India: A History. Revised and Updated (75 page)

In a rare display of unanimity both the governor-general and his council therefore denounced the local alliance of 1775 which precipitated the First Anglo–Maratha War as ‘unreasonable, impolitic, unjust and unauthorised’. It was unauthorised because the government of Bombay had concluded it without consulting its superior in Calcutta, unjust because it was no business of the British to blunder into the labyrinthine succession dispute over the peshwa-ship, impolitic because it flew in the face of Hastings’ hands-off policy, and unreasonable because Bombay lacked the means to fulfil its share in the venture. The First Maratha War was not, then, a sequel to Panipat nor another assault on Maratha hegemony. An untidy affair with as many treaties as battles, it was more a piece of Bombay mischief.

Although of growing commercial importance, Bombay was still politically and territorially insignificant compared to Calcutta or Madras. Partly to redress this situation, successive governors had long coveted the two neighbouring enclaves of Salsette island and Bassein port, both once Portuguese but subsequently resumed by the Marathas (and nowadays absorbed within the sprawl of greater Bombay). An offer of the cession of these two places in return for the Bombay government assisting Raghunath Rao, now one of the contenders for the peshwa-ship, with a force of 2500 men, was too good to miss. After a treaty to this effect had been signed at Surat in 1775, a combined Anglo-Maratha force moved into Gujarat and enjoyed some success before being halted in its tracks by Calcutta’s censure.

The Bombay troops were ordered back to camp and a British envoy was sent to negotiate with the Regency Council of the peshwa-ship in Pune. He agreed to abandon support of Raghunath in return for an indemnity and the cession of Salsette. But neither party honoured this treaty and in 1778 Bombay again rushed to Raghunath’s aid. This time it mobilised a force of four thousand which marched inland from Bombay and was heavily defeated while climbing up the Western Ghats towards Pune.

The Convention of Wadgaon (1779), signed on the spot in the wake of this defeat, was about as near to a surrender as the British had come since Bombay’s previous capitulation to Aurangzeb during the Childs’ ‘Mughal War’. In Pune the Regency Council, dominated by the redoubtable Nana Phadnavis (Farnavis), made much of this success and, on the strength of it, briefly enjoyed the support of Holkar, Scindia and the Gaikwad. By 1780 there was even talk of the grand alliance, so dreaded by the British, of the Marathas, the nizam, and Haidar Ali of Mysore. Against the background of the Second Mysore War and of the ongoing Anglo–French hostilities, Warren Hastings therefore repudiated the Wadgaon Convention and
reopened direct negotiations with Pune. There was little chance of an accommodation with Phadnavis, but the possibility of detaching the other Maratha confederates had improved greatly thanks to the appearance on the west coast of a British force sent overland from Bengal.

By virtue of his office as governor-general for all the British possessions in India, Hastings was being drawn, not unwillingly, into all-India adventures. Bombay’s plight, though richly deserved, could not be ignored; accordingly, in 1778 he had ordered six largely sepoy battalions to march right across the subcontinent to Gujarat. Starting from the Company’s Bengal salient in Awadh, they had taken the best part of a year to reach the west coast but, as with the Bengal troops who were about to be sent overland to Madras following Haidar Ali’s triumph at Polilur, their arrival changed the balance of power dramatically.

When the negotiations with Pune broke down, the Gaikwad, whose Gujarat base was particularly vulnerable, threw in his lot with the British. Meanwhile Mahadji Scindia received a rude shock when his core territories, hundreds of kilometres away to the north of Malwa, were threatened by another expedition from Bengal. Cragsmen from the latter even scaled the cliffs of Gwalior and captured what was still regarded as northern India’s greatest stronghold. Nearer home, the Marathas fared better and, though defeated at Ahmadabad in early 1780, successfully repelled another British attempt to force a way up through the Ghats to Pune in 1781.

