Gwalior

The strongest of the Maratha houses, and the one that came closest to beating the British in the field. The Scindia family were granted territory in Malwa by the Peshwa in the 1730s and built it into a state that controlled central India and, for two decades, the Mughal emperor himself. Mahadji Scindia took Delhi in 1788, restored the blinded emperor Shah Alam II to his throne and governed in his name as regent of the empire. He also did what no other Indian ruler managed: he hired a Savoyard officer, Benoit de Boigne, to raise brigades of infantry drilled and equipped on the European model with their own artillery, and those brigades beat every Indian army they met. His successor Daulatrao inherited that army at fifteen and lost it in two wars. The British fought the Scindia brigades at Assaye in 1803, where Arthur Wellesley - later Wellington - called it the hardest fighting he had seen, and again at Laswari, and destroyed them. Gwalior survived as a subsidiary ally with its territory reduced. Baiza Bai, Daulatrao's widow, ran the state and a banking house from 1827, held the revenue in order and lent money to the British, and was deposed by them in 1833 in favour of an adopted minor. She spent thirty years trying to get the throne back. Gwalior later held the largest arsenal in central India, which the rebels of 1857 captured; the state acceded to India in 1948. The fort itself is the reason the state has its name. Gwalior's citadel stands on an isolated sandstone plateau three hundred feet above the plain, was held by successive dynasties for a thousand years, and was described by a Mughal emperor as the pearl among the fortresses of Hind. Its rock-cut Jain colossi and the fifteenth-century Man Singh palace survive, and one of the earliest known written zeros is carved in a small temple on the hill.

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