On 14 January 1761 the Marathas Marched Out of a Starving Camp at Panipat, and Historians Still Disagree on How Many Died

The Third Battle of Panipat was fought on 14 January 1761, about 80 kilometres north of Delhi, between a Maratha army under Sadashiv Rao Bhau and the coalition of Ahmad Shah Abdali (also called Ahmad Shah Durrani), the ruler of Afghanistan. Among Abdali’s Indian allies were the Rohilla chiefs and Shuja-ud-daula, the Nawab of Awadh. The Marathas lost, and estimates of how many of them died run from about 40,000 to 100,000 or more, depending on who is counting and whether camp followers are included.

The fullest eyewitness account is in Persian, by Kashiraj Pandit, a Deccani Brahman who served as secretary to Shuja-ud-daula and carried messages between the two camps. The original is lost, and H. G. Rawlinson edited James Browne’s English translation in 1926. He wrote from memory long afterwards, Kashiraj admits. Jadunath Sarkar, whose Fall of the Mughal Empire appeared in 1934, puts the writing 19 years after the battle and still calls it the most trustworthy source on the fighting. Against Kashiraj this article sets Sarkar, G. S. Sardesai, T. S. Shejwalkar and Stewart Gordon, naming each where they differ.

From Lahore to the Yamuna, 1758 to 1760

In April 1758 a Maratha force under Raghunath Rao, the Peshwa’s brother, took Lahore from Abdali’s son Timur Shah. On the fort of Attock, on the Indus, Maratha commanders then planted their flag, Sardesai records. Sarkar answers that not a single Maratha soldier crossed the Chenab, and he calls the Attock claim an ignorant boast.

Late in 1759 Abdali returned to India (Gordon). Early in 1760 Dattaji Shinde, the Maratha commander in the north, was killed in a fight with Najib Khan, the Rohilla leader who had joined Abdali (Kashiraj). The Peshwa, Balaji Bajirao, replied by sending his cousin Sadashiv Rao Bhau north with a large army. Vishwas Rao, the Peshwa’s eldest son, went as nominal commander in chief, following Maratha custom, and Kashiraj gives his age as seventeen. From Patdur, near Aurangabad, the army marched on 14 March 1760, according to the itinerary from Sardesai that Rawlinson prints, and by August it had taken Delhi (Britannica).

Suraj Mal, the Jat ruler of Bharatpur, advised leaving the army’s families, baggage and heavy guns in Jat forts and fighting a war of movement. Malhar Rao Holkar agreed, Kashiraj writes. Refusing both, the Bhau pressed on.

Why Shuja-ud-daula joined Abdali

Both sides courted the Nawab of Awadh, who had a full treasury and a strong army (Gordon). At first he meant to stay out and join whichever side won, Kashiraj says. Then Najib Khan met him on the Ganges with written treaties and a Quran sealed by Abdali, and told him, in Kashiraj’s rendering, that the Bhau bore a mortal hatred to Muslims.

Further pressures come from Sarkar. A letter from the Bhau proposed giving Shuja the imperial chancellorship, the wazir’s post, while the Marathas were also demanding Allahabad and Benares from Awadh. Before going to the Afghan camp, Shuja asked for a signed safe-conduct and a robe of investiture as wazir from Abdali, and he was received there on 18 July 1760.

His part on the day is disputed. Shuja’s division of 2,000 horse, 1,000 musketeers and 20 guns held its ground and was not attacked, according to Kashiraj, and it did not move when the Afghan wazir sent for help. Later Persian chroniclers inflated Shuja’s role to flatter him, Sarkar says, noting that Kashiraj stood at Shuja’s side all day.

Afterwards Shuja sheltered about 6,000 Maratha soldiers and 400 officers (Sarkar), and Kashiraj says he sent them under guard to the border of Jat lands. Abdali then refused him the wazir’s post he was expecting, Sardesai says, and on 7 March 1761 Shuja left for Lucknow. Three years later he marched against the East India Company and lost at Buxar in October 1764.

Kunjpura, the river and ten weeks in a trench

On 17 October 1760 the Bhau stormed Kunjpura, an Afghan supply depot on the Yamuna, using the infantry and guns of Ibrahim Khan Gardi, a soldier of fortune whose sepoys were drilled in the European manner (Kashiraj). Abdali, held back by a flooded river, found a ford at Baghpat. His army began crossing on 25 October (Sarkar and Britannica agree), cutting the Bhau off from Delhi. At Panipat the Bhau dug in, and Sarkar dates the decision to entrench to 4 November.

