Panipat 1761: Two Pearls Dissolved, and the Day That Broke Two Empires

Central India, the middle of January 1761. A great Maratha army is crossing the Narmada, heading north. At its head rides the Peshwa, Balaji Bajirao, the Brahmin chief minister who runs the Maratha empire from Pune. He is late.

His scouts bring in a bankers’ courier, paid to carry a letter from Panipat, near Delhi, to Aurangabad in nine days. Bankers heard bad news first. The Peshwa opens the letter himself.

Two pearls have been dissolved, twenty-seven gold mohurs have been lostBankers’ letter from Panipat, as quoted by the historian James Grant Duff

Of the silver and copper, it goes on, the total cannot be counted. The Peshwa needed no key to the riddle. The two pearls were his eldest son, Vishwasrao, eighteen years old, and his cousin, Sadashivrao Bhau, commander of the army. The gold coins were his generals. The silver and copper were everybody else.

On 14 January 1761, on the plain outside Panipat, the Afghan king Ahmad Shah Abdali and his Indian allies had destroyed the largest army the Marathas ever sent north. It was among the biggest, bloodiest battles of the century.

This is the story from both camps. Neither comes out of it clean. Both had heroes.

This was the third great battle at Panipat. The first two, Babur’s in 1526 and Akbar’s army against Hemu in 1556, are in our story <a href="/news/mughals-panipat-to-taj-mahal-full-story">The Mughals, From Panipat to the Taj Mahal</a>.

By the 1750s the Mughal emperor was a puppet, and the Marathas pulled many of the strings. Their horsemen collected chauth, a quarter of the revenue, across much of India. To those who paid, it was the price of protection. To the Rajputs, Jats, Rohillas and the raided villages of Bengal, it often felt like plunder.

In 1758 the Peshwa’s brother Raghunathrao rode all the way to Lahore, drove out the Afghan governor and chased his men back across the Indus at Attock. A Maratha flag flew in Punjab. It was the high-water mark.

It did not last. The Afghan king, Ahmad Shah Abdali, had already raided India four times, and in 1757 his troops had sacked Delhi and massacred pilgrims at Mathura. He came back. In January 1760, at Barari Ghat on the Yamuna near Delhi, the Rohilla Afghans of Najib Khan, better known as Najib-ud-Daula, routed a Maratha army. Its commander, Dattaji Shinde, was killed and beheaded.

In Pune, the court argued over who should lead the revenge. Raghunathrao had come home from Lahore with a debt of 88 lakh rupees, according to Casi Raja, a Hindu secretary of Shuja-ud-Daula who was in the Afghan camp and later wrote the most detailed account of the campaign. The command went instead to the Peshwa’s cousin, the Bhau.

Sadashivrao Bhau was 29 when he set out: proud, clever and a fine administrator. Months earlier, at Udgir, he had beaten the Nizam of Hyderabad with the help of a remarkable soldier: Ibrahim Khan Gardi, a Muslim gunner trained by the French general Bussy. His sepoys, drilled and armed in the European style, were called the Gardis, from the French word garde.

On 14 March 1760 the army left Patdur, near Aurangabad. With it went the Peshwa’s son Vishwasrao as nominal commander. The famous Maratha chiefs Malhar Rao Holkar and Jankoji Shinde joined on the way north.

It was not only an army. Thousands of pilgrims came to bathe at the holy places of the north, with families, servants and traders. Modern estimates put the non-combatants near two lakh; Casi Raja heard five lakh, surely too many. Either way, it was a moving city that had to eat every day.

At Agra, Suraj Mal, the shrewd Jat king of Bharatpur, gave the Bhau the advice of a man who knew the north. Leave the families and the heavy baggage behind the Chambal, he said, and fight the Afghans the old Maratha way, light and fast, cutting their supplies until the hot weather sent them home. Casi Raja writes that Holkar and the other chiefs agreed.

The Bhau would not have it. In Casi Raja’s account he called Suraj Mal a mere zamindar and told Holkar he had outlived his wits. Casi Raja was an enemy writer, but Nana Fadnavis, on the Maratha side, also wrote that the Bhau gave up the Maratha way of fighting.

The army took Delhi on 1 August 1760. The troops were unpaid, so the Bhau had the silver ceiling of the Diwan-i-Khas, the emperor’s hall of private audience, pulled down and melted into coin. Casi Raja says it made 17 lakh rupees. Suraj Mal left the camp soon after and went home.

Ahmad Shah Abdali was about forty, a former cavalry officer of the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah who had been chosen king by Afghan chiefs at Kandahar in 1747. He took the title Durr-i-Durran, Pearl of Pearls, and his people, the Abdalis, became the Durranis. Afghans still call him Ahmad Shah Baba, the father of the nation.

