Mahadaji Shinde

Mahadaji Shinde was wounded and left for dead at Panipat, escaped with a permanent limp, and spent the next thirty years rebuilding Maratha power in northern India until he was effectively the regent of the Mughal empire. He was an illegitimate son of Ranoji Shinde, the commander Bajirao I had raised from a household servant, and he inherited a claim rather than a certainty. After Panipat he consolidated Gwalior and Malwa, and then did something no other Indian ruler of the period managed: he hired the Savoyard officer Benoit de Boigne and built European-drilled infantry brigades with their own artillery, paid for by assigned revenue, which could stand against both Indian cavalry and Company troops. With that army he took Delhi in 1788, restored the blinded Shah Alam II, and had himself appointed the emperor's deputy - the Marathas thereby holding the Mughal throne in trust. He beat the Rajputs at Merta and Patan and the Rohillas at Ghulam Kadir's fall. His relationship with Nana Fadnavis was a long rivalry conducted inside a shared loyalty, and the two of them between them are why the confederacy survived the 1780s. He died suddenly at Wanawadi near Pune in 1794. His brigades passed to his successor and were destroyed by the British nine years later. De Boigne s brigades numbered around twenty-seven thousand men at their height and were the largest European-trained force in India outside Company service. The Shinde house he consolidated ruled Gwalior until 1947. He was a patron of Marathi and Sanskrit letters and wrote devotional verse himself.

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