The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c13.38

c13.38

The defeat was due as much to bad generalship as to the inherent defects of the Maratha military system. Had there been a strong standing army to be permanently stationed in Hindustan, had Raghunath Rao held the Indus frontier, had Holkar joined Sindhia’s army in time, the battle of Panipat might not have been fought at all. But the feudal organisation of the army and the chronic financial needs of the Peshwa and his Sardars frequently compelled them to divert their energy to minor expeditions, while the real source of danger was ignored. The failure of Govind Pant Bundele was due more to the system than to any remissness on his part. His districts had for several years been disturbed by hostile Rohillas. Yet he was expected to meet not only the financial demands of the grand army but to raise a sufficiently strong cavalry force to devastate Oudh and Rohilkhand and to drive the allied army upon the artillery of Ibrahim Khan at Panipat. Another lesson of Panipat that was lost upon the Marathas was the impracticability of combining two opposite methods of warfare. The experiment proved disastrous at Panipat, and Colonel Malleson says that the fatal defeat of Assaye was mainly due to its repetition. During the Panipat campaign, Sadashiv Rao had relied almost entirely on his trained infantry for victory; his successors went further; their infatuation for this new method of fighting led them to neglect their once powerful cavalry, and during the forty years that intervened between Panipat and Assaye, Maratha generalship had also hopelessly deteriorated.