Third Battle of Panipat

Title: Third Battle of Panipat

Author: Abhas Verma

Publisher: Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, 2013 (First)

ISBN: 9788180903328

Pages: 326

Emperor Aurangzeb’s death sounded the death knell of the Mughal Empire. Though it lingered on for 150 years more, paramountcy was conceded to other players and the emperors lived under the shadow of their former glory. Marathas rose to prominence at this stage and their writ ran through the entire length and breadth of North India. The Muslim nobles and aristocrats who had ruled the country for nearly six centuries found it suffocating to remain under Maratha domination. Nadir Shah Afzar and Ahmed Shah Abdali, who were reigning over Persia and Afghanistan respectively, were invited to invade India and keep the Marathas at bay. Both of them made successful campaigns against India, sowing death and destruction in their wake and pillaging the country’s wealth. It is said that gratified by the riches he plundered from India, Nadir Shah exempted the people of his country from taxation for two years. Abdali made several incursions into North India and inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Marathas on Jan 14, 1761 in the Third Battle of Panipat. Abdali’s win put paid to Maratha aspirations of subjugating North India, but didn’t prevent the Mughal dynasty from continuing on their slide through the slippery slopes of history to its eventual doom. This book explains the historical inevitability of the Panipat battle and how it affected the course of events. Abhas Verma is a software engineer by profession with his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication. He is claimed to have put in four years of research into the preparation of this book.

What first strikes the reader is the haphazard nature of the presentation with tons of spelling and grammatical errors. Punctuation marks are nonexistent in many pages which points to sloppy proofreading. Unnecessary details are sometimes sourced from other books which includes even a paragraph on basket-making to cross rivers (p.67). In one instance, a single gigantic paragraph spans four full pages.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the entire North India lay cowering under the might of Maratha cavalry. They extracted tribute from local lords and meddled with imperial appointments of the Mughal court. Even the Rajput kingdoms felt threatened by the onslaught of the southerners. For the Muslim rulers like Najib Khan, the situation was unbearable. Instigated by the spiritual reformer Shah Waliullah, he invited Ahmed Shah Abdali of Kabul to invade India. Najib Khan was a Rohilla Muslim and wanted to crush the Maratha, Jat and the rising Sikh powers for the revival of Islam in India. That Abdali also shared the religious zeal is evident from his avowal of the intention to wage a holy war. He claimed that he had come to the country solely for God’s sake, to help his fellow clansmen – the Muslim community (p.209) – even though the native born Muslims were held in contempt by the nobles who were born in Persia or Central Asia.

The major thrust of this important battle lasted for only half a day in which the Marathas were routed, their generals killed and their camp followers captured by the Afghans. Traditional Indian armies travelled with a huge entourage in which the noncombatants outnumbered the fighters in the ratio 4:1. About a tenth of them were women. This was necessitated because the men who would do cooking and cleaning utensils were averse to grind corn for the meal which was considered a feminine chore. The horses were the soldiers’ own property and any injury to it in the course of the battle had to be compensated from his own pay. Such a ragtag army was no match against the superior fighting prowess of the Afghans. Verma estimates the casualty suffered by the Marathas. Out of the 60,000 soldiers, almost 30,000 perished in the battle which included generals like Vishwasrao, Sadashivrao Bhau, Jaswantrao Puar, Tukoji Sindhia and others. When the camp followers are also taken into account, the mortality figure shoots up to 50,000. Surprisingly, no reckoning of the dead among Abdali’s forces is seen.

Even though Abdali was invited by Muslim nobles, the forces which opposed him included Muslims as well, the shining one among them being Ibrahim Khan Gardi. After he was caught by the enemy at the end of a gallant struggle, he was beheaded and his corpse was flung away as a punishment for siding with kafirs. Afterwards, ropes were tied to his feet and in this way his body was dragged through the Shah’s camp and at last left as food for crows and kites (p.257). However, most of the Afghan soldiers serving under the Maratha general Vithal Shivdev refused to fight at the moment it was clear to them that the tide was turning in favour of Abdali. They also pillaged the Maratha camps in an instance of blatant treachery. The receding Maratha soldiers after defeat fell victims to Muslim villagers on the way. The news of the defeat had emboldened them to beat and loot the soldiers in the Mughal territories of Delhi where they were thought of as kafirs (p.254). But it should not be construed as a fight of Hindus against Muslims. King Madho Singh of Jaipur invited the Maharana of Udaipur to join him in an anti-Maratha alliance with Abdali (p.131).

Verma attempts to belittle the losses suffered by the Marathas in terms of men and material. He even consoles himself that most of the captured women belonged to dancing and other lower classes and not highborn. This futile exercise stares in the face of readers in mocking contradiction of the importance of the battle that killed Marathas’ rise to hegemony. They were down, but not out. That had to wait till 1818 when the gleam of Maratha suzerainty was finally put out by the British. In that sense, the British reaped the benefit accrued out of the Third Battle of Panipat. It also marked the end of foreign invasion from the northwest corner of the country.

The book is disappointing, but easy to go through. With a little more attention to the structure of the text and getup, a second edition may just be able to salvage something out of this wreck and do justice to the topic. It is shocking that a book of this genre came out without an index or glossary at all.

The book is recommended only to serious readers of history.

Rating: 2 Star