Introduction
Focusing on the 1803 Anglo-Maratha Campaigns
While studying history as an undergraduate I came across a rather grandiose volume of world history – the title of which I have long since forgotten. It was one of those ungainly texts approaching the size of a coffee-table book. Having just ‘discovered’ South Asian history, I quickly denounced this pretentious tome as too elementary in its abbreviated coverage of the subcontinent. The offending volume skipped easily from the Mughal Empire to the British Raj with heavily illustrated pages that showed greater concern for continuity than content. The text contained brief summaries of political events implying that the Mughals controlled India from 1526 until 1857 and then the British apparently stepped in as imperial rulers from 1858 to 1947. Leaving aside the long history of the East India Company (EIC) prior to 1858, there were still fundamental problems with this story. If modern South Asia had grown out of a seamless transition of imperial power, why had the British fought such a long series of wars there? There were three Anglo-Bengal Wars, four Anglo-Mysore Wars, at least three Anglo-Maratha Wars, as well as Anglo-Sikh and Anglo-Afghan Wars, which suggested the transference of power in South Asia was not analogous to passing the baton of governance in a relay race.1
As my studies in South Asian history progressed at the University of Toronto, I realized that I knew little about the Maratha people that featured prominently in the lectures of N. K. Wagle. The professor’s observations on Brahmin dominance of the Maratha administrative system helped me to realize that Westerners had largely overlooked the more secular aspects of Maratha military history. Prior to lengthy tutorials with Wagle, my elementary understanding of the Marathas had not developed much beyond the feeble textbook descriptions that summarized the Marathas’ identity as the ‘Marathi-speaking Hindu people native to the state of Maharashtra’. In the long run, that less than adequate cultural definition proved to be another gross generalization of humanity on a par with the sweeping world history that I found offensive. And so it was that I came to read more about Maratha history.
Maratha military history drew my attention because it reflected the struggle of a people who at various times posed a military challenge to the Mughals and the British. However, I did not feel I could do justice to a serious study of Mughal–Maratha conflict beyond the tactical level. But in contemplating that option I became fascinated with the way one’s own culture influences the perception of armed conflict among others. Within my studies, ‘cross-cultural conflict analysis’ came to mean an analysis of war’s dynamics as influenced by the presence of competing cultures. The conflicting cultures might be ethnic, racial, religious, national, political or any combination thereof; although for me the most challenging case studies were those that featured conflict between competing military cultures. Having acknowledged my limitations in trying to address Hindu–Muslim strife as a cross-cultural factor in Mughal–Maratha warfare, I turned specifically to look at the Maratha military challenge to the British in South Asia. It appeared that Britain’s military efforts in 1803 had a dual nature. There were counterinsurgency operations in disputed areas of control, but there was a much more serious conventional war for the cloak of the Mughal Emperor; a story often downplayed in modern British histories for one reason or another.
By the time I went up to Cambridge to begin a PhD, I recognized that my interest in cross-cultural conflict analysis had moved on to a very specific question. What role does cultural conditioning and cultural perception play in the formulation of war plans and the prosecution of war? Numerically based conflict analysis, or ‘game theory’ as used in the Pentagon’s war planning, caught my attention. To me it represented the contemporary cultural arrogance of strategic assumption and a portion of my thesis argued that ‘game theory’ and other mathematically based analysis systems remain less than ideal for military scenarios that feature cross-cultural conflict. In other words, linking your military response to assumptions about your enemy’s actions (i.e. strategy and tactics) is dangerous if you come from a different cultural background than that of your opponent. What seems to be your enemy’s next logical move or a ‘sure thing’ in his projected strategic behaviour may actually be a reflection of your own cultural conditioning. People of differing cultures do things in different ways and that includes waging war. While there may be similarities that make certain assumptions safe, there may also be differences that negate the logic of planned military actions. If you wage war against an opponent from a different culture, it is never safe to assume that the ‘givens’ that govern your behaviour also govern those of your enemy.
