{"id":340,"date":"2005-07-19T11:00:52","date_gmt":"2005-07-19T05:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/2005\/06\/01\/when-sankrant-fell\/"},"modified":"2005-07-19T11:02:07","modified_gmt":"2005-07-19T05:32:07","slug":"when-sankrant-fell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200507\/when-sankrant-fell\/","title":{"rendered":"So what happened on January 14, 1761?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember, long long back I had asked Was the British Raj good for India?<\/a><\/p>\n

That post got me an astonishing 64 comments. That makes me feel guilty about leaving that tantalising “January 14th, 1761” remark open ended. Now that the Prime Minister has caught the Advani disease, I suppose this is as good a time as any to examine what happened on January 14, 1761. <\/p>\n

Yes, that date refers to the third battle of Panipat, one which the Marathas lost rather ignominously, and some would say, unnecessarily. There are two ways to look at the defeat. One way is the Narlikar way.
\n
\nI once read a story by Jayant Narlikar (yes, the astrophysicist) in which a man gets literally transported into an alternative universe. The story is set in post independence India, but in that alternative universe, Bombay is still under British rule, while the rest of India never came under them. Bombay has been ruled by the British under a Hong Kong style arrangement which is set to expire in 1999. India is a parliamentary democracy, the Prime Minister stays in Pune and he is called the Peshwa. The Mughal Emperor is the titular head of state, who stays in Delhi.<\/p>\n

How did this alternative reality come about? In Narlikar’s story, the non-turning point took place on January 14th, 1761. In the real world, the Marathas lost the battle of Panipat to Ahmed Shah Abdali. It was a shock defeat. No one<\/i> expected it. Legend has it that the chain of events started when Vishwas Rao, the heir to the Peshwai, fell to a stray bullet.
\nIn the alternative world, the bullet misses him by a whisker. The Marathas go on to win the battle. The Maratha confederacy does not go into a decline. The British do not manage to take over the entire country; the Marathas do. In the 19th century, united India experiences a democratic revolution and the rest is (alternative) history.<\/p>\n

How plausible does this scenario look? Many of you seem to experience an “Aha!” moment when I mentioned January 14, 1761. So I am guessing that I don’t need to explain how much of a turning point it was. The Maratha Empire (or confederacy) was at its peak. The Maratha army was supremely confident of winning. So much so that they had taken their women and children along with them – they were on a pilgrimage. It never even occurred to them that there was any danger. But there was. The war was lost, and the inevitable happened -with depressing predictability. <\/p>\n

So the Narlikar way is to say that if it weren’t for a minor accident, history would have been utterly different from what actually occurred. <\/p>\n

There is another way. That however, involves writing the second part of a post I had written more than a year back. The was about India’s boundaries, Disunity and Institutions<\/a>. Read it and wait for the second part. If you’ve waited more than a year, what is a day or two more?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember, long long back I had asked Was the British Raj good for India? That post got me an astonishing 64 comments. That makes me feel guilty about leaving that tantalising “January 14th, 1761” remark open ended. Now that the Prime Minister has caught the Advani disease, I suppose this is as good a time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}