India: A History. Revised and Updated (74 page)

It was not a pretty story. If the conquest of Bengal had been partly dictated by a lust for personal gain, that of Mysore would owe much to a lust for personal glory. The Third Mysore War (1790–2) was declared and largely conducted by Lord Cornwallis, the general who had surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown during the American War of Independence. Upright and avowedly pacific, Cornwallis would wait three years before tackling Tipu. Once committed, however, he would pursue his quarry with a regard for his own dented military reputation that made anything less than Tipu’s abject surrender unthinkable. By way of contrast Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, the governor-general responsible for the Fourth Mysore War (1799), had barely touched Indian soil before he was preparing for battle. An uncompromising empire-builder whose
annexations were anything but fortuitous, Wellesley immediately embarked on a veritable
digvijaya
in which a debilitated Mysore would offer easy pickings for a host of ardent officers including his brother Arthur, the future Duke of Wellington.

Tipu himself was no innocent. Far from avoiding contentious policies liable to unite and provoke his neighbours, he defiantly espoused them. The Third War was provoked by what Cornwallis regarded as an ‘attack’ on Travancore, the southernmost of the Malabar principalities. Tipu disclaimed responsibility but, instead of backing off, maintained his doubtful interests in the area and duly fuelled British paranoia with a full-scale invasion of Travancore. A tripartite alliance forged by Cornwallis with the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyderabad, which should have deterred him, merely antagonised him. The British then laboriously mobilised a force of twenty thousand for an invasion of Mysore. Initially they were outmanoeuvred by Tipu, who brought the war to the Carnatic. But Cornwallis eventually gained the Deccan, stormed Bangalore and advanced on Srirangapatnam. Meanwhile another British army had swept up from the Malabar coast, and Cornwallis had been joined by his Maratha and Hyderabad allies. Tipu, heavily outnumbered and outgunned, yet held out for the best part of a year before accepting terms which could hardly have been more humiliating. They included an eight-figure indemnity, the surrender of half his territories, and British custody of his two sons, one aged eight, the other ten, as surety.

Unexpectedly the indemnity was paid, the sons were reunited with their doting father, and Tipu’s truncated kingdom was restored to an enviable prosperity. In that the Fourth War was so soon in progress, Cornwallis’s boast of having ‘deprived him [Tipu] of the power, and perhaps the inclination, to distract us for many years to come’ would attract ridicule. In fact it was an understatement. Cornwallis’s victory ‘paved the way for British supremacy throughout India’.
¹⁸
Moreover it did indeed deprive Tipu of the power to challenge the British; the decision to reopen hostilities for a fourth and last time came entirely from Governor-General Wellesley.

In extenuation much was made of the fact that Napoleon had just landed in Egypt and made no secret of his designs on the British in India. When, therefore, Tipu was discovered to be in correspondence with the French commander at the Île de Bourbon in the Indian Ocean and to have recently received from there a few Jacobin recruits, Wellesley had the pretext he needed. Under cover of an exchange of letters protesting mutual amity between Calcutta and Mysore, he mobilised some forty thousand troops, who were joined by double that number of camp-followers plus the 100,000 bullocks required for the largest ox-drawn baggage and munitions train ever organised.

Meanwhile Wellesley smugly recorded his satisfaction at having ‘drawn the Beast of the jungle [i.e. Tipu] into the toils’. The ‘toils’ barely amounted to a campaign. Compared to the logistical problem of supplying such an invasion, the fighting was something of a formality. It was all over in three months. Srirangapatnam was stormed, then sacked with an ardour that would not have disgraced Attila. Amongst the perhaps nine thousand Mysore dead was found the body of Tipu Sultan. He had been cut about with bayonets, shot twice, and then robbed of his jewelled sword-belt. British casualties totalled fewer than four hundred, mostly just wounded.

The ‘settlement’ which followed left the British unchallenged throughout the peninsula. Mysore was pared down to something not much bigger than the statelet it had been before Haidar Ali’s conquests. This was then awarded to a child of the old Wodeyar dynasty, assisted by a sufficient British presence, and burdened by sufficient British safeguards, to ensure subordination. The British helped themselves to more territory, including
the coastline of Karnataka; and in 1800 the other beneficiary, the nizam, helped them to still more. In lieu of the subsidy he was expected to pay for the presence of British troops in his existing territories, he handed over to the Company all those lands awarded to him in Mysore. Thanks to this arrangement, the nizams would enjoy British protection at no expense, plus great personal affluence if rather less power, for the next 150 years.

THE MARATHAS MANAGED

India thus entered the nineteenth century with an unusual political configuration. Regions which had normally enjoyed immunity from outside interference, like the south and east, were directly or indirectly under foreign rule, while the usually more vulnerable west and north remained under indigenous regimes. These latter regimes were numerous. In another reversal of roles it was the playing fields of empire in the north which were now subdivided into a patchwork of political lots. They included the numerous rajput states in Rajasthan and elsewhere, various Indo-Afghan enclaves like Rohilkand, Muslim amirates and chieftaincies in Sind and on the frontier, and some newer caste-based hegemonies of uncertain extent like that established by Jat cultivators in the Agra region, plus a closely related tangle of Jat-Sikh and non-Sikh states in the Panjab.

Then there were the Marathas. Collectively they controlled much the most territory, the most revenue and the most forces. For a time in the early decades of the eighteenth century they had also acted collectively. But by 1740 the big Maratha families had begun to peel away. In a decentralising process similar to that which had overtaken the Mughal empire, the Holkars of Indore, Scindias of Gwalior, Gaikwads of Baroda and Bhonsles of Nagpur continued to recognise the authority of the peshwa-ship in Pune while treating individual peshwas as fellow leaders whose sanction, though desirable, was not an essential asset.

