War and the Non-Elite: Towards a People’s History of the Mughal Empire

Situating Non-Elite Partners of the Empire

In 1982, Ranajit Guha pointed out in the introduction to the first volume of Subaltern Studies that the historiography of Indian nationalism had been dominated by a certain elitism. He argued that notwithstanding differences in interpretation, historians had usually been inclined till then to understand the Indian national movement in terms of the actions and ideologies of the colonial and Indian elite; the agency of the subaltern sections of the society had hardly been recognised. In opposition to this, he and his colleagues inaugurated an intellectual project to uncover the domain of popular politics, which he saw as being informed by a dynamic consciousness largely autonomous of elite intervention. ³ The result was a sustained scholarly effort over the next two decades or so at rewriting the history of Indian nationalism as something that is understood less in terms of colonial institutions, state interventions or elite action and more in terms of how the subaltern populations of South Asia negotiated, understood, imagined, mobilised and articulated their own versions of nationalist ideologies and movements.

The elitism that Guha pointed out dominated the historiography of Indian nationalism till around 1980 also happens to characterise most of the historiography on the Mughal Empire even today. Over the last century or so, Mughal historiography has gone through many shifts and turns. There has been considerable diversity in terms of methodologies, areas of focus, arguments and the use of sources. Yet, the formation and demise of the Mughal Empire has mostly been conceptualised in terms of the achievements of one sort of elite or another. During the first half of the twentieth century, the focus was mainly on the actions of the emperors. ⁴ Between the late-1950s and early-1990s, historians concentrated their attention overwhelmingly on the nature of the state apparatus, the administrative structure and the political economy. This period can be divided into two phases. During the first, which stretched till around 1980, the dominant way of thinking about the Mughal state was in terms of a strong centralised apparatus driven by sophisticated bureaucratic institutions. The principal focus here remained on the origins, organisation and socio-economic roles of the manṣabdārī elite, whom Athar Ali gave the evocative epithet ‘the apparatus of empire’. ⁵ This historiographical orthodoxy was strongly challenged in the second phase that started around 1980. Historians of a newer generation continued to work on political economy, but increasingly understood the Mughal state as a more flexible, accommodative and collaborative entity. In these discussions, the focus shifted away from the imperial manṣabdārī elite, but only to the local and regional elites of various statures. In the process, the dynamics of state-formation was taken beyond the imperial courtly circles to include the various actors in the region who contributed to the making and unmaking of the empire. ⁶ Yet, in spite of this diversification, the focus remained largely on the elite. This elitism has asserted itself even more strongly since the close of the twentieth century. Informed by the cultural and linguistic turns in the social sciences, a new group of historians based mainly in American universities have inaugurated a new phase of Mughal historiography. Here the main thrust has been the study of imperial ideology, courtly culture, political rituals and representations of power. Methodologically, there has emerged a greater emphasis on studying texts—literature, paintings and architecture—as cultural artefacts. Historians have used them to study the intellectual, cultural and ideological worlds of the elite that produced and consumed them. ⁷ Incidentally, very few beyond the elite had access to these texts. Hence, when the Mughal Empire is seen through the lens of the production, circulation and consumption of these texts, it seems to be a product of elite action and ideology more than ever before.

Yet, there have been certain rare voices that have highlighted the important roles of the non-elite in the making of the empire. ⁸ Let us look briefly at three such examples. One of the first to foreground the actions of the non-elite in the career of the empire was Irfan Habib. In his magnum opus published in 1963, Habib used a Marxian frame of analysis to explain the decline of the Mughal Empire in terms of socio-economic relations. He saw the Mughal manṣabdārī aristocracy as a revenue-hungry parasitic warrior class, which cared very little about the well-being of the peasantry. According to him, the strictness of the imperial manṣabdārī apparatus forced this aristocracy to appropriate as much land revenue from the peasantry as possible at all times. This amounted to a great burden on the rural communities. Over time, this class-based exploitation precipitated widespread peasant insurgencies across South Asia. This is what caused the downfall of the empire. ⁹ Habib’s work thus foregrounds non-elite agency by giving centre-stage to the peasantry in bringing about the demise of Mughal imperial power. Another major intervention came from Douglas Streusand. In his monograph published in 1989, he probed the role of non-elite agency in the emergence of the jāgīrdārī arrangement. He argued that this administrative apparatus was decisively shaped by the Mughal state’s concern with tackling the teeming populations of armed peasants of North India. According to him, the fact that the peasantry was armed meant that the state anticipated active resistance in revenue extraction. Consequently, the Mughals could not implement something like the Ottoman taḥrīr-tīmār practice, where land would be assigned to individual cavalrymen. The apprehension was that a single cavalryman would not be able to cope with a group of armed peasants when it came to revenue collection. This prompted Akbar to devise jāgīrdārī, where a piece of land would be assigned to the commander of a group of cavalrymen instead. ¹⁰ Thus, Streusand’s work sees the non-elite population of the peasant-soldiers leaving a fundamental imprint on the political economy of the empire. Finally, Abhishek Kaicker has very recently foregrounded the role of the urban population of Delhi in shaping the course of the Mughal city in roughly a hundred years between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. His work moves away from the mainstream idea of the Mughals ruling over a passive subject population and recovers the voice of the people to arrive at a notion of a new popular political subjectivity. Kaicker argues that this new practice of politics was one where the sovereignty of the Mughal emperor would be variously contested, invoked or defended by the urban dwellers, depending on the immediate circumstances. He suggests that this kind of popular politics and urban public emerged through a broad-based creative participation of the common people of the city in negotiating imperial power in their quotidian lives. ¹¹

