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The Battle of Buxar, 1764: the East India Company takes Bengal

Company wars in India · 22 October 1764 · East India Company vs Mughal and allied armies · ~8 min read · Updated October 2026

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Engraving of Company sepoys firing and reloading their muskets at Buxar in 1764 as a mounted British officer watches the fighting beyond

C. R., c. 1879, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

At a glance

British East India CompanyMajor Hector Munro
vs
Mughal Empire, Awadh and BengalShah Alam II, Shuja-ud-Daula and Mir Qasim
Date
22 October 1764 (some sources give 23 October)
Location
Buxar, on the Ganges, in modern Bihar
Period
Company expansion in India
Outcome
Decisive East India Company victory
By the numbers
SideStrengthLosses
East India CompanyAbout 7,000 (7,072 by Munro's own return), mostly Indian sepoys1About 850 killed, wounded and missing2
Allied armiesSeveral times larger, estimated at 40,000 to 50,0003Heavy; more than 2,000 dead on the field and thousands more drowned in the retreat4

Figures are approximate and vary between sources; Malleson's detailed count gives 7,072 for the Company and 847 Company casualties.

Quick answer

Who won the Battle of Buxar?

The British East India Company won the Battle of Buxar on 22 October 1764, the usual date, though Malleson and Fortescue put the fighting on 23 October. A Company army of about 7,000, mostly Indian sepoys, under Major Hector Munro defeated the much larger combined forces of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh and the deposed nawab of Bengal, Mir Qasim. The resulting Treaty of Allahabad in 1765 gave the Company the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, making it a ruling power in India.5

Seven years after Plassey, the East India Company's hold on Bengal was challenged by an alliance of the Mughal emperor and two powerful nawabs. At Buxar, on the banks of the Ganges, a small Company army settled the question in a single day of hard fighting, and a trading company became a territorial power.6

Part of Battles of India · Before: Third Panipat, 1761 · Next: Assaye, 1803

After Plassey

After its victory at Plassey in 1757 the Company installed nawabs of Bengal who depended on its support. One of them, Mir Qasim, who ruled from 1760, tried to govern independently and clashed with the Company over the trade privileges its servants abused. In 1763 the Company replaced him with his father-in-law, Mir Jafar, and in a series of battles drove him out of Bengal and Bihar across the Karamnasa river.7

Dark locator map with a gold star in a glowing circle marking the approximate site of the Battle of Buxar, the coasts, rivers and lakes of the region, and a small world map inset with the area boxed
The Battle of Buxar: the star marks the approximate site, and the inset shows the area on a world map. Drawn for this article from Natural Earth data, with no modern borders. Location map: © Echoes of Battle (data: Natural Earth, public domain)

The grand alliance

Mir Qasim fled to Shuja-ud-Daula, the nawab-vizier of Awadh, the rich province on the Ganges west of Bihar. With him was the emperor Shah Alam II, who had fled Delhi in 1758, proclaimed himself emperor after his father's murder in 1759 and had since been wandering without a capital, demanding tribute from Bengal and Bihar.8

Portrait of Shuja-ud-Daula in a fur hat and richly patterned robe
Shuja-ud-Daula, nawab of Awadh and one of the three allied leaders at Buxar, painted by Tilly Kettle at Faizabad in 1772. Yale Center for British Art. Public domain

Malleson tells how Shuja-ud-Daula, half inclined to send his guest away, was won over by the sight of Mir Qasim's European-trained battalions, and by his money: Mir Qasim promised eleven lakhs of rupees a month from the day the army crossed the Ganges. In the spring of 1764 the allies marched, attacked the Company at Patna and were repulsed, and fell back toward Buxar to wait out the monsoon.9

Mutiny and the guns at Chapra

The Company's army was itself in turmoil. Its soldiers had been promised a donation for the last campaign and had not been paid, and early in 1764 European troops mutinied on the Karamnasa, some of them deserting to the enemy. Then the sepoys rose over the unfair share they were given. When Major Hector Munro of the 89th Foot took command in August, another sepoy battalion mutinied at Manjhi.10

Munro's answer is one of the grimmest scenes in the Company's history. At Chapra, Malleson relates, he had 24 ringleaders court-martialed and sentenced to be blown from guns. Four grenadiers stepped forward to claim the right to die first, as was their place in battle, and were blown away. When the sepoy officers warned that their men would not allow the executions to continue, Munro loaded his guns with grapeshot, ordered the battalions to ground their arms and went on with the executions: sixteen more men were blown away there, and the last four at Moniah. Discipline was restored.11

Full-length portrait of an officer in a red coat and white breeches pointing toward a smoke-covered battlefield, standing beside a cannon on a pedestal under a palm tree
Sir Hector Munro, the victor of Buxar, by David Martin, about 1785. The name of the battle is carved on the pedestal beside him, above Pondicherry, which he took in 1778. National Portrait Gallery, London. Public domain. David Martin, Sir Hector Munro, NPG 1433, via Wikimedia Commons.

