Through the Lens of War: Akbar's Sieges (1567–69) and Mughal

SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2018.1430467

ARTICLE Through the Lens of War: Akbar’s Sieges (1567–69) and Mughal Empire-Building in Early Modern North India

Pratyay Nath Department of History, Ashoka University, Rajiv Gandhi Education City, Haryana, India

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS ThepresentarticleisastudyoftheprocessofMughalempire- Akbar; cavalry; early modern; building in early modern North India using war as the point of entry. empire; finance; labour; Specifically, it focuses on three sieges from the early years of Akbar’s Mughal; siege; war reign—Chitor (1567–68), Ranthambhor (1569) and Kalinjar (1569). It teases out certain aspects of these sieges and discusses them at length individually. Bypassing historiographically-popular themes like combat and technology, it explores less-probed issues such as the fate of defeated enemies, the involvement of zamindars and mansabdars, military financeandtheroleofquasi-militarylabourin imperial military campaigns. In the process, it strives to write a social, cultural and economic history of Mughal military expansion focused primarily on the second half of the sixteenth century.

The Mughals fought their enemies ceaselessly; be they grand campaigns for territorial expansion, counter-insurgency operations to put down peasant uprisings or operations aimed at suppressing rebellions within their own ranks, war was a constant preoccupation of the Mughal Empire. The organisation of its entire fiscal and administrative apparatus reflected this. During the frequent spells of open conflict, victories in combat were only one of the many priorities. The state also needed to ensure the smooth transportation of its armies and the unhindered supply of food, water and arms to them. At other times, it had to keep on attending to the maintenance, repair and construction of fortifications; the procurement, training and deployment of diverse types of war animals; the production, storage and ship- ping of various types of weaponry; and the recruitment, payment and transportation of enormous numbers of soldiers from the centres of mobilisation to the theatres of war. Con- sequently, war not only moulded the behaviour of the Empire in times of open conflict, but also fundamentally shaped its very nature, priorities and concerns even in times of peace. Yet, surprisingly, few scholars have used war as a point of entry for writing the history of Mughal empire-building.1 Instead, most works on Mughal warfare focus purely on its

CONTACT Pratyay Nath [email protected]

1. Exceptions include Dirk Kolff, Jos Gommans and Douglas Streusand. See Dirk H.A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Jos J.L. Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire, 1500–1700 (London/New York: Routledge, 2002); Jos J.L. Gommans, ‘Warhorse and Post-Nomadic Empire in Asia, c. 1000–1800’,inJournal of Global History, Vol. 2 (May 2007), pp. 1–21; and Douglas Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). © 2018 South Asian Studies Association of Australia 2 P. NATH technical aspects. Three areas in particular have been investigated in detail—pitched battles, gunpowder weaponry and army organisation.2 Historians working on other aspects of Mughal history have tended to treat war more as an aberration or rupture than as a structural part of its being. Consequently, they have found it more worthwhile to explore the political, social, economic and cultural processes leading to and effected by this rupture, rather than study the actual dynamics of war.3 These two tendencies have comple- mented each other in creating a widening gap between the historiographies of war on the one hand and of the other aspects of the Mughal imperial experience on the other. It is this gap that the present article addresses as an entry point into a much larger project. Douglas Streusand and Jos Gommans are among the few scholars to have brought discussions on war-making and Mughal empire-building together in a meaningful way. Streu- sand’s work grapples with the key reason behind Mughal military success in South Asia. He suggests that it lay in the Mughals’ ability to co-ordinate the deployment of firepower and mounted archers in pitched battles, which lent them a ‘definite but limited margin of military superiority’ compared to their adversaries.4 In sieges, a similar advantage derived from their ability to take large stone fortresses, albeit after very slow, arduous and painstaking sieges.5 Streusand argues that it was this peculiar nature of military superiority—definite, but limited—that lent the Mughal Empire a certain specificity in comparison with contemporary empires of the early modern world.6 Gommans, on the other hand, analyses the Mughal Empire using the category of (post-)nomadism.7 He locates the reasons behind Mughal military success in the empire’s sustained ability to import, maintain and deploy first-grade warhorses, as well as its capability to harness the best military and economic resources of both the sedentary and nomadic societies that lay on the frontiers of the Empire.8 The present article contributes to this scholarship by focusing on a key phase of Mughal history comprising the years between 1567 and 1569. Over these three years, imperial