In recognising the role of non-elite communities of South Asia in shaping the trajectories of the empire, the works of scholars like Habib, Streusand and Kaicker signify exceptions to the general elitism of mainstream Mughal historiography. What are the sources of this elitism? At one level, it is the nature of sources that is responsible. Modern historians have heavily relied on chronicles and documents produced by the Mughal state and the aristocracy to understand the empire. Patronised or written by members of the imperial courtly milieu, the primary function of these texts was to extoll the virtues and glory of the emperor, the ruling dynasty and the aristocracy. Recounting the past in a specific way was a means of doing this. Over time, the circulation of these texts within imperial aristocratic circles produced a political consensus in favour of the ruling dispensation. ¹² Owing to this orientation, the authors of these texts had little interest in narrating the activities or achievements of the non-elite participants of the empire. Yet, they did mention such information occasionally, if only in passing. In fact, as I show in this article, it is quite possible to read these texts critically to glean this information and cobble together a reasonably coherent picture of the of role of the non-elite. Hence, the limitations of the sources cannot fully explain the historiographical silence. It is my contention that the latter is also a product of a lopsided historical understanding, where modern historians conceptualise the Mughal Empire primarily as a product of elite actions and achievements. This might explain why so few historians have shown interest in exploring the roles of the non-elite in the first place.

This elitism is also palpable in the historiography of Mughal warfare. This manifests itself mainly through an overwhelming emphasis on the military importance of the Mughal cavalry. Cavalry was the more elite wing of Mughal armies. There was a huge overlap between the commanders of the cavalry and the political aristocracy of the empire. In comparison, the military contributions of the common infantry or other non-elite participants have received little attention of modern historians. ¹³ William Irvine, one of the first historians of Mughal warfare, played a big role in establishing this attitude. He noted that the Mughal infantry ‘held a very inferior position and was of little or no consideration’. ¹⁴ This understanding also informed several historians who wrote after him. Based on their study of Mughal political economy and administration, many of them saw the mounted aristocracy and their cavalry as the main driving force of Mughal armies. For instance, reflecting on the strengths of Mughal forces, Irfan Habib wrote that till the rise of the Maratha infantry in the second half of the seventeenth century, the might of Mughal armies rested on their ‘cavalry, or rather mounted archers, and it was in battle in the open field, in rapid movements, that they remained invincible…’. ¹⁵ The implication is that cavalry was the main driving force of the great conquests and expansion undertaken during almost the first century and a half of Mughal rule in South Asia.

The biggest problem with such arguments is that they are not based on any study of military campaigns. In many cases, it is the social, economic and political importance of the mounted aristocracy that has prompted historians to assume that this group and their cavalry forces must also have been equally important in the domain of war. But as I have shown elsewhere, a closer look at the actual dynamics of military campaigns reveals a very different story. Even when historians have looked at warfare, the focus has often been on pitched battles: a form of military engagement where the Mughal cavalry flourished. In comparison, other forms of engagements, like sieges and amphibious clashes, have scarcely been studied. Yet, studying these latter forms allows us to form a more nuanced understanding of the relative importance of the various participants in Mughal armies. ¹⁶ Another problematic aspect is a somewhat uncritical acceptance and reproduction of the inherent elitism of Mughal dynastic chronicles and imperial biographies mentioned earlier. This is manifested in the field of warfare through an over-whelming emphasis on the military achievements of the mounted aristocracy and the cavalry they commanded. Finally, a lopsided understanding of warfare is also to be partly blamed here. In discussions of Mughal warfare, historians have focused more on pitched battles than other forms of engagements. Incidentally, this was the one form of warfare where cavalry really flourished. Thus, both the focus areas of historians and the nature of the sources have contributed to an unsubstantiated and problematic understanding of Mughal warfare, where the cavalry is seen to have played the central role and everything else is relegated to a marginal position.

The combined result of these tendencies is that the military contributions of the non-elite soldiers of the common infantry to the process of Mughal war-making and empire-building went largely unexplored for a long time. It was Dirk Kolff’s Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy that brought about a paradigmatic shift in this picture in 1990. He moved the analytical focus away from the mounted aristocracy and threw valuable light on the world of non-elite peasant-soldiers. He also envisaged a complex and variegated military labour market that thrived in North India between the mid-fifteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Since then, the work of Kolff and several other historians has expanded our understanding of the world of non-elite soldiery and their contribution to South Asian warfare. ¹⁷ But there is a lot more work that remains to be done specifically on the Mughal infantry. Recently Andrew de la Garza has contributed to this area by discussing the tactics, training and weaponry of the foot-soldiers in the sixteenth-century Mughal armies. ¹⁸ In this article, I discuss the questions of their social background, nature of employment, roles in campaigns and overall contribution to Mughal war-making during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Yet, whatever little attention these non-elite foot-soldiers have received from Mughal chroniclers and modern historians, the workers who looked after the logistics of imperial military campaigns have received even less. ¹⁹ The main reason for this is that although the interventions of Kolff and other historians have significantly nuanced our knowledge about military participants in Mughal armies and increased our understanding especially of the non-elite groups, the category of ‘military labour’ itself has continued to be conceptualised in terms of combatants. Hardly any historian has recognised the importance of either logistics or the logistical workforce in Mughal war-making and territorial expansion. This neglect is a part of a larger tendency that characterises the writing of military history across the world, wherein war is conceptualised primarily in terms of combat. Consequently, all other war-related activities get marginalised within the academic discourse. Logistics is a major, though certainly not the only, casualty of this discursive violence. ²⁰ Concerned primarily about the achievements of the mounted aristocracy, Mughal sources also reveal very little about this workforce. Yet, as I show in the third section of this article, it is possible to put together a reasonably coherent picture using the fragments of information that are available. I argue that non-elite labourers such as carpenters, boatmen, woodcutters and pioneers were pivotal to the conduct of Mughal military campaigns in terms of the myriad logistical tasks they carried out. It was the fulfilment of these tasks that enabled the soldiers to fight their adversaries and the empire to expand its frontiers.

