The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c11.42

c11.42

De Boigne was an able administrator as well as a military leader and Sindhia's expectations were fully justified. Aligarh and its neighbouring districts prospered under De Boigne's Government, but luckily for Mahadaji, the Savoyard had no desire of settling in India or carving out an independent principality for himself. With a splendid army and the entire revenue of one of the richest provinces of the empire at his disposal, the Savoyard might have easily succeeded in accomplishing what an Irishman, more daring but less fortunately situated, attempted in vain. Whether the Peshwa's Government had realised the unwisdom of granting such rich *jahgirs* to strangers we do not know, but neither Boyd nor John Ford was as lucky as De Boigne and Perron. The new experiment was fraught with other dangers. The Marathas did not enter the regular army. Their tradition and habit equally disqualified them for such service, and the regular forces, whether under Sindhia or under the Peshwa, were composed entirely of non-Marathas. The Hindu privates, commonly called Telingas, were drawn mainly from Oudh, and the Muhammadan contingents, called Najibs and Alygholes, consisted almost entirely of Rohillas and Pathans. William Henry Tone, who knew them well, has described them as the most unscrupulous adventurers who did not hesitate to commit the worst crimes.² The private in the newly raised battalions, therefore, was not morally superior to his predecessor in the old *gardi* regiment. If the men were bad, their officers were worse. The European adventurers who sought the service of Indian princes came in pursuit of fortune. They were more daring than the old *gardi* leaders but hardly less unscrupulous. If Muzaffar Khan had been guilty of frequently changing his masters, Dudrenec behaved no better and he was by no means the only offender in this respect. Their inconstancy earned Dudrenec and his colleagues the unenviable epithet of *Daghabaz* or traitors from Jaswant Rao Holkar.¹ Moreover, these unreliable officers were hardly a match for accomplished English generals like Lake and Wellesley. Most of them had no previous military training. Perron, Borquin and George Thomas were all runaway sailors, and the French officers in Sindhia’s army have been described by Lewis Ferdinand Smith as ‘low in every sense of the word’. ‘Low they were in every sense of the word,’ he writes, ‘in birth, in education and in principle. Perron’s army was a minute miniature of the French Revolution — wretches were raised from cooks, bakers, and barbers, to be the Majors and Colonels, absurdly entrusted with the command of brigades and shoved into paths to acquire lacks.’² Michael Filoze, who made a fortune in Sindhia’s service and then retired to Europe, is described by the same writer, who knew him, as a ‘Neapolitan of mean birth, low character and illiterate.’³ Some allowance might have been made for the natural bias of an Englishman against his French rivals in the same service, had not Smith’s denunciation of the average officer been substantially confirmed by Colonel Skinner who was absolutely free from such a prejudice.