By now Scindia was trying to act as a peacemaker while Hastings, thoroughly alarmed by Haidar Ali’s successes in the Carnatic, was also anxious to disengage. Hostilities therefore ceased in 1781 and a final treaty, that of Salbai, was ratified in 1782–3. Like the first two Mysore Wars, the First Maratha War had brought no significant territorial gains to either side. The Marathas, however, had retained their freedom of action and had obliged the British to relinquish their championship of Raghunath Rao. Hastings, on the other hand, could congratulate himself on having extricated Bombay, on having demonstrated the British potential to strike practically anywhere in India, and of having achieved what, since the treaty also regulated British and Maratha relations with the nizam, Mysore and the French, he took to be a general and lasting arrangement.

In that the peace lasted for a quarter of a century, Hastings’ hopes were fulfilled. But this was mainly thanks to the survival into the mid-1790s of a remarkable generation of Maratha leaders. Nana Phadnavis, a brahman whom even the British acknowledged as the most astute political leader of his day, continued to control Pune until 1796. When the young peshwa in whose name he ruled came of age, his guardians simply became his gaolers
and Phadnavis remained in command. He fought much with Tipu, including that half-hearted support of Cornwallis during the Third Mysore War, and he registered some territorial gains in northern Karnataka. More significantly, he managed to stave off the challenge of the other Maratha leaders.

These included the Holkars of Indore, whose core territory in Malwa now enjoyed something of a golden age under the regency of Ahalyabhai, daughter-in-law of Malhar Rao Holkar. Judging by their correspondence, Malhar Rao had relied heavily on the sage young Ahalyabhai during his lifetime. His death in 1766 was preceded by that of his useless son, who was Ahalyabhai’s husband, and was followed by that of his equally useless grandson. Ahalyabhai was thus left with no obvious rivals. Her sex would still have disqualified her, had she not shown an extraordinary ability which won the regard of her subjects and of the other Maratha confederates, including Phadnavis. For some thirty years her firm and compassionate direction brought to southern Malwa a peace and prosperity which utterly belies the notion of Maratha administration as little better than legitimised extortion. ‘Moderate assessment and an almost sacred respect for the native rights of village officers and proprietors’ characterised her rule. Collecting oral memories of her in the 1820s, Sir John Malcolm, the British official most directly concerned with the ‘settlement’ of central India, seems to have become deeply enamoured of her.

With the natives of Malwa … her name is sainted and she is styled an
avatar
or Incarnation of the Divinity. In the most sober view that can be taken of her character, she certainly appears, within her limited sphere, to have been one of the purest and most exemplary rulers that ever existed.
²¹

Her latest biographers call her ‘the Philosopher Queen’, a reference perhaps to the ‘philosopher-king’ Bhoj whose capital of Dhar lay just a short ride from Ahalyabhai’s preferred residence beside the Narmada at the sacred site of Maheshwar. Her forts and roads brought a new security to Malwa and her patronage of temples and other religious establishments as far away as Varanasi and Dwarka (Gujarat) extended her fame throughout India. It has lasted. ‘Her reputation in Malwa today is that of a saint,’ reports a recent writer; ‘such are the results of a good, honest administration.’
²²

By way of contrast Mahadji Scindia, Ahalyabhai’s exact contemporary and her neighbour to the north, was rarely out of the saddle. Lamed by a wound at Panipat, he too reigned for over thirty years, during which he
overran more of northern India than any other Maratha. Not without setbacks, he finally established Gwalior as the Scindia stronghold, retook Delhi and Agra, made the incumbent emperor a Maratha protégé, and stood as guarantor of the Treaty of Salbai on behalf of all the Marathas. Later he inflicted heavy defeats on the Rohilla Afghans, and in 1790 practically eliminated the rajputs of Jaipur and Jodhpur; indeed their territories were still reeling from his devastations when in the 1820s Colonel James Tod, pursuing the same sort of ‘settlement’ in Rajasthan as Thomas Munro had effected in Mysore and John Malcolm in central India, first encountered his beloved rajputs.