2. Some of the most important representatives of this body of scholarship include Jadunath Sarkar, Military History of India (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1960); Kaushik Roy, India’s Historic Battles: From Alexander the Great to Kargil (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 54–79; Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Early Use of Cannon and Musket in India, A.D. 1442–1526’,in Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. XXIV, no. 2 (May 1981), pp. 146–64; Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Nature of Gunpowder Artillery in India during the Sixteenth Century—A Reappraisal of the Impact of European Gunnery’,in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 9, no. 1 (April 1999), pp. 27–34; Iqtidar Alam Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms: Warfare in Medieval India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004); William Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghuls (Delhi: Low Price Publication, repr., 2004); and Abdul Aziz, The Mansabdari System and the Mughal Army (Lahore: Abdul Aziz, 1945). 3. The literature pertaining to the Mughal invasion of Balkh–Badakhshan (1646–47) is a case in point. See, for instance, M. Athar Ali, ‘The Objectives behind the Mughal Expedition into Balkh and Badakhshan, 1646–47’, in M. Athar Ali, Mughal India: Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society, and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 327–33; and Richard Foltz, ‘The Mughal Occupation of Balkh 1646–1647’,inJournal of Islamic Studies, Vol. VII, no. 1 (Jan. 1996), pp. 49–61. Both of these fine pieces of scholarship focus squarely on the political and diplomatic processes that went into the making of this war. 4. Streusand, Formation of the Mughal Empire, p. 69. 5. Ibid., pp. 66–7; and Douglas Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2011), pp. 256–7. 6. Streusand, Formation of the Mughal Empire, pp. 51–69. In his recent comparative study of the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman empires, Streusand has developed this idea further. Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires, pp. 254–64. 7. Gommans’ monograph on Mughal warfare and state-building is the most comprehensive and thought-provoking work on the subject in recent times. It is particularly valuable for raising several new questions in the context of the historiography of early modern South Asia, including, but not limited to, the influence of ecology on warfare, military logistics and the political functions of royal mobility. Gommans, Mughal Warfare. He followed this up with a fascinating comparative study of the processes of empire-building in Mughal South Asia and Manchu China. Gommans, ‘Warhorse and Post-Nomadic Empire’, pp. 1–21. 8. Ibid., p. 21; and Gommans, Mughal Warfare, pp. 39–64. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 3 armies captured three major forts in central and western India, Chitor (1567–68), Ran- thambhor (1569) and Kalinjar (1569).9 Two of the armies were under the direct leadership of the third Mughal emperor—Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar (r. 1556–1605).10 This was a particularly crucial phase of Akbar’s reign, important both militarily and politically for a number of reasons. By this time, Akbar had already forged political alliances—often through matrimonial ties—with some of the most powerful Rajput states of western India, including Amber, Jaisalmer and Bikaner.11 Following the loss of his father’sempireinthe face of an Afghan resurgence around 1540, the young emperor had presided over a Mughal reconquest of North India. By the time of these three sieges, he and his commanders were looking to expand towards the economically lucrative western littoral, but it was imperative to first secure key areas and routes of central and western India, some of which these three forts commanded.12 These sieges also held the potential for an exemplary demonstration of the personal charisma and leadership capabilities of the young and ambitious emperor in front of his senior aristocracy, the religious establishment, his political adversaries and his imperial contemporaries from across Eurasia. Moreover, victory promised to build a formi- dable reputation for his armies. The importance the emperor attached to these sieges is made clear by the fact that he led the attack against Chitor and Ranthambhor himself. These two forts belonged to two Rajput rulers—Rana Uday Singh Sisodiya and Rai Surjan Hada, neither of whom had responded to Akbar’s earlier friendly overtures. Hence, aside from being a military and strategic necessity, subduing these two rulers was also a matter of personal political prestige for the emperor. Streusand has discussed these three sieges at length in his monograph on Mughal state- formation under Akbar. He argues that the difficulties the Mughal armies endured during these sieges persuaded them to accept the conditional surrender of garrisons in later ones. He also suggests that these sieges demonstrated how forts would always function as pivotal bargaining points between the empire and local powers. Underlining the only marginal importance of gunpowder artillery in deciding the outcomes of these sieges, he calls for a revision of the ‘Gunpowder Empire’ hypothesis.13 Here I build on his arguments and take the investigation in new directions.

