Maratha invasions of Bengal: A Visual History

The Maratha invasions of Bengal (1741-1751) were a series of raids by Maratha armies from Nagpur under Raghuji Bhonsle and his general Bhaskar Pandit into the Mughal province of Bengal ruled by Nawab Alivardi Khan. Coming almost every year, the Bargis (light cavalry) plundered western Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, burning villages, killing perhaps 400,000 people, disrupting the East India Company's trade and driving refugees into Calcutta, which dug the Maratha Ditch. Alivardi won battles and had Bhaskar Pandit murdered at a parley in 1744 but could not stop the raids; in 1751 he ceded Orissa and agreed to pay 1.2 million rupees a year in chauth. Bengal's ruin helped set the stage for Plassey six years later.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Maratha invasions of Bengal. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Bengal's revenue and losses

Timeline of the Maratha invasions of Bengal

1. 1741
   Bhaskar Pandit's first invasion
2. 1742
   Katwa; Maratha Ditch dug at Calcutta
3. 1743
   Peshwa's intervention
4. 1744
   Bhaskar Pandit murdered at Mankara
5. 1747
   Burdwan
6. 1751
   Peace; Orissa ceded

The first raids

Alivardi Khan had seized Bengal in 1740; a rival's family appealed to Raghuji Bhonsle, whose general Bhaskar Pandit invaded in 1741 with 40,000 horse, caught the nawab's army at Burdwan and plundered Murshidabad's outskirts. The Marathas took Hooghly and demanded chauth, a quarter of the revenue; Alivardi's counter-attack at Katwa in 1742 drove them off for the season. Terrified villagers fled and Calcutta's British merchants dug the Maratha Ditch around the town.

Peshwa, murder and stalemate

In 1743 the Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao marched into Bengal against his rival Raghuji, took payment from Alivardi to expel him, and left. Bhaskar Pandit returned in 1744; Alivardi invited him to negotiate at Mankara and had him and 21 officers stabbed. Raghuji himself came in 1745; his son Janoji and the Afghan mutineer Mustafa Khan raided Bihar; the nawab won at Burdwan (1747) and Bihar but the raids continued, and Orissa was effectively Maratha from 1749.

Peace and consequences

Exhausted, Alivardi agreed in 1751 to cede Orissa up to the Subarnarekha and pay 1.2 million rupees a year. Bengal's western districts had been depopulated; the poet Gangaram's Maharashtra Purana describes the horrors, and Bengali lullabies still warn children of the Bargis. The revenue loss and the nawab's weakness left his grandson Siraj ud-Daulah vulnerable to the Company; Alivardi died in 1756 and Plassey followed in 1757.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Maratha Empire (1674 to 1818)
• Mughal Empire (1526 to 1857)
• British Empire (1583 to 1997)
• Second Portuguese Empire (1663 to 1822)
• First French colonial empire (1534 to 1814)
• Danish colonial empire (1536 to 1953)

Wars of the same era and region

• Deccan wars (1680 to 1707)
• Seven Years' War (1756 to 1763)
• Bangladesh Liberation War (1971)
• War of the Austrian Succession (1740 to 1748)

8 surprising things about the Maratha invasions of Bengal

1. The Bengali lullaby 'Chhele ghumalo, para juralo, Bargi elo deshe' (the child sleeps, the neighbourhood is quiet, the Bargis have come) is still sung.
2. The Maratha Ditch dug by the British around Calcutta gave the city its later Circular Road.
3. The Dutch at Chinsura estimated 400,000 Bengalis were killed in the raids.
4. Bhaskar Pandit was killed while sitting on a carpet in the nawab's tent, one of the most notorious betrayals in Indian history.
5. Orissa remained under Maratha rule until the British took it in 1803.
6. The Peshwa and Raghuji, rival Marathas, both extracted money from Bengal in the same years.
7. The raids stripped western Bengal so thoroughly that Murshidabad's silk industry collapsed.
8. Historians link Bengal's weakened treasury directly to the nawab's inability to resist the East India Company in 1757.

Sources

• Maratha invasions of Bengal Wikipedia
• Alivardi Khan Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Maratha Empire World History Encyclopedia
• Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, vol. 1 (1932) M. C. Sarkar

Back to all empires and wars