Abstract
The category of ‘military labour’ has traditionally been used to designate ‘combat labour’ – the labour of soldiers. Focusing on the case of early modern South Asia, the present essay argues that this equivalence is misplaced and that it is a product of a distorted view of war defined primarily in terms of combat. The essay discusses the roles played by the logistical workforce of Mughal armies in conducting military campaigns and facilitating imperial expansion. It calls for broadening the category of ‘military labour’ to include all types of labour rendered consciously towards the fulfilment of military objectives.
Are soldiers labourers? Scholarly opinion has largely remained split on this question. The general mandate – at least with respect to early modern history – is betrayed by the average labour historian’s lack of interest in exploring labour dynamics in armies. Several scholars have argued against labelling military service as labour. Writing in the context of South Asia, Kaushik Roy, for instance, reasons that unlike ordinary labourers, soldiers are not simply motivated by salaries; cultural factors and ideologies play an important role in keeping them in service. Moreover, unlike the agricultural or industrial worker, the soldier is prepared to die in action. 1 Other historians have found alternate ways to bring in the issue of labour in the study of the military. Instead of entering the debate about whether soldiers are labourers, some have studied the relations of soldiers with mainstream workers. 2 There have also been those who have focused on occasions when soldiers are found to be rendering mainstream labour, mainly towards the fulfilment of logistical tasks. 3
Yet, there have been a small number of historians who have persuasively argued in favour of the usefulness of the category of military labour. Erik-Jan Zürcher, for instance, points out that one of the reasons for the lack of recognition of military service as work has been a prevalent definition of work in terms of an ‘activity yielding surplus value’. 4 This is contrasted with the perception of military service as something essentially destructive. He counters this argument in two ways. First, he highlights that there are times when soldiers are not engaged in combat and when they are required to complete a variety of productive tasks. Moreover, he points out that it is the service of soldiers that creates surplus economic value for states and empires. Hence, this kind of activity – he reasons – does qualify as labour and this is why the soldier needs to be considered as a labourer. 5 In doing so, Zürcher draws upon a historiographical tradition that explores enlistment or conscription into the military profession as the creation of a form of proletariat. 6 Writing about medieval and early modern South Asia, Dirk Kolff and Jos Gommans also support the idea of seeing soldiers as labourers. They point out that military employment shares many facets of common labour dynamics, including ‘supply and demand, recruitment, pay scales, training and loyalty, conditions of service, brokerage and mobility of labour’. 7
These are nuanced arguments and I am in favour of this approach. If a labourer can be defined as somebody who renders labour – physical or otherwise – towards the fulfilment of a particular goal in lieu of a wage, then a soldier is undoubtedly a labourer. However, the purpose of the present essay is to complicate the issue further. Based on my own research on Mughal warfare in early modern South Asia, I push the limits of this debate. I ask that if the contribution of soldiers should be categorized as military labour – and I agree that it should - then how should we categorize the labour rendered by the thousands of ordinary workers, who serve as the logistical bedrock of fighting armies?
The essay is divided into three sections. The first is primarily historiographical. Here I discuss the scholarly treatment of the subject of military manpower and labour in early modern South Asia. I argue that the existing body of literature is extremely rich and focuses on various elite and non-elite military participants. Yet, it still defines military labour solely in terms of combatants and does not take into account any other type of participant. In the second part, I focus on one such group of participants – the logistical workforce of Mughal armies. I discuss the various tasks this group fulfilled and how that contributed towards the conduct of Mughal military campaigns. This workforce comprised ordinary workers like carpenters, woodcutters, stone-cutters, sappers, miners, and boatmen. Although their work did not usually comprise combat, it is their coordinated labour that created military infrastructure and the very conditions for combat to occur. In the third part of the essay, I use this discussion of the Mughal case to argue that in order to recognize the value of the logistical workforce in the overall process of war and conquest, the very definition of the military labour needs to be radically expanded. I point out that a failure to do this so far is because of the dominant paradigm of military history-writing across the world, where war is conceptualized primarily in terms of combat. Almost all other military processes, including – but not limited to – military logistics, are marginalized within the historical discourse.
I. Military labour in the historiography of early modern South Asia
History of labour in South Asia before the eighteenth century is not a field that has seen a lot of scholarly attention so far. There has been some work on the early modern period. But here historians of labour have scarcely shown much interest in the various types of labour associated with warfare. 8 Until the 1980s, the study of military participants was not particularly popular among historians of war either. There was some scattered research on Mughal and Maratha armies, warrior ascetics, and military slaves. 9 The group that received the maximum attention was the manṣabdārī corps of the Mughal Empire. The upper echelons of this administrative cum military group comprised a big part of the mounted imperial elite. Since the 1960s through the 1980s, several historians wrote social, economic, and political histories of this mounted aristocracy. 10 Broadly speaking, the world of war in medieval and early modern South Asia was conceptualized in terms of such elite warrior communities of powerful states.
Since 1990, this intellectual landscape has changed significantly. That year, Dirk Kolff introduced the analytical category of military labour in the historiography of premodern South Asia. 11 Since then, he and other historians problematized the primacy that the existing historiography had given to the state and its warrior elite. Instead, these scholars explored the diversity of the South Asian military labour market by consciously focusing on non-elite military participants, especially the armed peasantry and the warrior ascetics. 12 Kolff himself expanded the ambit of the category of the military labour market further in the introduction to a volume that he co-edited with Jos Gommans. Here they envisaged an ‘inexhaustible’ labour market, one teeming with a vibrant population of different types of enterprising warrior groups and playing a major role in the rise and fall of states in medieval and early modern South Asia. 13 In this context, Kolff and Gommans interpreted the Mughal manṣabdārī organization as ‘a constitution regulating and managing a service that presided over the military labour market’. 14
In spite of these various interventions during the last 30 years, it is my contention that we are yet to fully comprehend the complexity of this military labour market. The main reason for this is that this labour market has been conceptualized entirely in terms of combatants so far; non-combat participants – who were employed in huge numbers to carry out a variety of war-related functions – have been completely excluded. In fact, there has been very little work on the role of these non-combatants in military campaigns in medieval and early modern South Asia. 15
This tendency of showering combatants with attention while ignoring the various non-combat participants of war is not something specific to the historiography of South Asia alone. It is, in fact, endemic to the writing of military histories across the world. 16 Several scholars of military logistics have pointed this out in the past. 17 Edward Luttwak argues that this emanates from an aristocratic view of war, one that has a lingering fascination with ‘whatever is dramatic’ as opposed to ‘what is merely important’. 18 This is what precipitated the traditional focus on combat, tactics, and technology – the aspects of war that seemed more attractive and important to the aristocratic classes of society – and a simultaneous neglect of the tedious non-elite world of logistics. Arguing along similar lines, Bernard Bachrach points out that even within the domain of combat, battles have enjoyed the most amount of attention for similar reasons. 19 For medieval European warfare – he argues – this has led historians to falsely equate warfare with the mounted knight, when in reality, the military role of the latter was restricted mainly to battles. In comparison, the non-elite logistical labourer was much more important to war-making in many cases. 20 The intervention of these historians notwithstanding, the scholarly neglect of logistics and logistical labour persists. 21 In turn, this means that across the world, histories of warfare are largely histories of combat and combatants, especially for the premodern period. It is then not a surprise that most of the times when the category of military labour is used in historical scholarship, it is used to refer to combatants. The historiography of South Asia – which we have studied in this section – is a case in point. It is this lacuna that the present essay addresses by throwing light on the workings of Mughal military logistics.
