Panipat 1761 and the India That Never Was

Sadashivrao Bhau with Ibrahim Khan Gardi

“We went forth to Paniput to battle with the Mlech, ere we came back from Paniput and left a kingdom there.” So runs Rudyard Kipling’s haunting verse on the Third Battle of Panipat, from his poem ‘With Scindia to Delhi.’  The devastating line - “and left a kingdom there” - has never lost its chill as we enter the 265th anniversary of that fateful battle.

For Maharashtra, the Panipat catastrophe, where the forces of the Afghan invader Ahmad Shah Durrani, along with his Indian allies, crushed the Maratha confederacy on a cold winter’s day in January 14, 1761, has survived less as a historical event than as a psychological scar in the Marathi political imagination that never quite healed.

Ahmad Shah Durrani

One finds that in much of Marathi historiography, the battle has been alternately mourned, mythologised or ‘downplayed’ in the sense that it has been transmuted from a strategic catastrophe into a consoling paradox.

In such retellings, Panipat is remembered less as a reckoning than as a thing to be explained away. The typical explanations are that for all the tremendous losses suffered by the Marathas, Ahmad Shah Abdali, never came back and therefore his defeat was hollow. Or else, Mahadji Scindia restored Maratha power at Delhi in 1772, and became its virtual master by 1789; therefore, Panipat was only a passing visitation.

Yet a turning point of this magnitude cannot be wished away by regional pride; its hard lessons deserve to be faced squarely by asking what if Marathas had won the day at Panipat?

A 1770 drawing of the Third Battle of Panipat.

While counterfactuals are always dangerous in sober history, a cautious historian like Sir Jadunath Sarkar was the first to clinically analyse this question in the second volume (1934) of his classic opus ‘The Fall of the Mughal Empire’ (1932-50).  

As Sarkar observed with some asperity, “since the days of Vishwanath K. Rajwade, it has been the fashion with Maratha writers to belittle the result of the battle of Panipat as no disaster to the Marathas except for the death of so many chiefs and so many thousands of soldiers. Its political consequence is spoken of as nothing, and the Abdali’s victory as a great illusion.”

In Sarkar’s view, the correct way to understand Panipat was not to look at what happened afterward but to imagine what would have happened had the Marathas won.

In January 1761, the Marathas stood closer to subcontinental supremacy than any Indian power since Aurangzeb. Their armies were in the Doab, Malwa, Rajputana, Bundelkhand and Punjab. The Mughal emperor was already their dependent while the Nizam had been defeated at Udgir that same year, thus marking the zenith of Peshwa Balaji Bajo Rao’s reign.

A victory at Panipat would have made this geography irreversible while ensuring that the Rohillas and Shuja-ud-Daulah of Avadh remained under Maratha thraldom.

As Sarkar opines, had Sadashiv Rao Bhau prevailed on that fateful winter morning, “the broken Durrani army would have been expelled from India, robbed and hunted down by the Sikhs through the Panjab.”

The Indus, India’s ancient defensive line, would have been closed to invasion from the north-west. Najib Khan, the Rohilla power-broker who had invited Abdali into Hindustan, would have been crushed outright.

Bhau’s victorious army could have perhaps resumed Dattaji Sindhia’s interrupted project: the annexation of Allahabad and Bihar and the extraction of Bengal.

Sarkar says that while the English, securely lodged after Plassey, would certainly have saved Bengal by regularly paying chauth to the Marathas, they could “hardly have fought to preserve Bihar” because their home forces were then entangled in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63).

Indeed, many scholars have drawn a clear inference between the Maratha debacle at Panipat and the establishment of the English dominions in India.

Bihar could have become, like Orissa, a Maratha forward base in the east. Awadh would have been reduced to tributary status. Instead, defeat reversed everything. By 1772 - the year of the Maratha recovery - Bihar and Bengal were closed to the Marathas beyond the possibility of conquest. Awadh was under British bayonets and the old Mughal grant of chauth could no longer be claimed. To the north-west, the Punjab had passed to the Sikhs even as the Durrani kingdom started crumbling by the end of the decade.