9. Contemporary Mughal sources do not spell out much beyond Akbar’s personal ambition to subdue the forts and the Rajput rulers who controlled them as the reason behind the Mughal attacks on the forts, leaving us to surmise the broader strategic motives using circumstantial evidence. 10. For the geographical setting of this region, see O.H.K. Spate and A.T.A. Learmonth, with the collaboration of A.M. Lear- month and a chapter on Ceylon by B.H. Farmer, India and Pakistan: A General and Regional Geography (Bungay, Suffolk: Methuen & Co., 3rd rev. ed., 1967), pp. 611–41. 11. Akbar had already married the daughters of the rulers of Amber and Jaisalmer, and the niece of the ruler of Bikaner. See Abul Fazl (Persian text edited by Maulawi Abdur Rahim), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, Vols. 1–3 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1876), pp. 155–8, 365–6; and H. Beveridge (trans.), The Akbarnama of Abu ’l Fazl, Vols. 1–3 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1904), pp. 240–4, 518–9. 12. The fact that the pull of the littoral and its ﬂourishing ports probably did play a major role in inducing the Mughal invasion of Mewar, Ranthambhor and Kalinjar is suggested by the fact that within three years of the fall of Kalinjar, the Mughals had invaded the sultanate of Gujarat on the western seaboard using land routes that passed close to these three forts. 13. Streusand, Formation of the Mughal Empire, pp. 57–64; and Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires, pp. 216, 257–8. For the importance of sieges in warfare in peninsular India, see Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015). Pro- pounded by V.V. Bartold and developed further by Marshall Hodgson and William McNeill, the ‘Gunpowder Hypothe- sis’ views gunpowder weaponry as the central factor in the formation and consolidation of the early modern imperial Islamic triumvirate—the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires. See Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Con- science and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago, IL/London: Chicago University Press, 1977), pp. 59–98; and William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1982), pp. 95–8. 4 P. NATH

This article opens with a very brief narrative of the three sieges. I then focus on certain of their aspects and discuss them in greater detail, drawing upon a large body of sources. I raise issues like the treatment of defeated adversaries, the role of political intermediaries in the dynamics of military expansion, the signiﬁcant function of non-elite military labour in producing military infrastructure, and the pivotal importance of the availability of liquid funds for the prosecution of campaigns. With this exercise, the article demonstrates how studies of war can help us approach the issue of empire-formation through fresh avenues.