The march to Buxar

Munro marched from Bankipur near Patna on 9 October, according to Broome and Malleson (Fortescue gives the 6th). Knowing the allies' strength in cavalry, he took a light, picked force and trained it every day on the march to form an oblong square at a moment's notice. On the way an ambush at a village near the Banas nala cost his advance guard, by Malleson's count, 72 men killed or badly wounded, and enemy horsemen harried the column all the way.12

On 22 October he reached the plain of Buxar and found the allied army drawn up before its entrenchments. It was a strong position, with the Ganges covering its left, the Torah nala on its right and earthworks in front. Inside it, Malleson writes, Shuja-ud-Daula had just turned on Mir Qasim, whose money had run out: he was stripped of his valuables, held prisoner and sent off on a lame elephant. The emperor, though nominally the head of the alliance, was little more than a prisoner in the camp.13

The armies

Malleson gives Munro's strength exactly: 857 Europeans, including 71 gunners, 5,297 sepoys and 918 Mughal horse, 7,072 men in all, with 28 guns. Other counts range from about 4,200 to nearly 8,000. The allied army was several times larger, about 40,000 according to Malleson and 40,000 to 50,000 according to Fortescue. At its core were the trained battalions of Samru and Madoc, officered by Europeans, with heavy guns, Awadh cavalry, Rohillas and some 5,000 Durrani horsemen, veterans of Panipat.14

Simple printed map of the Ganges at Buxar with the battlefield marked 1764
Map of Buxar on the Ganges with the site of the 1764 battle beside the fort and the road to Calcutta, published by A. F. C. de Cosson in Bengal: Past and Present in 1910. Public domain

The battle on the Ganges

Munro planned to rest his men and attack the entrenchments two days later, but the nawab came out to fight. Malleson, following the Company records, and Fortescue put the battle on the morning after Munro's arrival, 23 October; most references, including Britannica, date it to 22 October. The allied heavy guns opened fire first, outranging the Company's six-pounders, and Munro ordered his line forward, round a morass in front of his left and under fire from guns and rockets.15

The Durrani horse swept round to threaten the Company's left. The two lines formed square as they had practiced and drove them off with grape and musketry, but the horsemen, joined by Awadh cavalry, fell on the baggage and took the whole of it, then charged the rear line again and again, many of them dying inside the British ranks. Ghulam Husain Khan, an Indian nobleman who chronicled the war from the allied side, writes that the Durrani horsemen fell on the English camp and “killed and plundered without measure.”16

Plassey made the Company a kingmaker; Buxar made it a ruler.

The grove and the rout

On the right, fire from a battery in a village and a grove beyond it began to shake Munro's line. A sepoy battalion under Lieutenant Nicoll stormed the village but was thrown back from the grove. Munro then sent his whole right wing in with the bayonet, and the defenders gave way, leaving 27 guns behind. At that moment Shuja Quli Khan, commanding a mixed force of horse and foot 6,000 strong, mistaking the British volley for a victory of his own side, charged the Company's left, was beaten back and killed, and his defeat began the retreat of the whole allied line.17

Munro rode to the front, took off his hat and called three cheers, and the battalions pressed on. The troops holding Buxar fort, unaware of the defeat, were caught dismounted and fled in panic. Shuja-ud-Daula got his regular brigades and his treasure across the Torah nala and then broke the bridge of boats behind them; the camp followers left on the far side drowned in great numbers. Britannica records that the allied army, despite its numbers, was outflanked and cut down by musket volleys.18

The Company lost 847 killed and wounded, 101 of them Europeans. More than 2,000 of the allies lay dead on the field, by some estimates as many as 5,000, and the victors took 133 guns and the whole camp, booty that sold for more than twelve lakhs of rupees.19› 22 October in military history

The Treaty of Allahabad

The defeat broke the alliance. Shah Alam came over to the Company and became its pensioner. Shuja-ud-Daula fought on, but by the spring of 1765 the Company had overrun Awadh and taken Lucknow and Faizabad, and he gave himself up. Mir Qasim fled west and, Malleson records, died years later in poverty in Delhi.20

Robert Clive, back in India as governor, negotiated the peace. In the Treaty of Allahabad, concluded in August 1765, the emperor granted the Company the diwani, the perpetual right to collect the land revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, in return for an annual tribute of 2.6 million rupees. Clive deliberately stopped there: rather than march on Delhi, he returned Awadh to Shuja-ud-Daula as a buffer state, and the Company was paid 5 million rupees for its war expenses.21

