Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c54.s5.13

v4.c54.s5.13

The most reliable account of this battle of Ujjain is given in the despatches of Resident Collins’s agent in Ujjain, Jaswant Holkar’s letter to Bhārāmal Dādā, and the report of Lāji Ballāl’s envoy in Daulat Rao’s camp,—all of which are absolutely contemporary and based on personal knowledge. This account is supported and enriched by many details in the Holkar family tradition recorded in the *Kaifiyat*. The battle raged for two successive days; the decisive rain-burst just before the final charge of Holkar’s army is given in Bhawāni Shankar’s narrative and in Basāwan Lāl’s *Life of Amir Khan*. These sources prove the falsity of Herbert Compton’s story of the battle (*Adventurers*, pp. 255 and 363). He is wrong (i) in ascribing the conception of the attack on Ujjain to Mir Khan—whose bold initiative alone made “Holkar pluck up heart”,—as the timing of the movements of the two branches of Holkar’s army and even the assertion of Mir Khan’s eulogist, prove that the plan originated in Jaswant’s brain; (ii) Compton is not justified in asserting that “Hessing behaved in a most cowardly manner, flying at an early period of the action” and being “a half-caste son, by a native woman (really a French mestiche), of gallant old John Hessing, failed to demonstrate the doctrine of heredity.”