PANIPAT

Casi Raja Pundit, a mutasaddi or secretary in the service of Suja-ud-daula, Vazir of Oudh, was present at the third battle of Panipat and wrote an account of it in Persian. His account was translated into English in 1791 by Lt. Col. James Brown, Resident at Delhi from 1782 to 1785. The translated account was edited in 1926 with an Introduction, Notes, and Appendices by H. G. Rawlinson, Professor at The Deccan College, Poona.

It is the most detailed account we possess of the battle, and is the impartial narrative of an eye-witness of what he saw and heard. The narrative of Casi Raja Pundit brings alive larger than life personalities from history—Sadhashivrao Bhao, Ahmed Shah Abdali, and Ibrahim Gardi, among others.

The Maratha Empire was the pre-eminent power in the subcontinent in the eighteenth century. In 1761, under the command of Sadashivrao Bhao in the third battle of Panipat, the Marathas lost to Abdali, and Sadashivrao Bhao was killed. However, as H.G. Rawlinson writes in his Introduction, “A defeat is, under some circumstances, as honourable as a victory; and never, in all their annals, did the Maratha armies cover themselves with greater
glory, than when the flower of the chivalry of the Deccan perished on the stricken field of Panipat, fighting against the enemies of their creed and country.”

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