The sieges Of the three sieges, the first—that of Chitor—was the most difficult. The fort belonged to the Sisodiya Rajputs of Mewar. A Mughal army under Akbar had to devote almost six months to the siege before it was able to capture the fort, in part because the garrison deployed copious amounts of firearms—both matchlocks and artillery—to defend it. By contrast, the difficulties of transporting artillery overland from the Mughal base in Agra had prevented Akbar’sarmy from bringing any to the siege. Consequently, it had had to rely on the naqb (mine) and the sabat̤(sap)14 as the primary tools to prosecute the siege. A sar kob (siege tower) was con- structed, from which Akbar allegedly shot dead the commander of the garrison, Jaimal, at an advanced stage of the siege. When, at one point, the garrison opened negotiations for a settlement, several Mughal commanders expressed their willingness to negotiate their way out of the difficult siege; however, Akbar refused to lift the siege unless Rana Uday Singh himself surrendered. At this, the garrison retracted its offer and the siege dragged on. Ultimately, in 1568, a co-ordinated direct assault was launched on the fortificationsfromthecoverofthe sabat,̤ resulting in the ramparts being breached and the fort taken. Akbar ordered a qatl-i̤ ‘amm (general massacre) in retaliation: around 30,000 people—comprising both soldiers of the garrison and the general population—were executed.15 In 1569, it was Ranthambhor’s turn. There, the Hada Rajput chief, Rai Surjan, put up a valiant defence against a Mughal army again led by Akbar. Once again, the garrison brought significant firepower to bear on the besiegers, but this time the Mughals had come well prepared. They discovered the nearby hill of Ran and had their artillery hauled up onto it with the help of hundreds of bullocks and labourers. Once bombardment from this elevated position had demolished several buildings inside the fort, Surjan Hada opened negotiations to surrender. In contrast to the outcome in Chitor, on their satisfac- tory completion, Akbar pardoned him and welcomed him into the imperial aristocracy.16

14. A sap is a shallow trench or tunnel dug to allow besiegers to safely get closer to a fort’s walls. 15. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, pp. 300–3, 312–24; Beveridge (trans.), Akbarnama, Vol. 2, pp. 441–4, 462–76; Khwajah Nizamuddin Ahmad (Persian text edited by Brajendranath De), T̤abaqat-i Akbarı, Vol. 2, Vols. 1 –3 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1931), pp. 214–9; Brajendranath De (trans.), The Tabaqạ t-i Akbarı of Khwajah Nizạmuddın Ahmad,̣ Vol. 2, Vols. 1–3 (Delhi: Low Price Publication, 1992), pp. 341–8; Muhammad Arif Qandahari (Persian text edited by Haji Syed Muinuddin Nadwi, Syed Azhar Ali and Imtiaz Ali Arshi), Ta’rıkh-i Akbarı (Rampur: Hindustan Printing Works, 1962), pp. 109–15; Tasneem Ahmad (trans.), Ta’rıkh-i Akbarı (Delhi: Pragati Publications, 1993), pp. 148–53; Abdul Qadir Badaoni (Persian text edited by W.N. Lees and Ahmad Ali), Muntakhab al- Tawarıkh, Vol. 2, Vols. 1–3 (Cal- cutta: College Press, 1865), pp. 102–5; and W.H. Lowe (trans.), Muntakhabu-t-Tawarıkh by ‘Abdu-l-Qadir ibn-i-Muluk Shah known as al-Badaoni, Vol. 2, Vols. 1–3 (Delhi: Renaissance Publishing House, 1986), pp. 105–8. 16. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, pp. 329–30, 333–9; Beveridge (trans.), Akbarnama, Vol. 2, pp. 484, 489–91, 493–6; Ahmad (De, ed.), T̤abaqat, Vol. 2, pp. 224–5; De (trans.), Tabaqạ t, Vol. 2, pp. 353–5; Qandahari (Nadwi et al., eds), Ta’rıkh, pp. 115–21; Ahmad (trans.), Ta’rıkh-i Akbarı, pp. 154–61; Badaoni (Lees and Ali, eds), Muntakhab al- Tawarıkh, Vol. 2, pp. 107–8; and Lowe (trans.), Muntakhabu-t-Tawarıkh, Vol. 2, pp. 110–1. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 5

In the same year, Mughal forces under Majnum Khan Qaqshal besieged the fort of Kalinjar in central India. Although the garrison held out for a while under Raja Ram Chand of Pannah, the news of the fall of Ranthambhor demoralised it greatly. Moreover, the example of the massacre at Chitor must also have played on its mind. Eventually, the garrison decided to lay down its weapons and surrender. Raja Ram Chand started negotiating with Majnum Khan and sent him the keys of the fort, together with lavish gifts. As at Ran- thambhor, the surrender was welcomed by the imperial army and the garrison was pardoned. The fort was eventually assigned to the command of Majnum Khan Qaqshal.17 Against this backdrop, we now move on to focus more closely on particular aspects of the three sieges and see how we can use them to approach the larger subject of Mughal empire-building.

