We have brought our review down to the battle of Kharda, 1795. All our remarks passed in the preceding chapters necessarily refer to this period under review. Ours has never been the intention of recounting and examining all the details of the Maratha movement, but only to bring out those which would enable us to ascertain the leading motive, the underlying principle, that inspired and informed it and ascertain, in that … teal place in the history of our Hindu people. That … lash is done. Yet the period from 1795 to 1818 when the Maratha Empire fell, is too tragic to be passed by without a sigh or tear.
The Marathas, as we have seen, had but just given a finishing stroke that won the long-lasting war of centuries of Hindu liberation and laid low their ancestral Moslem foe. Exhausted, they fetched a sigh of relief and were just resting a while on their muskets. This was precisely the moment when a new and a far more powerful enemy, in spite of his being twice worsted, entered the lists again and assailed them with resistible might.
Even then they could have won, at any rate repulsed him for the third time, but just then, as fate would have it, Nana died and Baji Rao II became the undisputed master of his people and the undisputing slave of their foes. These two men Nana and Baji Rao II, embodied the two antagonistic tendencies that we find in conflict throughout the Maratha movement—one that inclined towards mean selfishness and denationalising self-aggrandisement; the other to patriotic sacrifices and public disinterestedness that made one glory oneself more in the greatness and independence of one’s own nation than in crowns and coronets secured for oneself at their cost. The Marathas, although they could not eradicate it altogether, yet succeeded in holding the meaner instinct in check till the days of Nana and his generation—the result was the great Hindu-Pad-Padashahi they built. But now Baji Rao-II and by naming him we name his entire generation who typified the meaner instinct—had secured the upper hand and the Empire, without a principle of cohesion to hold to it together, could not but totter to its fall assuredly: for just then, as we have seen, it was assailed, not by and Indian or Asiatic power, for in that case the Marathas being still on the whole better organised and more patriotic than any of them would have held their own—but by England; the result of the combat was a foregone conclusion.
For, England was then relatively far better equipped in all those essentials that contributed to great conquests. Their nation had long since passed the period of incubation, civil feuds and Wars of the Roses and religious persecution and star chamber tyrannies. Unlike the Marathas, they had long been trained into all those public virtues of how to obey and order and of how to rule and submit, of patriotic loyalty to their country and their King—the national emblem of sovereignty—and above all, racial cohesion and solidarity of aim and aspiration and loving subjection which a strongly consolidated nation—state engenders in a people. Even the Marathas—who of all Indian people was the best fitted in all these qualities—were woefully lacking in them relatively to the English.
Still single-handed they stood, they found even frantically, knowing later on full well that it was a struggle for existence. Some, even like that last great patriot- Maratha, Bapu Gokhale determined not to surrender even when despair and death stared them in the face. ‘We may be,’ said he to an English officer, ‘we may be carrying our shrouds about our heads, but we are determined to die with our swords in our hands.’ But with all their capable Statesmen, Generals, Mahadaji and Nana, Tukoji and Raghoj i and Phadke, removed almost simultaneously by death, with exhaustion in their ranks and worthless men at their front and that Baji Rao II at their head—and England for their dreadful antagonist: The result of the combat was a foregone conclusion. The Marathas lost and with them fell the last great Hindu Empire—the last great Indian Empire. Only in the Punjab the Sikhs yet kept alive a little flickering flame of Hindu independence; but that too was destined and for identical reasons, soon to die out.
We acknowledge that it is not without a keen agony that we write this epitaph on the grave of this our great national Empire, But we grudge not England her victory. Like a good sportsman we admire her skill and might that, stretching her hand over oceans and seas, over continents and countries, snatched an Indian Empire from our struggling hand and on that foundation has raised a magnificent World Empire, the like of which history has scarcely recorded.
Here then in the year 1818 lies the grave of the last and one of the most glorious of our Hindu Empires. Watch it. Hope, with frankincense and offerings even as Mary did, in loving solicitude. For, who knows when the Resurrection comes!!