Panipat sits about sixty miles north of Delhi, on flat, unremarkable agricultural land. Nothing about the place suggests historical significance. Yet three times in two centuries, armies gathered there to decide who would rule India. The third time, in 1761, produced what was probably the single bloodiest day of the eighteenth century.
The Maratha Confederacy arrived first. By 1760, they controlled most of the subcontinent. Their empire stretched from the Indus to the southern tip of India, and the Mughal emperor in Delhi did whatever they told him to do. A century earlier, they'd been rebels hiding in mountain forts. Now they collected taxes from Bengal to Gujarat.
Ahmad Shah Durrani, the Afghan king, objected to this arrangement. He'd built his own empire across Afghanistan and into Punjab, and he didn't appreciate Maratha armies showing up in Peshawar. When the Marathas captured Lahore in 1758, Durrani started planning.
He was good at planning. A former general under Nader Shah of Persia, he understood that winning battles often meant avoiding fair fights. So while the Marathas assembled an army in the Deccan, Durrani assembled a coalition. The Rohilla Afghans joined him. So did the Nawab of Awadh, who brought money and troops. The Rajputs and Jats, who might have helped the Marathas, decided to sit this one out. Old grievances about Maratha taxation suddenly seemed very important.
Sadashivrao Bhau led the Maratha expedition north. He was the Peshwa's cousin, an experienced commander, and by most accounts a capable general. Accompanying him was Vishwasrao, the Peshwa's eighteen-year-old son and heir. The young man had already fought in one war and reportedly looked forward to another.
Their army numbered perhaps 50,000 soldiers, including a well-trained infantry corps under Ibrahim Khan Gardi. The Gardis, as they were called, fought in European style with French-supplied artillery. On paper, this was a modern, formidable force.
The problem was what came with it. Tens of thousands of pilgrims, camp followers, and family members tagged along, hoping to visit Hindu holy sites in the north. Estimates vary, but the total number of people traveling with the army may have reached 300,000. Feeding and moving that many people required a constant flow of supplies.
The Marathas took Delhi in August 1760. The city had been sacked repeatedly over the previous decades and offered little in the way of provisions. Meanwhile, Durrani was approaching from the northwest with perhaps 60,000 troops and significantly fewer mouths to feed.
On October 25, Durrani made the move that would decide everything. In a night crossing of the flooded Yamuna River, he got his army between the Marathas and Delhi. The supply line snapped shut.
What followed was less a siege than a slow strangulation. The Marathas fortified their position near Panipat. Durrani surrounded them. Both sides raided each other's supply convoys, but the Afghans were better at it. They knew the territory and had local allies. The Marathas were a thousand miles from home in increasingly hostile country.
By late November, almost no food was getting through to the Maratha camp. Cattle died in large numbers. The winter cold, mild by northern standards but brutal for soldiers from the Deccan, made everything worse. By January, men were reportedly dying of starvation.
On January 13, the Maratha commanders held a council. The options were limited: stay and starve, try to retreat through Afghan-controlled territory, or attack. They chose attack. One account records that the generals asked Sadashivrao Bhau to let them "die in battle rather than perish by starvation."
The Marathas broke camp before dawn. They'd saved enough sugared water to give each soldier something before the fight. They formed up with artillery in front, infantry behind, and cavalry waiting in reserve. The line stretched about twelve kilometers across.
Durrani had a weapon the Marathas hadn't faced in these numbers: zamburaks. These were small swivel guns mounted on camels. The camel would kneel, the gunner would fire, and the whole assembly could relocate faster than any wheeled artillery. Durrani had roughly 2,000 of them.
The battle started around 8:00 AM. Ibrahim Khan Gardi led the first assault, pushing his disciplined infantry against the Rohilla positions on the Afghan right. The Gardis performed well. Contemporary sources suggest they killed around 12,000 Rohillas in three hours. The Afghan right wing was crumbling.
Then the zamburaks went to work. Mobile, elevated, and firing over their own troops' heads, they poured shot into the advancing Maratha formations. The Maratha artillery, positioned for a set-piece battle, couldn't respond effectively without hitting their own men.
Around 2:00 PM, Vishwasrao took a bullet to the head. He'd been fighting near the front, because that's apparently what eighteen-year-old heirs to empires did in the eighteenth century. He died quickly.
Sadashivrao Bhau saw it happen. He climbed down from his war elephant to find the body. This was understandable on a human level and disastrous on a tactical one. Word spread through the ranks that the commander had fallen. Panic followed.
Malharrao Holkar, commanding the cavalry on the right wing, decided the battle was lost and left. He took about 10,000 horsemen with him. The center collapsed. Afghan cavalry swept around the flanks. By 4:00 PM, organized resistance had ended.
The killing continued until dark.
Calculating casualties from eighteenth-century battles involves a lot of guesswork, but the sources generally agree on the scale. Between 60,000 and 70,000 soldiers died on the battlefield. That alone would make Panipat one of the century's deadliest engagements.
It got worse. The day after the battle, according to Kashi Raja (the chief minister of Awadh, who was there), about 40,000 Maratha prisoners were executed. The British historian Grant Duff, writing several decades later, interviewed a survivor and arrived at similar numbers. Around 22,000 women and children from the Maratha camp were taken as slaves.
T.S. Shejwalkar, whose 1946 study remains the standard account, concluded that at least 100,000 Marathas, soldiers and civilians combined, died during and after the battle.
Ibrahim Khan Gardi was captured while performing funeral rites over the bodies of Sadashivrao and Vishwasrao. The Afghans tortured and killed him. Loyalty, in this case, was not rewarded.
The Peshwa was still in central India when a messenger found him with a coded note: "Two pearls have been dissolved, twenty-seven gold coins have been lost, and of the silver and copper, the total cannot be cast up." His son and cousin were dead. His army was gone. He died six months later without ever really recovering from the news.
Durrani had won. He'd destroyed the main Maratha field army, killed their top commanders, and demonstrated that the Afghans could beat anyone on the subcontinent.
Then he went home.
Within three months of the battle, Durrani was back in Afghanistan dealing with tribal revolts and succession disputes. He left behind a nominal Mughal emperor and a regent, neither of whom had any real power. He never returned to India.
The Marathas, remarkably, recovered. Under Peshwa Madhavrao, they rebuilt their army and retook Delhi within a decade. The empire that had seemingly died at Panipat proved more resilient than anyone expected.
So who won? In the long run, probably the British East India Company. They'd conquered Bengal four years earlier and spent the 1760s consolidating their position while the Marathas and Afghans exhausted each other. The decade of Maratha weakness after Panipat gave the Company room to expand. By the time the Marathas had recovered, the British were too strong to dislodge.
The Third Battle of Panipat didn't hand India to the British directly. But it cleared away the one Indian power capable of stopping them.
The monuments at Panipat today commemorate different things depending on who built them. The Kala Amb obelisk marks where tradition says the Marathas made their last stand. A statue of Sadashivrao Bhau stands nearby. The Kabuli Bagh Mosque, built by Babur after the first Battle of Panipat in 1526, still shows damage from 1761.
Outside town, in a mango orchard, you can still trace the outline of the trench the Marathas dug in their final weeks. It's faint now, just a depression in the ground that most visitors would walk past without noticing.
January 14, 1761 fell on Makar Sankranti, a harvest festival. In much of India, it's traditionally celebrated with kite flying and sweets. In Maharashtra, they still remember what else happened that day.
The Third Battle of Panipat took place on January 14, 1761. Total casualties, including post-battle massacres, likely exceeded 100,000.
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