II. Logistical workforce in Mughal military campaigns
Mughal armies deployed enormous logistical workforces in their military campaigns. Their numbers could go up to several times the total number of actual soldiers. These workers performed a variety of activities, which produced the circumstances for combat to take place. Let us look closely at some of these activities.
Road-building
Building roads and keeping them under control was an integral part of Mughal military campaigns.
22
Given that early modern South Asia had considerable forest cover, woodcutters and pioneers would routinely proceed before the main army, cutting down forests and levelling the ground to ensure smooth movement of the troops.
23
Nicocolao Manucci, who journeyed with an imperial army under Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) in the mid-seventeenth century, describes such a scene in details: [T]here marched close to the baggage one thousand labourers, with axes, mattocks, spades, and pick-axes to clear any difficult passage. Their commanders ride on horseback carrying in their hands their badges of their office, which are either an axe or a mattock in silver. On arriving at the place appointed for the royal halt, they put up the tents and placed in position the heavy artillery.
24
These activities found a particularly important and visible role in three different regions. First, in regions like Kashmir or the Afghan area, the terrain was dominated by hills, defiles, and ravines. Here armies regularly needed the ground to be flattened before they could march over it. Narratives of Emperor Akbar’s (r. 1556-1605) military operations – especially those in the Afghan region in the mid-1580s – provide us with a lot of examples of this. The name of one Muhammad Qasim Khan – a commander holding the position of Mir Barr wa Bahr under Akbar – comes up repeatedly in contemporary texts with respect to these operations. 25 In many cases, Qasim Khan was sent ahead of the main army with groups of labourers to level the ground and create some sort of a path for the imperial troops to march on. For example, describing Akbar’s march from Agra to Kabul in 1585, Abul Fazl writes, ‘Qasim was sent on to level the roads (nishīb wa farāz rā hamwār gardand) up to the Indus. Afterwards he was to make the Khaibar and the road to Kabul passable for carriages (gardūn guzār sāzad)’. 26 Eventually, in the context of Akbar marching towards Kabul, the chronicler complements Qasim Khan on his good performance. He observed that roads over which camels and horses could travel earlier only with great difficulty had been rendered so good that even ‘carts passed through easily (ki ‘arāba ba-āsānī guzasht)’. 27
In the colder parts of empire on its north and northwest, removing snow from roads was a recurrent part of road-building. In addition, because of the hilly terrain of these parts, existing paths were often very narrow and passed over elevations. Consequently, the army had to frequently concentrate on building wider roads in order to proceed. The logistics of the Mughal invasion of Balkh and Badakhshan in 1645-1647 is a case in point. As a part of the preparations for the first campaign, one of the commanders of the army was sent in advance to mobilize ‘as many masons (sang-tarāsh, lit. stone-cutters), carpenters (najjār), and sappers (bel-dār) as should be required to improve the road’. 28 Soon after, we are told that a contingent of labourers was dispatched ahead of the main army. They were to render ‘the most strenuous exertions in widening narrow defiles (tausī‘ tangī-hā), leveling inequalities (hamwār sākhtan-i past), and constructing bridges (bastan-i pul-hā) along the road’. 29 In spite of these efforts, the invading army found it too difficult to proceed and the invasion was paused. The next year, imperial commanders were once again sent to recruit ‘a vast number of the peasantry in those regions for the purpose of removing the snow from the aforesaid [Tul] pass (barāy bar-dāshtan-i barf-i kutal-i mazkūr)’. 30 Accordingly, on the eve of the campaign in early 1646, the Amir-ul-Umara reached Kabul and concentrated his efforts on removing snow from the passes and roads. He also started building bridges over streams for the army to cross. 31 Such instances are, in fact, recurrent. 32
Finally, in certain regions like Assam, Bengal, and the Aravalli Hills, Mughal armies had to negotiate dense forests. Campaigns and combat were hugely dependent on woodcutters and other workers cutting down trees and thickets and preparing a way to march forward. Some references of this type come from narratives of imperial campaigns in Assam. Describing the 1662-1663 campaign, for instance, Khafi Khan mentions a group of ‘hatchet-men and wood-cutters’ marching ahead of the main army as it advanced along both banks of the river Brahmaputra in early 1662. He narrates that ‘with great care and caution, they cut down the trees with their hatchets and other implements and made a broad road for the army between the trees’.