Mahadji’s extraordinary success stemmed from his creation of a professional army. Under Count Benoît de Boigne, a Frenchman but a veteran of the English Company, he recruited several brigades of infantry and artillery officered by Europeans and composed of the largely Muslim and rajput mercenaries favoured by the Company. These proved immensely successful; but they were expensive and, when in arrears, unresponsive to appeals to their loyalty. Mahadji’s supremacy in the north, as also amongst his fellow Marathas, was thus achieved at a price which his successors could scarcely afford and with an instrument that they could scarcely control.

When Mahadji died in 1794, he was at Pune negotiating with Phadnavis for the peshwa’s recognition of his achievements and a contribution to the upkeep of his forces. It was the beginning of a rapid decline in Maratha fortunes. Ahalyabhai died in the following year, whereupon her Holkar successor would openly challenge Scindia’s primacy. Then in 1796 the powerless but still pivotal peshwa committed suicide. He was without issue and the way was thus opened for a revival of the claim of Raghunath Rao’s line as now represented by his sons. During four years of utter confusion at Pune, Nana Phadnavis arbitrated as best he could with the result that Baji Rao II, Raghunath’s eldest son, was installed as peshwa with support from Mahadji’s successor, Daulat Rao Scindia. But in 1800, when Phadnavis himself died, there ‘departed all the wisdom and moderation of the [Pune] government’. War between Yaswant Rao Holkar and Daulat Rao Scindia for control of the new peshwa soon spread to Pune itself, and in a pitched battle Holkar came out the winner. Desperate to retain his independence, the new peshwa, Baji Rao II, fled across the Ghats, down to the coast, and into the open arms of the British.

Bombay had encouraged Baji Rao’s hopes of British assistance and, with the bellicose Richard Wellesley as governor-general, the exiled peshwa was unlikely to be disappointed. By the Treaty of Bassein (1803) the British undertook to reinstate Baji Rao in return for his accepting, and paying for, the presence of British troops in his territories, a British resident in his capital, and all the other restrictions associated with the now familiar role of a ‘subsidiary ally’. Arthur Wellesley, fresh from the triumphs in Mysore, was sent north to prosecute this next phase of his brother’s
digvijaya
and duly restored the peshwa to Pune. ‘This act represented the end of the Maratha polity as an independent power. The rest of the story is one of British conquest, largely with funds from conquered territories.’
²³

THE FINAL PHASE

The Second Maratha War was waged by the British, supposedly on behalf of the peshwa, to silence Maratha opposition to their appropriation of the peshwa’s authority. Such, however, was the extent of Maratha power, especially Scindia’s, that the war would, in the words of the governor-general, lay ‘the foundations of our Empire in Asia’. Richard Wellesley, be it noted, now foresaw an empire, rather than ‘dominions’ or ‘possessions’, in an Asian as opposed to a purely Indian context; as the British pushed ever further west and north it seemed that there was no telling where destiny might take them. In the wake of the Second Maratha War others less bullish, like Thomas Munro, would concede simply that ‘we are now complete masters of India.’

Although the war lasted less than a year (1803–4) it destroyed Maratha power and left the British victorious throughout northern and central India. In the Deccan south of the Narmada, Arthur Wellesley triumphed over one of Scindia’s armies at Assaye in what the future duke always regarded as a stiffer contest than his victory at Waterloo. Then he repeated the feat over the Bhonsle forces at Argaon. More sensationally, an army from Bengal under General Gerard Lake engaged Scindia’s forces in the north. Deserted by most of their European officers, Scindia’s men yet gave a good account of themselves in the final showdown at Laswari. But by then Lake had taken Delhi, stormed Agra, and commandeered the Mughal emperor (it was still Shah Alam, now a woebegone and sightless octogenarian dressed in rags and unrecognisable as the dashing prince who had once made Clive his
diwan
). Elsewhere the British relieved the Nagpur Bhonsles of Orissa, and Scindia of his remaining territories in Gujarat. By way of a postscript Holkar, and then the Jat Raja of Bharatpur (near Agra), were provoked into further defiance and severely embarrassed General Lake’s forces before being brought to heel.