The Maratha Confederacy had been declining for a generation. After the death of Mahadji Scindia in 1794, the brilliant military leader who had restored Maratha authority in northern India using French-trained gunners and disciplined cavalry, no one of comparable ability emerged to hold the confederacy together. The Chhatrapatis and Peshwas who nominally led the Marathas had become figureheads while regional Sardars enriched themselves, siphoning tax revenues that should have funded the central government. The Second Anglo-Maratha War had been disastrous. Leaders like Daulatrao Scindia and Mudhoji II Bhonsle fought bravely but could not reverse the confederacy's structural rot. By 1817, the Maratha government was deeply in debt, its military capability fractured among semi-independent warlords, and the British East India Company was systematically tightening its grip across the subcontinent. The battle at Khadki was not the beginning of the end; it was the end itself.

The fighting began with an act of defiance. Vinchurkar's gun infantry opened fire on the house of Mountstuart Elphinstone, the British Resident in Pune, targeting the building from across the river. After Elphinstone evacuated, Kokare's cavalry swept in and burned every British bungalow in the vicinity. The residency was sacked and put to the torch. Elphinstone retreated to join the troops assembling at Khadki. A message went to Colonel Burr, who marched from Dapodi village near the confluence of the Pavana and Mula rivers to link up with Captain John Ford's corps. Before the battle, the Peshwa's commander Moropant Dixit had attempted to bribe Captain Ford into switching sides. Ford refused. The two British columns united and pushed forward to attack, a move that astonished the Maratha skirmishers, who had expected the small British force to be paralyzed with fear or already bought off.

Gokhale launched his main assault: a massed cavalry charge with 6,000 chosen horsemen aimed at the British line. Colonel Burr saw the movement coming, recalled his forward units, and ordered his men to hold their fire. Discipline would decide the engagement. The charge never reached the bayonets. A deep morass - a marshy patch of ground whose exact location is debated by historians to this day - lay directly in the cavalry's path. Horses stumbled, riders pitched forward, formations dissolved into confusion. As the Maratha horsemen floundered in the mud, British troops poured fire into the disordered mass. Only a handful of riders pressed through to reach the British lines. The rest broke and fled. With their great cavalry charge shattered, the Marathas began withdrawing their guns. The infantry pulled back. When the British line advanced, the field was empty. Total British casualties were sixty-eight. The Maratha army lost approximately 500 killed and wounded, but more critically, it lost its will to fight.

The aftermath unfolded with grim speed. The next morning, reinforcements arrived from Sirur, preventing Gokhale from attempting a second engagement. At Yerwada, Sardar Yashwant Ghorpade's forces were neutralized when the British bribed his troops away from him. Battalions from Ghodnadi and Jalna, along with the Panshe artillery gunners, defected to the British side. The Peshwa abandoned Pune. On November 17, 1817, just twelve days after the battle, East India Company forces occupied the Shaniwarwada, the seat of Peshwa power since 1732. By 1818, the Peshwa had surrendered entirely. Khadki became a British military cantonment, a garrison town that persists as a defense establishment today. The battlefield itself has been swallowed by modern Pune. The morass that broke the cavalry charge may lie beneath Range Hills Colony, or the Military Station Depot, or somewhere near the Symbiosis Institute of Management. Historian James Grant Duff, who watched the battle from the hills of Bhamburda, left an account that remains the primary source. The precise ground where an empire died is now indistinguishable from the city that grew over it.