33
Either due to a paucity of the number of workers available, or because of the density of the forest cover, soldiers were also deployed to help the workmen in these tasks. Another contemporary chronicler tells us that Dilir Khan, the commander of the vanguard of the imperial army, and Amir Mortaza, the dāro
Siegeworks
Siege warfare was a form of military engagement that demanded a lot of logistical work. Mughal armies routinely began their sieges by encircling forts on all sides and enforcing a blockade. They followed this up by constructing siegeworks – mines (naqb), saps (sābāt̤), batteries, and defensive barricades. This would be done by thousands of builders, carpenters, diggers, and other workmen with various specializations. In the siege of Chitor (1567-1568), for instance, Akbar’s army deployed 5,000 carpenters (najjār), builders (bannā’), stone-masons (sang-tarāsh), sappers, and other labourers. 35 Part of this contingent of labourers must have comprised skilled labour, in charge of planning and supervising the construction of the siegeworks. Alongside this, there must also have been a substantial number of unskilled workmen, responsible for digging earth, carrying rubble out, flattening the ground, and so on. This occupational difference and social hierarchy is easily discernible in contemporary Mughal miniature paintings that depict scenes of sieges. Working within the range of the projectile weapons of the garrison, these workers put their lives in danger to get the job done. Mughal sources indicate a very high rate of casualty among the workers owing to firing by the garrison. 36 The daily death toll was somewhere between 100 and 200. Having no time or respite to dispose of the dead bodies properly, these were built into the walls of the sap. In order to keep the workforce motivated and functional under such harsh conditions, Akbar – who was leading the siege – freely scattered gold and silver bullion among the workers. Abul Fazl writes, ‘[t]he coin of presents was poured into the lap of the workmen’s hopes, and silver and gold were reckoned at the rate of the earth (zar wa sīm khāk bahā shūda būd)’. 37 One can surmise that such financial rewards were accompanied by coercion to keep the workforce going. As a result of their constant labour for months on end, the siegeworks were finished. Ultimately, it was not Mughal siege artillery, but a physical assault on the fortifications delivered from a sap that brought the fort down. 38
Contemporary accounts of the siege of Ranthambhor (1569) allow us to find these workers in a slightly different role. 39 Here, the besieging Mughal army discovered a hill right opposite to the fort. Under the instructions of the commanders, 500 ‘iron-armed kahars and strong-shouldered porters (kahārān-i āhanīn-bāzū wa ḥammālān-i sangīn dosh)’ hauled 15 Mughal ẓarbuzans (big cannons) to the top of hill. 40 From here, Mughals bombarded the inner quarters of the fort and eventually scared the garrison into submission. In sieges where such nearby elevations were absent, Mughal armies would often require their workmen to construct artificial elevations called sar kob, from where artillery or handguns could be deployed.
War-fleet
In several theatres of war, including Bengal, Assam, and Sind, Mughal armies operated with war-fleets, sometimes comprising hundreds of vessels. In Bengal, war-boats numbered almost 300 in 1608. 41 In a major expedition against Khwaja Usman, an Afghan warlord, in Sylhet in 1611-1612, around the same number of boats were deployed. 42 Four hundred vessels were deployed in the Mughal invasion of Koch, Kamta, and Kamrup to the north of Bengal in 1612. 43 The number increased to close to 1,000 in the late-1610s, when imperial armies mounted an invasion against the Arakan kingdom to the southeast of Bengal. 44 Each of these war-boats required several boatmen as crew. Mirza Nathan, a Mughal commander who served in Bengal and Assam in the early-seventeenth century, puts the number of sailors and crew manning the entire war-flotilla under the command of his father at 12,000. 45 On another occasion, the number is mentioned to be around 13,000. 46 He also mentions that there were slightly less than 300 war-boats in the fleet at this time. 47 This means that on an average, 40 to 50 people were employed in manning every vessel. Understandably, bigger boats – especially those with artillery mounted on them – would require much more manpower than smaller ones, which mainly served as carrier vessels for troops and material.
Owing to the abundance of rivers and waterways in Bengal and Assam, a large part of the imperial campaigns in these parts were amphibious. As such, the war-fleet played a crucial role in Mughal territorial expansion here. The contribution of the corps of boatmen – who manned the war-fleet – to this process can hardly be over-emphasized. Moreover, contemporary sources indicate that the involvement of these boatmen went well beyond just logistical tasks. They were, in fact, often required to perform a variety of combat-related functions for the imperial armies. Let us consider a few examples.
Just like building roads in other regions, riverine areas would often require waterways to be cleared to facilitate the movement of vessels. In course of the amphibious campaigns in Bengal, the imperial fleet would, at times, need shallow and silted water channels to be dug up to proceed further. In one instance, the flotilla required to enter the Ichhamati River at a certain point during an ongoing military operation against Musa Khan in 1608. Mirza Nathan narrates that the task was assigned to him. He instructed 10,000 out of the 12,000 boatmen of the Mughal war-fleet to excavate the channel. He writes that he oversaw the operation personally and distributed bhāng (Indian hemp), opium, rice, and copper coins among the boatmen to keep their morale high. 48 The boatmen worked straight for a whole week and managed to dig up the silted canal. Thanks to their efforts, the imperial flotilla then sailed through it and entered the Ichhamati river. 49
Mughal texts also indicate that the boatmen of early modern Bengal were famous for building highly resilient temporary fortifications built of riverside mud. By the time the imperial armies made a decisive push into eastern Bengal in the early-seventeenth century, they were well-aware of the efficacy of these mud-forts, especially when defended with artillery, archers, and matchlockmen. During their campaigns in these parts from this time onward, imperial armies on the march would have their boatmen build these temporary fortifications for them at every station. In times of combat, Mughal generals made the boatmen construct these improvised forts to defend their position. 50 Given the paucity of big stone forts in deltaic Bengal, the mud-fort became the chief defensive apparatus of Mughal armies in course of the seventeenth century. In this case, the chief architects of these forts – the boatmen – were labourers who had been initially hired to fulfil a different function. This exemplifies how, in times of war, logistical labourers often had to switch their tasks as per the military needs of the campaigning armies.
Building mud-forts was not the only way in which Mughal armies drew their logistical workforce more explicitly into the ambit of combat. Imperial texts mention that during their campaigns in Bengal, the boatmen could be summoned to help out soldiers in course of sieges. On one such occasion, an imperial army had besieged Musa Khan’s fort at Dakchara in 1607-1608. At one juncture, Mughal troops were faced by constant firing by the garrison and found it extremely difficult to approach the fort. 51 Upon the command of Mughal officers, the wagons of the army were advanced in front to form a defensive barrier. Mughal troops took shelter behind them. Next, the boatmen were summoned. One half of them were instructed to accumulate mounds of earth and another to pile up bundles of grass behind the line of wagons in order to build a wall. The firing by the garrison caused heavy casualties in the ranks of the boatmen. Yet, they finished the task. 52 Their duty, however, did not end here. As the imperial troops closed in on the fort, they were welcomed by a ditch. The entire area had also been planted with sharp bamboo spikes to keep out any attack from the outside. If the Mughal army wanted to assault the fort directly, first the ditch needed to be filled up and the threat of the bamboo spikes had to be neutralized. Once again, the boatmen were called upon to help the soldiers out. The captains of the fleet were instructed to divide the boatmen into two parties. One was to deposit bundles of straw and the other basketfuls of earth into the ditch. 53 This task, too, the boatmen fulfilled amid constant firing by the garrison. 54 The coordinated efforts of the boatmen enabled the imperial army to eventually cross the ditch and storm the fort. 55
The camp
The imperial military establishment and the camp were serviced by thousands of workers and officials on a daily basis. They were responsible for the ceaseless production, transport, and maintenance of various equipments, weapons, and war-animals used in military campaigns. Manufacturing, storing, and guarding weapons of various kinds were a constant preoccupation of the empire. One can imagine that a large number of skilled craftsmen and workers remained engaged in producing military material at the imperial, regional, and local levels to satiate the demands of the empire. A huge workforce was also employed at all times at the stables of the various war-animals. Ā’īn-i Akbarī – an administrative compendium compiled in the late-sixteenth century – informs us that different types of elephants had specific servants dedicated to their upkeep. They numbered from two to five and a half, depending on the quality and nature of the animal.