He was invited and helped by Indian Muslim rulers who feared the Marathas more than him. The most important was Najib-ud-Daula, a Rohilla Pashtun soldier of fortune who had made himself master of the upper Doab and paymaster of the Mughal army. For him the Marathas were raiders who had burned his lands. In Delhi, the Sufi scholar Shah Waliullah also wrote to Abdali, urging him to rescue India’s Muslims.

The great prize was Shuja-ud-Daula, the young Nawab of Awadh, whose father had been a Maratha ally. Najib rode to Lucknow to win him over. Shuja joined the Afghans but, Casi Raja says, kept talking to the Maratha camp almost to the end, with Casi Raja carrying the messages.

So this was not simply India against a foreigner, though it is often told that way. The Hindu Marathas’ best infantry was led by a Muslim. On the Afghan side were Hindu officials and a Gosain commander, Raja Anupgir, in Shuja’s service.

In autumn the Yamuna ran high between the two armies. Abdali sat on the east bank; the Bhau held Delhi on the west. Letters went back and forth. On 16 September 1760 the Bhau wrote to Pune that money could not be borrowed anywhere.

In October the Bhau struck north at Kunjpura, an Afghan fort and grain store on the Yamuna. Ibrahim Khan’s men helped storm it. The garrison was killed or taken, and Qutb Shah, a Rohilla leader in the attack that killed Dattaji Shinde, was executed. Abdali, on the far side of the swollen river, could not save it.

Then the Marathas made a mistake. While they were busy plundering Kunjpura, Abdali found a ford at Baghpat, north of Delhi, and around 25 October got his whole army across. Now he stood between the Marathas and Delhi, and between the Marathas and home.

The Bhau fell back to Panipat, dug a ditch and rampart round his camp and followers, and waited. By 1 November 1760 the armies faced each other across a few kilometres of plain.

For two and a half months nothing was decided, and everything got worse. Both sides sent raiding parties to seize grain. The Afghans were hungry too: Casi Raja says coarse flour in their camp cost two rupees a seer. But they had the Doab behind them, and Najib’s Rohillas to bring in supplies. The Marathas had only what they could grab.

In December an Afghan raiding force rode about forty kos in a night and fell on Govind Pant Bundele, the Maratha officer bringing money and food from the Doab. The old man fell off his horse as he fled. His head was brought to Abdali. After that, Casi Raja notes, the Afghan camp ate well. The Maratha camp did not.

A Maratha chronicle, the Bhau’s Kaifiyat, says grain sold at a rupee a seer, when there was any. Nana Fadnavis remembered the stench of dead cattle.

The Bhau asked Pune whether to make peace on Abdali’s terms, which would have pulled the Marathas back to the Chambal. The Peshwa’s answer, as the Kaifiyat records it, was no.

On no account should you make friends with AbdaliThe Peshwa’s reply to the Bhau, as given in the Bhau’s Kaifiyat

The same chronicle says Vishwasrao secretly begged his father to hurry: there could be other sons like him, not other brothers like the Bhau. The Peshwa said he was coming. On 27 December he was still at Paithan in the Deccan, where he was getting married again. The British scholar H.G. Rawlinson, who edited Casi Raja’s account in 1926, was blunt: “Nothing can excuse this delay.”

By mid-January the chiefs crowded round the Bhau’s tent: “It is now two days that we have not had anything to eat,” Casi Raja reports. Better to die fighting. The Bhau agreed, and each chief took a betel leaf as an oath.

In the small hours of 14 January, a servant slipped across to the Afghan side with a note in the Bhau’s own hand for Casi Raja, asking if Shuja could still arrange anything.

The cup is now full to the brim, and cannot hold another drop.Sadashivrao Bhau’s last note to Casi Raja, before dawn on 14 January 1761

It was a Wednesday, the eighth day of the bright half of Paush in the Marathi calendar. An hour before dawn the Maratha army marched out of its lines with its heavy guns in front. Shuja-ud-Daula went to wake the Shah. Abdali rode out in whatever he was wearing and ordered his army to arms.

The two lines stretched for kilometres. By Casi Raja’s count the Afghan-led army had about 41,800 horse, 38,000 foot and 70 to 80 guns; the Bhau had 55,000 horse, 15,000 foot, including 9,000 of Ibrahim Khan’s sepoys, and about 200 guns. The fighting men were roughly matched.

The heavy Maratha guns were hard to aim low, and at first much of their shot flew over the Afghan lines. Then Ibrahim Khan Gardi rode up to the Bhau. Casi Raja records what he said: his men had not been paid that month, but no matter, “this day I will convince you” that they had earned it.

