पानीपत १७६१ (मराठा साम्राज्य एवं पानीपत महायुद्ध इतिहास)

THE MARATHAS IN THE PANJAB AND BEYOND 11 of the ill-clad and unadaptive Marāthas. An average Maratha soldier of those days wished to return home after eight month's service and very few were willing to continue in foreign lands for more than two camping seasons. Their prepa- ration, their equipment, their physical stamina, not to say home-sickness, would not possibly make their sojourn tolerable beyond that period. These were very real and basic difficulties and unless the Marathas became successful colonizers in distant lands their hope of ruling India was bound to fail. The Muslims spread their rule over the whole continent by this method of establishing self-sufficient colonies, however small, in the provinces they entered, one by one. And still they took centuries to spread over the whole continent. They were, moreover, proselytising and intermarrying with the various local people, thus always strengthening and increasing their outposts. The Marathas, on the other hand, had not shown any of these characteristic virtues nor were they endowed with progressive ideas, methods, or instruments,—in short a higher civilization like that of the British. How could they, under these circumstances, make them- selves good as successful conquerors in foreign climes? To hold this new stretch of five hundred miles from Ambala to Peshawar would have required a permanent garrison of one lakh of soldiers judiciously distributed at the various key-points. This stretch is itself geographically divisible into two almost equal parts; one from Ambala to the Chinab and the other from the Chinab to Peshawar. Up to the Chinab the land is a vast, sandy, level plain. One can scarcely see any hill on the horizon unless one goes north. Beyond the Chinab, hills begin on a small scale, and beyond the Jehelum, the region is mountainous, rocky and comparatively barren, the pro- portion of cultivable land becoming less and less. In the time of Akbar, the whole of this western tract was included in the three Mughal Subahs of Lahore, Multan (to include Sind), and Kabul which included both Kashmir and Kandahar in those days. Afterwards, Sind, or Thattha, Kashmir and Kandahar became separate governorships, due probably to their distance from the centre and the exigencies of military defence. Anybody wanting to rule over these territories would have required good cavalry with horses inured to hot and cold climates, camel corps carrying guns to run through the arid deserts, as well as good mountaineers to pass through dangerous and sometimes snow-clad regions. When Raghoba is found seriously discussing the sovereign rights of the Mughal government or the correct policy for their agents, the Marathas, in these regions, it is doubtful whether he had visualised all these prospects or calculated their cost. The Marathas also employed camels in carrying express despatches, kettle-drums as well as baggage; but they had never taken the trouble to create an efficient, fighting camel-corps, much less organise a mobile artillery of swivel-guns carried on these animals, like Abdali. In fact, Abdali's chief and most successful innovation seems to be this mobile artillery which was always handy when compared to guns carried on carts drawn by bul- locks. In the camel-corps, both the gunner as well as the driver were seated on the same animal; there was absolutely no impediment to its movement. Bul- lock-drawn artillery, on the other hand, needed a pioneer force of sappers and miners to prepare a tolerably good road to carry these heavy guns, requiring in many cases as many as fifty bullocks to draw each gun. The chief adviser