56
Every contingent of 10, 20, and 30 elephants was supervised by a faujdār, who was responsible for training the elephant for the battlefield.
57
Similarly, a large number of non-elite caretakers were assigned to the horse stables, in addition to a host of elite supervisors. The a
The moving imperial military camp – itself an embodiment of the pomp and glory of the empire – was similarly serviced by hundreds of labourers. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, Francois Bernier puts the number of foot-soldiers at ‘two, or even three hundred thousand’.
60
He continues, This will not be deemed an extraordinary computation if we bear in mind the immense quantity of tents, kitchens, baggage, and even women, usually attendant on the army. For the conveyance of all these are again required many elephants, camels, oxen, horses, and porters.
61
At all times, two sets of camps would be maintained; while one would be pitched at one station, the other would be sent ahead to be ready at the next. This whole operation, carried out meticulously for months on end, necessitated the involvement of very large numbers of labourers and officers with diverse duties and specializations. Aside from the soldiers employed as guards and beasts of burden deployed to carry the material, food, and furniture, the Ā’īn mentions that each encampment would be worked by ‘a thousand Farrashes [sic], natives of Iran, Turan, and Hindustan, 500 pioneers (bel-dārān), 100 water-carriers (suqā), 50 carpenters (durodgar), tent-makers (khaima-doz), and torch-bearers (mash‘al-chī), 30 workers in leather (charm-doz), and 150 sweepers (khāk-rob)’. 62
Recruitment
The one obvious question that emerges from the above discussion is whether the Mughals maintained permanent corps of logistical workforce. Unfortunately, Mughal texts do not give us any direct answer to this question. It is understandable that some of the work described above were perennial in nature. Taking care of war-animals, producing weaponry, and serving the camp fall within this ambit. It is possible that workers were employed on the long term for these tasks. It appears that beyond this, the bulk of the logistical workforce needed in military campaigns for the performance of specific military tasks were kept in employment only on the short term. They would often be recruited at the onset of campaigns directly from the region the army would operate in. For instance, we find a Mughal army headed towards Qandahar in mid-seventeenth century waiting for several days at Kabul for gathering pioneers and road-builders from the area from Jalalabad. 63 Mughal texts designate these various groups of workers by their specialization – like carpenters (durod-gar), pioneers (bel-dār), and blacksmiths (āhan-gar). This indicates that these were workers already specialized in these fields. They were recruited with the hope that they would bring their specialized skills to the service of the imperial campaigns. Hence, the armies did not have to train these workers. In early modern South Asia, communities oriented towards different professions would be organized on the basis of their caste status and religious background. Inevitably, this social basis of their occupation would play a big role in shaping the nature of recruitment, pay, and supply of these workmen in Mughal armies. Dirk Kolff has investigated this social angle to some extent with respect to the non-elite ‘spurious’ Rajput soldiers of eastern and northern India. 64 The issue needs further investigation in the context of the logistical workforce in early modern South Asian armies.
As to the method of their recruitment, once again we have very little direct information. In one case, a text mentions Mirza Nathan requisitioning boatmen from Khwaja Mutahhar Karori. 65 Elsewhere Nathan is mentioned to have deputed mutāṣaddīs to recruit boatmen from the neighbouring localities. 66 Their official titles indicate that these were imperial officers, usually involved in revenue administration. Hence, they would have strong connections with or would have been recruited from the rural elite, which would give them access to the local labouring communities. At the other end, it seems that the leaders or commanders whom Manucci saw among the woodcutters employed in the Mughal armies in the mid-seventeenth century negotiated with the representatives of the Mughal state on behalf of the labouring communities. They appear to be the middlemen through whom the state would recruit and control these vast populations of workers. In this sense, they were similar to the jam‘dārs or jobber-commanders Kolff finds leading the peasant-soldiers of North India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They could also be compared with the military entrepreneurs who supplied troops, money, and equipments to early modern European states. 67 Our sources also indicate the fairly easy availability of these workers. 68 The state would usually hire and pay these workmen and then assign them to individual commanders as per their rank and need as dākhilī troops. The Ā’īn clearly mentions that this would be the case, for instance, for carpenters (durod-gar), blacksmiths (āhan-gar), water-carriers (suqā), and pioneers (bel-dār). 69 Finally, the zamīndārs – a heterogeneous social group comprising the rural elite of various statures – who joined Mughal ranks played an important role in facilitating the process of labour recruitment owing to their intermediate status between the imperial circles and village communities. In one such instance, Raja Satrajit – the zamīndār of Busna – lent Mirza Nathan 100 boatmen for a period of three months to reconstruct some Mughal residential buildings in Gilah that had been gutted by fire. 70
Motivation
What led these thousands of people in the logistical workforce to serve the Mughal Empire? Ravi Ahuja points out that in the second half of the eighteenth century, the war between the English East India Company and the Mysore sultanate caused massive disruption to the society and economy in the Tamil Plains of South India. Military conflict destroyed the economy and devastated rural communities. This left a large part of the surviving population with no other option for livelihood than to join as camp followers those very armies that had caused their destruction in the first place. 71 Did something similar happen in the Mughal Empire as well? One argument against this could be that in contrast to war-ravaged South India of the second half of the eighteenth century, Mughal territories were relatively less contested between Akbar’s rise to power in the middle of the sixteenth century and Aurangzeb’s death in the beginning of the eighteenth. True, there were repeated rebellions and insurgencies, and the state’s response was usually swift and violent. Yet, the picture of war driving societies to pauperization and destitution that Ravi Ahuja unravels for late eighteenth-century South India is difficult to trace in the Mughal Empire at its height.
