The East India Company’s army was commanded by Major General Arthur Wellesley, a skilled tactician who had previously defeated the Tipu of Mysore and stole his mechanical tiger (I’m not making this shit up). On the 23rd of September, 1803 the forces of the East India Company met the Maratha Empire in battle near the village of Assaye. Outnumbered nearly 5 to 1, Wellesley manoeuvred his 9500 soldiers to their advantage and advanced towards the Maratha army. The British marched to within 50 metres of the enemy artillery, fired their muskets and then charged in with their bayonets. There was heavy fighting as the two armies met at close range and several of the British regiments came close to annihilation, however the tide of the battle was soon with the British as a number of the Indian and French officers who were commanding the Maratha army fled, leaving their men in disarray. Major General Wellesley, leading his men from the front, had two horses shot out from under him during the battle but remained uninjured himself. The British pushed on and passed the line of Maratha cannon, however a number of the gunners manning the cannons had simply been pretending to be dead, only to stand up and start firing cannonballs and grapeshot into the arse of the British advance. The British 78th Regiment of Foot and 7th Madras Native Cavalry turned around and retook the cannons, this time making sure the gunners were actually dead.
Soon enough the Maratha army broke and started retreating, leaving the British victorious. Although the Maratha Empire wasn’t fully defeated until the Third Anglo-Maratha War over a decade later, the Battle of Assaye weakened them and led to the British becoming the preeminent power in central India.
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Three wars that doomed the Maratha Confederacy. By the late eighteenth century, the Maratha Confederacy was one of the greatest powers in the central Indian subcontinent. During the reign of Shivaji (d. 1680), the Marathas erupted from their mountain domain of the Western Ghats on the Arabian Sea and were transformed from Hindu mercenaries into warlords in their own right. Significant as was their military proficiency in the rise of the Marathas, equally important were the dissensions that afflicted Mogul rule of India. The reign of Shivaji paralleled that of the Mogul emperor Aurangzeb, whose vigorous persecution of non-Muslims in the last half of the seventeenth century served to encourage revolt among not merely the Marathas but the Rajputs and Sikhs as well. The resulting overextension of Mogul forces meant that, by the time of Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the Marathas had established themselves as the dominant power in the Deccan. In the succession crises that followed the death of the emperor, the Marathas were able to extend their power still further, until by 1740, their ruler, the Peshwa of Pune, governed from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal.
Given the nature of the Maratha rise to power, it was fitting, if not ironic, that the ultimate British victory in the three Maratha Wars had as much to do with dissension among the Marathas as to particular proficiency on the part of their European enemy. As the Marathas extended their power across India, governance of lands seized from the Mogul emperor was left in the hands of Maratha commanders. Consequently, rather than governing a centralized state, the Peshwa of Pune oversaw what the nineteenth-century historian James Duff described as a “communion of interests.” The same tendency to internal dissension that so afflicted the Mogul empire and that largely accounted for the rise of the Marathas soon became a feature of Maratha political life.
Matters took a serious turn in the early 1770s, when the British East India Company’s Bombay presidency saw in the succession crises of that time an opportunity to expand its interests in the region. In 1775, Bombay recognized Raghunath Rao as the legitimate claimant to the Peshwaship in exchange for territorial gains and in so doing set the scene for the First Maratha War (1775-1782). It was a conflict that ran in fits and starts. At Aras (18 May 1775), Raghunath and his British allies were defeated by the Maratha commander, Hari Pant. Facing war with France and its primary Indian ally, the Sultan of Mysore, Governor of India Warren Hastings took the opportunity of this defeat to condemn Bombay’s actions and ordered the company troops back to their quarters. Subsequent negotiations with the Maratha Regency Council failed-despite British offers to abandon Raghunath Rao for territorial concessions-and in 1778 troops from Bombay again marched against the Marathas. Though their defeat at Talegaon (11-17 January 1779) represented a serious setback to British interests in the region, 1779 also marked an important turning point in British strategic interests in India. Concerned that Bombay’s actions could increase French interest in the region, Hastings ordered six battalions to march from Bengal. When the commander of this force, Colonel Thomas Goddard, heard of the defeat at Talegaon, he did not turn back but pushed on, covering 300 miles in 19 days. When negotiations with the Regency Council failed, Goddard was joined by the Gaikar, Maratha princes from Baroda, and successfully stormed Ahmadabad. Meanwhile, in 1780, a second Bengal force under Captain Thomas Popham captured the Marathas’ mountaintop fortress at Gwalior (November 1780). Just as British victory over the Marathas seemed to be assured, however, Haidar Ali, Sultan of Mysore, invaded the Carnatic, opening the Second Mysore War. As a result of the very real threat to Madras and the British position on the Carnatic, the East India Company opened negotiations with the Marathas in 1781 that would end with the Treaty of Salbai (1783). Although the latter forced the British to relinquish their support of Raghunath Rao, the expeditions of Goddard and Popham nonetheless demonstrated the British ability to strike at will anywhere on the subcontinent.
