The lands of the Maharashtra in the north-central region of India had stood open to a British advance ever since the defeat and death of Tipu Sultan in 1799. North of Mysore and inland from Bombay, the immense plateau of the Deccan was the homeland of great Maratha armies, the legacy of the famous seventeenth-century leader Shivaji. North of the Deccan lay Rajasthan and Delhi, and the great fortress at Aligarh.
The long defensive struggle of the Marathas against the British had begun with the victories of Nana Farnavis in 1779, and it was now renewed on different fronts over the following two decades, producing numerous defeats as well as notable victories. Indeed, the cost in lives and in revenue of the Maratha wars was to lead to the eventual recall of Richard Wellesley, the governor, for his particular war had not been authorised in London. The Maratha resistance provoked his political downfall, even though his generals prevailed on the battlefield.
Daulat Rao Sindhia was the principal Maratha leader, forming part of the ‘Maratha Confederacy’, an informal grouping of the most powerful Maratha rulers in the vast inland territory of central India. These included the one-eyed Jeswant Rao Holkar, based at Indore, and Baji Rao II, known as ‘the Peshwa’, based at Poona. Sindhia, perceived as the heir to Shivaji, was also the protector of Shah Alam, the surviving Mughal emperor in Delhi, now old and blind.1 In August 1803 he was faced with British armies advancing into the Deccan.
Sindhia and Holkar were both powerful chiefs, but they had a great capacity to fight among themselves - a considerable source of strength to the British.2 Both were aware of the British threat, and understood Wellesley’s need to enlarge his territory, for the governor was short of money to fund his armies; he needed the extra revenue that a conquest of the Maratha lands would provide. Baji Rao had taken the line of least resistance with the British, accepting their help in May 1803 to recover Poona from Holkar.
Sindhia was the first Maratha ruler in the way of the British advance, but he had to fight on two fronts. In the Deccan, he was threatened by the forces of General Arthur Wellesley, the governor’s brother and later the Duke of Wellington, remembered as the victor at Seringapatam in 1799. Further north, in Rajasthan, Sindhia’s French-trained armies confronted an invasion led by
General Gerard Lake, recently arrived from Ireland, considered a skilful tactician and a good organiser.3
The war began in August with Lake’s army bombarding Sindhia’s headquarters at Aligarh, south of Delhi. Sindhia was obliged to surrender after the loss of 2,000 men, and his southern fortress at Ahmadnagar in the Deccan, north of Poona, also had to be abandoned, after a similar heavy bombardment by Wellingtons army A final confrontation came in September, when his forces met those of Wellington at the battle of Assaye, further north - possibly the fiercest battle against the British invaders ever seen in India. Sindhia’s soldiers acquitted themselves well, and British casualties were heavy, but the British were judged to have won when Sindhia’s surviving forces retired from the field.4
Another fierce battle took place on the outskirts of Delhi, and General Lake’s forces seized the city. Shah Alam, the old Mughal emperor, sat under a tattered canopy to receive the British general - and he did so, according to a contemporary report, ‘with every external appearance of the misery of his condition’. He was now obliged to obey the orders of a ‘British Resident’ established in Delhi, and he died soon after, in 1806. His son, Akbar Shah, became the new emperor, but only in name. The British now ruled supreme in Delhi.
Sindhia watched helplessly while Lake rolled up parts of the Maratha map of India that had once been his. The capture of Delhi and the fortress at Agra yielded immense sums in prize money, distributed among British soldiers. The end came in October, at the village of Laswari, west of Agra. Sindhia’s military commander, Abaji, fought a final battle against Lake, and here again the Marathas acquitted themselves well. Lake was to claim that he had been much impressed by the Marathas at Laswari, just as Wellington had been surprised by the strength of the resistance at Assaye. Yet Laswari was a serious Maratha defeat. They lost 7,000 men as well as their guns and ammunition. British losses were also substantial, with over 800 killed or wounded.5
Sindhia’s principal army was now destroyed, and he signed a peace treaty seriously disadvantageous to his cause. He gave up a substantial slice of territory, formally handing over the Maratha lands north of the Jumna River, including Delhi and Agra, but he secured a fresh deal that allowed him to survive as a Maratha ruler with some of his powers intact. The Peshwa Baji Rao was less fortunate. A ‘British Resident’ was installed at Poona, assuming the powers and status that he had once held. The peace treaty was humiliating for the Maratha rulers, yet within two years the British political position had deteriorated.
The following year, in July 1804, Jeswant Rao Holkar, the only undefeated member of the Maratha triumvirate defending central India, launched a surprise attack on a British force at Sonara, south of Agra. This was the worst military reverse suffered by the British since Haidar Ali had defeated Colonel Baillie’s army outside Madras in 1780, nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Five sepoy companies deserted during the retreat to Agra.
After the military defeats of Sindhia’s forces at Assaye and Laswari in 1803, and the defection of the Peshwa Baji Rao, Holkar was the last member of the old Maratha Confederacy to remain at large. Safely ensconced in his fortress at Indore, he still had hopes of reviving the alliance with Sindhia and Baji Rao to fight against ‘the infidel Christians’. He was a resolute opponent of the British, aware of their ambition to take over the continent, but Sindhia and Baji Rao distrusted him and were not prepared to join an anti-British alliance.6
Although weakened by Sindhia’s defeat, Holkar was in a relatively strong position for the British were seriously over-extended. Holkar was a well-educated and intelligent ruler, with ‘a mind more quick of conception and fertile in resources than any of the other Mahratta chiefs’, according to Major William Thorn, who had fought against him.7 He spoke Persian as well as Marathi, and although he lacked an eye, he was an excellent guerrilla leader.