The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns of 1803 provide an interesting case study where military victory obscured the degree to which a Western power misread an Asian opponent. That the British were the military winners in 1803 is not disputed. Rather it is the continuing misrepresentation of their Maratha opponents and the explanation of how victory was attained that are contested. The events of 1803 are now two centuries old, the dust stirred by Britain’s retreat from empire has settled and it is time to question what passes for the inherited wisdom. For me the Anglo-Maratha Campaigns of 1803 hold a greater historical significance for two specific reasons.
First, I believe these campaigns represent the misunderstood ‘high-water mark’ of Maratha military power.2 One should not become attached to the notion that the Maratha military forces of 1803 were ‘Hindu’ armies. A proto-national model would be more appropriate. A model based on the realization that collectively the Maratha armies of 1803 were quite secular and not dissimilar to the armed forces of modern India in being composed of military professionals from across the subcontinent. The Maratha powerbrokers of that era were interested in victory and their military effort drew men from the broadest military spectrum – one that included Hindus from every caste, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians. In that respect the Maratha armies of 1803 competed directly with the British for the loyalty of soldiers needed for the projection of power within the contest for India.
Following 1803 there was no indigenous South Asian military hope of driving the British back into the three EIC enclaves established as the Bengal, Bombay and Madras Presidencies. By 1804 Bengal and Madras were joined and their territories expanded towards eventual inland link-up with Bombay.3 The 1803 campaigns also saw the extension of British power to Delhi and with that, the British became the ‘guardians’ of the Mughal Emperor. Possession of the Emperor was all-important because it expedited Britain’s imperial ascendance and served as additional political cover for the first half of the nineteenth century. The EIC assumed control of a crumbling Mughal infrastructure but with their vast financial network the British were able to selectively employ Mughal political servants and officials, to solidify their own hold on South Asia. There would be many more years of fighting but it was this imperial transition that would later appear as a seamless handoff of power in those sweeping world-history textbooks that allocate a chapter per civilization.
The Marathas were the last indigenous South Asian power that was militarily capable of not only halting but also rolling back the consolidation process that ultimately produced the British Raj. The Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845–6, 1848–9) and the Anglo-Afghan Wars (1839–42, 1878–80, 1919) occurred after the British had achieved a military perimeter around the majority of Hindus in India. In subcontinental terms, these later wars were comparatively localized conflicts which would have had limited interethnic political appeal for Hindus beyond the regional strongholds of the Sikhs and Afghans. As for the events of 1857, whether you call them rebellion, mutiny, or the first freedom struggle, they were of seismic proportion in reshaping the already existing political and military order of British rule. Despite the potential appeal of a Pan-South Asian resistance in 1857–8, the British were still able to draw on vast numbers of soldiers who continued to serve them loyally for one reason or another. The departure of the British from South Asia would ultimately have to wait for a more profound shift in world order.
Second, the historic misreading of the Maratha military challenge and the portrayal of British victory in 1803 – as something inevitable or part of a conflict process that was determined by so-called ‘Western military superiority’ – serves as an example to demonstrate that cross-cultural conflict analysis remains a particular weakness for Westerners. And I submit that our analytical failure has contributed to the construction of dangerously ethnocentric strategic theories to support a Western version of the world’s military history.
This story of the 1803 campaigns shows in a unique way that even though the British won, it was not for those military reasons we might have assumed from reading William McNeill, Paul Kennedy or Geoffrey Parker.4 Western authors have consistently ignored the depth of the South Asian historic record and arranged explanations with a cultural bias that upholds Western military culture and its own special brand of imperialism. We manipulated our interpretation of events to make them appear as logical in the imaginary court of human history, or better yet, scientifically inevitable. Despite being culturally pressed for more serious revision in the 1980s, we clung to the idea that ‘Western military superiority’ was self-evident in military victory and subsequent political ascendance. A belief in a superior Western innovation, technology, discipline and drill formed the backbone of a revised theory about the European Military Revolution: an expanded argument that saw the ‘rise of the West’ in imperial terms as having been derived from a European ‘Military Revolution’.5 However, the theory’s Western fondness for a Social Darwinist approach to the clash of military cultures is an embarrassing racial carry-over from the nineteenth century.6
Chanting the culturally chauvinistic mantra ‘the military rise of the West’ has dulled our senses and left us ill equipped to analyse military cultures that we find foreign. Oddly enough, when foreign military cultures seemed technologically similar to our own, we had a tendency to derogatorily dismiss them as if they were shabby imitations of our cherished ‘Western way of war’.7 Those who believe that the ‘rise of the West’ was somehow inevitable as the result of a Military Revolution have taken far more comfort from their uncontested theories of technological ascendance than from theories of defence economics concerning the clash of international systems and market dominance. However, the time has come to question whether the historic record really leads to a rational explanation of dominance predicated on technological determination – meaning it is time for a ‘reality-check’ on the argument that Western ascendance was determined by supposed Western military superiority in the form of weapons, drill and doctrine.
