Battle of Buxar

On 22 and 23 October 1764, at Buxar on the Ganges in Bihar, about 130 kilometres west of Patna, a British East India Company army under Major Hector Munro defeated the combined forces of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, Mir Qasim of Bengal, Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh and Balwant Singh of Benares. The victory led to the Treaty of Allahabad in 1765, which gave the Company the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, a decisive step towards British rule in India.

Bengal was among the richest provinces of the Mughal Empire, but by the 18th century its governors, the Nawabs, were independent in all but name, while the East India Company claimed ever wider privileges there. After the Company's victory at Plassey on 23 June 1757, it installed Mir Jafar as Nawab, and in 1760 replaced him with his son-in-law Mir Qasim. The new Nawab soon clashed with the Company over trade. Company servants used their passes to move goods free of the transit duties that Indian merchants had to pay, damaging local commerce. When Mir Qasim abolished internal customs duties altogether, the Company objected and demanded that they be restored.

Fighting began on 25 June 1763 with a Company attack on Patna. Over the following months Company troops defeated Mir Qasim in a series of battles and retook Patna in November. Mir Qasim fled west and formed an alliance with Shah Alam II and Shuja-ud-Daula, ruler of Awadh and the emperor's grand vizier. In May 1764 the allies were repulsed outside Patna.

Munro's army numbered 7,072 men, about 1,800 of them British regulars and some 5,300 Indian sepoys. The allied armies were estimated at more than 40,000. At daybreak Mirza Najaf Khan, commanding the Mughal right, advanced first, but the Company lines formed within twenty minutes and threw the attack back. British accounts also mention Durrani and Rohilla cavalry fighting in skirmishes. The fighting was over by midday. As his troops withdrew, Shuja-ud-Daula blew up large stores of gunpowder.

Munro pursued in several columns. Shuja-ud-Daula retreated west across a bridge of boats over the Karmanasa river and then destroyed it, leaving the emperor and part of his own army behind. Mir Qasim also fled. Najaf Khan rallied the remaining troops around Shah Alam, but the emperor chose to negotiate with the victors.

Figures vary by source. The historian John Fortescue put Company losses at 847 killed, wounded and missing, most of them sepoys, and the allied dead at 2,000, with many more wounded. Another account gives 69 European and 664 sepoy casualties on the Company side and 6,000 on the Mughal side. The Company captured 133 guns and more than a million rupees in cash.

Shah Alam placed himself under British protection, and Shuja-ud-Daula, pursued across the Ganges plain, eventually surrendered. After a final defeat of the allies and their Maratha supporters in May 1765, Mir Qasim sought peace; he died impoverished in 1777. The Treaty of Allahabad, signed on 16 August 1765, granted the Company the diwani, the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa on the emperor's behalf in return for a fixed payment. The emperor came to depend on the Company's money and soldiers. In 1772 the Company ended the remaining local administration and took direct control of Bengal.

Buxar confirmed what Plassey had begun. The defeat of the emperor and two of the most powerful regional rulers exposed the divisions among India's princes and made the Company the leading power in Bengal and much of northern India. The battle is widely seen as the beginning of the end of real Mughal political power and as a step towards the British rule that culminated in the British Raj.

Our 1783 map shows Bengal under Company rule, with Awadh (Oudh) to the west and the Maratha Empire beyond, as the balance of power stood two decades after the battle in India.