In which Britain gets that up smash.

The Marathas when they didn't suck.

Okay so yesterday I sat down and said to myself: “Self, you are looking real snazzy today. You look like you're all set to write up one of those blog posts that you have been procrastinating on for a long time.” Myself was right, as usual. Once I started it all just flowed like a really good piss. An appropriate simile, because we're going to 19^th Century India, a place where if you pissed, you were probably going to die.

Today's adventure is about the Maratha Confederacy and the Second Anglo-Maratha War, which took place in India between 1803 and 1805. This will probably be the first of two entries on Brits smackin' around Indians, because that happened for a long time.

The Marathas were a people who loved a good scuffle. They were descended from the ancient Hindu dynasties of the Yadavas and the Silaharas, men from the Northwest, towards harsh desert and mountains. Nobody really cared about them until the early sixteenth century when local Maratha chieftains served as mercenary captains in the armies of the Muslim kingdoms of Deccan India. Basically, the Marathas were the equivalent of Blackwater founding its own country. After many years of protracted fighting with their neighbors, Shivaji, the son of one of those mercenary chiefs, united the many Maratha clans between 1664 and 1680 by sheer chutzpah. He systematically kicked the asses of every neighboring kingdom. Even when the big bad Mughal Empire—the impressively powerful rulers of most of India at the time—came to kick him in the face, he fought a war with them for twenty-seven years, from 1681 to 1707.

Roll the tape back, let me lay that down again.

TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OF CONTINUOUS WARFARE.

And the Mughals lost.

Shivaji was obviously someone who was a lot different than his contemporaries. His army was lightly armored and highly mobile, allowing them to outrun and outmaneuver their heavily armored foes. He also abandoned the ancient feudal system wherein the various warlords and rulers of the kingdom supplied him with their own armies, preferring a centralized military that was paid in cash, like the professional armies of Europe. The problem with thinking outside the box in this era is that you are probably the only one who does that sort of thing. When Shivaji died, he was succeeded by a series of rulers who were weak and close-minded. The feudal system made a comeback as the Maratha kings curried (lol) favor with powerful men by giving them land. Soon the office of king was under the essential control of the Peshwa, or chief minister. The various Sardar, or feudal lords, controlled their own private armies again.

One of the major military changes that came with the rise of the Peshwa and Sardar was that the Maratha forces became mostly cavalry-oriented. The Peshwa also attempted to adopt Western-style officers and artillery corps. However, at the battle of Panipat in January 1761, they screwed it all up. Itching for a chance to try out the shiny new Imperial army against an encroaching force of some 60,000 Afghan troops, the Peshwa could not coordinate his cavalry and infantry, resulting in the utter annilhation of the 28,000 strong Maratha force. Meanwhile, the Sardar couldn't decide whether to ride to the rescue with their 30,000 reinforcements or just lay back and count rocks or something. Rocks beat paper--I mean Peshwa.

“But Matt!” you bluster. “Why do we care about that stuff, man?”

Well hold your horses, I'm getting to that.

Long story short, the 1761 Battle of Panipat was a decisive moment in Maratha history, both politically and militarily. After that gigantic foul-up, no one really took the Peshwa seriously anymore, and the Maratha Sardars began to exert their independence. By the late eighteenth century, the Sardars had become independent rulers, and the once-mighty Maratha kingdom had fragmented into a loose-knit confederacy racked by internal conflict. 

So while the various Sardars were gallumphing around arguing with each other, those zany Brits had been creeping onto the scene, and we all know what happens when the Brits come creeping around.

The Brits cosplaying a malignant growth.

The East India Trading Company (or E.I.C.) was a lot more than a simple trading company. By a series of five acts around 1670, King Charles II provisioned the Company with the rights to autonomous territorial acquisitions, to mint money, to command fortresses and troops and form alliances, to make war and peace, and to exercise both civil and criminal jurisdiction over the areas they acquired in their conquests. During all this fighting in Maratha territory, the Brits had not been idle. The E.I.C. had just finished four wars in a row against the Marathas' southern neighbor of Mysore. The Company now had a substantial foothold in India, and were not about to stop there. On December 3^rd 1802, the British, taking advantage of the internal disputes within the Maratha Confederacy, forced the Peshwa to sign the Treaty of Bassein. Under this treaty, the Maratha Confederacy essentially became a protectorate of the British.

I don't know about you, but that would rustle my jimmies. The Maratha Sardars were pretty rustled themselves, but they tried to negotiate with the British about the exact terms of the treaty. The British, instead of negotiating seriously, worked to keep Sindhia and Holkar, the two most powerful Sardars, from allying with each other against the Company. They succeeded, and when active hostilities broke out in August 1803, Sindhia's Army of Hindustan stood alone against the might of the E.I.C. Thus began the Second Anglo-Maratha War. (Yes there was a first one, but it wasn't as important as the other two so back off.)

This may seem like a conflict that was ridiculously stacked against the Marathas. However, the Sardars, who knew what the Brits were capable of, had been very interested in modernizing their armies because as it turns out, even curly mustaches can't protect you from a bullet in your nostril. So, to avoid lead boogers the Sardars had begun to talk with the French about training troops in the European style, so as to make their facial hair pointier and more adept at parrying musket balls. Before the first official war with the Brits was fought, the Marathas had raised around eighty battalions of regular infantry and various artillery sections, trained and led by Europeans in the British style.