Instead, it is possible to argue that financial rewards held out a sizable incentive for various communities. The logistical labourers were mainly paid in cash. 72 This is indicated by Shireen Moosvi, who points out that by the seventeenth century, paying skilled and unskilled labourers as well as domestic servants in cash was standard practice. 73 In contingent times, more cash and other rewards would be held out. Abul Fazl’s description of Akbar scattering gold and silver bullion among the labourers who were deputed to construct the siegeworks at Chitor under heavy firing by the garrison 74 or the mention of Mirza Nathan freely distributing bullion, rice, and intoxicants among the workers deployed to dig up the silted channel in eastern Bengal are cases in point. In addition, it is likely that some labourers had to render their services without any remuneration (be-gār) as a part of their social and caste obligations.
Dirk Kolff argues that the itinerant non-elite Rajput soldier/trader/herder, who hired his services out to various states in early modern South Asia, was strongly inspired by an ideal of naukarī (service). 75 Is it possible that aside from financial remuneration and some element of coercion, the same ideal of service also inspired the woodcutters, pioneers, carpenters, stone-cutters, and other workers in the Mughal logistical workforce? Unfortunately, the imperial sources are completely silent on this. Here one reaches one of the many limits ingrained in the elite and state-centric nature of the Mughal archives. Perhaps vernacular sources of this period might be able to throw more light on such socio-cultural issues pertaining to the logistical workforce. This, however, is beyond the ambit of the present essay.
III. Logistical workforce and the category of military labour
The preceding discussion highlights the diverse nature of the tasks carried out by the Mughal logistical workforce. Some of these tasks – like cutting trees and building roads – enabled Mughal forces to reach the theatres of war to engage their adversaries in combat. Some – like manufacturing weapons and taking care of war-animals – made available the military infrastructure necessary for the execution of combat. Yet others – like rowing the war-fleet – comprised logistical tasks that needed to be managed before, after, as well as during combat. Finally, certain activities – like building mud-forts, filling up ditches around forts during sieges, and constructing siegeworks – were actions that directly complemented actual combat. It should also be noted that several of these actions were executed under constant enemy-fire, often resulting in enormous casualties among the workforce. Collectively, these labourers made an enormous contribution to the conduct of Mughal military campaigns and the course of imperial territorial expansion – something that modern scholarship has hardly acknowledged. The intimate connection of their mundane organizational activities with combat, their centrality to the production of military infrastructure, and the willingness of the labourers to risk their lives to fulfil them in many cases makes it clear that this kind of labour cannot be clubbed together with the forms of manual labour of peacetime societies, like domestic labour, agricultural labour, or construction labour. How should we categorize it then?
One is tempted to suggest the term ‘logistical labour’, while continuing to reserve the term ‘military labour’ for designating the labour of combatants. This, however, is deeply problematic. The category of ‘military’ does not comprise only combat; it also comprises logistics and a whole range of other things like ideology, finance, infrastructure, and representation. As I have pointed out earlier, it is only through a skewed understanding of war primarily in terms of combat that the category of ‘military labour’ has become interchangeable with combat labour. Historically, this conceptual distortion has led to the erasure of many social groups which have performed various important non-combat tasks related to the production of war. Women are a case in point. Throughout the ages and across the world, men have usually barred women from participating in combat and have jealously defended the latter as largely a masculine domain. But recent scholarship shows that even while being excluded from combat, women have always been indispensable to the overall process of war. They have played vital roles as wives, mothers, sutlers, care-givers, sex-workers, rulers, defenders of property at home, manufacturers of weapons, producers of food, and so on. 76 However, the focus of the bulk of military history on combat has meant that the history of war has traditionally been written in terms of the exploits of men. It is they who are projected as the real actors and heroes of war, while women are mostly seen as rendering labour that is ‘support’ or ‘auxiliary’ in nature. Combat thus emerges as the discursive core of war; all other actions are relegated to the periphery as ones that merely support the core action. This has resulted in an utter lack of recognition of women’s contribution to the process of war-making throughout human history.
This epistemic violence has had expressions in various fields. Deborah Tyler-Bennet talks about one of them in her work on the poetry of the World War I. She points out that from the very beginning, this genre of poetry came to be defined in terms of the experience in the battlefield. And since the battlefield of the World War I was completely dominated by men, this meant that war-poetry too has largely been dominated by the way men experienced and thought about the war. Through the institutionalization of poetry of the World War I in various anthologies and collections over the twentieth century, it is this masculine/combatant version of the World War I – in the form of ‘elegies, the poetry of incident or poetic “testimonials”’ – that got canonized as the authentic poetic expression of the experience of the war. 77 But women – while often being forced to remain away from the theatres of war – too experienced the World War I in their own ways and composed poetry about it. Tyler-Bennet argues that far from the battlefield, they often engaged with the idea of the war in allegorical and abstract terms using ‘mythic, folk or fairy tale narratives’. 78 But the conceptualization of the war in terms of combat has led to the systematic marginalization of the woman’s voices within the genre of World War I poetry and a lack of recognition of women’s voices as an authentic experience of the military conflict. 79
The case of the marginalization of logistics within the historiographical discourse on war is similar. Here the victim is typically the non-elite labourer, whose services produced the conditions and infrastructure for combat to take place. Hence continuing to use the category of ‘military labour’ only for combatants while using a separate category to designate the logistical workforce is deeply problematic.
