पानीपत १७६१ (मराठा साम्राज्य एवं पानीपत महायुद्ध इतिहास)

132 PANIPAT 1761
with an army on the march with all their camp followers, could not be
kept up and the disaster inevitably followed The Maratha army was
mainly composed of veteran horsemen with a life long belief in the guerilla mode
of warfare It seems they neither understood nor had a mind to follow the cor-
rect orders of their commander based on the tactics advised by Ibrahim Khan
Gardi, and when the inevitable disaster followed, due to their misunderstand-
ing and faint heartedness in the fight, they laid the whole blame on the new
mode of "entrenched warfare" On this point the whole opinion in Maha-
rashtra seems to be unanimous and it is reflected in these chronicles
Notwithstanding these prepossessions, however, the Bakhar correctly
reports Bhau's plan of the battle which was unknown to Kashiraj Pandit on
the other side and which was not followed to the end Unaware of the plan
and the aim, Kashiraj reports the battle in an inexplicable way, while the
author of the Bakhar charges Bhau himself with breaking the plan decided on
the previous night and thus becoming the author of the disaster All the his-
torians up till now have been so much obsessed with the idea of the complete
reliability of Kashiraj s report that they have never stopped to inquire how
the account in the Bakhars is to be explained and why it should be disbe-
lieved and set aside The full import of the intended plan in the Bakhar can-
not be understood unless one studies the detailed maps of the battle-field in their
complete environment, and tries to construe a connected idea with the help of
every line reported in the Bakhar in combination with it The authors of the
chronicles seem to be well acquainted with the topography of the battle field and
its surroundings, and they might have been personally present in the Maratha
camp themselves The chronicles correctly report the changes in Abdali's camp-
ing ground during the two months and a half, while the impression created by
Kashiraj's account fixes Abdali's camp once for all, a very serious discrepancy
on the part of this eye witness ¹³ When one begins to re read the Bakhars in
the light of the original letters, one is impressed by the substantiality of their
account.
THE COMMON POINTS IN KASHIRAJ'S NARRATIVE AND THE BAKHAR
Comparison
That Kashiraj wrote his account after reading some other accounts is
proved by certain curious coincidences in the arrangement of his writing and
that of Bhau Bakhar, which was definitely a northern Indian production The
short Kaifiyat was definitely written earlier than the Bakhar But what seems
strange to the reader is that the correct consecutive narration of events is fol-
lowed by the writer of the Kaifiyat, and an absence of the sense of time char-
acterises the writer of the gossipy Bakhar Thus the Bakhar gives Govindpant
Bundele's death as the first event while it was actually the fourth during the
beleagurement Similarly, the cutting off of Parashar Dadaji's treasure carry-
ing party was the last event which is subsequently dealt with by the Bakhar
¹³ Bhau Kaifiyat pp. 14, 21