White Mughals (19 page)

He also did his best to persuade the Hyderabadis that in his opinion their army was simply not up to taking on the celebrated infantry regiments of the Marathas. These were trained in the latest French military techniques by one of the greatest military figures of eighteenth-century India, Comte Benoît de Boigne, and famed for their ‘wall of fire and iron’, which had wreaked havoc upon even the best-drilled Indian armies sent against them.
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Aristu Jah, wrote Kirkpatrick, did not seem to think ‘the danger so imminent, as I should be inclined to do, were a brigade of De Boigne’s to be actually employed against him, for in this case I am afraid that the business would be over before the people at home would be able to send out the necessary orders for our taking this state under our protection’.
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By December, however, Kirkpatrick realised that he was failing to get his message across: not only the Nizam, but the entire camp at Bidar had convinced themselves that victory against the Marathas was within their grasp. Every night the dancing girls sang songs about the forthcoming triumph, and Aristu Jah even announced to the court that when they took Pune he would send his Maratha counterpart Nana Phadnavis, ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’, off to exile in Benares ‘with a cloth about his loins, and a pot of water in his hands, to mutter incantations on the banks of the Ganges’. ‘There would appear to be a storm brewing in the head of [Aristu Jah],’ William Kirkpatrick wrote to Shore, ‘which may possibly burst at no great distance of time … Whenever it takes place I shall dread its consequence; and not be without my fears of these consequences being ere long.’
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Kirkpatrick was right to be anxious. In December 1794, just as news arrived that his brother James had finally succeeded in getting transferred from Vizianagram to Hyderabad and was already on his way, the order was given. The Nizam’s huge army lumbered out of the safety of Bidar and headed off to war in the direction of the Maratha capital of Pune.

The campaign was as short as it was disastrous.

For three months the Nizam’s army advanced slowly towards Pune along the banks of the Manjirah River. The Marathas advanced equally slowly towards the Mughals (as the Hyderabadis called themselves
^ap
). Of the two armies, the Marathas’ was slightly larger—around 130,000 men against the Mughal total of around ninety thousand; the Maratha force was also much the more experienced and better led. Both armies were equally divided between cavalry and infantry, though only the Hyderbadis had a regiment of female infantry dressed in British-style redcoats, brought along primarily to protect the Nizam’s harem women, who also came along on the trip in a long caravan of covered elephant howdahs.
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The slow march towards Pune was marked by frequent courtly but inconclusive negotiations between the two sides; to the end the Nizam insisted that he was not invading the Maratha territories, merely enjoying a prolonged hunting expedition along the marches of his territory. At every stage, negotiation was preferred to fighting, and intrigue to outright war. Like the baroque social etiquette of the Nizam’s court, the military strategy of the Nizam seemed like an elaborate and courtly charade, a slow and penetrating game of chess rather than a real campaign with living soldiers suffering actual fatalities.

While negotiations continued, both sides spent much of their energies on attempts at destabilising the army of the other through bribes and covert intelligence work. Aristu Jah spent a vast sum—rumoured to be around one crore rupees
^aq
—trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade Scindia and his famous de Boigne brigades to desert the Maratha army, while Nana Phadnavis spent a smaller sum—reportedly around seven lakh rupees
^ar
—trying to encourage the pro-Maratha and pro-Tipu factions in the Hyderabad durbar to betray Aristu Jah. Mir Alam, Aristu Jah’s former protégé, was believed to be among those who received Nana bribes.
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The British Resident in Pune, Sir Charles Warre Malet, thought Mir Alam’s behaviour particularly suspicious when he came to the Maratha court to negotiate, and he relayed his suspicions back to William: ‘He appears to have done little else since his arrival at Pune,’ wrote Kirkpatrick to Shore, ‘but complain and insinuate perpetual suspicions [of Aristu Jah] to Sir Charles Malet, the utility of which I have never been able to discover. On the contrary they only serve to perplex and procrastinate matters.’
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Aristu Jah, meanwhile, concentrated all his efforts on trying to persuade Kirkpatrick to throw in his lot—and more specifically the armies of the East India Company, especially the two British regiments stationed at Hyderabad—with the Nizam. But William refused to alter his position: in this war, he maintained, the Company was to be strictly neutral. He even rather stiffly refused to answer Aristu Jah’s question as to which route the Hyderabad army would do best to take, saying it was ‘against all sense of propriety’ for him to give advice on such a matter.

Finally, on the evening of 14 March 1795, the Nizam’s army arrived at the top of a ridge known as the Moori Ghat, and looked down to see the Maratha army encamped a day’s march below them. At eight o’clock the following morning, 15 March, the Nizam gave the order for his troops to descend from the heights of the ghat. The Marathas were waiting for them at the bottom.

