Third Battle of Panipat

By January 1761 the Maratha army that had pushed north to the edge of Afghanistan's ambitions was cut off at Panipat, out of supplies, and burdened with a civilian camp that may have outnumbered the soldiers. Sadashivrao Bhau attacked because waiting meant starving. The Maratha line did well for much of the day before it broke, and what followed the breaking was worse than the battle. Maratha power in northern India was checked for a decade, and Ahmad Shah Durrani, unable to hold what he had won, went home. The space that opened in northern India was not filled by either of them, and within a generation the East India Company was in it.

Casualty figures for Panipat are among the least recoverable of any major eighteenth-century battle, because the camp made combatant and non-combatant indistinguishable and because both sides had reasons to report what they reported. In Marathi the name became the word for catastrophe, and the battle sits in western Indian memory in a way it does not elsewhere in the country. The communal reading, which makes the day a Hindu-Muslim confrontation, is a later imposition that historians push back on by pointing out the Muslim units in Maratha service, the artillery under Ibrahim Khan Gardi among them, and the large Hindu powers that stayed out of the fight rather than rally to either side, though that correction competes with a very successful 2019 film and with political uses of the battle. The strategic argument that outlasts all of it concerns who actually benefited, since the two powers that could have contested northern India spent themselves here and a third, then still a trading company with an army, did not.