The combined neglect of the common infantry and the logistical workforce in the historiography on warfare gives the impression that although Mughal armies comprised various types of participants, warfare and territorial expansion were primarily an elite venture: a product of the actions of emperors, the imperial mounted aristocracy and their cavalry. To return to an earlier point, this elitism in the field of war is only a part of the larger elitism and the neglect of non-elite agency in the historiography of the Mughal Empire. This is something that this article problematises by offering a people’s history of the Mughal Empire. My historical approach is inspired and informed by the research conducted in the ‘history from below’ and Subaltern Studies traditions. The effort in this article is not so much to understand the consciousness, ideologies or even struggles of the labouring classes—something that has been one of the main objectives of both these intellectual traditions. Rather, the focus here is far more modest: to recover and foreground the role of the non-elite in the making of something that is usually understood as an elite enterprise. ²¹

Common Infantry

In the early modern European and the Ottoman empires, the advent of firearms benefitted the foot-soldiers. The handgun-equipped common infantry rapidly rose in military importance as well as socio-political standing. ²² In South Asia, however, the picture was quite different. As Douglas Streusand observes about the Mughal empire, the matchlock-bearing infantry never came to a position of challenging the social or political supremacy of the mounted aristocracy. ²³ Mughal armies employed common infantry in increasingly large numbers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as both archers and matchlockmen. Writing in the late-sixteenth century, Abul Fazl dedicated one whole section of his administrative compendium Ā’īn-i Akbari to foot-soldiers (piyad-gan). Interestingly, for the Mughals, this was an over-arching category that included various types of people, like soldiers, guards, wrestlers and logistical workers. The only common thread that connected them all was that unlike the mounted soldiers (suwārs), they served on foot. Abul Fazl provides a lot of details about the various types of foot-soldiers, their work, their pay and so on. Foot archers, for instance, were characterised as dākhilī troops. The state would hire them directly and then hand them over to individual manṣabdārs. These archers would be paid between 100 dāms and 120 dāms, while the commanders of every group of ten archers (Mīr-dah) would receive between 120 dāms and 180 dāms. Abul Fazl also discusses guards in detail. He says that thousands of darbāns served as palace guards. Their pay varied from 100 dāms to 120 dāms. Their Mīr-dahs were divided into five classes, with a pay of 120 dāms, 130 dāms, 140 dāms, 160 dāms and 200 dāms respectively. ²⁴ Another group of palace guards, called Khidmatiyyas, received 100 dāms, 110 dāms, 120 dāms, 140 dāms, 180 dāms and 200 dāms each, depending on their ranks. ²⁵ Abul Fazl also mentions various types of gladiators (shamsher-bāz) – the Yak-hath, who fought only with one hand; some from the south who carried shields big enough to hide a horseman; some who used much smaller shields; the Banaits, who used long swords; the Bankulis, who used bent swords and so on. Every hundred of them were under the command of a Ṣadī (literally, centurion), who enjoyed the status of an aḥadī. According to Abul Fazl, their pay ranged between 80 dāms and 600 dāms. There were also wrestlers from various regions, whose pay varied from 70 dāms and 450 dāms. ²⁶ Abul Fazl also includes several types of labourers within the category of foot-soldiers. One of them were kahārs, who numbered several thousands. They carried loads and were paid something between 120 dāms and 160 dāms. The head of the group (sar-i guroh) received something between 384 dāms and 192 dāms. ²⁷

All these details that Abul Fazl included in his administrative compendium supports the idea of Kolff and Gommans about the military labour market of early modern South Asia being a highly specialised and variegated one. Foot-soldiers with various specialisations vied with each other for patronage here. Often people from specific regions would be known for their expertise in specific fields. For instance, Mewatis are described to have been excellent messengers and spies. ²⁸ The kahārs of the Deccan and Bengal were considered to have been the best. ²⁹ Many of them used specific weapons and were assigned to specific duties. As indicated above, contingents of ten foot-soldiers would often be put under the command of a Mīr-dah and groups of hundred under a Ṣadī. These commanders had their separate status and pay, which was higher than the people they commanded. According to Abul Fazl, all of these personnel were organised in a systematic, clearly defined and hierarchical schema. Each had a specific pay assigned to him. In many cases, their payment was graded depending on their skills. The case of the matchlockmen, which we will discuss shortly, is a case in point.