Unfortunately the danger of culturally distorted Western military romanticism continues to linger. We in the West still want to believe in explanations of superior technology, discipline and drill, because they continue to suit our cultural and political purposes in the twenty-first century. Attributing the rise and fall of empires to a European ‘Military Revolution’ has become something of a prerequisite to accepting the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA) that emerged in the final decade of the twentieth century.8 It was as if we needed a Western military version of the past to underpin a new ‘high-tech’ vision of Western cultural superiority in the future.9
Some scholars have been willing to question the basic European context of the revised Military Revolution thesis.10 That has left the door open for others to challenge whether there ever was such a thing as a true Military Revolution; if indeed the phrase refers to anything other than a round of accelerated military evolution. Any military organization of historic magnitude is constantly at war with itself in balancing stagnation with military evolution. Soldiers and armies are bound by their military traditions as well as their inherited hierarchies in the form of political purpose and organizational behaviour – which may be as simple and all pervasive as rank. Yet at the same time they are constantly seeking evolution and innovation in strategy, tactics and especially technology, to provide the military answers for current conflicts as well as future wars. But being in a dual state of stagnation and evolution precludes them from being truly revolutionary. Not even the twentieth century’s greatest purpose-built revolutionary armies – the Red Army of the USSR and the People’s Liberation Army of China – could shake the stagnation/evolution dichotomy. They were held fast in spite of periodic dedicated attempts to be ‘more revolutionary’ or to renew their revolutionary credentials in a technological and military context.11 As for the unrepentant cultural chauvinism of those who continue to advocate technological determination as an explanation for Western ascendance, I can only say that the 1803 Anglo-Maratha Campaigns demonstrate – with a surprising reverse example – that technological innovation and superior firepower were never the absolute guarantors of military success in war.12
Although the book that follows is in large part an attempt to redress the historic and cultural imbalance, it is also an examination of how information is lost or misconstrued as it passes from one cultural setting to another. Westerners have used a very rigid and predictable model for South Asian conflict analysis, a biased model that has downplayed the legacy and meaning of South Asian warfare. But part of our problem is that we have dealt with large blocks of time in order to make analysis easier. Going back and studying the wars on an individual battle-by-battle basis is mandatory if we are going to revise the gross generalizations that were made about South Asian military culture and experience. I feel there is good reason to retell the story of these campaigns in the light of new discoveries about the manner in which the British achieved military victory in 1803.
The Maratha military challenge
To a great extent this book deals with Maratha military culture and the challenge it presented to the British. However, this portion of the text is intended to provide the reader with some idea of how the events of 1803 fit into the larger picture of South Asian military history.
The extension of European conflict
The British ‘conquest of India’ came about as the result of a rather lengthy series of economic, political and military events stretching over more than two centuries from the founding of the EIC in 1600. This has caused some historians to rethink the once popular theories of decisive battles for control of the subcontinent, which are now much more open to debate. While economic rivalry was always a potential trigger for violence between competing European powers in South Asia, it could at times be tempered by shared defence concerns or a desire for the maintenance of peace between home governments. But during the eighteenth century the South Asian extension of European wars was facilitated by overall improvements in France’s as well as Britain’s ability to organize and equip indigenous defence forces that were interchangeable with European troops in the order of battle. This point is crucial in trying to understand all of the Western hyperbole surrounding the use of so-called ‘European discipline and drill’ by South Asian troops. By instructing South Asian soldiers in the latest version of standard procedures for their armies, competing European powers were merely ensuring a compatible level of interchangeability between their home armies and those of their colonial military forces. A number of mid-eighteenth-century South Asian armies already utilized both indigenous and European military organizational systems and South Asians already had all the personal warrior attributes they needed prior to this latest round of standardization aimed at European political objectives. The widespread imposition of a nation-specific European theory of military organization (i.e. Britain or France) enabled Europeans to use South Asian soldiers more effectively in terms of European colonial force structure and its tactical deployment towards attaining European political objectives in a colonial setting. These mid-eighteenth-century European institutions did not set a historic precedent for the introduction of either discipline or drill in South Asian armies.