Treatment of adversaries The three sieges under focus ended essentially in two ways. At Ranthambhor and Kalinjar, the garrisons surrendered to the besieging imperial armies. They were treated kindly and absorbed into the imperial body politic. But at Chitor, the garrison and a large part of the civilian population was killed following the storming of the fort. Contemporary sources state that around thirty thousand people died, including some eight thousand Rajput soldiers.18 This happened in spite of the fact that the garrison had earlier opened negotiations for a peaceful settlement.19 The larger issue at hand here, then, is the treatment of defeated adversaries by victorious Mughal armies. How can these three sieges help us engage with this question? Mughal texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bear overwhelming evidence to the fact that spectacular acts of violence—like the massacre at Chitor—were rela- tively uncommon in Mughal history. Looking to project the Mughal state as a benevolent upholder of justice, peace and social order, imperial armies were speciﬁcally instructed not to commit such atrocities in the course of their campaigns. Not only would the general populace of invaded regions routinely be spared, but even actual adversaries would usually not be executed after being defeated; the empire always preferred to co-opt and absorb them into its own ofﬁcialdom. In view of this, it can be said that Mughal expansion happened more by way of absorption of various political groups than by their outright annihilation.20

17. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, pp. 340–1; Beveridge (trans.), Akbarnama, Vol. 2, pp. 498–9; Ahmad (De, ed.), T̤abaqat, Vol. 2, pp. 225–6; De (trans.), Tabaqạ t, Vol. 2, pp. 356–7; Qandahari (Nadwi et al., eds), Ta’rıkh, pp. 120–1; Ahmad (trans.), Ta’rıkh-i Akbarı, p. 157; Badaoni (Lees and Ali, eds), Muntakhab al- Tawarıkh, Vol. 2, p. 120; and Lowe (trans.), Muntakhabu-t-Tawarıkh, Vol. 2, p. 124. 18. Both Abul Fazl and Arif Qandahari, who wrote independently of each other, put the total death toll at thirty thousand. Niza- muddin Ahmad and Badaoni state that around eight thousand Rajput soldiers died in the massacre. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama,Vol.2, p. 323; Beveridge (trans.), Akbarnama, Vol. 2, p. 475; Ahmad (De, ed.) T̤abaqat, Vol. 2, p. 219; De (trans.), Tabaqạ t, Vol. 2, p. 347; Qandahari (Nadwi et al.,eds),Ta’rıkh, p. 113; Ahmad (trans.), Ta’rıkh-i Akbarı, p. 150; Badaoni (Lees and Ali, eds), Muntakhab al- Tawarıkh, Vol. 2,p.104;andLowe(trans.),Muntakhabu-t-Tawarıkh, Vol. 2, p. 107. 19. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, p. 316; and Beveridge (trans.), Akbarnama, Vol. 2, p. 467. 20. Chetan Singh and Muzaffar Alam made similar arguments in the 1980s in their work on Mughal North India. More recently, Farhat Hasan’s work on the Mughal conquest of and rule in Gujarat and Munis Faruqui’s monograph on the formation of princely dispensations in the Mughal Empire have also made this point extremely persuasively. See Che- tan Singh, ‘Centre and Periphery in the Mughal State: The Case of Seventeenth Century Punjab’,inModern Asian Stud- ies, Vol. 22, no. 2 (1988), pp. 299–318; Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Rela- tions in Western India, c. 1572–1730 (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Munis Faruqui, The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6 P. NATH

