Who won the Third Battle of Panipat?
The Afghan-led Durrani coalition of Ahmad Shah Durrani won a decisive victory at the Third Battle of Panipat on 14 January 1761, crushing the army of the Maratha Empire under Sadashivrao Bhau, then the dominant power in India, in what The Tribune calls one of the largest and bloodiest conflicts in Indian history. Tens of thousands died in a day, and the defeat is often seen as helping open the way for later British dominance.5
On a January day in 1761, on the plain of Panipat north of Delhi, two of the greatest powers in India met in one of the largest and bloodiest battles in Indian history. The Maratha Empire, then the dominant force in India, was crushed by an Afghan-led coalition under Ahmad Shah Durrani. Tens of thousands died in a single day, and the defeat reshaped the struggle for India; it is often seen as one of the turning points that, over time, helped open the way for British dominance.6
Part of Battles of India · Before: Plassey, 1757 · Next: Buxar, 1764
The field of Panipat
Panipat lies about fifty miles north of Delhi, on the main road that joins the Punjab to the plain of the Ganges. Every invader from Afghanistan or Central Asia had to come this way, and the broad flat country around the town suited masses of cavalry, elephants and guns. Twice before, in 1526 and 1556, battles here had decided who would rule from Delhi. In 1946 Jawaharlal Nehru said that at Panipat India's fate had been decided several times.7 › First Battle of Panipat, 1526
The Marathas reach for the north
By the 1750s the Mughal emperor in Delhi ruled little more than the country round his capital. The Marathas, from their homeland in the Deccan, had spent two decades expanding north, into Malwa and Gujarat, Rajasthan and Bundelkhand, and as far as Bengal and the Punjab. A treaty of 1752 made them protectors of the Mughal throne. From the northwest came another power: Ahmad Shah Durrani, also called Abdali, the founder of the Afghan state, who invaded India again and again between 1747 and 1769 and sacked Delhi in 1757.8
The two were bound to collide. Maratha forces pushed into the Punjab in 1757 and 1758, driving out Durrani's son Timur. In 1759 the Shah came back, swept the Marathas out of the Punjab and occupied Delhi, then moved east into the country of his ally Najib Khan, chief of the Rohilla Afghans, to gather the Muslim powers of Hindustan against the Marathas.9
The Bhau's army
The Peshwa, the Maratha chief minister and real ruler, sent his cousin Sadashivrao Bhau north to restore the situation, with the Peshwa's young son and heir, Vishwasrao, at his side. The core of the army was 20,000 picked horse and a disciplined corps of about 10,000 infantry and gunners under Ibrahim Khan Gardi, a Muslim soldier of fortune who had learned French drill in the service of the Marquis de Bussy. Maratha chiefs including Holkar and Sindhia joined on the march, and the Jat ruler Suraj Mal brought 20,000 men.10
This was a new kind of Maratha army. For a century their strength had been light horsemen who lived off the country and could ride fifty miles after a defeat. Now the Bhau brought a park of artillery, drilled infantry and a vast camp with families, servants and pilgrims. Holkar and Suraj Mal urged him to leave the families and heavy baggage in a fortress and fight the old way, with clouds of horse wasting the country round the enemy. The Bhau refused. Offended, Suraj Mal and his Jats soon left the alliance.11
In August 1760 the Bhau took Delhi, forcing the small Afghan garrison in the citadel to surrender, and stripped the silver ceiling of the imperial audience hall to pay his men. Durrani spent the monsoon in camp at Anupshahr, where Najib won over the young Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, to the Afghan side. Kashi Raj Pandit, a Hindu in Shuja's service who carried messages between the two camps, later wrote the fullest eyewitness account of the campaign.12
Kunjpura and the crossing at Baghpat
The Bhau struck first. He marched up the Yamuna to Kunjpura, about eighty miles north of Delhi, and stormed the Afghan post there, taking its garrison prisoner, while Durrani's army sat on the far side of a river swollen by the autumn floods. Then the Shah moved. Leaving camp opposite Delhi around 20 October 1760, his army crossed the Yamuna at Baghpat in the last week of October (from the 23rd by Kashi Raj's account, 25 to 27 October by Sarkar's) and came up behind the Marathas, between them and Delhi.13
