khoji parkHistory · Western and southern India · 1775–1784
The Company Lost Battles—and Won Time
A disputed inheritance was about to become a Company war.
Read in slides1. A succession that brought outsiders in
After Peshwa Madhavrao I died, his brother Narayanrao took office and was murdered in 1773. Their uncle Raghunathrao claimed power, but Narayanrao’s widow gave birth to Madhavrao II, whom a council of Maratha leaders supported. The infant was Narayanrao’s son, and the struggle over his succession created an opening for outside intervention.
A disputed inheritance was about to become a Company war.
2. The bargain at Surat
In 1775, Raghunathrao sought British East India Company support for his claim. The Treaty of Surat offered territorial and financial concessions in exchange for military help. Company authorities themselves disagreed over the arrangement, so the conflict began with divisions on both sides rather than two perfectly united powers following one simple plan.
The bargain bought an army and a complicated war.
3. Wadgaon reverses the advance
In January 1779, Maratha forces surrounded a Company force at Wadgaon and compelled a humiliating agreement. The defeat showed that British military success was far from inevitable. Warren Hastings rejected the agreement, however, and Company forces continued campaigning, demonstrating that a battlefield reversal did not automatically remove the institution’s capacity to fight.
A defeat had produced a treaty that the Company refused to accept.
4. Another war in the south
The wider Anglo-French conflict reached Indian ports, including Mahé, whose capture intensified Hyder Ali’s hostility toward the Company. In 1780, Mysore’s forces inflicted a major defeat on a British detachment at Pollilur. The Company now faced serious pressures in different regions while Britain was also fighting a costly war in North America.
The Company’s enemies were multiplying faster than its easy victories.
5. Pressure was not collapse
Mysore’s successes did not mean that every later engagement went its way. British forces won at Porto Novo in 1781, and campaigns in western and central India produced further gains and reverses. Treating the decade as an uninterrupted sequence of British defeats would hide the military resilience and political divisions that shaped the eventual settlements.
The map remained contested, even after spectacular British losses.
6. Peace before Hyder’s death
The Treaty of Salbai was signed in May 1782, ending the Maratha war through a negotiated settlement and the abandonment of Company support for Raghunathrao. Hyder Ali died in December, so his death cannot explain the earlier signing. The chronology matters because diplomacy had already begun reducing the Company’s simultaneous military burdens.
The treaty came first; a convenient later explanation gets the order wrong.
7. Separate endings
The Anglo-French settlement of 1783 and the Treaty of Mangalore with Tipu Sultan in 1784 helped end overlapping conflicts. These were negotiated outcomes, not proof that a single unified Indian campaign had nearly captured every Company base. The parties pursued different interests, and the peace agreements gave them opportunities to regroup under changed conditions.
The wars overlapped, but their participants did not share one ending.
8. The history inside the what-if
The Company survived a dangerous period and later expanded under different military and political circumstances. Whether another alliance could have expelled it is a counterfactual, not a documented event. What the decade establishes is more concrete: Indian powers could inflict severe defeats, while negotiation and divided interests helped the Company survive without winning every campaign.
The battles were real. The alternative ending remains unwritten.