Introduction:
Between 1526 and 1707, no power in India – European or otherwise – could stand against the Mughals. The Marathas were being brutally slaughtered by the Mughal Deccan Field Army and the British had been confined to their small holdings on the coastlines of India. As I established in my previous article, this was due to a very efficient and large military system – centred around light artillery (later) and cavalry – that defeated every conventional army it faced. The Mughal Army’s backbone, artillery and cavalry, were exceptionally well-trained, well-led and well-equipped – as laid out in the previous article.
However, with the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the mighty Mughal Empire began to fall apart under its own weight and the religious and societal divisions created by Aurangzeb. The Mughal campaign against the Marathas was called off and the Maratha Empire quickly began to regroup and rearm. Though, by the mid-18th Century, the Marathas would be a formidable force and command a large and well-trained army, within 60 years of the Battle of Plassey, the Marathas would cease to exist.
For this, there were many reasons. Of course, the political instability engendered by the Peshwa system as well as the constant in-fighting between various Maratha Peshwas weakened the Maratha state immensely. But, the cannons brought in by the British secured the Empire’s downfall.
The Maratha Army After Shivaji:
In the middle of the 18th Century, the Maratha Army, while not as large as the Mughal Army, was still very large. But, the Peshwa Period saw a total desecration of the Army raised by Shivaji (this article gives more detail about the Maratha Army under Shivaji).
Under the Peshwas, the Marathas maintained a very small professional force – i.e well trained and serving throughout the year – and the majority of their army, when on expedition or at war, was made up of what we would now call conscripts. This was in stark contrast to the extremely well-trained force maintained by Shivaji. By the mid to late 1700s, a Maratha Field Army numbered about 100,000 musket-armed light cavalry, 10,000 musketeers and 40-50 heavy artillery. As you may remember from the previous article, a Mughal Field Army numbered 50,000 match-lock armed cavalry, 10,000 musketeers and – far more importantly – about 200 pieces of light artillery with 2-4 pieces of siege artillery. Their lack of artillery (another departure from Shivaji’s army, as will be explained later) is not the only drawback of the Maratha Field Army. Multiple European observers, commenting on the Maratha men and comparing them with their own and with the men they had faced under the Mughals, note that the Maratha infantry is largely a disorganised rabble and the cavalry – while well trained – is not particularly fierce in its actions. In fact, by the end of the 18th Century, the Peshwas had – mysteriously – brought back the system discontinued by Shivaji, in which men would return to their fields for the harvest and abandon their military posts. Many other rules created by Shivaji were struck – such as the ban on looting.
In the face of all these issues, the Maratha Armies – perhaps due to the fragmented nature of North India at the time – swept across North India to form the Maratha Empire. To keep it safe and to allow it to prosper, they needed to hold it against the British. To hold it against, the British, they had to defeat them. To defeat them, they needed artillery.
A Short History on Maratha Artillery
Every historian who chronicles the Maratha Army notes, invariably, that the Marathas never managed to grasp the concept of artillery. This is quite interesting, as the Maratha Army’s relationship with artillery began with Shivaji. In fact, as early as the 1570s, the Maratha people were being trained as gunners and regularly fought in the armies of the Deccan Sultanate as gunners against the Portuguese.
Shivaji, during the First Mughal-Maratha War (the Maratha War of Independence) instituted the Tophkhana, or Regiment of Artillery, very early on. The men in this regiment, all of whom were regulars (i.e served all year, were paid regularly and received a set training regimen) were led and trained by Portuguese officers recruited by Shivaji. The cannons they were using were of French make. In fact, Shivaji was so taken by the French cannons, that he allowed to set up a Factory (in this sense, meaning embassy) at the port-town of Rajapore (modern-day Rajpur) where they would import and sell to the Marathas their finest cannons. In 1671, the French Factory would be joined by an English factory, whose guns Shivaji also brought into service.
In fact, almost all of Shivaji’s artillery would quickly become French or English. The French by the late 1600s were not a major player in India but the English were. Seeing the Mughal artillery and the number of forts that he needed to take from them, Shivaji – throughout the 1670s – conducted numerous secret negotiations with the British to acquire 1 siege mortar, 3 or 4 siege guns, enough grenades for a battalion of grenadiers, and 62 light artillery guns. The British, careful not to anger the Mughals, sold these to the Portuguese who sold them to the Marathas, to allow the British to maintain plausible deniability.