Whether these rules and regulation that Abul Fazl laid down in the Ā’īn were actually followed in practice or not is a different matter. But the very existence of these elaborate norms indicates that the empire had created an elaborate classificatory regime for the employment and governance of the common infantry. ³⁰ This detailed normative structure from the late-sixteenth century paints a picture that is radically at odds with William Irvine’s suggestions about the marginality of the infantry in Mughal armies. All of the infantrymen Abul Fazl describes had their own spheres of specialised activity. They contributed to the Mughal world of war in their own ways. Even a group like the wrestlers, who it might seem were unimportant to warfare, were important in terms of enriching the imperial military culture and fostering certain models of military sports, bodily discipline and masculinity. ³¹

Among the various types of common infantry, the one that was arguably the most important tactically and most visible in contemporary sources were the matchlockmen. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they formed an important and expanding section of Mughal armies. Let us begin by exploring their role in warfare. They held a key position in Babur’s battle tactics, which revolved around the coordinated deployment of heavy cavalry, light cavalry, field artillery, matchlockmen and the wagon laager. In full battle formation, the wagons would be lined along the front of the army. They would be chained with each other to prevent a potential cavalry charge by the adversary. The field artillery would be stationed between these wagons. The heavy cavalry, divided into several wings, would be stationed at the back. The light cavalry would take up position on the flanks and the vanguard. Finally, the matchlockmen would be positioned behind the wagons. ³² This positioning of the latter was to offer them protection against enemy attacks. This was necessary because using matchlocks was cumbersome business. The considerable time that a matchlockman required to reload his gun after firing it once created the need to offer him some protection. In Europe, this was done pikemen. ³³ In Japan, Oda Nobunaga used palisades to shelter his matchlockmen at the battle of Nagashino (1575). From this position, they decimated the cavalry of Takeda Katsuyori. ³⁴ Babur borrowed the practice of stationing his matchlockmen behind the wagons from the Ottomans. The result was that these matchlockmen made a crucial contribution to Babur’s landmark victories in the battles of Panipat (1526) and Khanua (1527). ³⁵ From this time onward, matchlockmen, alongside foot archers, formed an integral part of Mughal battle tactics, especially in the bigger ones. While it was certainly the cavalry that flourished the most in Mughal pitched battles, the common infantry, alongside other wings like artillery and elephants, usually lent crucial support. In certain cases, the common infantry could even come to the rescue of the cavalry. For instance, during the Balkh campaign of 1646–47, Uzbeg mounted archers constantly attacked Mughal armies on the march. The use of evasive cavalry tactics by these archers prevented the Mughal heavy cavalry from closing in on them. Faced by this crisis, it was the matchlockmen, with their ability to engage the enemy from a distance, who were deployed in large numbers to repel these attacks. ³⁶

Yet, as Douglas Streusand points out, the Mughals fought surprisingly few big pitched battles. ³⁷ This pushes us to look beyond battles in trying to understand the tactical importance of Mughal matchlockmen. It was in the two other forms of military engagements—sieges and amphibious engagements—that we find them playing even more crucial roles. In both these spheres of military action, matchlockmen emerged as one of the most important wings of Mughal armies tactically. The reason was the frequent physical separation of armies in these engagements. In sieges—numerous especially in Central India and the Deccan—this separation was created by the fortifications. For weeks and even months on end, armies would entrench themselves and engage each other from a distance. Matchlockmen could be very effective in these conditions when given some elevation, and thus access, to target members of the garrison. To this effect, they would sometimes be stationed on neighbouring hillocks, at other times on artificial siege towers. ³⁸ Hand to hand combat could break out only if soldiers of the garrison would sally out to attack the besiegers or if the latter would storm the fort. Beyond offering strategic mobility in terms of raiding nearby areas or maintaining the flow of communication, cavalry had little tactical importance under these circumstances.

In amphibious engagements—rampant mainly in Sind, Bengal and Assam—the conditions were quite different. In this type of military contest, the separation would be caused by waterbodies. Close combat could begin only if one water-borne army would manage to board the boats of the other or if one land army and one naval army would manage to close in on each other. Either way, armies squarely depended on projectile-throwing infantry and artillery to engage one another. Matchlockmen were one such group of the common infantry, others being foot archers, rocketeers, artillerymen and so on. Consequently, all these infantrymen were deployed in very large numbers in Bengal and Assam, often outnumbering the cavalry by far. Once again, the cavalry had very little tactical importance under these conditions. Its mobility—tactical and strategic—was severely curbed by the numerous rivers, marshes and sometimes forests. ³⁹

Thus, we see that matchlockmen comprised a crucial fighting wing of Mughal armies across different forms of military engagements, especially in sieges and amphibious clashes. As for numbers, we find Abul Fazl mentioning in the late-sixteenth century that the imperial army had in its employment twelve thousand matchlockmen. ⁴⁰ In the seventeenth century too, we find large contingents of matchlockmen in operation. Under Jahangir, for instance, thousands of them were deployed in the amphibious campaigns in Eastern Bengal between 1608 and 1612. ⁴¹ During the reign of Shah Jahan, the army that invaded Balkh in 1646 had around ten thousand infantrymen—comprising matchlockmen, rocketeers and artillery-men—alongside fifty thousand cavalry. ⁴² In 1649, a similar number accompanied the army sent to besiege Qandahar. ⁴³

