Untouchable Mahar soldiers defeated the Brahmin Peshwa army at Koregaon

Evidence

11 The Peshwas were initially ministers under Shivaji who founded the Maratha empire in seventeenth-century western India. After the death of Shivaji in 1680, the Peshwas, who were Chitpavan Brahmins, turned into a military-bureaucratic elite, and, in one of those rare instances, both ritual and secular power were vested with Brahmins. The reign of the Peshwas witnessed what feminist scholar Uma Chakravarti (1995, 3–21) terms “the consolidation of Brahmanya-raj”. In 1818, the 30,000-strong army of the last Peshwa, Bajirao II (1795–1818), was defeated by the 500-member regiment of ‘Untouchable’ Mahar soldiers led by Capt F.F. Staunton. This is known as the Battle of Koregaon, along the river Bhima, northwest of Poona. For an account of the rise of the Brahmins in western India, see Eaton (2005). — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1038

Categorization

• XREF: The Koregaon battle memorial is a central site of Dalit identity and the Bhima Koregaon riots of 2018 — connects to ongoing Dalit political memory.
• SEED: Angle: the 1818 Battle of Koregaon as the origin myth of Dalit resistance — how a 500-man Untouchable regiment defeating a 30,000 Brahmin army became the pivot of modern Dalit commemoration.