For two and a half months the armies skirmished. A convoy carrying cash from Delhi stumbled into Afghan pickets in the dark on 4 January and was almost wiped out (Sardesai).

Peace was tried. Through Kashiraj the Bhau asked Shuja-ud-daula to mediate, and Abdali’s other Indian allies were willing. Najib Khan blocked it, telling Abdali that “The Mahrattas are the thorn of Hindostan.” When the allies pressed for a decisive battle, Abdali answered, in Kashiraj’s account, that “Military operations must not be precipitated.”

Maratha chiefs and soldiers surrounded the Bhau’s tent on the eve of battle, Kashiraj writes, and said they had eaten nothing for two days. Each took a betel leaf and swore to march out an hour before daybreak. About three in the morning the Bhau sent Kashiraj a note: “The cup is now full to the brim, and cannot hold another drop.” Sardesai passes it on with the caution “if Kashiraj is to be believed.”

The morning of 14 January

Shuja-ud-daula woke Abdali with the news that the Marathas were coming out, Kashiraj says, and Abdali sat on his horse smoking a hookah as the Maratha guns fired their first volley. Heavy Maratha shot passed over the Afghan ranks and fell a mile behind them. Gordon agrees that the artillery proved almost useless.

On the Maratha left, Gardi’s seven battalions went into the Rohillas under Hafiz Rahmat Khan and Dundi Khan with fixed bayonets. Nearly 8,000 Rohillas were killed or wounded, Kashiraj puts it, and six of Gardi’s battalions were almost destroyed. In the centre the Bhau and Vishwas Rao charged the division of the Afghan wazir Shah Wali Khan and broke through it, and Kashiraj found the wazir on foot, shouting after his men that their country was far away. Holkar’s and Jankoji Shinde’s contingents on the Maratha right faced Najib Khan and Shah Pasand Khan and did little until the end (Sarkar). Fighting began at about nine and ended at nearly three in the afternoon, Sardesai writes.

At noon Abdali sent his military police to drive fugitives back into the line, and seven or eight thousand men were forced back, Kashiraj says. About 10,000 more went to support the wazir, who led them into the Bhau’s centre at about one o’clock while Najib and Shah Pasand attacked the flanks. Even the size of that reserve is disputed. Sardesai also gives 10,000, while Gordon and Britannica say about 5,000 fresh cavalry.

Accounts differ on how Vishwas Rao died between two and three. Kashiraj says he was wounded and put on an elephant, and that his body, found next morning, bore a sword cut on the neck and a slight arrow wound. Nana Fadnavis, who was in the camp, remembered a cannon shot, in a memoir that Rawlinson prints and Sarkar distrusts because it was written about 30 years afterwards. A bullet from a camel-mounted swivel gun killed him, says Sardesai. The Bhau fought on for about half an hour, and then, Kashiraj writes, the whole Maratha army turned and fled “as if by enchantment.”

Abdali’s own letter, which Sardesai prints, says plainly that the Bhau and Vishwas Rao were slain. A note in Rawlinson’s edition places the Bhau under a black mango tree. Today, the Panipat district website says, the tree has disappeared and the site is marked by a British-era obelisk, described as a brick pillar with an iron rod on top inside an iron fence.

Counting the armies

Kashiraj gives the musters of 18 and 19 October 1760. Abdali’s side had 41,800 horse and 38,000 foot with 70 to 80 guns, plus irregulars he puts at four times the Durrani regulars. For the Bhau he lists 55,000 horse and 15,000 foot with 200 guns, plus 15,000 Pindaris, light irregular horse.

Sarkar treats those figures as rough and subtracts the losses of the siege. His tally of units actually in line on 14 January comes to about 60,000 on Abdali’s side and 45,000 on the Maratha side, and Sardesai gives the same two numbers. Shejwalkar puts the Maratha fighting men at about 50,000 and calls Kashiraj’s multiplier for Afghan irregulars much overestimated. Gordon reads the two sides as roughly equal in manpower.

The camp followers are harder to pin down. Five hundred thousand people of all kinds were said to be in the Maratha camp, Kashiraj reports. Half a lakh (50,000) fighters and about eight times that number of non-combatants is Sarkar’s picture, while Shejwalkar estimates 150,000 non-combatants. Gordon puts the whole camp, including the bazaar and support staff, at 60,000 to 80,000 people.