Most of these matchlockmen were actually peasants who served as mercenaries through the winter months, the usual off-season of agriculture. Dirk Kolff traces the history of these communities back to the mid-fifteenth century, when most of them would serve as foot archers. Over the sixteenth century, many of these peasant-soldiers transitioned to using matchlocks instead of bows and arrows. This was facilitated by the easy availability of saltpetre and iron—the two major ingredients for making matchlocks—in the Middle Gangetic Basin. ⁴⁴ Saltpetre would be made from nitre: a mineral component produced naturally in this region. Heat and humidity would facilitate the decomposition of the excreta produced by large animal populations of the region into nitre. European travellers of the seventeenth century also noted the easy natural availability of saltpetre in this region. ⁴⁵ As for iron, Asha Shukla Choubey points out that iron ores have traditionally been mined in the hills of the Chota Nagpur Plateau, which also lay close to the Middle Gangetic Basin. Throughout the early modern period right down to the eighteenth century, iron would be mined in these regions, especially in the Singhbhum area. It would then be exported to Bengal and Bihar. Choubey’s work shows us that centring this iron mining industry, there developed a thriving network of blacksmiths and other tradesmen in these parts. They would process this iron ore and manufacture different things with the metal. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the town Monghyr in the Middle Gangetic Basin was a renowned centre of metalworks and the manufacture of weapons. ⁴⁶

By the late sixteenth century, we find several communities like Ujjainiyas, Baksariyas and Purbiyas in the employment of both the Mughals and other states. They specialised in musketry and thus became much valued in the military labour market. Dirk Kolff argues that by virtue of this community-based military specialisation, they were able to find employment in the armies of different polities of North India, including several Rajput states and the Sultanates of Gujarat and Malwa by mid-sixteenth century. ⁴⁷ After the Mughal Empire expanded to Gujarat and Malwa during the 1560s and 1570s, many of these groups joined Mughal armies. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, Niccolao Manucci noted that Mughal infantrymen were mainly peasant-Rajput soldiers, whom Kolff calls ‘spurious’ Rajputs, from the Middle Gangetic Basin. ⁴⁸ Alongside these groups who served in the imperial armies, there also arose during the seventeenth century various communities who would serve different regional polities. Iqtidar Alam Khan points out that they had to get accustomed to using muskets as they were often up against the authority of the Mughal empire. The cases of the Baluchis and the Sikhs are examples of this. Khan also points out that by the initial decades of the seventeenth century, members of the upper echelons of the peasant society of different parts of North India began to carry and use matchlocks. ⁴⁹ By the late seventeenth century, there also appeared several new social communities, such as the Bahelias and Bhadurias, in North India who also specialised in foot-musketry. During the reign of Aurangzeb, the Baksariyas were the largest social group serving in the Mughal army as foot-musketeers as well as foot archers. ⁵⁰ By the turn of the century, the matchlock had percolated to even the lower strata of the rural population across vast regions of South Asia. ⁵¹

From the Mughal sources, we also get some information about the recruitment and pay of these matchlockmen in imperial armies. Abul Fazl writes in the late-sixteenth century that officers attached to the matchlockmen had four grades, with salaries of 300 dāms, 280 dāms, 270 dāms and 260 dāms respectively. The common matchlockmen were grouped into five classes and each class was further categorised into three groups. Salaries were 250 dāms, 240 dāms and 230 dāms respectively in the first class, 220 dāms, 210 dāms and 200 dāms in the second, 190 dāms, 180 dāms and 170 dāms in the third, 160 dāms, 150 dāms and 140 dāms in the fourth and 130 dāms, 120 dāms and 110 dāms in the fifth class. ⁵² Dākhilī matchlockmen were paid 140 dāms. ⁵³

Middlemen played a key role in the recruitment of these peasant-soldiers. From the account of Mirza Nathan, it becomes clear that the men employed in the imperial artillery in Bengal in the early seventeenth century served under sardārs or leaders. They were the people the state officials negotiated with. In one incident, for instance, these sardārs bargained with Mughal commanders serving in Bengal regarding the pay of the artillerymen. ⁵⁴ These were the sort of people who Dirk Kolff refers to as jama‘dārs or jobber-commanders. ⁵⁵ In the sixteenth century, peasant-soldiers would usually be led by community leaders with strong local and communitarian ties. The Purabiya Rajput leaders Medini Rai and Silahadi are cases in point. ⁵⁶ However, Kolff argues that in course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authority of such leaders was gradually superseded by independent political entrepreneurs and jobber-commanders as the more common brokers between states and the peasant-soldier communities. ⁵⁷ These various middlemen could play very crucial role in determining who would eventually be recruited and who denied employment. For this reason, as Kolff puts it, ‘the common soldier was far more loyal [to these middlemen] to the states that had contracted him’. ⁵⁸

Logistical Workforce

Alongside very large number of combatants, Mughal armies also included huge groups of non-combatants. These people would look after the various logistical tasks of campaigning armies. For instance, a large number of workers and officials served the imperial camp on a daily basis. Abul Fazl mentions that two sets of imperial camps would always be maintained. While the emperor would be using one, the other with all its paraphernalia would be dispatched to the next station in advance to be used the next day. He writes that each such encampment would be serviced by ‘a thousand Farrashes, natives of Iran, Turan and Hindustan, 500 pioneers (bel-dārān), 100 water-carriers (suqā), 50 carpenters (durodgar), tent-makers ( kh aima-doz) and torch-bearers (mash‘al-chī), 30 workers in leather (charm-doz) and 150 sweepers (khāk-rob)’. ⁵⁹ It is true that imperial encampments would be more lavish and more labour-intensive that other types of camps. However, given that Mughal princes and commanders emulated imperial habits of consumption in a large measure, the number of workers employed in their camps was probably not substantially lower either.

