Number of words: 484

The hinterlands of Bombay were then controlled by a set of powerful Maratha principalities. These states, the most important of which had their capitals in Gwalior, Baroda, Indore and Nagpur, were founded after the region was wrested away from the Mughal Empire in the seventeenth century by the Maratha leader Shivaji Bhosale. Following his death his realm was divided up between several energetic Maratha dynasties. Unlike the kingdoms of the Gangetic plain, the major Maratha states were well able to hold their own against the East India Company’s armies. In tactics, as in armaments, the Maratha dynasties went to great lengths to keep pace with the innovations of the day, and in some regards their military doctrines were actually in advance of those of the British.

The military historian Randolf Cooper writes:

The memoirs of the British officers who witnessed the Maratha artillery in action leave no doubt about its level of sophistication. At the time of the Second Maratha War [1803], France was considered to have the finest artillery in the world. When British officers saw the volume of fire produced by the Maratha guns, some asserted incorrectly that they were manned by Frenchmen but all agreed the effect was devastating. Another false assumption was that Frenchmen were responsible for the production of artillery and its accoutrements in India, when in fact the French merely provided the most modern example to be copied.

Another reason that the British were slow to expand in western and central India was that their main base in the region, Bombay, was hemmed in by a steep range of mountains and a rugged plateau. “Unlike the wide, flat plains of Bengal, so perfect for infantry manoeuvres, the terrain beyond Bombay was better suited to guerrilla-style resistance It was precisely by taking advantage of the lay of the land that Shivaji’s Maratha warriors had defeated the forces of the Mughals.

The upshot was that at a time when the British had succeeded in eliminating all opposition in the Gangetic plain, they still faced formidable challenges in western and central India, especially in Malwa, a region that covered much of present-day Madhya Pradesh, as well as parts of Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan.

In Malwa too the cultivation of poppies had grown steadily since the sixteenth century. Over time opium became an important article of commerce for the merchants of the surrounding regions, whose networks reached all the way from the coast into the deepest fastnesses of Malwa. These included enterprising business communities from several different religions-Hindus, Jains and many Muslim sects-which had for centuries traded and speculated in agricultural commodities such as wheat, cotton, sugar cane and so on. As the cultivation of poppies expanded, opium too became an important commodity for trade and speculation for Jains and Marwaris, Bohras and Ismailis.

Excerpted from Pages 101 to 102 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh