The Battle of Assaye
At Assaye in September 1803 a British force of about seven thousand attacked a Maratha army five times its size and won, and the officer who commanded it called it the hardest fighting he ever saw. The army it beat was not a conventional Indian one. Mahadji Scindia of Gwalior had hired a Savoyard officer, Benoit de Boigne, to raise brigades of infantry drilled, uniformed and equipped on the European model, with their own artillery trains and European and Eurasian officers. Those brigades had beaten every Indian army they met and had made Gwalior the strongest power in central India, holding Delhi and the Mughal emperor in it. Daulatrao Shinde inherited that army at fifteen. The Second Anglo-Maratha War came out of the Company's treaty with the defeated Peshwa, which the other Maratha houses read correctly as the end of their independence. Arthur Wellesley found the combined Scindia and Bhonsle forces behind a river and attacked at once rather than wait, on the reasoning that a delay would let them withdraw. He crossed at an unmarked ford he inferred must exist because two villages faced each other across the water, and the Maratha guns turned to meet him. A third of his force were casualties by evening. Gwalior lost the campaign and the brigades. Lake took Delhi and Agra in the north in the same season, and the treaty of Surji-Anjangaon at the end of the year stripped Scindia of the Doab, of Delhi and of the emperor whose protector he had been. The European officers were dismissed and the brigades disbanded, which ended the only serious attempt by an Indian power to match the Company at its own military system. Wellesley became Wellington, and told an interviewer decades later that Assaye, not Waterloo, was the best thing he ever did in the way of fighting.
- Year: 1803 CE
- Category: Military