During the eighteenth century South Asian colonial armies held enormous potential for extending the ability of England and France to wage war in Asia.* A colonial army consumed military resources but it was still far more cost-effective than shipping an all-European force to the far side of the globe. South Asia’s extreme climate had provided the Europeans with an initial reason to look for indigenous allies who could prosecute their wars more effectively, while South Asian leaders sought European allies who might help tip the balance of power in local struggles.† It was often a mutually symbiotic relationship nurtured by the joint quest for military advantage. And although large portions of South Asian society had been militarized since Vedic times, the Anglo-French rivalry of this period would feed directly into larger South Asian regional power struggles so that it became hard to distinguish influence from impetus and cause from coincidence.
As the EIC grew, in terms of financial and military power, it became a more sophisticated civil–military mechanism capable of managing British wars in Asia. Within India there were three separate Presidencies, Bengal, Bombay and Madras, each with its own Governor, Council and army. But Bengal was the largest and wealthiest of these Presidencies and after implementation of Pitt’s India Act (1784), the Governor of Bengal became the Governor-General with powers placing him above the other Governors and providing scope for coordinating the segmented governmental apparatus on the ground. Nonetheless, the separate Presidencies retained their distinctive military identities via their individual armies and that enabled the ‘Honourable Company’ to amass a wealth of tactically based regional knowledge as well as develop military specializations suited to specific combat environments. Over the years the British had also dispatched a number of the King’s troops to India and although they were often used to spearhead assaults they were not generally as knowledgeable about ‘in-country’ operations. From his seat of government in Bengal the Governor-General had senior military authority and he coordinated various EIC military deployments as well as operations involving His Majesty’s troops. The tremendous distance between London and India meant that the Governor-General operated for months at a time without direct guidance and he often had to act on his last available orders or a set of principles interpreted from policy guidelines.
Anglo-Maratha conflict
By the second quarter of the eighteenth century the Marathas could be said to have controlled 75 per cent of the subcontinent.13 And with the EIC gradually pushing the economic and political hinterlands of its three Presidencies ever inward, a clash was inevitable. Once the British began to engage the Marathas militarily, the conflict process flared sporadically for two generations, stretching from the Battle of Aras on 18 May 1775 until the Siege of Asirghar on 7 April 1819. In fighting this series of Anglo-Maratha wars the EIC in effect accelerated the disintegration of the Maratha Confederacy that was the indigenous heir to India’s military fortunes.14 Those unfamiliar with South Asian history often find it difficult to trace the Anglo-Maratha Wars as they overlap with the Third and Fourth Anglo-Mysore Wars in which the Marathas were British allies and neutrals respectively. The sequencing of the major wars looks something like this:
The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns of 1803 were directed against those Maratha leaders who opposed the Treaty of Bassein,* a Subsidiary Alliance agreement signed in desperation by the Maratha Peshwa† (Prime Minister) Baji Rao Ⅱ. For his part, the Peshwa probably saw the document as a politically expedient and cost-effective means of temporarily obtaining British troops to protect himself – a marriage of convenience if you will. Ironically, the Peshwa needed protection from the leaders of the Sindia and Holkar clans that formed part of his own broadly based political network. The most militarily powerful Maratha clans menaced Baji Rao Ⅱ with their armies because the Peshwa was, in their opinion, an ineffectual and loathsome political figure. Baji Rao Ⅱ apparently saw his own signature on the Treaty of Bassein as a ploy in a larger game of control, which he believed he could win. The naively optimistic Peshwa apparently hoped to use the British as temporary allies in 1803 to help claw back political power – after which time these foreigners could be dispensed with and crushed.
