A review of the book 'An Eyewitness Account of The End of the Maratha Empire: The Journals of Captain John MacLeod, 1817-1821' edited by Manoj Dani and Guruprasad Kanitkar.
Captain John MacLeod was a young Scottish military engineer who marched into the Deccan in November 1817, just as the Maratha Empire's century-long dominance collapsed under the weight of the Third Anglo-Maratha War. His day-by-day field journal, edited by Manoj Dani and Guruprasad Kanitkar, is the subject of this episode. We trace MacLeod's path from route surveys through the Satmala and Sahyadri ranges, to the pursuit of Peshwa Bajirao II, the fall of forts like Sinhagad and Purandar, and finally his travels through a pacified Deccan visiting Bijapur, Aurangabad, and Burhanpur. Along the way, we look at what MacLeod's journal reveals about the mismatch between Maratha guerrilla warfare and Company siegecraft, and what it means that an empire's end got recorded by the engineer sent to help end it.
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Coming up: A review of the book 'An Eyewitness Account of The End of the Maratha Empire: The Journals of Captain John MacLeod, 1817-1821' edited by Manoj Dani and Guruprasad Kanitkar.
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
Before I proceed, a full disclosure: This book was bought with my own money and not been provided to me by the authors or publisher.
Little bit about the authors:
Guruprasad Kanitkar is an engineer by training and a historian by passion, working across Maratha and Mughal-era history, archaeology, and language. He has authored, co-authored, translated and edited multiple books in both, English and Marathi.
His scholarly work extends to archival translation: he rendered the Persian-language Mughal Farmans into Marathi across two volumes, "मुघल फर्माने खंड १-२", covering documents from Akbar to Aurangzeb.
Manoj Dani is a historian and researcher specializing in the Third Battle of Panipat, with over a decade of research spanning archives and museums in India, the UK, the USA, Ireland, Japan, Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. He is a lifetime member of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute and the Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal, Pune.
He is the author of 'Battle of Panipat in Light of Rediscovered Paintings' (2020), 'अज्ञात पानिपत' (2023), and 'पॅरीस संग्रहालयातील छत्रपती शिवाजी महाराज यांची बखर' (2024) and Mughal Farmans & Nishans.
Apart from this, he has written extensively on subjects such as the Ganeshotsav at Shaniwar Wada, the Battle of Sinhagad, and the Siege of Ajinkyatara Fort, and is currently researching the architecture and history of Shaniwar Wada.
Educated in Ahmednagar and Pune, Dani holds a degree in Computer Science, ranked first in Mathematics in Maharashtra, and holds two patents in the field. He has held senior IT positions at companies in both India and the USA, where he currently resides.
Let me read a brief description of the book:
QUOTE
In November 1817, the Maratha Empire—a formidable power that had shaped the destiny of the Indian subcontinent for over a century—stood on the precipice of total collapse. As the forces of Peshwa Bajirao II clashed with the British East India Company, a young Scottish military engineer named Captain John MacLeod marched directly into the chaos.
An Eyewitness Account of The End of the Maratha Empire The Journals of Captain John MacLeod, 1817-1821 presents MacLeod’s complete, day-by-day field journal. Far from a dry military dispatch, this diary offers a rare, unfiltered window into a world moments before it changed forever. Readers will traverse the rugged Deccan plateau in pursuit of the retreating Peshwa. You will experience the visceral realities of the Third Anglo-Maratha War, including fort sieges, sudden skirmishes, chaotic tiger hunts, and the desperate plundering of ancient manuscripts.
Beneath his rigid military exterior, MacLeod reveals a profound humanity that pierces the strict binaries of colonial warfare. He fiercely critiques British blunders, personally steps in to save local women from marauding European soldiers, and marvels at the awe-inspiring architectural majesty of Bijapur.
Meticulously edited by Manoj Dani and Guruprasad Kanitkar, this breathtaking time capsule is an unforgettable testament to a fractured frontier.
UNQUOTE
Editors Manoj Dani and Guruprasad Kanitkar have organized what could easily have been a dry regimental log into a readable narrative arc: reconnaissance, war, and its aftermath.
The book opens not with battle but with surveying: an entire first section devoted to mapping the passes of the Satmala and Sahyadri ranges, from the Bor Ghat to Trimbak and the Godavari headwaters. That MacLeod, an engineer, begins here rather than at the front line is telling. Before a shot was fired in earnest, the Company was building the terrain intelligence it needed to move armies and guns through Deccan country the Marathas knew far better than they did.
The second section covers the actual campaign: the pursuit of Peshwa Bajirao II from Ahmednagar through Poona, the occupation of the city, and on to Koregaon and Mahidpur. This is followed immediately by what the contents page of the book calls "The Maratha Forts Campaign," a long sequential list of sieges — Sinhagad, Purandar, Wai, Kamalgad, Wasota, and more — culminating in the installation of a Company-backed Raja at Satara.
The third and later sections shift into travelogue, as MacLeod tours the pacified Deccan between 1820 and 1821, visiting Aurangabad, Daulatabad, Bijapur, and Burhanpur, mixing tiger hunts with observations on ruins and courts. That shift in tone across the book, from campaign diary to travel journal, is itself a quiet record of how quickly the region moved from war to occupation.
For historians, the appeal is obvious: this is a field-level account from an officer whose job was measurement and engineering, not just soldiering, which should make his observations on terrain, fortifications, and logistics more precise than most memoirs from the period.
What comes through even from the structure alone is the mismatch in method between the two sides.
The Marathas fought as they had for a century: fast, irregular cavalry warfare (ganimi kava, the "guerrilla style" associated with Chhatrapati Shivaji) built around raiding, harassment, and avoidance of set-piece battles wherever possible. Power was federated rather than centralized — Scindia, Holkar, the Bhonsles of Nagpur, the Peshwa himself — so there was no single Maratha army to defeat, only a Peshwa to chase and a network of hill forts to reduce one by one. Those forts (gad) were the backbone of Maratha strategy: refuges, supply points, and symbols of authority, built into near-inaccessible hilltops across the Sahyadris precisely to resist prolonged siege.
The Company's forces answered this with the opposite logic: disciplined line infantry, volley-fire drill, and above all combined-arms siegecraft — artillery and engineers working together to reduce fortifications systematically rather than avoid them. The book's back-to-back listing of fort after fort falling in 1817–18 (Satara, Sinhagad, Purandar, Vajragad, Wasota) reads almost like a checklist, and that is the point: it was a methodical, engineered campaign of attrition against Maratha strongpoints, not a single decisive battlefield clash. MacLeod's own opening chapter on route surveys underscores this — the British treated logistics and cartography as a precondition for war, where Maratha strength lay in local knowledge and mobility rather than mapped infrastructure.
The contrast, in short, is centralized, engineered, siege-based warfare against decentralized, mobile, fort-and-raid warfare — and the outcome of that mismatch, once the Company had the resources and intelligence to sustain a long campaign, was close to foregone.
Final Verdict:
For anyone interested in the final decades of Maratha power, the military history of the Deccan, or the making of British India, An Eyewitness Account of The End of the Maratha Empire is a fascinating and unusually evocative source.
The book reminds us that empires often end in stages: first on the battlefield, then in the forts, then in the political institutions—and finally in the way a landscape is remembered.
MacLeod was there to witness that process.
And thanks to the editors, we can now follow his footsteps.
I give this book 4.25/5.
The book is currently available only in Paperback format and is yet to be made available in Kindle and Audible formats. Also, the book is not available on Amazon USA at the time of recording this podcast episode. I have given the respective buy links in the show notes. Please check it out for the latest price.
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