What, then, was left to the Marathas when they returned to Delhi in 1772? Little beyond the Jat lands, Mewat, and Haryana to the west - territories that would become the cockpit of North Indian politics for the next twenty years. As Sarkar observes, the revived Maratha power, shut out from the rich imperial heartlands they had once sought to command, found itself confined to the deserts of Rajputana and the fractured, inhospitable tracts of Bundelkhand – which were entirely Hindu regions - where, between 1765 and 1805, its campaigns bred a deep and enduring bitterness against the Maratha name in Rajput memory.

Meanwhile, as the Marathas and Afghans were locked in mortal combat at Panipat, dramatic events were taking place on consecutive days that were the prelude to the permanent establishment of the English power.

The fugitive Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II was launching, with French help, his attempt to recover Bengal only to be defeated by the English near the Son River on January 15. The very next day (January 16), Pondicherry fell, thus eliminating the last barriers to Company dominion.

But the moral effect of the Panipat calamity, observes Sarkar with his customary acuity, was even greater. The Maratha failure to oppose the foreign invader in 1757 and even more, with the Bhau’s vast resources in 1760-61, convinced the Indian world that Maratha friendship was “a very weak reed to lean upon in any real danger.” No North Indian potentate would risk sure annihilation by siding with the Marathas in their day of difficulty. Maratha protection was not worth purchasing by the least sacrifice, because the Marathas had clearly demonstrated in the last four years that they could not protect their dependents, any more than they had been able to protect their own selves in 1761.

Above all, the Panipat disaster, by hastening the death of Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao, killing his grown-up son Vishwas Rao and his expert and devoted cousin Sadashiv Rao Bhau on the field, and removing several able captains and civil officers – Balwantrao Mehendale, Jankoji Scindia, Ibrahim Khan Gardi, Yashwantrao Pawar, Shamsher Bahadur, Santaji Wagh, Antaji Mankeshwar, Govindpant ‘Bundele’ to name but a few - left the path absolutely open to the guilty ambition of Raghunathrao ‘Raghoba Dada,’ the most infamous character in Maratha history.

This was perhaps the greatest mischief done by the debacle at Panipat.

Here, historian T.S. Shejwalkar’s lament is telling. In his monograph ‘Panipat 1761’ (1946), Shejwalkar, who wrote his work as a rebuttal to Sarkar’s volume as he disagreed with the latter on several points, observed that Chhatrapati Shivaji “had not merely revived Hindu kingship; he had modernised it” by refusing to turn his kingdom into a closed, xenophobic Japan.

According to Shejwalkar, Shivaji Maharaj’s successors forgot this synthesis of tradition and modernity. “Had Shivaji’s ideas and ideals been properly understood and followed by his successors,” Shejwalkar concluded, “there would have been no occasion for a Panipat in 1761.”

The counterfactual of the Marathas winning Panipat is again asked by Prem Datt Verma in ‘Marathas and Panipat’ (ed. by Hari Ram Gupta). Verma observes that a Maratha victory at Panipat would have compelled the Bangash Pathans and the Par-Rohillas to pay heavy fines and give up territory. Rajasthan, whose rulers had sulked in neutrality during the Afghan invasion, would have been punished and Maratha supremacy over the Rajput states “hastened and accelerated.”

While this would have made for rough politics, it would have been Indian politics. With Abdali eliminated and foreign help removed, the Najibs and Nizams would have been forced, as Verma put it, “to seek out an Indian adjustment with their Hindu neighbours, thus placing Indian politics in its insular setting.”

With the Maratha host destroyed, no Indian power remained capable of overawing the East India Company.

While counterfactuals tempt the mind to substitute consolation for causality, the big “what if?” demands to be asked of great turning points – whether the Battle of Tours in 732 CE, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 - because they reveal not what was fated, but what was forfeited.

Panipat belongs to that company. It was not merely a lost battle but a lost trajectory, the moment when an indigenous solution to India’s imperial crisis was violently extinguished and a foreign one made possible.