IF you are going to Europe this year, skip London and Rome and Berlin and go straight to Brussels, a dull little city that happens to be the capital of Belgium. From Brussels, take a bus or taxi to a small town, almost a village, called Waterloo and visit the meadow where a grand battle took place almost two hundred years ago. It was the greatest battle of the 19th century that decided the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte and his empire, and helped the British launch their own empire.
Go back to Brussels and take a plane back to Delhi. Less than a hundred kilometres north of Delhi lies Panipat, also, like Waterloo, a sleepy little town, with more history than it can cope with. It is close to Kurukshetra, where the great war described in Mahabharata took place. Panipat is also the site of three historically decisive battles, the first of which marked the beginning of the Mughal empire in India, and the last one, which was fought exactly 250 years on Sankranti day (14th January 1761) marked the beginning of the end of the Maratha empire.
I have visited Panipat a number of times, just as I have spent time in Waterloo. After Waterloo, Napoleon was captured and died on a small island in the Atlantic. At Panipat, two Peshwas were killed, along with thousands of troops. After Panipat, a depression descended on the Marathas, which means not only western Maharashtra but also northern mini-kingdoms of the Scindias and Holkars. The depression did not lift until 150 years later when Lokmanya Tilak took over the political reins, not only in Maharashtra but also in India. Which, after Panipat, was eventually taken over by the British.
In fact, Panipat came just in time for the British, who, four years earlier in 1757, had scored a decisive victory at Plassey under Robert Clive, and were looking for more territorial morsels. Within 60 years of Panipat, the British defeated the Marathas in a battle near Pune and the Peshwas, which means the Hindus, disappeared from the scene altogether.
There is also an Indian connection to Waterloo. The man who defeated Napoleon was Duke of Wellington, whose brother was governor-general in India, under whom, the same Wellington had fought against the Marathas in South India. So many empires were at war against each other in the 18th century and the world was being re-shaped at Waterloo in Europe and Panipat in India.
When I lived in Delhi – I now live in Pune, once the capital of the Marathas – I used to go religiously to Panipat almost every year though there is very little in Panipat to remind you of the great battle. The Marathas, which means the Hindus, for the great Shivaji had laid the foundation of his kingdom as Hindupadapadshahi, and was crowned as a Hindu king. To me, the battle of Panipat in 1761 was in essence a conflict between Hindu forces on one side and Muslim forces on the other, the latter symbolised by Ahmad Shah Abdali and his cohorts, who, between them, planned to re-Islamise the Mughal rulers who, according to them, were losing their Islamic character under the influence of the Hindus in India. The battle of Panipat was therefore a battle for re-assertion of the Islamic spirit of the Mughal rule, and had, therefore, a strong pan-Islamic flavour. I do not know whether the Peshwas were aware of this, but Ahmed Shah Abdali and others certainly did, though they did not make too much noise about it.
Why did the Marathas lose? Every year, dozens of books and scores of articles are published about the great fiasco. Panipat is not so much a battle as a wound into the very heart of the Maratha psyche. Even children taunt each other by referring to Panipat. In fact, Panipat is to Maharashtra what Waterloo is to the French. The French have never forgiven the British for their defeat at Waterloo, which explains why a hundred and fifty years after the battle, Charles de Gaulle refused to grant them an entry into the European Common Market!
My own hunch is that the Marathas lost because they did not know why they had come all the way from Pune to fight an intruder from Kabul from across the Hindukush range. Abdali was not the real enemy; the real enemy lay in wait in Kolkata waiting for a chance to pounce on them. Actually, the Marathas were so obsessed with Abdali and others that they never realised the potential danger from a rising power like the British. The British, after all, did not represent the king in England, but a small company called East India Company, for whom the Marathas had nothing but contempt.
The Marathas never took the British seriously and one of the Peshwas, an uncle of the Maratha commander-in-chief at Panipat, had actually entered into an agreement with the British to fight a Maratha naval chieftain on the west coast. In life-in peace as well as in war-you should know your real enemy, not just your friend. Unfortunately, the Marathas could never distinguish between the two. They believed that the Moghuls in Delhi, a spent force, were their friends and needed their protection, and were prepared to go out of their way to help them.
Actually, only a few years earlier, these very same Moghuls had played havoc with Shivaji and his forces, and had captured his son and murdered him. But after Aurangzeb’s death, the Marathas suddenly became very friendly towards the Moghuls and rushed to Panipat to defend them against a newcomer from Kabul, whence also the Moghuls had come.
Two hundred and fifty years after Panipat, we Hindus still do not know who is our friend and who our enemy. The Congress Party, which came into being to fight the British, meaning white foreigners, is now headed by a white foreigner, and Congressmen pay obeisance to her as some Indians used to do to the British viceroy and the Moghul emperor before him. What matters who rules Delhi. The Moghuls ran Delhi before the British ousted them. The Marathas should have thrown the Moghals out before turning on the British. Instead, they turned on a total stranger, a man from Kabul. They fought the wrong enemy and lost.