Painting of the Mughal emperor under a canopy handing a scroll to a British officer
Shah Alam II hands Robert Clive the grant of the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in August 1765, as imagined by Benjamin West in about 1818. British Library. Public domain

Why Buxar mattered

Plassey had made the Company kingmaker in Bengal; Buxar and the treaty that followed made it the legal collector of the revenues of one of the richest regions in the world. Under Clive's so-called dual system, the Company held the diwani, the revenue, while the nawab kept the nizamat, the civil administration; but one man of Clive's choosing, Muhammad Reza Khan, ran both as deputy diwan for the Company and deputy nazim for the nawab. That made the Company, in Percival Spear's words for Britannica, the virtual ruler of India's two richest provinces.22

Buxar is often ranked above Plassey, because it defeated the Mughal emperor himself and laid the financial foundation of British rule in India: Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia of Bangladesh, calls it the final establishment of British ascendancy in Bengal. The diwani paid for the armies and bases of the Company's later expansion. Awadh paid too: by the treaty of 1801 it ceded the Doab and Rohilkhand to cover the cost of a Company subsidiary force, and in February 1856 the Company took over its government for good. Malleson judged Shuja-ud-Daula the most skilled Indian commander the British had yet faced, beaten above all by the steadiness of disciplined infantry.23

For the wider story, see the guide to the battles of India and the early modern era page. Four decades later, the Company's army fought the Marathas at Assaye.

Frequently asked questions

When was the Battle of Buxar?

It is usually dated 22 October 1764. Munro reached Buxar that day, and some accounts, including Malleson's, place the fighting on the morning of 23 October.24

Who won the Battle of Buxar?

The British East India Company under Major Hector Munro won.

Who fought against the East India Company at Buxar?

The combined armies of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, Shuja-ud-Daula, the nawab of Awadh, and Mir Qasim, the deposed nawab of Bengal, though Shuja-ud-Daula had already turned Mir Qasim out of the camp before the battle.25

How big were the armies at Buxar?

The Company had about 7,000 men, 857 Europeans and the rest Indian sepoys and cavalry, with 28 guns. The allied army numbered about 40,000 to 50,000.26

How many died at Buxar?

The Company lost 847 killed and wounded. The allies lost more than 2,000 dead on the field, thousands more drowned in the retreat, and 133 guns.27

What was the result of the Battle of Buxar?

The Treaty of Allahabad in 1765 gave the Company the diwani, the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, in return for an annual tribute to the emperor.28

Was Buxar more important than Plassey?

Many historians think so, because Buxar defeated the Mughal emperor and two nawabs together and gave the Company legal control of Bengal's revenues.

Notes

A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.

  1. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. III. ↩
  2. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. III. ↩
  3. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. III. ↩
  4. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin; or, View of Modern Times. ↩
  5. Mohammad Shah, “Buxar, Battle of”; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. III; Tony Bunting, “Battle of Buxar”. ↩
  6. Tony Bunting, “Battle of Buxar”; Mohammad Shah, “Buxar, Battle of”. ↩
  7. Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, “Mir Qasim”; Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, “Mir Jafar Ali Khan”; G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive. ↩
  8. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Shah Alam II”; Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, “Shah Alam II”; G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive. ↩
  9. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin; or, View of Modern Times. ↩
  10. Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin; or, View of Modern Times. ↩
  11. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. III. ↩
  12. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. III. ↩
  13. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin; or, View of Modern Times. ↩
  14. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; Tony Bunting, “Battle of Buxar”; J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. III. ↩
  15. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Tony Bunting, “Battle of Buxar”; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. III. ↩
  16. Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin; or, View of Modern Times. ↩
  17. Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin; or, View of Modern Times. ↩
  18. Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; Tony Bunting, “Battle of Buxar”. ↩
  19. Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; Tony Bunting, “Battle of Buxar”. ↩
  20. Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, “Shah Alam II”; C. U. Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive. ↩
  21. T. G. Percival Spear, “Robert Clive”; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Shah Alam II”; Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, “Diwani”; C. U. Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries. ↩
  22. T. G. Percival Spear, “Robert Clive”; Tony Bunting, “Battle of Buxar”; Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, “Diwani”. ↩
  23. Mohammad Shah, “Buxar, Battle of”; C. U. Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries; G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive. ↩
  24. Mohammad Shah, “Buxar, Battle of”; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive. ↩
  25. Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin; or, View of Modern Times. ↩
  26. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. III. ↩
  27. G. B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive; Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army; Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, A Translation of the Seir Mutaqherin; or, View of Modern Times. ↩
  28. T. G. Percival Spear, “Robert Clive”; Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, “Diwani”. ↩

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