He took a flag in his own hand and led seven battalions with fixed bayonets into the Rohillas of Hafiz Rahmat Khan and Dundi Khan. They fought hand to hand for three hours. Casi Raja reckons nearly 8,000 Rohillas were killed or wounded; six of Ibrahim Khan’s battalions were almost wiped out, and he was wounded several times.

In the centre the Bhau and Vishwasrao charged the Grand Vizier, Shah Wali Khan, and broke through a line of horsemen, Persian musketeers and camel-mounted swivel guns called zamburaks. Thousands fell. The Vizier got down from his horse to fight on foot in full armour and shouted to his fleeing men.

Our country is far off, my friends; whither do you fly?Shah Wali Khan, Abdali’s Grand Vizier, as recorded by Casi Raja

Shortly before noon, it looked as though the Marathas might win.

Abdali had kept something back. Watching from the rear, he sent his nasaqchis, a mounted police corps, to drive runaways back into line; Casi Raja says they forced seven or eight thousand men to return. Then he threw fresh troops, about ten thousand by Casi Raja’s count, into the centre, while Najib and Shah Pasand Khan hit the Maratha flanks.

The Marathas had marched out hungry. Their horses were half starved. Now they faced fresh men. From about one o’clock the fighting in the centre was with spears, swords, axes and daggers.

Between two and three, Vishwasrao was hit. Accounts differ: Casi Raja says he was wounded, Nana Fadnavis says a cannon shot. The Bhau had him lifted onto his elephant. Then, by Grant Duff’s account, he sent word to Holkar “to do as he had directed”, left the elephant, mounted his Arab horse and rode into the fight. His empty howdah was seen by his men.

Soon after, as if at a signal, the whole Maratha army turned and ran. Holkar left the field; so did Gaikwad and the chiefs of the left. Thousands were cut down, and many suffocated in the ditch of their own camp. Afghans pursued for kilometres in every direction.

Nana Fadnavis, eighteen, stayed close to the Bhau until a senior officer told him to go. Years later he wrote bitterly about the chiefs who had sworn to die for their leader and then fled: “the mere companions of his prosperity, and deserters in the hour of adversity.”

He stripped off his fine clothes and walked through the night. Hiding in long grass, he was dragged out, and an old man in the Afghan band said, “he is but a boy, let him go.” A wandering bairagi gave him flour; he wrote that he never tasted anything so sweet.

Night fell. Men, women and children who had crowded into Panipat town were surrounded. In the morning the Afghans took them out.

Grant Duff, who interviewed a survivor, says the women and children were kept as slaves. The men were lined up, given a few grains and a little water, and beheaded. Casi Raja, who was in the victors’ camp, writes that nearly forty thousand prisoners were taken alive and most of those who fell into Durrani hands were murdered in cold blood. Durrani soldiers joked that their mothers and wives had asked them to kill a few unbelievers on their behalf. Outside almost every tent, he says, heads were piled up.

Grant Duff wrote that it was “to the eternal disgrace of themselves and of humanity.” Fugitives were also robbed and killed by villagers along the roads.

Not everyone in the winning camp behaved alike. Shuja-ud-Daula posted his own men to protect the six or seven thousand who took refuge with him, and later sent them under guard to Jat territory. Grant Duff recorded the story of Naro Bhagwant, a Maratha clerk lined up for beheading, who was dragged out of the line by Hussein Khan, an Afghan officer who had once served in the Bhau’s artillery. Hussein Khan gave him five gold coins and an escort home. One of the escorts later chased him down and took the coins.

Jankoji Shinde, about twenty, was held wounded in an Afghan chief’s tent. Shuja tried to ransom him; Casi Raja says Najib, an enemy of the Shinde family, told Abdali, and the chief had Jankoji killed to hide him. Ibrahim Khan Gardi, hidden in Shuja’s camp, was handed over after Durrani soldiers surrounded the Shah’s tent and the Vizier swore on the Quran he would be safe. Casi Raja says he was treated with great cruelty and died on the seventh day, reportedly after poison was put in his wounds.

Mahadji Shinde, Jankoji’s young uncle, got away lamed for life. He would come back.

Plunderers found Vishwasrao’s body on his elephant and sold it to Shuja for two thousand rupees. Abdali had it brought to his tent, and the whole camp came to look. Casi Raja says the young man looked as if he were asleep. A crowd of Durranis cried that it was “the body of the king of the unbelievers” and wanted it dried and stuffed to take home to Kabul.

Shuja and the Grand Vizier went to the Shah. In Hindustan, they told him, the bodies of fallen chiefs of every religion are handed over for their own rites, and “enmity should be limited to the life of our enemy”. Najib and the other Indian chiefs joined the plea. After two days Abdali agreed.

