The limited adoption of European-style military forces by eighteenth century rulers in India

Indian Economic and Social History Review

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 229-244

  Gordon, Stewart ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 22444454286     PISSN: 00194646     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/001946469803500301     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. The issue of the 'embedding' of a technology in ideas and ideology have been admirably explored in two recent books; Wiebe E. Bijker, Shaping Technology/Building Society, Cambridge, Mass., 1992,
2. and Wiebe E. Bijker idem, The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge, Mass., 1987.
3. This approach avoids consideration of overall 'superiority' or 'inferiority' of non-Western technology, a not very productive question, but one which has generated much literature, both in the West and Asia. See William McNeil, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since A.D. 1000, Oxford, 1983.
4. Also, A. Dharampal, Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century, Delhi, 1971;
5. Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj, 1857-1905, Oxford, 1995.
6. Baburnama, trans. A.S. Beveridge, Delhi, 1989 rpt, pp. 99-100.
7. Rafi A. Alavi, 'New Light on Mughal Cavalry', in Medieval India: A Miscellany, Volume 2, Aligarh, 1972, pp. 73-74;
8. see also William Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghals: Its Organisation and Administration, Delhi, 1962 rpt, p. 52.
9. Robert Orme, Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, London, 1805, p. 418
10. Edward McEwen, Robert L. Miller and Christopher A. Bergman, 'Early Bow Design and Construction', Scientific American, June 1991, pp. 76-82.
11. For other representations of this type of army in camp and in battle, see P. Pal, Court Paintings of India, 16th-19th Centuries, New York, 1983;
12. see also, Michael Brand and Glenn D. Lowry, Akbar's India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory, New York, 1986.
13. Vishaka N. Desai, Life at Court: Art for India's Rulers, 16th-19th Centuries, Boston, 1985, Plate 71.
14. Mughal paintings show these early shoulder arms in use from covered platforms mounted on the backs of elephants, but mainly in hunting.
15. Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668, second edition (revised by Vincent A. Smith), Delhi, 1989 rpt.
16. Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghals, p. 155.
17. The use of matchlocks in river warfare in Bengal is illustrated in a dispersed page from the Beatty Collection Akbarnama now in the Cincinnati Museum. See Ellen S. Smart and Daniel S. Walker, The Pride of Princes: Indian Art of the Mughal Era in the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, 1985.
18. Documentary evidence corroborating this portrayal is found throughout the many battles described by Mirza Nathan, who served in Bengal for 20 years in the reign of Jahangir. See Baharistan-i-Ghaybi, trans. M.I. Borah, Assam, 1936.
19. See, for example, G.N. Pant, Mughal Weapons in the Baburnama, New Delhi, 1989, Plate 1.
20. For example, see the static arrangement of the artillery in 'A'zam Khan captures Fort Dharur' from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, fol. 91b,
21. published in P. Pal, Master Artists of the Imperial Mughal Court, Bombay, 1991, p. 143.
22. J.N. Sarkar, Military History of India, Calcutta, 1960, p. 47.
23. See, for example, the famous Akbarnama painting by Miskina and Paras of a cannon being dragged up to the siege of Ranthambor, Victoria and Albert Museum, Acc. No. 72/117, published, among other places, in Geeti Sen, Paintings from the Akbar Nama: A Visual Chronicle of Mughal India, Calcutta, 1984.
24. Bernier, Travels, p. 217.
25. Baburnama, p. 153.
26. Dirk H.A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450-1850, Cambridge, 1990.
27. Dirk H.A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450-1850, Ibid., pp. 63-64.
28. The first choice of term to describe the receipt of local land rights in return for military service might have been igta. This term describes precisely the relationship between a Muslim ruler and his military followers, from the first Muslim invasions of India onwards. When the relationship moved beyond the Muslim followers to indigenous local militarised families, it was rarely termed iqta; more commmonly, these groups termed the relationship watan. I have, therefore, chosen to use the term watan. See Richard Eaton, 'Iqta tenure in the Deccan in the age of Timur', Paper Presented at the Conference on South Asia, Madison, 1996, unpublished.
29. D.A. Pawar, ed., Tarabaikalin Kagedpatre, Kolhapur, 1969, p. 124. Translation mine, with the assistance of Dr Shiresh Chikte.
30. D.A. Pawar, Tarabaikalin Kagedpatre, Ibid., p. 129.
31. W.H. Tone, who travelled through Khandesh in the late eighteenth century, counted 20 forts in the course of a day's march. W.H. Tone, Illustrations of Some Institutions of the Maratha People, London, 1818, p. 9.
32. S. Settar and Gunther D. Sontheimer, Memorial Stones: A Study of their Origin, Significance and Variety, Dharwad and Heidelberg, 1982.