Aside from the camp, a huge workforce was permanently employed in the servicing of the imperial military enterprise. Their tasks included the manufacture, protection and transportation of weaponry, the construction and repair of fortifications and the mobilisation and upkeep of war-animals. The last task itself required the participation of thousands of workers. Abul Fazl recorded that different types of elephants had specific servants working towards their well-being. The number of these attendants could range from two to five and a half, depending on the nature and quality of the animal. ⁶⁰ A faujdār was to supervise contingents of 10, 20 and 30 elephants. He would also be in charge of training the elephants for battle. ⁶¹ Similarly, a lot of people were employed in various capacities in the horse stables. The hāḍā would train the horses in their initial steps, the akhtachī was to look after the harness, the baytar would be responsible for their medical care, the chābuksawār would look into the speed of the horses, the naqīb would watch over them and so on. The Ā’īn records eighteen types of such offices in all. ⁶² Similarly, the stables of other animals—camels, mules and cows—would all have their own staff responsible for the animals in various capacities. ⁶³

Military campaigns would require the logistical workforce to perform a variety of tasks. Roadbuilding was one such sphere of activity. It required the deployment of a lot of workers, like pioneers and woodcutters. They would usually be dispatched ahead of the main army, designated with the task of clearing a path for the troops to march. Niccolao Manucci recorded the presence of ‘one thousand labourers, with axes, mattocks, spades, and pick-axes’ in Aurangzeb’s army responsible for cutting forests down to make roads. ⁶⁴ Woodcutters would be indispensable in forested areas. Descriptions of Mughal wars in Assam mention the deployment of thousands of such workers for cutting down the thick forests of the region for the army to proceed. ⁶⁵ In rugged areas, pioneers would be required to break stones and level the ground to create a path. This, for instance, was a major concern during Akbar’s campaigns among the Afghans hills and defiles in the mid-1580s. ⁶⁶ In areas that experienced snowfall, clearing snow from the road was a necessity. We see this in course of the Mughal expedition to Balkh and Badakhshan in 1646. ⁶⁷

A lot of labourers with diverse specialisations were required in siege warfare. The usual routine of Mughal armies while besieging a fort was to encircle it, blockade it and then start building batteries and siegeworks. The latter comprised constructing temporary fortifications for protecting the besieging Mughal army as well as building mines (naqb), saps (sābāt̤) and siege towers (sar kob) to attack the fort. These tasks were labour-intensive and required the participation of a lot of workers. In the siege of Chitor (1567–68), for instance, five thousand builders (bannā’), carpenters (najjār), stone-masons (sang-tarāsh), sappers and other workmen were deployed. ⁶⁸ The tasks usually needed to be done as fast as possible. The workers would also be under constant firing by enemy archers, matchlockmen and artillery. Contemporary sources indicate that this often claimed a lot of lives among these workers. ⁶⁹ A part of this workforce must have comprised skilled labourers, who planned and supervised the construction of the siegeworks. There must have been a far greater number of semi-skilled and unskilled labourers for carrying out tasks like digging, chopping wood, levelling the ground, carrying earth and so on. Labourers could also be required to move heavy pieces of siege artillery. In case of the siege of Ranthambhor, for instance, Abul Fazl describes ‘iron-armed kahars and strong-shouldered porters (kahārān-i āhanīn-bāzū wa ḥammālān-i sangīn dosh)’ hauling fifteen Mughal ẓarbuzans (big cannons) up the neighbouring hill of Ran for them to be deployed against the fort. ⁷⁰

There were also specific types of workers whose would be required in specific regions. The boatmen who manned Mughal war boats in the theatres of amphibious warfare was one such group. Bahāristān gives a fairly detailed account of their myriad contributions to the prosecution of Mughal military campaigns in Bengal and Assam in the early-seventeenth century. ⁷¹ As the size of the Mughal flotilla gradually expanded to several hundred war boats by this time, campaigning armies had to recruit thousands of boatmen. ⁷² While smaller boats mainly carried troops, larger ones often also had artillery fitted on them and hence would require extra manpower in order to manoeuvre the guns.

What is worth noting is that even beyond their primary duty of manning the imperial war boats, these boatmen were repeatedly called upon to perform a variety of other tasks. Just like pioneers and woodcutters were deployed elsewhere in the empire to cut down forests and build roadways, the boatmen could be called upon to help with riverine navigation. For instance, they were ordered to dig up the silted channel of a river to allow the war fleet to proceed during one expedition in 1608. ⁷³ Mirza Nathan, the author of Bahāristān, says that he was entrusted in leading the boatmen in this task. He writes that he accordingly deployed 10 thousand out of the 12 thousand boatmen of the Mughal flotilla. He supervised the entire operation personally. It took the boatmen a week to dig up the channel and clear the mouth of the river for the fleet to proceed, but, in the end, they completed the task. ⁷⁴

The boatmen of Bengal were also repeatedly called upon to erect improvised mud fortifications, for which they had a reputation. Built of riverside earth, these mud forts were resilient against artillery fire. Mughal armies had to subdue many of them during their intensive campaigns especially in Eastern Bengal between 1608 and 1612. Over time, they realised the efficacy of these defensive structures and would have their boatmen construct these for them, especially to defend their positions in course of campaigns. ⁷⁵

The duties of the boatmen did not even stop at helping imperial troops construct fortifications, but they also had to help out at times in capturing them. In one such example, the boatmen were called upon to assist in the difficult siege of a fort at Dakchara. ⁷⁶ Owing to the relentless firing by the garrison, Mughal forces found it very difficult to approach the fort. Mirza Nathan then had the wagons of the army brought up and arranged as a defensive barrier along the front lines of the army. After this he mobilised the boatmen. He divided them into two groups, ordered one to pile up earth and the other bundles of grass behind the wagons to build some sort of a wall. The firing of the garrison claimed the lives of several boatmen, but ultimately the job was done. ⁷⁷ Next, they were ordered to fill up the ditch around the fort and cover up the sharp bamboo spikes planted in the ditch by depositing bundles of straw and basketfuls of earth in it. ⁷⁸ Once the ditch had been filled up, the Mughal army brought in their war-elephants and stormed the fort. ⁷⁹

