Bikers for Warriors

Sadashiv Rao Bhau with Ibrahim Gardi (left)
in a painting at Raja Kelkar Museum, Pune

    On Saturday, 550 descendants of Maratha fighters completed a 5,400-km long journey, retracing the route of their forefathers who fought in the Third Battle of Panipat. They want India to remember the story that got lost in history

    To Panipat — that was the route to begin with. So, on January 3, a group of youngsters left Pune on a historical journey. Their destination was the famous battlefield of Haryana. Saddled on motorcycles, these 550 individuals, 34 of them women, roared past the Western Ghats, the Narmada, and the Chambal ravines on their way to Panipat. To call it an adventure trip would have been a travesty of the emotion they were trying to articulate —it was their bid to relive the journey undertaken by their ancestors 252 years ago. It was also an attempt to put the record straight about the Third Battle of Panipat in which forces of the Maratha confederacy had taken on Ahmed Shah Abdali.

    Before the battle, the Marathas had begun a 10-month long campaign under the command of Sadashiv Rao Bhau to reach Panipat and take on Abdali’s forces. Now, their descendants want the country to hear the story which “hasn’t been told properly.” “We have participants from Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat. We all wanted to have first-hand experience of what the Marathas under Sadashiv Rao Bhau had experienced two-and-ahalf centuries ago. The story of Panipat needs to be told to our countrymen,” says Pandurang Balkawade, a historian who is one of the driving forces behind the Panipat Ranasangram Smruti Samiti that organised the rally which ended in a function attended by President Pratibha Patil and Punjab governor Shivraj Patil at Panipat on January 14.

    But retracing the path of the Maratha warriors was not easy. The bikers faced the same problems their ancestors might have in the 18th century. As they entered the Gangetic plains in January, the winter chill froze their bones. “At Agra, about 250 people had to turn back because of the cold,” says Dr Sandeep Mahind, who took care of the logistics through the 5,400-km long journey.

    The rally entered Delhi on the 10th day of their journey. Back in 1760, it took the Marathas 120 days to reach Delhi from Sindkhed in the Deccan. The Maratha retinue exceeded the number of combatants. Also, the Marathas then were no longer a highly mobile cavalry army that believed in the shoot-andscoot doctrine. They had heavy artillery that slowed down their march.

    “The cold definitely played a part in the Maratha debacle at Panipat. The army wasn’t sufficiently provisioned to beat the chill. In comparison, the Afghans came from a cooler climate and could easily fight here. But it was the dwindling supplies that seriously impaired the Marathas. The Maratha command structure was faulty, too. While generals like Scindia and Holkar preferred the traditional mode of guerrilla warfare, Bhau himself and Ibrahim Khan Gardi believed in European style combat with effective use of artillery and musketry,” says Dr Uday S Kulkarni, the critically acclaimed author of Solstice At Panipat: 14 January 1761.

The bikers on their way to Haryana

    On October 25, 1760, Abdali crossed the Yamuna at Baghpat, surprising the Marathas. Their route to Delhi blocked, the Marathas dug in at Panipat for two months. “Both sides played a waiting game and decided to starve each other down. On the diplomacy front, too, they failed. After that, it became difficult for the Marathas to sustain. They had to fight,” Kulkarni says.

    On January 14, 1761, the Marathas came out of their defences and began the attack at 9am; by 3pm, it was all over. Most of the top commanders, including Peshwa’s son, Vishwas Rao, and Bhau himself, lay dead.

    Considering the importance of this battle in Indian history, very little has been done to preserve its legacy. “It was impossible for us to do anything. Our family was banished to Bithoor after the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817-18. Until the 1930s, we were required to obtain permission of the district collectors of Bareilly and Poona before leaving Bithoor and going south. But the other sardars, the so-called rajas (Holkar, Scindia, Gaekwad and Bhonsle), were better off. Nobody, not even the government of India after Independence, did anything to preserve the legacy,” rues Uday Sinh Peshwa, a scion of the Peshwa family.

    But others realised the importance of this battle. The British studied it keenly and though they understood they could beat the Indian forces, they retained their admiration for the great Maratha generals, including Ibrahim Khan Gardi. “The governor of Bombay would visit my family every year to pay respects to my great ancestor. The practice continued until Independence,” says

Rehan Abbas Ali Sardar, a direct descendant of Ibrahim Gardi. “My great grandmother had willed it that none of us should ever go to Panipat. She feared some evil might befall us, the way it did on Ibrahim Khan, who was captured by the Afghans and tortured to death. There should be some memorial of all those who perished at Panipat.”

    How much of the battle do our own universities remember? “As a faculty of defence studies in a couple of civilian institutions, I observed that the element of military history was missing,” says Maj Gen (retd) Shashikant Pitre. In most universities in the West, where military history is a separate branch of study, they talk about even lesser known Indian battles. The same is, however, not true of our universities. The general also hoped the government would do something to preserve the legacy. “The memory of Panipat still affects people in Maharashtra. The name itself has become a byword for disaster or great loss,” Pitre says.

    The bikers from Pune may just have rekindled an interest in the legacy of their great ancestors, revisiting an episode that changed the history of India.

FACE-OFF AT PANIPAT

ARMY STRENGTH

Marathas

40,000 light cavalry, 15,000 infantry, including 8,000 Gardi musketeers; 15,000 Pindaris; 200 cannons

Afghans

42,000 heavy cavalry; 38,000 infantry; 10,000 reserves; 4,000 personal guards; 80 cannons

TOP COMMANDERS

Marathas

Vishwas Rao, Sadashiv Rao Bhau and Ibrahim Khan Gardi

Afghans

Ahmed Shah Abdali, Shah Wali Khan and Najib Khan Rohilla