However, this apparent leadership advantage would prove to be the leak in the slurpee straw, so to speak. Even before the war began, the British made sure everyone on the other side knew that they would handsomely reward any officer who left the Maratha army and came over to the British. Most of the mid-level and junior Maratha officers were British or Anglo-Indian, and many took up the British offer. This might not have been a big deal, but the leader of the officer corps, a Frenchman named Pierre Cuiller, goofed big time. Instead of countering the British offer, Cuiller just fired all British and Anglo-Indian officers from the army, including those who were still loyal to the Marathas! Overnight the Maratha Army lost the majority of its officer corps. These European officers formed the bulk of the veteran command element of the Maratha battalions, and their sudden departure ensured that the outcome of the impending war with the British had already been decided. Oops.

VOTES FOR WOMEN!

Well, boned as they were, the Marathas still tried to put up a fight. Thanks to their record of military excellency prior to the Brits showing up to their doorstep, they were revered as fierce warriors throughout the whole of India:

“...the capital of a Mahratta prince was the saddle of his steed, the Mahratta base was the whole Western India, and the fortresses of the Western Ghats, perched on inaccessible rocky pinnacles. Secure in these, they sallied forth with waves of horsemen over the length and breadth of India, plundering, laying and levying tribute as they rode. Even distant Calcutta feared them...”

That's pretty scary stuff right there, especially if you were some poor chap from Liverpool who woke up one day wearing a red coat and pointing a gun at angry natives in the jungle (more likely than you'd think in the service of His Majesty or the Company).

So who comes flapping onto the scene but Arthur Wellesley himself.

Hold on a second, I want you to paint my heart as well...

What? You don't know who Arthur Wellesley is? He's nobody important really, its not like he's the guy who thrashed Napoleon at Waterloo or anything. You could call him the Duke of Wellington, or the General formerly known as Duke. But this was before he earned his noble title, so he was just some random scrub they sent to cause trouble in the brush.

Wellesley had been given command of the entirety of the East India Company's military and political assets in India upon his arrival in June of 1802. By August 23^rd, 1803, he had managed to force the entire Maratha army under the command of Anthony Pohlmann (a Hanoverian mercenary) into a major battle at the town of Assaye.

All 19th Century armies fought in colored boxes, historical fact.

The Marathas were arrayed behind a huge number of artillery batteries in a defensive line that stretched between two rivers. This meant that the only viable option of attack for Wellesley was to charge straight into the teeth of the Maratha guns. He ordered a large line of infantry to move towards the guns on his left flank. As you can imagine, while this was incredibly ballsy, it also meant that a devastating barrage was continously hammering the advancing British infantry until they were only 50 yards from the Maratha lines. Artillery in these days would use a nasty type of ammunition against closing infantry called canister rounds. Imagine the cannon being turned into a giant shotgun, with proportionately larger pellets, and you can imagine what kind of damage these cannons were doing to the British.

The Brits took it like men, and charged with bayonets fixed at the Maratha guns. The artillery crews fought bravely, but got their collective faces kicked in. The British charge kept its momentum, pushing through to the line of Maratha infantry behind the guns. Well, I don't know about you, but screaming men in red who just stabbed all my friends running at me might invoke feelings of terror. The Marathas ran screaming.

Meanwhile, on the British right flank, Wellesley had ordered a battalion of pickets (skirmishers) and the 74^th Highlanders to move obliquely towards the town of Assaye, in order to extend his comparatively small line and to deny Pohlmann the opportunity to outflank him. However, he did not mean for the picket force to advance all the way to the city alone and unsupported, which is exactly what they did of course. Soon, they were within krumpin' range of the city's defenses, and the Marathas were in full clobbering mode. The skirmishers were killed almost to a man, and the 74^th Highlanders managed to form a fighting square behind hastily built fortifications made entirely out of the bodies of their dead. Talk about manliness.

Wellesley causing a proper ruckus.

Wellesley knew that meant trouble, because the destruction of his right meant that his army was very vulnerable to a flank attack. He instead ordered a cavalry detachment to ride to the rescue. The Marathas were forced away from the British right, and routed enmasse towards the River Juah, where they attempted a last-ditch defense before fleeing the field. The British, too exhausted to pursue, called it a day.

British casualties in the Battle of Assaye amounted to 428 killed, 1138 wounded and 18 missing; a total of 1,584 – over a third of the force engaged in combat. The 74^th and the picket battalion were decimated; from a strength of about 500, the 74th lost ten officers killed and seven wounded, and 124 other ranks killed and 270 wounded. The pickets lost all their officers except their commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Orrock, and had only about 75 men remaining. Of the ten officers forming the general's staff, eight were wounded or had their horses killed. Wellesley himself lost two horses; the first was shot from underneath him and the second was speared as he led a charge. The number of Maratha casualties is more difficult to ascertain. Despatches from British officers give a figure of 1,200 dead and many more wounded but contemporary historians have estimated a total of 6,000 dead and wounded. The Marathas also surrendered seven stands of colours, large amounts of stores and ammunition and 98 cannon – most of which were later taken into service by the East India Company.

Wellesley would remark later: "I should not like to see again such a loss as I sustained on the 23rd September, even if attended by such a gain". Despite the grief he felt for his casualties, he always regarded Assaye as his finest military moment across his entire career.

“Well Matt”, you bleat. “Again we beg the question: why do we care?”

Well kids, that's a good question. The fighting between the British and the Marathas did not stop after the Battle of Assaye, important as it was to the eventual British conquest of India. In fact, there was still another war yet to come before the British could claim dominance over most of India. The defeat of the Maratha army at Assaye led to the major concession of territory to the British, giving them control over a large portion of Eastern India. This land gave the British a much more permanent foothold in India, and allowed them to successfully mount the Third Anglo-Maratha War 12 years after the Second.

The Indian territories after the Second Anglo-Maratha War

Stay tuned for part two, where I'll talk about the Third War, which resulted in a lot more important stuff happening than the Second did.

--Matt