The Military System of the Marathas, with a Brief Account of Their Maritime Activities c18.27

c18.27

The Maratha Government did not recognise their responsibility of public instruction. Distinguished Brahman scholars and physicians of all castes and creeds were encouraged by liberal grants of rent-free lands and pensions, but private individuals were generally left to equip themselves as best they could for the professions of their choice. The great majority of the upper classes joined the army. They learnt to fight, but there was no systematic arrangement for any instruction in the science of war. Fighting was more or less a matter of experience, and the general education that was then available consisted wholly of cultural training in literature, grammar, politics, logic and philosophy. There was no treatise on the science of war, and if we except a single chronicle, that dealing with the campaign of Panipat, there was no record of the military experience of the Maratha generals. An officer never retired from service and had therefore no leisure for writing about the theories and practice of war. His experience was, therefore, lost to posterity and only his near relatives, who had the good fortune of serving with him, could profit by his teaching, and these could not always be expected to supply the best or the aptest pupils. The progress that Europe was making in the eighteenth century in theoretical science was absolutely unknown to the Indians of that age, and no Maratha chief ever attempted to master the superior military and nautical science of the west as Peter the Great did. The Maratha officers began their military careers too early, were much too tied to the time-honoured system to learn anything new and generally died early; if some of them had the good luck of attaining a ripe old age, they were too busy with their annual expeditions to leave a written account of their campaigns, and their limited education hardly qualified them for such work.