Given the loosely confederate nature of Maratha power and the spread of Maratha operations to practically the entire subcontinent, it was perhaps inevitable that each would in time respond more to local opportunities and challenges. The Maratha incursions into Orissa and Bengal which had so tested Nawab Alivardi Khan in the 1740s and had prompted construction of Calcutta’s ‘Maratha Ditch’ were the work of the Bhonsles of Nagpur. The peshwa objected and even sent his own troops to Bengal to oppose the Bhonsle incursions. Thereafter Nagpur would often defy Pune and, much preoccupied with extorting revenue in Orissa and along its common
frontier with the nizam, would play a marginal role in joint Maratha operations.

In the following decade other Marathas, particularly Malhar Rao Holkar of Indore and Jayappa Scindia soon of Gwalior, took advantage of succession disputes amongst the rajputs to extend their revenue claims in Rajasthan. In 1752–3 they again intervened in the chaotic affairs of Delhi and were a party to the blinding and removal of the then emperor. Further Maratha expansion saw Raghunath Rao, the brother of the peshwa Balaji Baji Rao (son of Baji Rao I), pushing into the Panjab in the wake of the Afghan withdrawal after Ahmed Shah Abdali’s plunder of Delhi in 1756. In Lahore as in Delhi, the Marathas were now major players, while far away in the Deccan a defeat of the nizam in 1760 left the peshwas at Pune secure in possession of their Maharashtrian homeland.

Indeed 1760 is taken to mark ‘the zenith of Mahratta power’. Freezing the moment for all its glory, James Grant Duff, author of the classic nineteenth-century
History of the Mahrattas
, seems to pay unintentional homage to the imagery of those fulsome dynastic inscriptions of an earlier age.

The pre-eminence to which the Mahrattas had attained was animating and glorious; their right to tribute was acknowledged on the banks of the Coleroon [the lower Kaveri in Tamil Nadu], and the Deccan horse had quenched their thirst from the waters of the Indus. The Mahratta people felt a pride in the conquests of their countrymen …
¹⁹

The moment was short-lived. Before the year was out the peshwa’s general, fresh from his victory over the nizam, led the main Maratha army north to meet the threat posed by the reinvading Abdali. Abdali could count on the support of fellow Afghans, like the Rohillas, and had also won over the powerful (and then still independent) Nawab of Awadh. On the other hand Holkar, the Scindia family and other Maratha chiefs dutifully joined the swelling army of the peshwa. Well equipped with artillery, and with Duff’s ‘Deccan horse’ looking especially splendid, this was the largest and most magnificent force ever assembled by the Marathas. In an age when sectarian loyalties rarely transcended political advantage, it might even have passed for a Hindu host had the hoped-for support of coreligionists like the rajputs and Jats materialised.

Notwithstanding, Delhi was retaken and the Marathas moved on up the Jamuna. On 14 January 1761 at Panipat, a hundred kilometres north of the capital and the scene, like nearby Karnal, Tarain and Kurukshetra, of so many decisive battles, they finally engaged the main Afghan army. For
a few hours the Marathas seemed to prevail. Then in time-honoured fashion Abdali introduced his ten thousand reserve cavalry. As he told it in a letter to Raja Madho Singh of Jaipur, ‘Suddenly the breeze of victory began to blow and, as willed by the Divine Lord, the wretched Deccanis suffered utter defeat … Forty to fifty thousand troopers and infantrymen of the enemy became as grass before our pitiless swords.’
²⁰

As was his wont, Abdali soon withdrew again; as was their wont, bands of Sikh irregulars preyed on his treasure-laden convoys as they lumbered home across the Panjab. Such tactics had traditionally been those of the Marathas; had they preferred them to formal confrontation on the pitch of Panipat, they might have fared better. The Maratha leaders would quickly recoup their losses, reassert their authority in regions previously under their control, and reclaim their revenue rights in others, like the rajput states. But the prestige of the peshwa was seriously damaged by Panipat. The incumbent Balaji Baji Rao collapsed a few weeks later, supposedly of a broken heart. Although his young successor, Madhava Rao, briefly restored some authority, when he died prematurely in 1772 there began a succession crisis of mind-boggling complexity which lasted for a generation and would drain the office of much power. The Mughal emperor, his own office long since drained of power, had fared no better; Panipat left him a dependant of the Nawab of Awadh. And as for the nawab himself, the only Indian prince to emerge from the battle a winner, he was humbled five years later by the British at Baksar.

‘Never was a defeat so complete and never was there a calamity which diffused so much consternation,’ wrote Mountstuart Elphinstone of Panipat. It formed a fitting conclusion to his 1839
History of India
; ‘for the history of the Moghul empire here closes of itself.’ The Maratha attempt to revive it had failed. Delhi was deserted, the emperor an exile. ‘Meanwhile,’ wrote Elphinstone in his grand finale, ‘a new race of conquerors has already commenced its career which may again unite the empire under better auspices than before.’

In retrospect it is often asserted that the British were the real winners from the great tourney of Panipat. But this was not obvious at the time, and throughout the next two decades the Company’s policy remained that of ‘ring-fencing’ Bengal and their other settlements with amenable buffer states capable of absorbing the still formidable impact of Maratha muscle. The Company’s London directors had been deeply critical of the military expenditure incurred by the likes of Clive and Munro in Bengal and Awadh. Financial retrenchment was ordered, and to Warren Hastings in the 1770s the avoidance of Maratha attentions was crucial.