‘We are obliged to remain in the field at enormous cost,’ Lake noted gloomily to Governor Wellesley in April. Wellington’s army in the Deccan was also in poor shape, bogged down with few provisions. When Wellesley ordered Lake to prepare an attack on Holkar’s armies in April 1804, the Marathas had considerable initial success. They shadowed Lake’s forces in the neighbourhood of Tonk, south-west of Agra, and obliged them to withdraw to Agra when overcome by the summer’s heat. Colonel William Monson was left behind to monitor the Marathas’ movements, and he moved south across the Chambal River to Sonara, with reinforcements from the Rajah of Kotah. It was here that Holkar launched his devastating attack in July that forced Monson to retreat to Agra.8 His victory was a severe blow to the British. Lake’s biographer wrote how ‘for a time the safety of Upper India was gravely imperilled. . . Permanent injury to British prestige was the result of so serious and complete a reverse. The natives of India had discovered that British armies were not invincible’.9
Throughout early autumn, everything went Holkar’s way. Lake was retreated from Agra to Cawnpore, to await reinforcements from Calcutta, while one of Holkar’s armies was sent to recapture Delhi. The city was surrounded for several weeks, and the siege was only abandoned when Lake’s reinforced army arrived later in the year. Holkar’s troops moved north, and the tide turned in Lake’s favour.10
The war concluded in November when Holkar was ambushed by Lake’s forces at Farrukhabad. Holkar escaped, but his soldiers were caught unready, sleeping beside their horses. Hundreds were cut down, and perhaps as many as 3,000 were killed or died of their wounds. Many of those who escaped simply abandoned Holkar’s cause, and returned home. Holkar faced defeat, with little left except his immense fortress at Bharatpur. There he held out, and even when
Lake tried to capture it in January 1805, Holkar forced him to withdraw, after sustaining more than 3,000 casualties. The fortress was to stand alone, unconquered, for another twenty years.
The resistance war by Holkar and Sindhia, although ultimately unsuccessful, was not without effect. The Maratha rulers suffered serious military setbacks, but the British were wounded politically. Governor Wellesley had squandered money on waging wars that were designed to bring in extra revenue, not to spend it, and in 1805 he was reprimanded by his employers, the East India Company, and ordered home. He was not well received there either.11
His successor was the elderly and reliable General Charles Cornwallis, now aged sixty-six. He was an old India hand who had done battle with Tipu Sultan in 1792; he was a veteran of the American wars of the 1770s; and he had been the commander in Ireland in 1798. But the Maratha resistance had obliged him to return to India with a commitment to cut back on expenditure and to abandon the wilder schemes for the enlargement of empire. On his first day back, in August 1805, he wrote to Lake to tell of his ‘earnest desire. . . to put an end to this most unprofitable and ruinous warfare’.
Sindhia, the loser in 1803, was courted by Cornwallis, who ignored Holkar and embarked on a peace deal. Sindhia found that everything under dispute with him was to be given back: Gohad and Gwalior were to be returned; Delhi was to be abandoned. He was allowed to restore Maratha influence in Hindustan; the British frontier was drawn back from the Chambal to the Jumna; and British protection was withdrawn from the native princes whose land lay between the rivers.
Sindhia’s resistance had apparently been worthwhile. At least one Maratha ruler had triumphed, if only temporarily. The British were left with their empire in India facing an uncertain future. Cornwallis’s policy exemplified the decline in the British position, and his own personal circumstances were not good. The exertions of his return to India had been severe. Shortly after the settlement with Sindhia, in October 1805, he collapsed and died.
Holkar remained out in the cold, accusing Sindhia of falling ‘a prey to temporary selfish gain’ He remained hopeful of finding allies with whom to continue the anti-British struggle, and he retreated across the Sutlej River in November 1805. He camped in the Punjabi plain between Amritsar and Lahore, in the hope that he might secure the support of Ranjit Singh and other Sikh leaders.12 These were vain hopes, and a further forty years were to pass before the heirs to Ranjit Singh were ready to battle the British.
Holkar agreed finally to make peace with the British, recognising that he had run out of friends. He signed a treaty with Lake at Amritsar, and pledged to abstain from all further incursions into the territories of the East India Company. The British, for their part, agreed to allow Holkar to remain sovereign in his own land.
Not everyone was content. This was a treaty through which Holkar ‘was reinstated in dominions to which he never had any right, complained Major Thorn, who had battled alongside General Lake throughout the campaign, ‘and which, even if he had, he deserved to have forfeited’.13 Lake was so annoyed by the Cornwallis policy of abandoning in peace talks what had been gained in battle that he resigned and returned to England. He died in London three years later, still an angry man.
The Maratha rulers had been forced to allow Wellesley and Lake to greatly enlarge the British Empire in India. They had lost Mysore and Travancore, the Maratha principalities of Baroda and Poona, the territories of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and, to the north-west, the province of Oudh.
The British conquerors were well rewarded: Wellesley was knighted, Lake made a peer. Yet the Marathas had also done well. Two powerful rulers remained beyond British control - Sindhia at Gwalior and Holkar at Indore - and their fiefdoms were to remain independent for a further decade. With admirable strategic vision, Holkar devoted the rest of his short life to the construction of a gun factory. He died in 1811 at the age of thirty.14 Sindhia died years later, in 1827. Yet the Maratha resistance of 1803-05 only postponed the evil hour. In the following decade, in 1817-18, the Marathas were to find that the British, freed from their European distractions, had time, energy, and money to encompass their destruction.
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