Siege of Asirgarh (1819)

01The last fort

By early 1819 the Peshwa had surrendered and the other Maratha chiefs had signed treaties. Asirgarh belonged to Daulat Rao Scindia, but its killedar, Jaswant Rao Lad, would not hand it over, and he had given refuge to Appa Saheb, the deposed Raja of Nagpur, who had escaped from British custody. Scindia ordered the fort’s surrender, and when the order was ignored, Doveton and Malcolm closed in from the Deccan and Malwa sides in March 1819.

02Siege and surrender

The Company first took the walled town below the fort and the lower works, then built batteries and shelled the upper fort for weeks. Asirgarh had fallen to Akbar in 1601 and to Wellesley’s officers in 1803, each time by surrender rather than storm, and so it went again. Jaswant Rao Lad gave up the fort in April 1819. Appa Saheb was not there; he had slipped away earlier and eventually found shelter with Maharaja Ranjit Singh and later in Jodhpur.

Dynasty · c. 1739–1853 CEBhonsles of NagpurRaghuji Bhonsle, a kinsman of the Chhatrapatis’ clan, was sent to Berar by Shahu and made Nagpur the seat of the largest Maratha state in central India. His armies took Odisha from the Nawab of Bengal, and the house ruled until the British annexed Nagpur in 1853.Read →