Another tempting possibility is to scrap the category of ‘military labour’ altogether and use two new ones instead – ‘logistical labour’ for the labourers of the logistical workforce and ‘combat labour’ for the soldiers. These categories have the merit of being descriptive of the nature of labour being rendered. There is evidence to indicate that states that raised and employed armies in fact maintained this loose distinction between the two groups of people in terms of the nature of labour they rendered. For instance, Radhika Singha points out that during the World War I, the British Indian army designated the contingent of labourers (followers) meant to render menial labour as ‘Labour and Porter Corps’. She highlights that the distinction between them and the sepoys (soldiers) was maintained rigorously in terms of recruitment guidelines, payments, benefits of service, rations, and even gifts. 80
Yet, Singha demonstrates through the case of the British Indian army that several factors frequently threatened and repeatedly broke down this distinction. They included the actual recruitment practices of the government, the way the outside world perceived the Indian soldiers and followers, and the logic of market demand for military manpower. In addition, certain regimental practices like making soldiers do logistical work (‘fatigue duty’) and a certain militarization of the professional culture of the camp followers also contributed to the distinction between the soldier and the logistical labourer becoming hazy. 81
Evidence from Mughal South Asia also indicates that ‘logistical labour’ and ‘combat labour’ were never water-tight categories. As we have seen earlier, combatants were often called upon to render logistical labour, as was the case with the soldiers and commanders of Mir Jumla’s army in 1662-1663. They were forced to take up the task of cutting down forests during the Mughal invasion of Assam. 82 At the same time, activities like constructing siegeworks while braving enemy-fire could take logistical labourers dangerously close to performing combat-related tasks. As to whether the logistical and combat labour had become interchangeable at the level of recruitment at any point of time under the Mughals as it did in South Asia during the contingent time of the World War I is unknown. All this makes it quite clear that while the categories of ‘logistical labour’ and ‘combat labour’ could sometimes be used as methodological shorthands to designate two largely different forms of labour related to the production of war, one needs to be cognizant of the fluidity of these categories.
I would rather argue that it is more appropriate for us to recognize that the older category of ‘military labour’ actually encompasses both of these two types of labour, and much more. For the sake of historical accuracy, it is essential to reclaim the category of the ‘military’ from the exclusive ambit of combat and have it include the myriad non-combat – albeit equally important – activities that comprises the overall domain of war. In other words, any and every labour rendered consciously towards the fulfilment of military objectives should be conceptualized as military labour. Only then will it be possible for us to recognize the importance of the various non-combat military tasks, which modern scholarship has neglected. Otherwise, they will continue to remain in the marginal spaces of historical knowledge as ‘support’ or ‘auxiliary’ tasks. These labels seem to be harmless and descriptive at first glance. But as I have shown earlier, they are actually the products of a highly distorted view of war and perpetrators of great discursive violence. Once we have successfully broadened the ambit of the ‘military’ beyond combat, it will be easier for us to recover the histories of the various non-combat tasks that have contributed to the production of war as well as the peoples and communities who have carried them out. Logistics, whose history has remained an extremely neglected field within military history, is one of them. It is high time we inquire into the role of logistical operations in shaping the military fortunes of states, nations, and empires across the world. We also need to ask that if we restore the logistical labourer into the category of military labour, what implications that would have for the writing of military history in general.
Broadening the category of military labour and subsuming logistical labour within it has important implications for South Asian history. It helps us rethink the category of ‘military labour market of Hindustan’ that Kolff introduced three decades back. In the light of the preceding discussion, one can definitively say that the nature of this labour market was even more complex than what has been argued till now. Thousands of ordinary workers with diverse occupational specialization were as much as part of it as combatants like peasant-soldiers, military slaves, and warrior ascetics. Early modern South Asian states not only vied with each other to attract the various types of soldier-participants of this labour market into its ranks, but also competed over recruiting the workmen for performing the indispensable logistical, organizational, and infrastructural tasks. Analysis of the interaction between states and this logistical workforce bears the potential of enriching our understanding of the interactions between war, empire, and society in South Asia. It also has important repercussions for the historiography of early modern warfare globally. Traditionally dominated by studies of combat, operations, and technologies, this field has been enriched in recent years by social histories of various groups of military participants. 83 Recognizing the logistical workforce as one such group and acknowledging their importance by including them within the category of military labour nuances our understanding of this history further and opens new avenues for analysis. In turn, this contributes to the analyses of the relationships between war-making, labour mobilization, and imperial expansion in the early modern world.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This paper has benefitted from the comments and suggestions of Ravi Ahuja, Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Camille Buat, Maria-Daniela Pomohaci, Anna Sailer, and the two anonymous referees of War in History.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1.
Kaushik Roy, Military Manpower, Armies and Warfare in South Asia (London and New York: Routledge, [2013] 2016), pp. 2-3.
2.
See, for instance, Michelle Moyd, ‘Making the Household, Making the State: Colonial Military Communities and Labour in German East Africa’, International Labour and Working-Class History, 80, no. 1 (2011), pp. 53-76; Joshua B. Freeman, ‘Militarism, Empire, and Labor Relations: The Case of Brice P Disque’, International Labour and Working-Class History, 80, no. 1 (2011), pp. 103-20.
3.
See, for instance, Elizabeth Sheshko, ‘Constructing Roads, Washing Feet, and Cutting Cane for the “Patria”: Building Bolivia with Military Labour, 1900-1975’, International Labour and Working-Class History, 80, no. 1 (2011), pp. 6-28; Nathan Wise, ‘An Intimate History of Digging in the Australian Army during the Kokoda Campaign of 1942’, Labour History, 107 (2014), pp. 21-34. Unfortunately, most of these works focus on the colonial/industrial era. In comparison, there is a dearth of scholarship for earlier times.
4.
Erik-Jan Zürcher ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative History of Military Labour 1500-2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), p. 11.
5.
Zürcher, Fighting for a Living, p. 11.
6.
Jan Lucassen, ‘The Other Proletarians: Seasonal Labourers, Mercenaries and Miners’, International Review of Social History, 39 (1994) Supplement 2, pp. 171-94; Jan Lucassen and Erik-Jan Zürcher, ‘Conscription as Military Labour: The Historical Context’, International Review of Social History, 43 (1998), pp. 405-19.
7.
Jos J.L. Gommans and Dirk H.A. Kolff, eds., Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia 1000-1800 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 13.
8.
See, for instance, Ahsan Jan Qaisar, Building Construction in Mughal India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Neelam Chaudhary, Labour in Mughal India (New Delhi: Aravalli Books International, 1998); Shireen Moosvi, ‘The World of Labour in Mughal India (c. 1500-1750)’, International Review of Social History, 56 (2011), pp. 245-61.
9.
See, for example, William Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghuls (Delhi: Low Price Publications [1903] 2004); Surendra Nath Sen, The Military System of the Marathas (Calcutta: Orient Longmans, 1928); J.N. Farquhar, ‘The Fighting Ascetics of India’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 9, no. 2 (1925), pp. 431-52; W.G. Orr, ‘Armed Religious Ascetics in Northern India’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 24, no. 1 (1940), pp. 81-100; David Lorenzen, ‘Warrior Ascetics in Indian History’, Journal of American Oriental Society, 98, no. 1 (1978), pp. 61-75; Gavin Hambly, ‘Who were the Chihilgani, the Forty Slaves of Sultan Shams al-Din Iltutmish of Delhi?’, Iran, 10 (1972), pp. 57-62.