Compared to the common infantry, information about the recruitment and pay of the logistical labourers is much more fragmented and incomplete in contemporary Mughal texts. Some of the labourers, whose services were needed around the year, must have been employed in the long-term. These included the people who would take care of the animals, manufacture weaponry and serve the camps. Other workers, who carried out specific tasks in course of campaigns, would be raised on a more temporary basis. For instance, on the eve of the Balkh-Badakhshan campaign of 1646, one Mughal commander was dispatched to raise a contingent of ‘masons (sang-tarāsh, lit. stone-cutters), carpenters (najjār) and sappers (bel-dār)’ to create a road for the army. ⁸⁰ The incident of the strike of the boatmen in Bengal in 1608, with which this article began, also gives us a peek into this dynamics of recruitment and pay. In order to resolve that particular incident, Mughal commanders sent their officials like mutaṣaddīs to neighbouring villages to recruit—or perhaps coax into employment—boatmen and sailors. This bore fruit. Subsequently we find a thousand new boatmen joining the Mughal fleet. ⁸¹ This also points to the mechanisms of recruitment in terms of personnel. Mutaṣaddīs are one type of officials who are also mentioned on other occasions as the agents of recruitment of logistical labourers. ⁸² Another type of official who is mentioned is the karorī. In one instance, we find Mirza Nathan making a requisition for boatmen with Khwaja Mutahhar Karori. ⁸³

As in the case of the matchlockmen, there seems to have been leaders of the logistical labourers who negotiated with the state on their behalf. For example, Manucci saw such leaders among the woodcutters and pioneers of Aurangzeb’s army in the mid-seventeenth century. They rode on horseback ‘carrying in their hands their badges of their office, which are either an axe or a mattock in silver’. ⁸⁴ It is possible that these were the counterparts of the jama‘dārs or jobber-commanders, who, as Kolff points out, mobilised and led various groups of peasant-soldiers. ⁸⁵ In this sense, they are comparable with the military entrepreneurs who supplied soldiers and resources to early modern European states. ⁸⁶ It also appears that logistical labourers were fairly numerous and easily available. This is something that Babur recorded right at the inception of Mughal rule in South Asia. ⁸⁷ They must have been recruited from occupational groups with different specialisation and were usually organised along caste or religious lines in medieval and early modern South Asia. It also appears that it would usually be the state that would recruit and pay these workers itself as dākhilī troops before allotting them to individual commanders in accordance with their ranks and requirements. The Ā’īn indicates that this was the norm, for example, for hiring carpenters (durod-gar), blacksmiths (āhan-gar), water-carriers (suqā) and pioneers (bel-dār). ⁸⁸ Shireen Moosvi points out that by the seventeenth century, skilled and unskilled labourers as well as domestic servants were paid in cash in the Mughal Empire. ⁸⁹ This was probably also the practice for logistical labourers. ⁹⁰ It is highly likely that some labour was rendered without any payment (be-gār) as a part of their community or caste obligations. There might also have been an element of coercion on the part of the state, especially when it came to carrying out dangerous tasks on the battlefield. In times of contingency, the state would sometimes give additional incentives to these labourers. During the excavation of the silted canal in Bengal, for instance, Mirza Nathan freely distributed bullion, rice and intoxicants among the boatmen to keep them going. ⁹¹ During the siege of Chitor (1567–68), Akbar is mentioned to have distributed gold and silver bullion among the workers to get them to brave firing by the enemy and build the siegeworks for the Mughal army. ⁹²

Towards a People’s History of the Mughal Empire

Several points emerge from the above discussion. They help us rethink our understanding of Mughal war-making and empire-building as well as the politics of history-writing on these subjects. Let me start with a few reflections on the case in point: warfare. What immediately emerges is that notwithstanding their historiographical neglect, the non-elite groups discussed here were extremely important for the ability of the Mughal state to make wars and win them. The common infantry, especially matchlockmen, held great importance in Mughal military tactics. This was particularly true for sieges and amphibious engagements, although they also played an important part in battles. The labour of the logistical workers enabled the Mughal state to transport and supply its troops, mobilise and maintain the war-animals, produce military infrastructure and so on. Recognising this importance of the non-elite in military campaigns helps us problematise the traditional historiographical emphasis on the cavalry as the main driving force of Mughal warfare and conquests.

It also shows us that the ‘military labour market of Hindustan’ was far more complex that what Dirk Kolff, and later Jos Gommans, envisaged. ⁹³ As mentioned earlier, they implicitly define the category of military labour in terms of the labour of combatants. However, the arguments presented in this article indicate that the logistical workforce was as integral to the conduct of military campaigns as soldiering groups. Owing to their vital role in the production of military infrastructure, the close connection of their work with combat and their willingness to risk their lives to complete certain tasks, the nature of their labour rendered by the logistical workers was essentially very different from ordinary labour, like construction labour or textile labour in peacetime societies. In view of this, it is necessary to expand the ambit of the category of ‘military labour’ to include the logistical workforce as all. In fact, this category needs to be radically expanded to include any and every type of labour—combat or non-combat—that contributes consciously towards the making of war. ⁹⁴ Once we appreciate this complexity of the ‘military labour market of Hindustan’, it then becomes possible for us to realise that the states in early modern South Asia did not just vie with each other to attract soldiers to their ranks, as Kolff and Gommans suggest. ⁹⁵ These states must also have had to compete with each other in order to recruit very large numbers of logistical workers. The fact that out of these states, it was the Mughal state that was able to build a pan-South Asian empire points to its success as an employer and paymaster of both combatant and non-combatant military labour.

