The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c10.2

c10.2

THE MARATHAS, like other Indians, never excelled in artillery. Of its efficiency as an offensive weapon of long range they had early become aware. It was to his artillery tactics that Babar owed his decisive victories over his Rajput and Pathan opponents; it was their superior knowledge of artillery that had made the Portuguese so formidable in Southern India. It became, therefore, an imperative necessity for the Indian potentates of the North and the South to furnish themselves with the new arms. Portuguese and other European adventurers were on this account warmly welcomed by Indian princes, but some enterprising Hindus had also learnt the novel science. A quaint account of an artillery duel between a Brahman gunner named Rama and a Portuguese artilleryman, fought as early as 1571, has come down to us. The Brahman’s gun was baptised the ‘butcher’, while the machine of his Christian rival was called the ‘lion’, and the two men grimaced, grinned and made faces at each other before they fired.¹ There were, therefore, some Indian gunners even before the rise of the Marathas.