10.
Important works include Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707-1740 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, [1959] 2003); M Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, [1966] 2015); M. Athar Ali, The Apparatus of Empire: Awards of Ranks, Offices and Titles to the Mughal Nobility, 1574-1658 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985); Ahsan Jan Qaisar ‘Distribution of the Revenue Resources of the Mughal Empire among the Nobility’, in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Mughal State, 1526-1750 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 252-8.
11.
Dirk H.A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
12.
Douglas Streusand, Formation of the Mughal Empire (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Stewart Gordon, ‘Zones of Military Entrepreneurship in India, 1500-1700’, in Stewart Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 182-209; Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Muskets in the Mawas: Instruments of Peasant Resistance’, in K.N. Panikkar, T.J. Byres and Utsa Patnaik, eds., The Making of History: Essays Presented to Irfan Habib (London: Anthem South Asia Studies, 2002), pp. 81-103; Iqtidar Alam Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms: Warfare in Medieval India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 164-90, 218-26; William R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Dirk H.A. Kolff, ‘Peasants Fighting for a Living in Early Modern North India’, in Zurcher, ed., Fighting for a Living, pp. 243-66; Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770-1830 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
13.
Jos J.L. Gommans and Dirk H.A. Kolff, eds., Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia 1000-1800 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 13-26.
14.
Gommans and Kolff, Warfare and Weaponry, p. 23. Gommans elaborated on these ideas in his own monograph on Mughal warfare. Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 39-98.
15.
Exceptions include Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghuls, pp. 190-201; Andrew da la Garza, The Mughal Empire at War: Babur, Akbar and the Indian Military Revolution, 1500-1605 (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 157-81; Pratyay Nath, Climate of Conquest: War, Environment, and Empire in Mughal North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 120-30. Radhika Singha has noted a similar historiographical lacuna in the context of South Asia’s participation in World War I. She observes that this is in sharp contrast to the colonial archives, which hold a wealth of information about South Asians employed in the Labour Corps. Radhika Singha, ‘Finding Labor from India for the War in Iraq: The Jail Porter and Labour Corps, 1916-1920’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 2 (2007), pp. 412-45, see 416-7. Also see Radhika Singha, ‘Front Lines and Status Lines: Sepoy and “Menial” in the Great War 1916-1920’, in Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharaina Lange, Dyala Hamzah and Ravi Ahuja, eds., The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. 55-106.
16.
Exceptions to this tendency are few and far between. One of the most notable ones for the early modern period is Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659 (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, [1972] 1975).
17.
Edward Luttwak, ‘Logistics and the Aristocratic Idea of War’, in John Lynn, ed., Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middles Ages to the Present (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 3-7; John H. Pryor, ‘Digest’, in John H. Pryor, ed., Logistics of Warfare in the Age of Crusades (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 275–292, see pp. 275-6.
18.
Luttwak, ‘Logistics and the Aristocratic Idea of War’, p. 4.
19.
Bernard Bachrach, ‘Charlemagne’s Cavalry: Myth and Reality’, Military Affairs, 47, no. 4 (1983), pp. 181-7; Bernard Bachrach, ‘Medieval Siege Warfare: A Reconnaissance’, Journal of Military History, 58, no. 1 (1994), pp. 119-33. Also see R.C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, 1097-1193 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 14-5; Yuval Noah Harari, ‘The Concept of “Decisive Battles” in World History’, Journal of World History, 18, no. 3 (2007), pp. 251-66.
20.
Bachrach, ‘Charlemagne’s Cavalry’, p. 184. Also see Bachrach, ‘Medieval Siege Warfare’, pp. 119-33.
21.
This is reflected by the lament of the editor of a recent volume on the subject about how less we still know about the impact of military logistics on the conduct of war. Pryor, ‘Digest’, pp. 275-6.
22.
I have argued elsewhere that road-building lay at the heart of Mughal territorial expansion. Nath, Climate of Conquest, pp. 172-89, 216-20. For a study of Mughal roadways, see Abul Khair Muhammad Farooque, Roads and Communications in Mughal India (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1977). Also see Jean Deloche, Transport and Communications in India Prior to Steam Locomotion, English translation by James Walker, vol. I: Land Transport (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).
23.
Father Monserrate, for instance, noted this when he accompanied Akbar on the latter’s journey towards Kabul. Anthony Monserrate, The Commentary of Father Monserrate on His Journey to the Court of Akbar, 1580-1582, trans. J.S. Hoyland (New Delhi and Chennai: Asian Educational Services, 2003), p. 80.
24.
Niccolao Manucci, Storia do Mogor, trans. William Irvine, 4 vols. (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 2005), II, p. 63.
25.
Pratyay Nath, ‘Building the Empire: Military Infrastructure and the Career of Muhammad Qasim Khan in Mughal North India’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Seventy-Fifth Session (Delhi, 2014), pp. 270-4.
26.
Abul Fazl, Akbar-nāma, ed. Maulawi Abdur Rahim, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1876), III, p. 470-1; The Akbarnama of Abu ’l Fazl, trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1904), III, p. 709.
27.
Akbar-nāma, ed. Rahim, III, p. 566; Akbarnama, trans. Beveridge, III, p. 856.
28.
Inayat Khan, Mula
29.
Shāhjahān-nāma, ed. Rehman, p. 397; Shah Jahan Nama, trans. Fuller, p. 323.
30.
Shāhjahān-nāma, ed. Rehman, p. 412; Shah Jahan Nama, trans. Fuller, p. 338.
31.
Shāhjahān-nāma, ed. Rehman, p. 412; Shah Jahan Nama, trans. Fuller, p. 338.
32.
See, for instance, Abdul Hamid Lahori, Bādshāh-nāma, ed. Maulawis Kabiruddin Ahmad and Abdul Rahim, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1867-1868), II, p. 513.
33.
Khafi Khan, Aurangzeb in Muntakhab al-Lubab, trans. Anees Jahan Syed (Bombay: Somaiya Publications Pvt. Ltd., 1977), p. 184.
34.
