generally accepted change. Such a public belief alone could have awed the refractory vassals of Delhi into obedience and averted the necessity of war and war’s inevitable consequences—the drain on the finances and the interruption of revenue collection. Thus even after Patan and Mertā the subdued North gained no real peace and time for recuperation.
v4.c44.s1.5
For full one year, from July 1789 to June 1790, Sindhia waited for a peaceful solution of his dispute with Holkar by their common master’s award; but he waited in vain. Then he used the sword to cut the knot. Jaipur was crushed for good at Patan (20 June 1790) and Mārwar at Mertā (10 September), and Ali Bahādur bribed to go away and conquer Bundelkhand. And then at last was Mahādji Sindhia free to leave Mathurā and assert his mastery in Rajputana.
v4.c44.s1.6
But not yet fully. For, the mischievous activities of the Holkar agents continued to obstruct the smooth working of Sindhia’s policy. So, he was forced to take recourse to the sword again: at Lakheri (1 June 1793), Holkar was decisively knocked out of the North-Indian ring.
v4.c44.s1.7
But it was now too late. Precious years had been wasted in delay and futility caused by Holkar’s opposition and Nānā Fadnis’s double-dealing, and after Lakheri Mahādji had only eight months of life left to him. With his death the empire he had built up for the Marathas under the mask of the regency of Delhi, began to break up.
v4.c44.s1.8
One cannot help feeling that Nānā Fadnis’s wrong policy was due even more to his ignorance of North Indian conditions and people than to the crooked working of his Machiavellian mind. He saw the things of the Delhi empire through his ears. His sole visit to North India had been made more than 30 years before, as an obscure and sickly lad, in the disastrous Pānipat campaign. Thereafter, neither he, nor any first-grade agent of the Peshwā was sent to visit Mathurā personally, see things for himself, and give a final decision in the Holkar-Sindhia dispute with all the authority of the Peshwa's Government. Such a course alone could have averted so much waste of blood and money by the Maratha race.
v4.c44.s1.9
Nānā Fadnis was obsessed by the narrow ideas of the age of Bālāji Rao, the third Peshwā, when Maratha armies were irresistible and every expedition brought back vast amounts of treasure or fertile new territory. He could not realise that North India had been sucked dry by ceaseless civil war, foreign invasion, and rebellion, ever since 1752. He could not adequately recognise that the balance of power in the North had shifted completely in consequence of the English rushing in to fill the vacuum caused by the Maratha eclipse at Pānipat. He knew not that the old Maratha policies of war and diplomacy which had succeeded under Bāji Rao I and Bālāji Rao (1720-1760) were now hopelessly out of date and that an entirely new orientation of Maratha policy in Hindustan and a new type of Maratha generals and administrators were required for carrying out the new policy. Nānā Fadnis lived blind to the moving outer world, like the proverbial frog in the well, and yet the central power of the Maratha Government during these eventful twenty years (1775-1795) was wielded by him with dictatorial authority.
v4.c44.s1.10
Mahādji Sindhia was the man on the spot. He knew by long years of personal experience the problems of North India better than any other Maratha leader then living. Therefore, the unwise conduct of Nānā Fadnis filled Mahādji with despair. He repeatedly wrote to Punā offering to resign his northern responsibilities to some other agent of the Peshwā, and himself retire to the long-sought repose of private life.*