The above sections also reveal the merits of moving away from the traditional focus on battles and technologies while studying warfare and adopting a social history approach instead. The exploration of the actions, social backgrounds, motivations, wages, organisation and mechanisms of recruitment of the various non-elite communities involved in Mughal military campaigns lead us into a relatively unexplored domain of war. In turn, it helps us move towards a better understanding of the relationships between war and society. For instance, the large-scale involvement of the various non-elite communities in Mughal campaigns shows that war was never alien to South Asian society, but very much a part of it. Ravi Ahuja has recently thrown light on the impact of the violent cycle of war, devastation and pauperisation during the Anglo-Mysore wars in late eighteenth-century South India. He argues that one important reason for rural communities to join the mobile military camps as labourers and camp followers was the search for livelihood and survival following the utter devastation that warfare had caused to local village society. ⁹⁶ Mughal military campaigns too must have had a negative socio-economic impact in areas of conflict. ⁹⁷ Yet, there is little contemporary evidence of the level of death, devastation and pauperisation in the Mughal case, especially in North India, comparable to what Ahuja encounters in his work. Rather, joining Mughal military campaigns was probably more of an opportunity than a compulsion for both the peasant soldiers and the logistical workers. Service in Mughal armies held out financial rewards and possibly prestige and glory. For instance, we know from Dirk Kolff’s work about the great value that the peasant/herder Rajput communities in early modern North India ascribed to the notion and performance of service (naukarī) to their employers. Aside from financial remuneration, this ideal of serving one’s master as soldiers occupied an important position in the social and cultural consciousness of these communities. ⁹⁸ It is tempting to conjecture that the case of the logistical workers was similar. At any rate, such questions about the relationship between war and society open up new avenues for writing histories of war.

Let us now look beyond warfare to see how the above sections help us rethink the history of the Mughal Empire at a more general level. As I argued earlier, owing to the nature of sources as well as a lopsided historical understanding, the Mughal Empire has mainly been understood till now as an enterprise produced by the actions of the emperors and the imperial elite. Undoubtedly, this historiography has taught us a lot about the nature of sovereignty, imperial administration, political economy, courtly culture, political ideology, representation of power and so on. But because of its long-standing, and now resurgent, elitism, it has obscured the crucial role various non-elite communities of South Asia played in the processes of the making and unmaking of the empire. The above exploration of the roles of non-elite military participants in Mughal military campaigns challenges this. Since war and military conflict was one of the most important facets of Mughal state-formation and empire-building, it can be safely argued that the roles of these non-elite communities were crucial in shaping these broader processes as well. In other words, studying the roles of non-elite military participants in Mughal armies reveals that the empire was not solely an elite enterprise but also a result of active and large-scale non-elite participation. ⁹⁹

Finally, forgoing the traditional elitism of Mughal historiography allows us to reflect on the nature of the Mughal state afresh. The large-scale participation of non-elite soldiers and logistical workers in the imperial armies indicates that Mughal state-formation and empire-building was based on a broad-based participation of South Asia’s population. Here it is worth recalling Farhat Hasan’s reflections about the nature of the Mughal state. He argues that the state was intimately entangled with social relations at the local level. The ability of the state to govern emanated from its ability to negotiate and engage these ‘local relations of power’. ¹⁰⁰ In view of this, he sees the Mughal state as only ‘partially differentiated’ from society. ¹⁰¹ In this form, the state did not remain an alien, authoritative, centralising and coercive entity—something that it is sometimes portrayed as; ¹⁰² rather, Hasan sees it as ‘both coercive and consensual’ and ‘both extractive and re-distributive’. ¹⁰³ This extends the work Chetan Singh, who already in 1988 argued that the Mughal state evolved on the one hand by accommodating the vested political and economic interests of its nobility and on the other by incorporating the landed elite of the region into its own administrative apparatus. He added that demands of administration and the needs to appease local and regional interests often caused substantial deviation from the centralising tendencies of the imperial administration. ¹⁰⁴ Recently, Munis Faruqui has located one of the main sources of Mughal power in the ability of its princes to recruit, mobilise and ally with important social groups including intellectuals, religious figures, military leaders, powerful administrators and so on. ¹⁰⁵ My own research supports this growing understanding of the Mughal state as a socially embedded entity. I have shown elsewhere that Mughal territorial expansion heavily relied on the support of local chieftains and its ability to harness their political, economic and cultural resources. Participation in the empire offered these chieftains a chance to enhance their power and prestige, while it helped the empire pursue its dynastic ambitions. ¹⁰⁶ For the various non-elite communities like the ones discussed in this article, participation in the affairs of the Mughal state held out financial, social and cultural rewards. For the Mughals, co-opting these communities and harnessing whatever material or cultural resource they had to offer was a way of pursuing their own imperial agenda. It is at these interstices of these local and imperial interests that the development of the Mughal state occurred. In the process, the empire emerged as essentially an accommodative and collaborative venture involving myriad elite and non-elite actors from South Asia and beyond.