पानीपत १७६१ (मराठा साम्राज्य एवं पानीपत महायुद्ध इतिहास)

THE MARATHAS IN THE PANJAB AND BEYOND 11
of the ill-clad and unadaptive Marāthas. An average Maratha soldier of those
days wished to return home after eight month's service and very few were willing
to continue in foreign lands for more than two camping seasons. Their prepa-
ration, their equipment, their physical stamina, not to say home-sickness, would
not possibly make their sojourn tolerable beyond that period. These were very
real and basic difficulties and unless the Marathas became successful colonizers in
distant lands their hope of ruling India was bound to fail. The Muslims spread
their rule over the whole continent by this method of establishing self-sufficient
colonies, however small, in the provinces they entered, one by one. And still
they took centuries to spread over the whole continent. They were, moreover,
proselytising and intermarrying with the various local people, thus always
strengthening and increasing their outposts. The Marathas, on the other hand,
had not shown any of these characteristic virtues nor were they endowed with
progressive ideas, methods, or instruments,—in short a higher civilization like
that of the British. How could they, under these circumstances, make them-
selves good as successful conquerors in foreign climes?
To hold this new stretch of five hundred miles from Ambala to Peshawar
would have required a permanent garrison of one lakh of soldiers judiciously
distributed at the various key-points. This stretch is itself geographically
divisible into two almost equal parts; one from Ambala to the Chinab and the
other from the Chinab to Peshawar. Up to the Chinab the land is a vast,
sandy, level plain. One can scarcely see any hill on the horizon unless one
goes north. Beyond the Chinab, hills begin on a small scale, and beyond the
Jehelum, the region is mountainous, rocky and comparatively barren, the pro-
portion of cultivable land becoming less and less. In the time of Akbar, the
whole of this western tract was included in the three Mughal Subahs of Lahore,
Multan (to include Sind), and Kabul which included both Kashmir and
Kandahar in those days. Afterwards, Sind, or Thattha, Kashmir and Kandahar
became separate governorships, due probably to their distance from the centre
and the exigencies of military defence. Anybody wanting to rule over these
territories would have required good cavalry with horses inured to hot and cold
climates, camel corps carrying guns to run through the arid deserts, as well
as good mountaineers to pass through dangerous and sometimes snow-clad
regions. When Raghoba is found seriously discussing the sovereign rights of
the Mughal government or the correct policy for their agents, the Marathas,
in these regions, it is doubtful whether he had visualised all these prospects or
calculated their cost. The Marathas also employed camels in carrying express
despatches, kettle-drums as well as baggage; but they had never taken the
trouble to create an efficient, fighting camel-corps, much less organise a mobile
artillery of swivel-guns carried on these animals, like Abdali. In fact, Abdali's
chief and most successful innovation seems to be this mobile artillery which
was always handy when compared to guns carried on carts drawn by bul-
locks. In the camel-corps, both the gunner as well as the driver were seated on
the same animal; there was absolutely no impediment to its movement. Bul-
lock-drawn artillery, on the other hand, needed a pioneer force of sappers and
miners to prepare a tolerably good road to carry these heavy guns, requiring
in many cases as many as fifty bullocks to draw each gun. The chief adviser