Daulatrao Shinde

Daulatrao Shinde inherited the strongest army in India at fifteen and lost it to the British in two campaigns. He succeeded his great-uncle Mahadji Shinde in 1794 as ruler of Gwalior, at a moment when the Maratha confederacy dominated northern India and the Shinde house held the Mughal emperor in its keeping. His army was trained and officered on European lines, largely the creation of the Savoyard Benoit de Boigne, and Pierre Cuillier-Perron commanded it after de Boigne retired. He spent his early years fighting the other Maratha houses rather than the British: the quarrel with the Holkars of Indore ended in the sack of Poona in 1802, which drove the Peshwa Baji Rao II into the arms of the East India Company and produced the Treaty of Bassein. That treaty brought on the Second Anglo-Maratha War, in which Arthur Wellesley beat him at Assaye and Argaon in 1803 and Gerard Lake took Delhi and Aligarh; by the Treaty of Surji-Anjangaon he surrendered the territory between the Ganges and the Jumna, Delhi and Agra, and the custody of the emperor. He kept out of the Third Anglo-Maratha War in 1817 and was obliged instead to sign away his claims and accept a subsidiary alliance, which preserved his state and ended its independence. He was left with debts and with irregular troops he could not pay, the Pindaris, whose raiding gave the Company its pretext for the final war. Gwalior remained a princely state until 1947. His widow Baiza Bai ruled Gwalior after him and was deposed by the British in 1833. The Shinde name is usually written Scindia in English sources, which is why he appears under two spellings. He had no son of his own body and adopted an heir shortly before he died.

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