Who won the Battle of Assaye?
Major General Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, won the Battle of Assaye on 23 September 1803 during the Second Anglo-Maratha War. With about 4,500 regular troops he crossed the Kaitna river at an unguarded ford and attacked the combined Maratha armies of Scindia and the Raja of Berar, some 40,000 strong, capturing 98 or more of their guns at a heavy cost in his own men. Wellesley later regarded it as the best battle he ever fought.4
Years before Waterloo, a young general named Arthur Wellesley found the main Maratha army camped along a river in central India. Outnumbered several times over, he attacked at once, in a battle that cost him dearly and that he later regarded as the best he ever fought.5
Part of Battles of India · Before: Buxar, 1764 · Next: Chillianwala, 1849
The Maratha war
By 1803 the Maratha Confederacy was the East India Company's great rival for supremacy in India. Its nominal head, the peshwa Baji Rao II, had been beaten by the Holkar family and, in December 1802, accepted British protection by the Treaty of Bassein. Two of the great Maratha chiefs, Daulat Rao Scindia and the Bhonsle Raja of Berar, refused to accept it, and in August 1803 the governor-general, Wellesley's elder brother Richard, declared war on them.6
Their armies were formidable. Besides tens of thousands of horsemen, Scindia had battalions trained and led by European officers in the French manner, and a powerful, well-served artillery train. Malleson counts 10,000 of the infantry as trained on the European system.7
Wellesley in India
Arthur Wellesley had sailed to India in 1796; in 1798 his elder brother Richard arrived as governor-general. He commanded the 33rd Foot in the war against Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799 and then governed and garrisoned Mysore. Promoted major general, in the spring of 1803 he marched to Poona and restored the peshwa to his capital on 13 May.8
When war came, he struck first at Ahmadnagar, a fortress he thought the strongest in India after Vellore. He opened fire on 10 August and took it two days later, which gave him a secure depot and cut the Marathas off from the Deccan.9
The chase across the Deccan
The Maratha cavalry then slipped past the British through the Ajanta pass, threatening the territory of Britain's ally the Nizam of Hyderabad. Wellesley and a second Company force under Colonel Stevenson spent weeks marching after them through a country the Marathas had laid waste, until on 20 September the Maratha horse rejoined their infantry and guns, and the next day the united army took up a position at Bokardan.10
On 21 September Wellesley and Stevenson met at Badnapur and agreed to march by separate routes and attack the enemy together from two sides on the morning of the 24th. The plan did not survive contact with the enemy.11
An army found by surprise
On the morning of 23 September, as Wellesley's men were about to make camp at Naulniah, scouts brought word that the combined Maratha army lay only a few miles away on the Kaitna river and was preparing to move off. Fearing it would escape, Wellesley decided to attack at once, without waiting for Stevenson.12
From a rise he saw the whole Maratha army drawn up along the far bank of the Kaitna near its junction with the Juah: infantry and guns massed on the left, resting on the village of Assaye, and some 30,000 cavalry on the right. Estimates of the whole Maratha force run to about 40,000 men with more than 100 guns. The field commander was Anthony Pohlmann, a German soldier of fortune; Scindia and the Raja of Berar were in the camp but left the field.13
The ford on the Kaitna
The Kaitna could be crossed only at fords, and the one his guides knew was commanded by the Maratha guns. Wellesley noticed two villages, Peepulgaon and Waroor, facing each other across the river beyond the Maratha left, and reasoned that there must be a ford between them. There was. Unguarded, it carried his army across onto the narrow tongue of land between the Kaitna and the Juah.14
The Marathas reacted fast. They swung their whole army round to face the new threat, forming a line between the two rivers and, since there was not room for all of them, a second line at right angles to it, with its left anchored on Assaye. Wellesley formed his infantry in two lines with his cavalry behind them, all the while under fire from the guns in and around the village.15
The guns of Assaye
The plan was to hold back the right while the left fell on the Maratha right wing by the Kaitna. It went wrong on the right. The 74th Highlanders, with the pickets in front of them, veered toward Assaye and its guns, opening a gap in the line, and advanced straight into the heaviest fire. The bullocks drawing the British light guns were shot down, and when an officer sent to ask what to do about the guns, the answer came back to get on without them.16
The 74th came close to annihilation. The pickets broke back onto it, and Maratha horse swept round the village onto its flank. Fortescue gives its loss as 11 officers and 113 men killed and 6 officers and 271 men wounded; the regiment had gone into action about 500 rank and file strong.17
The charge of the 19th
Wellesley saw the Maratha horse gathering to turn the check into a rout and struck first. He sent in his only British cavalry, the 19th Light Dragoons, only 360 sabers strong, with the Madras Native Cavalry behind them. They rode through the broken ranks of the 74th with a cheer and drove the Maratha horsemen back through their own lines.18
On the left, meanwhile, the 78th Highlanders and the Madras sepoys stormed the Maratha line with the bayonet and took the guns. Many Maratha gunners had thrown themselves down as if dead; once the line had passed, they rose and turned their guns on its rear. Wellesley led the 78th and the 7th Madras Native Cavalry back to retake them, and had a second horse killed under him. The village of Assaye was carried, and the Maratha infantry was driven step by step into the Juah. Colonel Maxwell of the 19th led a last charge across the river and was killed, but the enemy fled the field.19
Malleson called Assaye a general's battle, quoting the judgment of a contemporary, Munro, that Wellesley left no part of his army unemployed and supported every point that was pressed at the very moment it was needed. The trained battalions alone got away in some order.20
The cost
The victory was bought dearly. The return printed by Fortescue gives 428 killed, 1,138 wounded and 18 missing, 1,584 in all, and Malleson lists the same killed and wounded; EBSCO Research Starters gives 456 killed and about 1,200 wounded. Both Malleson and Fortescue write that two horses were killed under Wellesley, and the head of his orderly dragoon was carried away by a cannon shot.21
The Marathas left about 1,200 dead on the field, with their wounded scattered all over it; Fortescue says the wounded were estimated at four times as many as the dead, and EBSCO gives about 5,000. All their artillery, 98 guns by Malleson's count and 102 by EBSCO's, fell into British hands.22› 23 September in military history
Why Assaye mattered
Assaye broke the main Maratha field army in the Deccan. Weeks later Wellesley beat the Bhonsle's army and Scindia's again at Argaum, and on 15 December he stormed the hill fortress of Gawilghur. Two days later the Raja of Berar signed a treaty ceding Cuttack and Berar, and Scindia followed with the Treaty of Surji-Anjangaon, his defeat sealed in the north by General Lake's victory at Laswari.23
For Wellesley it was the making of his reputation. Napoleon would later sneer at him as a sepoy general, but the National Army Museum notes how much India taught him that he would use in Spain: discipline, the handling of allies, intelligence, maneuver and secure supply lines. He regarded Assaye as the best battle he ever fought.24
For the man who won it, see the Duke of Wellington, and for the wider story, the battles of India and the Napoleonic era.
