The army that had to be invented

The Maratha army that went north in 1760 was the finest cavalry force in India, and at Panipat it was annihilated by an enemy that was also, largely, cavalry. That is the detail worth sitting with. The defeat was not the failure of a bad army. It was the failure of a good one to be the right kind.

Mahadji Scindia survived the field with a leg injury that lamed him for the rest of his life. He spent the following three decades answering the question the battle had asked.

What the loss actually taught

Maratha warfare had been built, brilliantly, on speed. Light horse that could appear where it was not expected, cut supply, decline the pitched battle and win the campaign by exhausting the enemy's ability to stay in the field. Against the Mughal system it had worked for a century.

What it could not do was hold ground under sustained fire. Cavalry cannot take a prepared position. It cannot stand still and absorb artillery. And by the second half of the eighteenth century, the powers that mattered in India were increasingly the ones that could do both — disciplined infantry firing in volley, with guns trained to move with them.

1784

In 1784 a Savoyard named Benoît de Boigne entered Mahadji Scindia's service. He was in his early thirties, born at Chambéry to a furrier's family, and had already served in the French and Russian armies and briefly with the East India Company. He was hired to raise and train infantry on European lines.

He began with two battalions. It is important to be precise about what was being bought here, because it was not tactics — those were widely known — and it was not weapons, which were available. It was discipline as an institution: men paid regularly, drilled continuously, kept together in peacetime, and therefore able to do the one thing Maratha armies had not been able to do, which was stand.

The proof, arriving in the wrong order

The first test came in 1787 at Lalsot, against the combined armies of Jaipur and Jodhpur, and it went badly. Mahadji's Hindustani contingents, unpaid at a moment when grain in camp was at famine prices, deserted in numbers. The Mughal contingent left him. He extricated what remained and fell back.

But the two trained battalions held the field. In a defeat, that was the finding. The rest of the army had come apart and de Boigne's men had not.

The following year at Agra, in 1788, the same troops turned the position around, and the year after that Mahadji Scindia gave de Boigne a brigade of ten battalions with artillery to match. In June 1788 Ismail Beg was beaten. That autumn, when the Rohilla chief Ghulam Kadir seized Delhi, deposed Shah Alam II and blinded him, Mahadji marched, took the city on 2 October, and restored the emperor he was formally the deputy of — he had held the offices of Regent and commander-in-chief of the empire since December 1784.

Patan and Merta

The system was demonstrated conclusively in 1790. On 20 June at Patan, de Boigne's brigade — roughly ten thousand men with a heavy weight of guns — met a Rajput confederate force several times its size and broke it. On 10 September at Merta, the Jodhpur cavalry was broken the same way. Ajmer followed.

In under six months, Rajput military power had been decisively reorganised by an army that fought standing still. In 1793 the same brigades defeated Tukoji Holkar at Lakheri, which settled an internal Maratha question by the same method.

Mahadji Scindia died of a fever at his camp at Wanavdi, near Pune, in February 1794, at the height of his authority. He left no direct heir. The state and the army passed to Daulatrao Scindia, then about fifteen.

The part that is hard to write

The machine worked. That is not in question. What it could not do was outlive the man who understood what it was for.

Nine years after Mahadji's death, at Assaye in September 1803, a British force under Arthur Wellesley met the Scindia army in the field. What it met was not Maratha light horse. It was disciplined infantry behind well-served guns — the system Mahadji had spent thirty years and a fortune building, now commanded by others and set against a professional European army rather than alongside one.

Wellesley won, and later named that day, not Waterloo, when a friend asked him for the best thing he had ever done in the way of fighting. The compliment is usually read as praise for him. It is at least as much a description of what he was shot at by.

The Battle of Assaye is told in full here.

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