Peace between the British and the Marathas would last for the next two decades, until a succession crisis shook the confederacy in 1803. Defeated by his rival, Holkar of Indore, Baji Rao II entered into the Bassein Treaty (1803), by which the British agreed to restore Baji as Peshwa in return for the Marathas accepting and paying for British troops in their capital, together with other obligations. To restore Baji Rao and bring those princes who rejected the Bassein Treaty to heel, Governor General Sir Richard Wellesley planned a twofold campaign against the Marathas. First, Wellesley’s brother, Arthur, would lead a force of 9,000 Europeans and 5,000 Indian troops into the Maratha homeland. A second force under Gerard Lake invaded Hindustan. In March 1803, Wellesley’s force captured Pune and restored Baji as Peshwa. On 23 September 1803, Wellesley’s army met and defeated the Marathas under Doulut Rao Sindhia at Assaye. Though victorious, Wellesley would later recall this campaign as the hardest-fought action of his long career. Meanwhile, Lake captured Delhi on 16 September 1803 and in the Battle of Laswari (1 November) finally destroyed the forces of the Maratha prince, Sindhia. In the meantime, the British government had grown concerned with the extent of these operations. In particular, the siege of Bhurtpore (January- April 1805) had claimed 3,100 men before the British were victorious. Accordingly, Lord Wellesley was recalled, and with the capitulation of Holkar at Amritsar (December 1805), the Second Maratha War came to an uneasy close.
The Third Maratha War (1817-1818) was in large part the consequence of the turmoil that gripped India as Maratha power finally crumbled. In the aftermath of the Second Maratha War, a vast horde of former Maratha soldiers known as the Pendaris spread out across central and southern India in an organized campaign of violence and depredation. When the governor of India, Francis Hastings, Lord Moira, decided to move against the Pendaris with two large armies, he expected Maratha support. Instead, the Peshwa Baji Rao II, justifiably resentful of the conditions imposed on him by the British in return for their support in the 1803 war, turned on the British and attacked and destroyed their residency at Pune with a force of 27,000 men (5 November 1817).Holkar likewise took to the field but suffered defeat at the hands of Sir Thomas Hyslop at Mahidput (21 December 1817) before being forced to surrender. Nor did the Peshwa fare any better, for on the same day his forces destroyed the British residency at Pune, they were defeated at Kirkee by a mere 2,800 British soldiers. Defeated again at Koregaon (1 January 1818) and Ashti (20 February), the Peshwa finally surrendered to Hastings’s army on 2 June 1818. With Baji Rao’s surrender, the hereditary office of Peshwa was abolished by the victorious British, and with it the political and military power of the Maratha Confederacy ceased to exist.
References and further reading: Duff, James G. History of the Mahrattas. Ed. J. P. Guha. New Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1971. Gordon, Stewart. The Marathas, 1600-1818. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Keay, John. India. A History. London: Harper Collins, 2000. Mehra, Parshotam. A Dictionary of Modern Indian History, 1707-1947. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