Counting the dead

Abdali’s own figure comes from his victory letter to Raja Madho Singh of Jaipur, which Sardesai prints and credits to Sarkar’s version in the Modern Review of May 1946. In it Abdali wrote that 40,000 to 50,000 of the enemy’s horse and foot were cut down.

Historians go higher. As many as 50,000 combatants and non-combatants died, Gordon says, while adding that estimates vary widely. Britannica puts deaths at 60,000 to 70,000 and says the Afghans slaughtered about 40,000 Marathas after the battle. Thirty-two heaps of bodies lay on the field, according to Kashiraj, Sarkar and Sardesai. Sarkar counts 500 to 1,500 in each, a rough 28,000 in all, and Sardesai gives the same total and estimates nearly 75,000 killed overall. More dead lay in the ditch and along the flight route, not far short of the field total in Sarkar’s reckoning, and 22,000 prisoners were enslaved. Not less than 100,000 soldiers and camp followers together were slaughtered, Shejwalkar writes.

About 40,000 prisoners were taken alive and most were killed, Kashiraj says, and in Sarkar’s translation every Durrani soldier brought away “a hundred or two” to slay. Shejwalkar rejects that: if 10,000 Durranis had done it, he writes, the toll would have been a million.

Why the Bhau lost, according to the people who have studied it

Kashiraj paints the Bhau as haughty. Rawlinson warns that Kashiraj shared the view of the older Maratha chiefs, Holkar and Shinde, who regarded the Peshwa as an intruder in northern India, and may be unfair to him. Digging in was the right strategy, Rawlinson argues, because the Peshwa had ordered the Bhau to break off talks with Abdali and promised to follow with the main army. His evidence for the Peshwa’s orders is a Marathi account, the Bhau Saheb’s Kaifiyat.

Sarkar disagrees. The surviving letters show no request from the Bhau for troops, only for money, he finds, and the Peshwa’s second marriage at Paithan on 27 December made no difference in the north. Entrenching was sound in theory, in his view, but depended on supplies the Bhau did not have, and defeat was inevitable given the Afghans’ discipline and tactics. Why the Bhau waited two and a half months before attacking “cannot be satisfactorily explained”, Sardesai writes. All three of them, Rawlinson, Sarkar and Sardesai, fault him for bringing the women and camp followers to Panipat.

Gordon argues that the Marathas never settled on one way of fighting. Older commanders such as Holkar wanted the traditional Maratha tactics of mobile light cavalry, which Rawlinson links to Shivaji’s campaigns. Younger ones had seen what artillery could do, and only Gardi had built a trained infantry force. Nobody had worked out how to combine the Maratha cavalry charge with infantry and guns.

Holkar’s conduct is also contested. Malhar Rao Holkar had a secret understanding with Najib Khan and fled an hour before the end, leaving Jankoji Shinde’s flank open, Sarkar concludes. He calls Holkar’s own defence, that the Bhau ordered him to escort the women out, apocryphal, though Rawlinson accepts that the Bhau sent such word. Betrayal of the Bhau is hard to believe, says Shejwalkar, who points to Holkar’s later campaigns in Malwa and against the Rajputs.

What came back by 1771

The Peshwa died at Poona on 23 June 1761 (Sarkar). Abdali entered Delhi on 29 January and left on 20 March (Sardesai), and Najib Khan then ran the city for about ten years as dictator (Sarkar). On 15 January, the day after Panipat, a British force under Major Carnac beat the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II on the Son, Sardesai notes.

A disaster that cost the Marathas a generation of leaders is how Sarkar describes Panipat. Rebellions broke out across Maratha territory, Gordon writes, though he adds that the decade after was overall one of recovery of revenue areas and rebuilding of military strength. Mahadji Shinde, who was lamed by a wound received in the flight (Sarkar), led an army that Gordon says defeated the Jats and Rohillas and took Delhi in 1770. Sardesai dates the entry to February 1771 and has Shah Alam arriving in Delhi under Maratha escort on 6 January 1772. Britannica’s entry says that, although the Marathas later regained some authority, their rule had for practical purposes come to an end.

Sarkar rejects the view, common among Maratha writers since Rajwade, that Panipat was soon undone. The Marathas who entered Delhi in 1771 and 1772 came as protectors of the emperor, he writes, and the position they had held in 1760 was recovered only by Mahadji Shinde in 1789.