पानीपत १७६१ (मराठा साम्राज्य एवं पानीपत महायुद्ध इतिहास)

The third battle of Panipat was fought between the Marathas led by Sadashivrao Bhau and the foreign Afghans with their Indian allies led by Ahmad Shah Abdali Bhau had been called by the Mughal Emperor Alam gir II before his murder He was acting as Regent of the Mughal empire at the dead emperor's behest The Marathas were fighting with Abdali, the foreign interferer in Indian politics, and not Abdali the champion of Islam This point has not been emphasised by the historians uptil now, because they have misconstrued it Bhau (and the Peshwa also) had invited Shuja ud daulah of Oudh, the Nizam brothers in the Deccan, Kamal ud din Khan Babi from Gujarat and even the Indian Ruhelas and Afghans, to join their forces with him His main support in the campaign was Ibrahim Khan Gardi with his trained infantry corps The Peshwa's half brother Samsher Bahadur was a Muslim, who died of wounds received at Panipat Many departments of the Maratha army, especially the artillery, were manned almost exclusively by the Muslims On the other hand, no Hindu potentate from northern India fought as an ally of the Marathas They were all in their minds, siding with Abdali, and had taken part in calling him to India to punish the Marathas It is unhistorical, therefore to call the battle of Panipat a Hindu Muslim fight, though Najib had screwed'down Abdali on the religious count, for selfish ends Verily religion is the last resort of scoundrels! Temperamentally, the Marathas are incapable of bigotry, fanaticism, extremes They take to a thing as a duty for the time being and leave it when found unnecessary They had taken up arms for the defence of their gods and homes in the seventeenth century They wielded arms in the eighteenth for keeping India free from foreign rule But in the nineteenth they had so far forsaken their military life that they were classed by Lord Roberts with the Bengalees and Madrasees as one of the non martial races of India In 1930, the Bombay Presidency supplied only seven thousand men out of a lakh and fifty eight thousand of Indian soldiers, and all the seven thousand were not Marathas This transformation shows that the Marathas were not war like or bred to the profession of arms in the same sense as the Afghans or the Turks They were peasant civilians turned into soldiers for a cause

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Having depicted the historical background so far, it is but meet that I should pass on to the previous writings in the field I am about to enter It is instructive to study the gradual change of opinion on the Panipat affair During the nineteenth century Kashiraj and Duff practically held the field When Rajwade wrote his thundering detailed introduction in 1898 on the basis of new letters in Marathi, he practically carried the public with him as if caught in a flood Nobody stopped to inquire whether his analysis was correct, nor did any one point out the obvious defects in his editing of the letters Ten years later, a level headed professor of history (H G Limaye), writing a special essay on the European modelled Indian armies and their rela tions with the Indian States in the eighteenth century, changed the trend of opinion by half While still charging Govindpant Bundele and Malharrao xi