Mirza Najaf was well aware that the new European military tactics that had already become well known in eastern and southern India were still largely unknown in Hindustan, where the old style of irregular cavalry warfare still ruled supreme; only the Jats had a few semi-trained battalions of sepoys. He therefore made a point of recruiting as many European mercenaries as he could to train up his troops. In the early 1770s, that meant attracting the French Free Lances who had been left unemployed and driven westwards by the succession of Company victories in Bengal…
Steadily, one by one, he pulled them in: first the Breton soldier of fortune René Madec; then Mir Qasim’s Alsatian assassin, Walter Reinhardt, now widely known as Sumru and married to a remarkable and forceful Kashmiri dancing girl, Farzana.
[…]
Soon the pair created their own little kingdom in the Doab: when the Comte de Modave went to visit, he was astonished by its opulence. But Sumru, he noted, was not happy, and appeared to be haunted by the ghosts of those he had murdered: he had become ‘devout, superstitious and credulous like a good German. He fasts on all set [Catholic feast] days. He gives alms and pays for as many masses as he can get. He fears the devil as much as the English … Sometimes it seems he is disgusted by the life he leads, though this does not stop him keeping a numerous seraglio, far above his needs.’
[…]
A little later, the Mirza’s army was joined by a very different class of soldiers: the dreadlocked Nagas of Anupgiri Gossain. Anupgiri had just defected from the service of Shuja ud-Daula and arrived with 6,000 of his naked warriors and forty cannon. These Nagas were always brilliant shock troops, but they could be particularly effective against Hindu opponents. The Comte de Modave records an occasion when the Company sent a battalion to stop the Nagas ‘pillaging, robbing, massacring and causing havoc … [But] instead of charging the Nagas, the Hindu sepoys at once laid down their arms and prostrated themselves at the feet of these holy penitents – who did not wait to pick up the sepoys’ guns and carry on their way, raiding and robbing.’
By August, under these veteran commanders, Najaf had gathered six battalions of sepoys armed with rockets and artillery, as well as a large Mughal cavalry force, perhaps 30,000 troops in all. With these the Mughals were ready to take back their empire.