THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUGHAL EMPIREforces in India, they dispatched an arrogant general, Lally, who had no
experience of the country at all. The British defeated him in 1760 at the
battle of Wandiwash, near Madras. He was made a scapegoat in France
and was executed. The dream of an Inde française died with him.
From an Indian point of view all these dramatic events were still rather
marginal. The battle of Plassey was a mere skirmish compared to the Indian
battles of that time and the battle of Wandiwash was an encounter between
the British and the French: no Indian interests were involved there. The
power of the Marathas was at its zenith in 1760 and their military
endeavours dwarfed all these European exploits. Balaji Baji Rao, the Peshwa
who had ruled in Pune since 1740, though not a great warrior was a very
competent administrator. His brother Raghunath led the Maratha army in
North India and had repelled the Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani several
times. Ahmad Shah returned again and again, however, and finally—in
1761—the Peshwa sent an enormous army to the north which was supposed
to meet the Afghan invader on the traditional Indian battlefield of Panipat,
where Baber had triumphed over the sultan of Delhi by means of superior
firepower and a very flexible strategy. This time the Afghan won his victory
over the Marathas for similar reasons. The Maratha general, Sadashiv Rao,
relied too much on his heavy field artillery which he had firmly installed on
the battlefield. He then got bogged down in a lengthy war of attrition and
Ahmad Shah won the final battle by making use of light field artillery
mounted on the backs of camels. After his victory Ahmad Shah returned to
Afghanistan while the defeated Maratha army returned to the south. The
Peshwa died of grief after this defeat.
The paradoxical feature of this great decisive battle of 1761 was that
nothing was actually decided by it at the time. With hindsight, it seems to
be very clear that the two main contestants for supremacy in India, the
Afghans and the Marathas, had neutralised one another in that year and
that the British, who had just entrenched themselves in Bengal and had
defeated their French rivals at Wandiwash, were bound to benefit from this
situation. To contemporary eyes, however, another ruler appeared to be the
most immediate beneficiary of the outcome of the battle of Panipat: Shuja-
ud-Daula, the nawab of Oudh. He was not only the governor of the largest
and most central province of the Mughal empire, he had also attained the
position of vezir and the young Great Mughal, Shah Alam, was under his
tutelage. Shuja-ud-Daula seemed to emerge as the ruler of North India and
had he been able to consolidate his position, the history of the British in
India would have been very different.
He decided to challenge the British when he was asked for military
support by the nawab of Bengal, Mir Kasim. The British had established a
regime of reckless plunder in Bengal following the departure of Clive. After
emptying Mir Jaffar’s treasury they had seen to it that his richer relative,
Mir Kasim, became nawab. After being thoroughly mulcted, Mir Kasim