33. It is well known that Shivaji, founder of the Maratha polity, had infantry in nearly equivalent numbers to his cavalry and that these troops were important in battles which centred on forts in Maharashtra. Nevertheless, soon after Shivaji's death, warfare between the Mughals and the Marathas dictated rapid movement on horseback, and the infantry dwindled.
34. Muzaffar Alam, 'Eastern India in the early eighteenth century "crisis"': Some evidence from Bihar', The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 28 (1), 1991, pp. 53-55.
35. Surajit Sinha, 'State formation and Rajput myth in tribal central India', Man in India, Vol. 42 (1), January-March, 1962, pp. 35-75.
36. See the extensive discussion of the coalescence of the Maratha caste in Stewart Gordon, Zones of military entrepreneurship in India, 1500-1700', in Surajit Sinha, idem, Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India, Delhi, 1994.
37. This appears to be the case in two mid-eighteenth century paintings, one from Central India and one from the Himalayan hills. See P. Pal, Court Paintings of India, Plate R. 33;
38. see also, B.N. Goswamy and Eberhard Fischer, Pahari Masters: Court Painters of Northern India, Zurich, 1992, Plate 97.
39. In looking at hundreds of images of Mughal and Deccan Sultanate rulers, it seems striking that I have yet to see a ruler with a firearm either in a battle or a courtly setting. The only context in which royalty regularly used firearms seems to have been hunting; rulers were, however proud of good marksmanship, and had their kills recorded in official memoirs.
40. Bernier, Travels, p. 217.
41. For our purposes, it is enough that European armies arriving in India were quite different in organisation and focus than indigenous Indian ones. I wish to avoid the issue of whether there was a military 'revolution' in Europe in the seventeenth century. The debate goes back more than 20 years now, though Geoffery Parker's The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, Cambridge, 1998,
42. is less than a decade old. The discussion is well summarised in C. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution: The Debate, Boulder, 1995.
43. Recently, some historians have moved the 'revolution' backwards and forwards from the early Middle Ages to World War I. Other historians are rethinking the whole concept. See John A. Lynn, 'The evolution of army style in the modern west, 800-2000', The International History Review, Vol. 17(3), August, 1996.
44. This argument generally follows Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo, Bloomington, 1991.
45. In the course of the eighteenth century in Europe, cavalry gradually became less central as the rate of infantry and artillery fire improved. Especially important were efforts to improve the battlefield mobility of infantry and the introduction of lighter horse-drawn artillery in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Some infantry units of necessity were operating without cavalry, but all would have preferred having it - for skirmishing, for foraging, for frontal attacks, for flanking actions, even for filing holes in the infantry line.
46. Major Madan Paul Singh, Indian Army under the East India Company, New Delhi, 1976, p. 2.
47. 'The Ajnapatra or Royal Edict', trans. S.V. Puntambekar, Journal of Indian History, Vol. 8 (2), August, 1929, pp. 212-13.
48. For example, Bombay received orders to raise seven companies of 80 men each, plus an artillery company with 100 gunners. Singh, Indian Army, p. 5.
49. John Lynn types the British and French armies which arrived in India in the mid-eighteenth century as 'state commission armies' characterised by much more sophisticated military administration, mainly paid professional troops, purchase of commissions, and lack of national or patriotic commitments. Lynn, 'Evolution', p. 537.
50. Singh, Indian Army, p. 5.
51. Quoted in Singh, Indian Army, p. 5.
52. W.S. Desai, Bombay and the Marathas up to 1774, New Delhi, 1970, p. 154.
53. There was universal respect by Tipu's European opponents for his military organisation, training and battle tactics. He has received some recent scholarly attention. See P. Barua, 'Military developments in India, 1750-1850', Journal of Military History, Vol. 58, November, 1994, pp. 600-604.
54. Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600-1818, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 117-18.
55. C.B. Baillie Fraser, Military Memoirs of Lt. Col. Skinner, London, 1851, pp. 188-90.
56. The enormous overland horse trade, which every observer noted in the seventeenth century, simply continued in the eighteenth, in the form of large annual horse fairs. See Stephen F. Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 25-26.
57. Barua, 'Developments', pp. 613-14.
58. Quoted in G.S. Sardesai, Main Currents of Maratha History, Bombay, revised edition, 1949, p. 148.
59. The British Resident thought that Shinde was but little inconvenienced by the desertion of the unpaid Maratha troops and their leaders, as others were readily available. See India Office Library, Bengal Political and Secret Proceedings, June-September 1786, pp. 476-80.
60. Indian rulers, by and large, retained the same horse-based honours right through the British conquest of India. See Kate Brittlebank, 'Curiosities, conspicuous piety and the maker of time: Some aspects of kingship in eighteenth-century South India', South Asia, Vol. 16 (2), 1993, pp. 45-46.