The Bhau was harder to find. On the second day a headless body was found some distance from the field. Maratha envoys in the Afghan camp washed it, wept, and said it was their master, recognising a black mark on the thigh, an old dagger scar on the back and lines on the sole of one foot. Casi Raja, whom Shuja called a man of the Marathas’ own country and caste, burned the bodies of the Bhau and Vishwasrao with sandalwood, with twenty of the Shah’s guards standing by.

That night a Durrani soldier, promised he could keep his loot, produced a head wrapped in cloth. The Bhau’s envoy, Raja Babu Pandit, said it was his master’s and burned it outside the camp. Grant Duff still wrote that his fate “was never accurately known”. Years later a man in Pune claimed to be the Bhau; he was treated as an impostor.

The Peshwa got the bankers’ letter near the Narmada; by 24 January, at Bhelsa, survivors had confirmed it. He turned back to Pune, broken. He died there on 23 June 1761, at his temple on Parvati hill, aged 40. His sixteen-year-old son Madhavrao took over a shaken state. Grant Duff wrote that every military family in Maharashtra was mourning someone.

Abdali did not stay to enjoy it. Back in Delhi, Casi Raja says, his Afghans mutinied for two years of unpaid wages and a march home. Shuja quarrelled with them and left for Awadh. Abdali recognised Shah Alam II as emperor, left Najib in charge at Delhi and left the city on 22 March 1761. He never came back to Delhi.

The battle settled less than it seemed. By 1771 Mahadji Shinde was back in Delhi, and in 1772 he escorted Shah Alam to his throne. Najib died in 1770. In 1774 the Rohillas were crushed by Awadh and the East India Company together.

The real winners were not at Panipat at all. The East India Company had won Bengal at Plassey in 1757. In 1764 at Buxar it beat Shuja-ud-Daula. With the Marathas bleeding and the Afghans gone, nobody in the north could stop it.

Casi Raja ended by saying Providence had used Ahmad Shah to humble Maratha pride. Abdali’s own letter to Raja Madho Singh of Jaipur, as translated by the historian Jadunath Sarkar, said the Marathas fought “so well that it was beyond the capacity of other races.”

Punjab had watched all this from the side. The Sikhs had helped the Marathas take Lahore in 1758, but in 1760 no alliance was made with them. Ala Singh, the Sikh chief of the Phulkian lands who would found Patiala, is said by his biographer Kirpal Singh to have supplied grain to the Maratha army.

As Abdali marched home through Punjab, the Sikhs struck at his columns. Sikh tradition says Jassa Singh Ahluwalia’s men freed about 2,200 Hindu women being carried off and returned them to their families; the number and place vary between tellings. By November 1761 the Sikhs had taken Lahore.

Abdali came back for them. In February 1762 his army caught the Sikhs near Kup and killed many thousands in the Vadda Ghallughara, the Great Massacre; that spring he blew up the Harmandir Sahib. But the Marathas’ fall had left Punjab to two forces only, the Afghans and the Sikh misls, and within a few years the misls had won. That story is told in The Ghallugharas and the Misls.

Punjab’s villages kept a saying from those years: khada peeta lahe da, baki Ahmad Shahe da. What you eat and drink is yours; the rest is Ahmad Shah’s.

Historians have argued about this for two and a half centuries, and the argument is still alive.

On the edge of Panipat, near Ugrakheri village on the road to Sanoli, there is a quiet park called Kala Amb, the black mango. Local legend says a mango tree there was watered by so much blood that it turned black. An obelisk marks the place where, it is said, the Bhau fell. Every 14 January people gather there for Shaurya Diwas, a day of valour; in 2025 Maharashtra’s Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis came. Haryana and Maharashtra are now building a larger memorial on 23 acres around it.

“The Marathas want to see where their ancestors shed blood,” the caretaker of Panipat’s museum told ThePrint in 2024. A visitor from Beed said: “We only lost the battle because we didn’t have enough food and water.” In Marathi, to say something has become a Panipat is to say it ended in disaster. Some members of Haryana’s Ror community say they descend from Maratha survivors who stayed behind; others in the community dispute it, and there is no firm evidence either way.

In Afghanistan, the battle belongs to the story of Ahmad Shah Baba, the founder of the state, buried in a domed tomb in Kandahar. A Pashto couplet attributed to him says he forgets the throne of Delhi when he remembers the mountains of his own land. In Pakistan he is remembered as a Muslim hero; one of its ballistic missiles is named Abdali, and it was test-fired as recently as May 2025.

In Punjab he is the man who blew up the Harmandir Sahib. One king: a father to one people, a conqueror to another, a destroyer to a third.

On the plain now there are fields, factories and a highway; Panipat is better known for blankets than battles. But for one winter day in 1761, more than a hundred thousand armed men fought here over who would rule Hindustan. In the end, none of them did.