British imperial historians have tended to see the battles of 1803 as springing from the unwillingness of independently minded Maratha leaders to peacefully acknowledge their subordinate status under the Treaty of Bassein as signed by the Peshwa. The formula for a British intervention in ‘native affairs’ was not new and the Treaty of Bassein was in keeping with the basic tenets of the Subsidiary Treaty Alliance System. A similar treaty with the Nizam of Hyderabad had apparently been successful but the Nizam did not have to contend with multiple princely retainers each with greater military power than his own. Governor-General Richard Wellesley’s* supporters have asked us to believe that, if the Treaty of Bassein had worked as intended for the EIC, it would have seen the various competing Maratha clan factions brought peacefully together under a rather weak but manageable Peshwa. By signing the Treaty of Bassein, Baji Rao Ⅱ surrendered his autonomy and unknowingly gave Richard Wellesley a political cover to meddle further in Maratha affairs. Ever since the impeachment trial of former Governor-General Warren Hastings† the scrutiny of Governors-General had been aimed at detecting abuses of power that might suggest ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’. The Treaty of Bassein was a godsend to Richard Wellesley in that it allowed him to explain his expansionist Maratha policy in terms of political involvement on behalf of his reluctant ally the Peshwa. This could be used to help portray the events of 1803 as a just and legal war against opponents of the treaty as long as one accepted the premise that Peshwa Baji Rao Ⅱ was the legitimate Maratha ‘ruler’. But real Maratha power lay elsewhere and the British soon began to despise the Peshwa as well.
Governor-General Wellesley’s main Maratha enemies in 1803 were Daulat Rao Sindia,‡ the Maharaja of Gwalior, and Raghuji Bhonsle Ⅱ§ of Nagpur.16 Raghuji possessed a magnificent mounted force in 1803 and some tenacious infantry units in the form of battalions from Hindustan and the Persian Gulf. But the most formidable enemy army, the one that could march on short notice, take land, occupy it, hold it, forcing the British to pay the maximum price, was the army of Daulat Rao Sindia. The ‘regular corps’ of Sindia’s army featured sepoy battalions that were often indistinguishable from those of the EIC in uniform, drill and ethnic origin. The third principal Maratha powerbroker of this period was Jeswunt Rao Holkar,* the Maharaja of Indore. However, Holkar abstained from participation in the battles of 1803 in an apparent hope that Sindia and the British would fight each other to a weakened point that he (Holkar) might be able to exploit.17
The British strategy for dealing with the Marathas in 1803 depended heavily on a two-prong projection of power into the interior of the subcontinent. The main British infantry forces were divided between Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) General Gerard Lake’s† ‘Grand Army’ in the northern theatre (Hindustan) and Major-General Arthur Wellesley’s ‘Army of the Deccan’ in the southern theatre. Arthur was the younger brother of Richard Wellesley – Britain’s Governor-General of India. However, Arthur went on to gain greater European fame in the Peninsular War and he is most often remembered for his famous victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.‡
Although this overview makes it sound as if Hindustan§ and the Deccan∥ were the only campaign areas in 1803, there were three other operational areas that were essential to the British war effort. Unfortunately there is neither time nor space in this book to do justice to these other military events. Two actions centred on securing coastal regions. Colonel Murray captured Sindia’s port of Broach in Gujarat18 on the west coast while Raghuji Bhonsle’s maritime province of Cuttack in Orissa on the east coast of India was taken in a pincer movement launched by troops from Bengal and Madras.19 The seizure of the Maratha ports completed the British effort to seal the coastline of the subcontinent in 1803; a military move that paid lasting benefits in their subsequent South Asian wars. The great Maratha naval tradition of coastal raiding, once upheld by clans like the Angrias, was history.20 And with increased freedom of movement in the shipping lanes, the British enjoyed further logistical advantage as men and war materiel were transferred between EIC bases without fear of Maratha interception. The third major action of 1803 was the landlocked operation in Bundlekund aimed at creating a buffer zone and further disconnection between Maratha forces in the interior of the subcontinent.