Place · battle · India
Assaye
The 23 September 1803 battle at Assaye in Jalna district, Maharashtra, where Major-General Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) with 7,000 troops defeated a Maratha army of 50,000 under Daulat Rao Scindia and the Raja of Berar during the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Wellesley later called it the hardest fighting he ever saw, Waterloo included — 1,500 British and 6,000 Maratha casualties in a single afternoon of massed infantry fire. The Scindia army's 100-plus-gun field artillery, trained by the French mercenary General Pierre Perron, posed one of the most serious challenges British forces faced in India. The Second Anglo-Maratha War effectively ended Maratha capacity to resist British paramountcy; the 1803 Treaty of Surji-Anjangaon ceded Delhi and the Yamuna doab.
- Date
- 1803 CE
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 20.000, 75.630
Connections (5)
- CampaignRaigad
Assaye in 1803 broke the Maratha field armies, and the Treaty of Bassein that preceded it had already made the Peshwa a subsidiary of the Company. The confederacy formally ended in 1818. Raigad, Shivaji's coronation seat, had been taken by the Mughals in 1689 and was of no military importance for the last century of Maratha power, but it remained the symbolic capital and was blown up by British artillery in 1818 to make that point.
- CampaignGāwilghur
Gawilghur, a Deccan hill fort of the Imad Shahis in the Berar hills, fell to Wellesley in December 1803, six weeks after Assaye and a month after Argaon. The two together ended the Second Anglo-Maratha War in the Deccan. Wellesley said afterwards that Assaye was the hardest fighting he had seen, and he said it after Waterloo.
- Succession in timeSrirangapatna / Srirangapattana
Mysore fell in 1799 and the Maratha confederacy four years later, and the two wars were fought by the same commander with the same instrument: subsidiary treaties that left Indian rulers their thrones, their titles and a Company garrison they paid for. Between them the Company acquired the Deccan and the peninsula, and after 1803 no Indian power could face it in the field.
- Succession in timeChillianwala
Assaye in 1803 and Chillianwala in 1849 are the beginning and the end of the Company's conquest of northern India, and both were expensive. Between them the Marathas, the Pindaris, the Gurkhas, the Burmese, the Sindhis and the Sikhs were all defeated, and the map of British India was complete eight years before the rebellion that changed who administered it.
- Power passed toShaniwarwada, Pune
Assaye and Argaon broke the Maratha field armies in 1803; Pune held out for another fifteen years under a Peshwa already bound by the Treaty of Bassein. The surrender of 1818 ended the confederacy, and the pension paid to Baji Rao II at Bithoor, refused to his adopted heir, produced Nana Sahib and the Kanpur rising of 1857.
On these journeys
Sources
List of wars in the Indian subcontinent; standard reference accounts
Open Assaye in the repository →