Firing began soon after lunch, at around 2 p.m. It was the two rival battalions of French-trained infantry that came into contact first, with the ‘Corps Français de Raymond’ fighting under the French Republican tricolore and making steady progress into the centre of their Maratha counterparts, the famous de Boigne brigades, who fought under the French Bourbon emblems. To William’s great surprise, Raymond’s twelve newly raised infantry regiments used their higher altitude to great effect, showering de Boigne’s flanks with sprays of grapeshot. Kirkpatrick was more surprised still when the Mughal Women’s Regiment, the Zuffur Plutun or Victorious Battalion, advanced equally steadily downhill with their muskets, and succeeded in holding their own against the Maratha right wing.
^as
By nightfall, Raymond’s force, deserted by their Paigah cavalry escort, had been forced to retreat a little in the face of a fierce cannonade from de Boigne’s artillery. But the bulk of the Nizam’s army had succeeded in reaching their designated campsite on the banks of a rivulet three miles on from the slopes of Moori Ghat. There they dug in for the night, well positioned for the expected battle the following morning.

No one was quite sure at the time what went wrong, but just after eleven o’clock that night, a sudden panic broke out in the Nizam’s camp. Looking back on the rout the following morning, William wrote:

What in fact had happened, as Kirkpatrick later learned, was that an intermittent cannonade by the Marathas had panicked the Nizam’s women, and especially Bakshi Begum, the Nizam’s most senior wife, who threatened to unveil herself in public if the Nizam did not take his entire
zenana
(harem) into the shelter of the small and half-ruined moated fort of Khardla. This lay at the very bottom of Moori Ghat, just over three miles behind the front line. During the confusion of the Nizam’s inexplicable retreat, a small party of Marathas looking for water stumbled across a Mughal picket, and the brief exchange of fire in the dark was enough to throw the remaining Hyderabadi troops into a complete panic. They rushed back to the walls of the Khardla Fort, leaving all their guns, baggage camels, ammunition wagons, stores and food behind them.

When dawn broke the following morning, the Marathas found to their amazement that the Mughals had not only thrown away their strategic advantage, but left their arms, ammunition and supplies scattered over the battlefield while taking shelter in an utterly indefensible position. Charles Malet wrote in his official report that morning that ‘we are necessarily astonished at the important consequence that ensued in the unaccountable flight of the Nizam’s army, by which not only the respectability of his personal character and government was sacrificed, but the very existence of himself and his army endangered’.
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Their amazement did not, however, stop the Marathas from taking full advantage of the Mughal reverse: by ten o’clock in the morning they had brought in four hundred abandoned Mughal ammunition carts, two thousand camels and fifteen heavy cannon. By eleven they had completely surrounded the army of Hyderabad, and began raining shot down on the fort from the sixty cannon which they managed to manoeuvre onto the lower slopes of Moori Ghat. There had hardly been a battle; but already it was all over for the Nizam.
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By the following morning provisions in the fort were already beginning to run low, and the Marathas had sent in an envoy to settle terms. ‘The distress of the army for water and forage is increasing hourly,’ wrote William, who had taken shelter with the rest of the Nizam’s entourage,

In the event negotiations rambled on for twenty-two days. Each day the situation grew worse in the Hyderabad camp as the Marathas tightened the siege. Each day, as the Nizam hesitated, the Marathas raised their demands. Many in the Nizam’s camp suspected that the lack of any serious resistance or any attempt to break the siege was due to treachery within the Hyderabad ranks, with suspicion later falling on both Mir Alam and the pro-Maratha Paigah nobles. These suspicions increased when it emerged that the key Maratha demand was the disgrace and surrender of the presumed plotters’ principal enemy, the Nizam’s pro-English Minister, Aristu Jah. Whatever its cause, the scale of the disaster for Hyderabad was now increasingly clear: ‘The Nizam is obliged to yield to all the demands of the M[aratha]s,’ wrote William, ‘and ceases to be an independent prince.’
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Many of the letters that William wrote at this period are lost, as the messengers who carried them failed to make it through the Maratha lines, and were cut down by the patrolling Pindary horsemen. The few which have survived show that the situation within the fort was insupportable, and that Kirkpatrick’s small English party was suffering as badly as the rest.

The water in the old fort was green and brackish and gave the defenders dysentery, but despite this sold for a rupee
^at
a cup. By the end of the first week all spare supplies of forage and food were finished, and the price for even a handful of lentils rose astronomically. The defenders cut down the Tamarind trees in the fort and ate their leaves and bark and unripe fruit. After these were exhausted, starvation began to set in: some died of hunger, others of thirst, and the squalor led to an outbreak of cholera.
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By the end of the second week, a third of William’s escort and servants were dead. On 30 March he wrote to Calcutta:

William was in fact playing down the seriousness of his own illness. Before the siege, the effect of spending the entire monsoon under canvas had already taken its toll, and he had had to spend more and more time flat on his camp bed, taking opium to relieve his pain. The rest of his party and their pack animals had also found the going hard. Even before they left Bidar, Kirkpatrick had lost two of his elephants and two of his camels. Now all of his escort and servants who were not dead were seriously ill, and there was little the Residency’s English doctor, George Ure, could do for them. Particularly badly affected was William’s Assistant, Steuart, who was languishing with a high fever. He never completely recovered, lingering on until October when his strength finally ebbed away.