The armies' positions were now reversed. The Afghans had the whole of Hindustan at their backs; the Marathas had only the dry plains of Sirhind. After a sharp fight at Sambalka the Bhau fell back to Panipat and dug in around the town behind a ditch sixty feet wide, with his guns on the rampart. The Shah camped a few miles to the south behind felled trees. At the Shah's muster, as Kashi Raj recorded it, his own army counted 24 regiments of 1,200 horse, with forty guns and swivel guns on camels, and his Indian allies brought 13,000 horse and 38,000 foot: 41,800 horse and 38,000 foot in all, about 80,000 men. Keene, retelling the same account, gives the allies 28,000 horse, which counts most of the Afghan cavalry twice.14
Two months of hunger
For two months the armies faced each other. There were constant skirmishes and duels, and Najib once lost 3,000 of his Rohillas. But time was on the Shah's side. His patrols, 5,000 of his best horse riding through the winter nights, closed the roads round the Maratha camp. A Maratha foraging force under Gobind Pant Bundela was surprised and destroyed; a convoy carrying money from Delhi blundered into the Afghan lines in the dark and was cut to pieces. On one occasion, Kashi Raj reported, 20,000 camp followers out gathering food were massacred in a wood.15
The Afghan camp was hungry too. The Sikh rising in the Punjab cut Durrani off from home, and his allies begged him to fight. He refused, waiting for the Marathas to starve. In their camp disease and lack of money did the rest. When the Bhau, his spirit failing, offered through Shuja to accept any terms, Najib persuaded the Shah to refuse.16
The cup is full
By early January 1761 the Maratha camp had eaten its last grain. The chiefs met by torchlight and swore to march out before dawn and break through or die. The Bhau sent a last note to Kashi Raj, who preserved its words: "The cup is full to the brim, and cannot hold another drop. If anything can be done, do it." It reached Shuja's tent at three in the morning. Before he had finished reading it, scouts ran in to say that the Marathas were leaving their lines.17
On 14 January the Maratha army came out in an oblique line with its guns in front: Ibrahim Khan's infantry on the left, the Bhau and Vishwasrao with the household troops in the center, Holkar and Sindhia on the right. Facing them were the Rohillas of Najib on the Afghan left, Shuja and the Afghan vizier Shah Wali Khan in the center, more Rohillas under Hafiz Rahmat Khan, and Persian cavalry on the far right. Durrani himself watched from a small tent behind the line.18
The day of slaughter
At first everything went the Marathas' way. Ibrahim Khan led his trained infantry with fixed bayonets against the Rohillas and, by Kashi Raj's account, put nearly 8,000 of them out of action, holding that part of the field for three hours. The Bhau himself charged Shah Wali's division in the center and broke much of it; the vizier was seen trying to stop his own men from running. By noon the Afghan center was cut in two and their right almost destroyed.19
Then Durrani played his reserve. He sent his bodyguard to drive every able man out of camp and turn back the fugitives, and threw several thousand fresh horsemen to his shaken right and 10,000 more in close order at the center, while Najib and the chief of staff Shah Pasand Khan struck the Maratha flanks. The counterattack began about one in the afternoon. Between two and three, Vishwasrao was wounded and soon afterwards killed. The Bhau mounted his horse and rode into the fight and was not seen alive again. Holkar and the Gaikwar left the field, and the Maratha army collapsed.20
What followed was a massacre. Thousands were cut down in the pursuit or drowned, or were killed by villagers they had plundered. Britannica puts the dead of the battle at 60,000 to 70,000, and says about 40,000 Maratha prisoners were slaughtered afterwards; the Tribune gives more than 100,000 dead, soldiers and civilians together. Ibrahim Khan was captured wounded and died in Afghan hands a week later. A headless body thought to be the Bhau's was found miles from the field and cremated with Vishwasrao at Shuja's request.21
Why it decided India
The defeat ended the Maratha advance in northern India and killed many of their ablest leaders. The empire stopped expanding and in time split into rival states. Yet Durrani could not hold India either. His troops grew mutinous, and within weeks he went home, leaving Najib in Delhi. In the following years the Sikhs took the Punjab from him.22
Into the vacuum stepped a third party. The British East India Company, which had won at Plassey in 1757, was the power best placed to exploit the absence of a strong state in India in the decades that followed. Keene, writing in 1887, called the battle the besom that swept Hindustan for the coming of the British. The Marathas recovered much of their strength under Mahadji Sindhia, who escaped the field that day.23 › Battle of Buxar, 1764