By the time of the Peshwas, the Marathas did not need to scrounge around European Factories for guns. In the 1760s, the Peshwas had set up factories in Ambegaon and Pune with the goal of supplying the Army. The factory at Ambegaon was set to work producing muskets and musket-balls. One factory at Pune was focused on 13-inch siege mortars and mortar shots while the second factory at Pune was focused on light artillery and cannon-balls. Despite this step up, the Maratha Army relied far more heavily on Portuguese and English artillery. Due to a number of treaties signed with them in the 1720s and 30s, Portuguese and English cannons were far cheaper to buy than Maratha cannons. Though, as Colonel Tone – a senior officer in the EIC Factory at Surat – notes, the Maratha artillery was far superior to what the English and Portuguese were selling to them and he believed that continuing to export these inferior guns would only advantage the EIC.
And it was with these disadvantages that they faced the British artillery.
The East India Company and the European Military Revolution:
The first, most important thing, to note is that Colonel Tone’s statement is, simultaneously, true and untrue. It is true that the cannons being made in the Maratha factories were better than what the English were offering to them. It is untrue that they were better than English artillery in general. Rather obviously, the English – or even the Portuguese – were not selling their newest designs or their best guns to the Marathas. Instead, the guns on offer to them were inferior in every possible way to every gun in India at the time.
The differences between the two sets of artillery, and what made the English artillery superior, were all in the metal. Firstly, and most importantly, about 90% of all Indian artillery (referred to by the British as Country Artillery) was made of brass. These brass cannons were state of the art – in 1690. By the 1700s, the Europeans had mastered the art of casting iron. Iron, a much stronger metal than brass, allowed the Europeans to pack more powder more densely into the cannon which would propel the round much faster than previously. A brass cannon, with brass being a weaker metal, would explode with the amount of powder packed into an iron cannon. What iron guns existed, were made very crudely and with no precision, with each barrel different to the next – a total lack of uniformity throughout.
These weaknesses in Country Artillery extended to the ammunition. Once again, this ammunition was state of the art for 1690. They were made of hunks of iron that were hammered into shape while extremely hot – but not yet melted. This, combined with the imprecise barrels of the iron guns, meant that not every cannon ball could fit every barrel and they had to be made to measure. By contrast, the Europeans – on the eve of the Industrial Revolution – had figured out a way to make iron hot enough to melt it and cast it into moulds for perfect and precise measurements. This, combined with further improvements in European metallurgy that allowed them to strengthen the iron beyond anything Indian foundries were capable of, meant that the East India Company’s artillery out-ranged and out-gunned the Maratha Artillery. The Europeans, by the 18th Century, had made it illegal for any European to take employment in the Armies of the Marathas and – under pain of death – had made it illegal for metal-workers and gunsmiths to work for the Maratha factories.
In the end, by the time of the 2nd and 3rd Anglo-Mughal Wars, the Peshwa Armies were ill-trained, they were badly equipped and they were outmatched in every way by the Armies of East India Company. Their defeat, it would now appear, was all but certain.
Sources:
Bruce Lenman, “The Weapons of War in 18th-Century India”, in Journal of the Society of Army Historical Research, 46:185 (1968), pp. 33-34 (This article contains extremely outdated information and does not include newly discovered sources, however it gives a great and very accurate account of the EIC’s capablities and weaponry at the time)
S. N. Sen, The Military System of the Marathas (Orient Longmans; 1928)
Maj. James Grant Duff, History of the Mahrattas, Vols. 1-3 – any edition
Iqbal Khan, “Metallurgy in Medieval India – The Case of the Iron Cannon”, in Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 45 (1984), pp. 464-471
Ram Tandon, “European Adventures and Changes in the Indian Military System”, in Hans Hagerdal (ed.), Responding to the West: Essays on Colonial Domination and Asian Agency
S. Bhattacharya, “The Second Anglo-Maratha War”, in Proceedings of the Indain History Congress, 22 (1959), pp. 403-406
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