Battle of Assaye

On 23 September 1803, near the village of Assaye in the Deccan of western India, a small East India Company army under Major General Arthur Wellesley attacked and beat a far larger Maratha force raised by Daulatrao Scindia and Raghoji II Bhonsle of Berar. The fight was the pivotal clash of the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, regarded it for the rest of his life as the best thing he ever did on a battlefield.

Around 1800 the great chiefs of the Maratha Empire were fighting one another. In October 1802 Yashwantrao Holkar defeated Scindia and the Peshwa, Baji Rao II, at Poona. The Peshwa fled to the British and, by the Treaty of Bassein that December, accepted Company control of his foreign policy and a permanent garrison in return for his restoration. The Governor-General, Lord Mornington, was Wellesley's elder brother and saw the chance to make Britain the leading power in India. Wellesley duly reinstated Baji Rao in May 1803.

Scindia and the Raja of Berar regarded the treaty as an intrusion into Maratha affairs and gathered their armies on the border of Hyderabad, a British ally. When talks broke down in early August 1803, Wellesley declared war on both. Gerard Lake opened a campaign in the north while Wellesley operated in the Deccan.

Wellesley stormed the walled town of Ahmednagar on 8 August and its fort surrendered days later. He then spent weeks chasing the mobile Maratha host with a second column under Colonel James Stevenson. By September the allied chiefs had concentrated a combined army of perhaps 50,000 or more, including some 10,800 regular infantry drilled and led by European officers such as the Hanoverian Anthony Pohlmann, together with tens of thousands of irregular horsemen and over 100 guns.

On 21 September Wellesley and Stevenson agreed to strike from two directions three days later. But on 23 September Wellesley's scouts found the enemy only about five miles away, not where he had expected. With roughly 4,500 regular troops, some 5,000 allied horse and 17 guns, he chose to attack at once rather than wait and risk the Marathas slipping away.

Pohlmann had drawn up his line behind the Kailna river. Guessing that a ford must lie between two villages beyond the Maratha left, Wellesley crossed there in mid-afternoon to strike the flank. Pohlmann swiftly turned his line to face him, stretched between the river and Assaye.

Maratha artillery tore into the British ranks, so Wellesley abandoned his own guns and sent the infantry straight at the cannon with bayonets. The 78th Highlanders and Madras sepoy battalions broke the southern part of the line. On the right, however, the pickets and the 74th Highlanders strayed towards Assaye and were nearly destroyed until a charge by British and Madras cavalry rescued them. Maratha gunners who had pretended to be dead manned their pieces again and had to be driven off a second time. In the evening Pohlmann's remaining infantry withdrew across the Juah river, and the irregulars left Assaye. The exhausted victors could not follow.

The Company force lost 428 killed, 1,138 wounded and 18 missing, more than a third of those engaged. British dispatches put Maratha deaths at about 1,200, while some modern historians estimate around 6,000 killed and wounded; 98 guns were captured. Wellesley later called it the bloodiest battle for its size that he ever saw.

Further victories at Argaon and Gawilghur, together with Lake's successes in the north, forced Scindia and Berar to seek peace, leaving the Company the dominant power across much of the subcontinent. Regiments that fought there carried "Assaye" as a battle honour, although the Government of India has since classed it as a repugnant one.

Our 1800 map shows the Maratha lands on the eve of the war, and the 1815 map shows the expanding Company territories, forerunners of the later British Raj.