My next point sir would be that the British came at exactly the right point in time to prevent the eventual and ultimately natural Indian push-back to Mughal imperialism towards the formation of what is popularly today called Akhand Bharat.
In the context of what transpired two centuries later, they came at the right point in time for Pakistan and Pakistanis.
And as a corollary to the same, once the Attock to Cuttack span of the Maratha empire became a military reality, the next possible and very probable target would have been Safavid Persia.
Though by then the Great Game was on in real earnest and the Russians chasing their war water ports would have had something to say about that. Maybe the French as well.
So Daneshmand makes a good point about the buffer state (Pakistan) between the two civilizations.
The only fly in the ointment being that the buffer state was carved out of both civilizations. Leaving everyone suitably miserable and generally antsy all around. Cue and fast forward to 2015 .....
That was a terrible post, particularly considering the antecedents of the poster.
The light cavalry army that was so effective in the plains of the Deccan, and even in the thickly populated upper Indian plains, just fell apart when facing the heavier horses and better cavalry of the Afghan-Indian composite that beat them. Surprisingly, the Maratha artillery was better, brilliantly served as it was by Ibrahim Gardi and his very professional corps (one reason why they killed him with such sadistic brutality after the battle). But it was nowhere on the standards or the lines of the British Horse Artillery that was just coming in and giving continental armies a very hard time.
A step back to see the state of the military world wide (actually, only Asia and Europe; pulling in the Japanese and Chinese aspects would take too long). In Europe, Marlborough and Savoy had humbled French pride in the War of the Spanish Succession; although the victories were extremely bloody, there was a great deal of expansion of the military system. This war, and the contribution of Marlborough to first, British war-fighting, later, to European, and through that, global methods of waging war, was the efficient supply and commissariat system. The British Army was able to march 12 to 14 miles a day, about 250 miles could be covered in less than 45 days. Compare that to the lumbering pace of all south Asian forces which were not cavalry forces. Their discipline, too, was exemplary; Minden was just two years before Panipat III, but the calm resolution of a British infantryman, which allowed the guards to be marched up to the manned and firing palisade at Blenheim, and holding their fire until their Brigadier had stuck his sword in the palisade, was already formed and ready. Where was an Indian equivalent?
In the year of the Spanish Succession, Louis XIV maintained an army of over 370,000 men (the Pakistan Army in 1947 was half of that). But more than numbers, it was military skill and organisation. Division into army corps would have to wait for more than 40 years after Panipat III. However, regiments, brigades and divisions existed, and were regular formations, commanded (often, not invariably; the professionalisation of armed forces was to go on and on for another two hundred years.
The point being?
The point is that Indian armies, in those days, before the 19th century incursion of a number of refugees from war-ravaged Europe, were still just a step ahead, an artillery park ahead of mediaeval military organisation.
There is zip possibility that a south Asian army would have hurt Persia, IMHO. They might even have struggled through Afghanistan, although in my opinion even that would have been doubtful; the fighting elan of the Sikhs was still a few decades away, although they had started guerrilla attacks on the Abdali troops by then. I fail to see even the remotest possibility of Safavid Persia being attacked - successfully attacked, that is.
You can do better than that,
@vsdoc . I'm sure you wouldn't have to search too hard for a mentor.