Shihabuddin Talish, Tarikh-i Aasham, trans. Mazhar Asif (Guwahati: Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, 2009), pp. 17-9.
35.
Khwajah Nizamuddin Ahmad, T̤abaqāt-i Akbarī, ed. Brajendranath De, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1931), II, pp. 216-7; The Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī of
36.
Akbar-nāma, ed. Rahim, II, p. 316; Akbarnama, trans. Beveridge, II, p. 467.
37.
Akbar-nāma, ed. Rahim, II, p. 316; Akbarnama, trans. Beveridge, II, pp. 467-8.
38.
Akbar-nāma, ed. Rahim, II, p. 316; Akbarnama, trans. Beveridge, II, pp. 467-8; T̤abaqāt-i Akbarī, ed. De, II, p. 217; Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī, trans. De, II, p. 344.
39.
‘bannāyān-i chābukdast wa
40.
Kahars were a community of labourers usually specialising as palanquin bearers. Akbarnama, ed. Rahim, II, p. 337; Akbar-nāma, trans. Beveridge, II, p. 494; T̤abaqāt-i Akbarī, ed. De, II, pp. 224-5; Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī, trans. De, II, pp. 354-5. Badaoni says that the number of kahars deployed was seven or eight hundred. Abdul Qadir Badaoni, Munta
41.
Mirza Nathan, Bahāristān-i
42.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 42a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 102.
43.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 106a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 223.
44.
Bahāristān, JS61, folio 192b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 405.
45.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 21a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 62.
46.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 17a-17b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 47.
47.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 16a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 45.
48.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 21a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 62.
49.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 22a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 64. For another example, see Bahāristān, JS60, folio 16b -17a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 47.
50.
See, for instance, Bahāristān, JS60, folio 48b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, pp. 117-8.
51.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 22b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, pp. 65-6.
52.
Bahāristān, JS60, folios 22b-23a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, pp. 66-7.
53.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 23a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 68.
54.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 23a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 68.
55.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 23a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, pp. 68-9.
56.
The translator of the Ā’īn explains that this implied ‘either eleven servants for two elephants, or [that] the last was a boy’. Abul Fazl, The Ā’īn-i Akbarī by Abu ’l-Faẓl ‘Allāmī, trans. H. Blochmann, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1948-1949), I, pp. 132-3.
57.
Abul Fazl, Ā’īn-i Akbarī, ed. H. Blochmann, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1869-1872), vol. p. 135; Ā’īn, trans. Blochmann, I, p. 133.
58.
Ā’īn, ed. Blochmann, I, pp. 143-4; Ā’īn, trans. Blochmann, I, pp. 145-7.
59.
Ā’īn, ed. Blochmann, I, pp. 148-9, 151-153; Ā’īn, trans. Blochmann, I, pp. 155, 159-62.
60.
Francois Bernier, Bernier’s Travels in the Mughal Empire, A.D. 1656-1668, trans. Archibald Constable (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company, 1891), p. 220.
61.
Bernier’s Travels, trans. Constable, p. 220.
62.
Ā’īn, ed. Blochmann I, p. 42; Ā’īn, trans. Blochmann, I, p. 49. As for the supply of food, Mughal armies depended on mobile communities of grain merchants, the most prominent of whom were the Banjara(s). These were tribes of nomadic pastoralists who moved with armed caravans of thousands of pack animals at a time, transporting primarily food grains across most of South Asia from surplus to deficient areas. For further details, see Nath, Climate of Conquest, pp. 148-52. By far, the most detailed study of the Banajaras is Manisha Choudhury, Trade, Transport and Tanda: Shifting Identities of the Banjaras (New Delhi: Manohar, 2018).
63.
Shāhjahān-nāma, ed. Rehman, p. 502; Shah Jahan Nama, p. 426.
64.
Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, pp. 71-116.
65.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 15b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 43.
66.
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 9b-10a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 30.
67.
For early modern North India, see Kolff, ‘Peasants Fighting for a Living’. For early modern Europe, see David Parrott, ‘Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years’ War: The Military Revolution’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 18 (1985), pp. 7-25; Jeff Fynn-Paul, eds. War, Entrepreneurs, and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean, 1300-1800 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014).
68.
Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, Bāburnāma: Memoirs of Bābur, trans. Annette Susannah Beveridge, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1998), II, p. 520.
69.
Ā’īn, ed. Blochmann, I, p. 190; Ā’īn, trans. Blochmann, I, p. 264.
70.
Bahāristān, Persian text, JS61, folio 149b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, vol. I, p. 281.
71.
Ravi Ahuja, ‘A Crisis Disremembered: Towards a Social History of War in Eighteenth-Century South India’ in Ravi Ahuja and Martin Christof-Füchsle, eds., A Great War in South India. German Accounts of the Anglo-Mysore Wars, 1766-1799 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 55-77.
72.
William Irvine provides a table detailing the wages of various logistical labourers. Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghuls, p. 174.
73.
Moosvi, ‘The World of Labour’, p. 246.
74.
Akbar-nāma, ed. Rahim, II, p. 316; Akbarnama, trans. Beveridge, II, pp. 467-8.
75.
Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, pp. 71-116.
76.
For the early modern period, see Barton C. Hacker, ‘Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A Reconnaissance’, Signs, 6, no. 4 (1981), pp. 643-71; John A. Lynn II, Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Barton C. Hacker and Margaret Vining, eds., A Companion to Women’s Military History (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012).
77.
Deborah Tyler-Bennett, ‘“Lives Mocked at by Chance”: Contradictory Impulses in Women’s Poetry of the Great War’, in Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout, eds., The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 67-76, p. 68.
78.
Tyler-Bennett, ‘Lives Mocked at by Chance’, p. 68.
79.
Tyler-Bennett, ‘Lives Mocked at by Chance’.
80.
Singha, ‘Front Lines and Status Lines’, pp. 59-60.
81.
Singha, ‘Front Lines and Status Lines’, pp. 64-71, 77-83. Also see Singha, ‘Finding Labour from India’, pp. 441-5.
82.
Tarikh-i Aasham, trans. Asif, pp. 17-19. One is reminded in this context of the fact that in both the World Wars, soldiers were made to render logistical labour. Singha, ‘Front Lines and Status Lines’, p. 58; Wise, ‘An Intimate History of Digging’.
83.
See, for instance, Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living; Jeff Fynn-Paul, eds., War, Entrepreneurs, and the State; David A. Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