There are abundant references in contemporary texts to how invading Mughal armies were instructed to first try to lure and/or threaten their adversaries into submitting to the empire, thereby becoming a partner; force was to be applied only if the adversaries seemed completely unwilling to respond to such offers. For instance, Abul Fazl, Akbar’sofficial biographer, describes how Akbar instructed an army dispatched against the Baluchis in 1578 to first try to get them to submit to his authority by offering counsel mixed with gen- tle rebukes. Only in the eventuality of it being rejected was the army ‘to enlighten their darkness by the flashes of the sword’.21 The above example typifies the usual Mughal attitude towards adversaries, where annihilation was a final resort used only in extreme cases of resistance.22 This was precisely the justification that imperial chronicles advance for the massacre at Chitor. Abul Fazl says quite clearly that Akbar ordered the qat̤l-i ‘amm there because of the dogged resistance of the Rajput garrison and the broad-based collaboration it received from the people. Abul Fazl reasons that since this had not been the case during Alauddin Khalji’s conquest of the fort in the thirteenth century, the common people had been spared at that time.23 Such violence, hence, was used by the Mughals as a political weapon under specific circumstances. It was to be applied when a resolute adversary showed little inclination to become a loyal ally—and, by the same logic, when the general population showed little prospect of becoming loyal subjects—once absorbed into the imperium. Besides, the massacre at Chitor was probably also Akbar’s way of making a political statement, meant to send a strong message to the fugitive Rana Uday Singh. The events at Ranthambhor and Kalinjar allow us to see the unfolding of the Mughal norm mentioned above. If we look at the case of Ranthambhor more closely, we can appreciate this better. Threatened by bombardment by the imperial artillery, Rai Surjan decided to surrender. He first negotiated with some of the Mughal commanders, who arranged an interview between his sons and Akbar. The Rajput princes were honoured at court and the negotiations bore fruit. The emperor showered them with gifts and sent them back to their father with positive messages. Rai Surjan then requested that one of Akbar’s trusted courtiers escort him to the imperial court; Akbar sent Husain Quli Khan, a highly-placed commander, for the task. Rai Surjan honoured Husain Quli by coming out of the fort to meet him and putting him up at his own residence. Eventually, Husain Quli guided Rai Surjan to Akbar’s court. The Rajput chief offered lavish gifts and the keys of his fort to Akbar, who bestowed imperial favours on his defeated adversary in return. He also granted Rai Surjan’s request for three days’ grace for the Rajput garrison to evacu- ate the fort. As guarantee, Surjan left his own sons to attend the emperor. Rai Surjan kept

21. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 3, pp. 235–6. 22. Streusand makes a similar point when he says that the sooner an adversary submitted to the Mughals, the greater was the reward he received. Streusand, Formation of the Mughal Empire, p. 65. 23. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, p. 323; and Beveridge (trans.), Akbarnama, Vol. 2, p. 475. It is interesting to note that the siege of Chitor was one of the few occasions when Akbar issued a fathnama (proclamation of victory). In it, the imperial rhetoric takes a pronounced religious overtone, describing Mughal forces as ‘dutiful mujahids’ and the Rajput garrison as ‘wicked infidels’. This is in sharp contrast to the major Akbari chronicles. Writing in the late sixteenth century, Abul Fazl or Nizamuddin Ahmad usually downplayed the Mughals’ and their adversaries’ religious identities when narrating wars. They explained military conflicts in general through more universal binaries defined in terms of morality, justice, and so on. The reason for this shift would make for a very interesting investigation, but is beyond the scope of the present essay. See Ishtiaq Ahmed Zilli, ‘Fathnama-i Chitor, March 1568. An Annotated Translation’, Pro- ceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 33 (1971), pp. 350–61. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 7 his word and handed charge of the fort to the Mughal commander, Mihtar Khan, on the due date. The next day, Akbar entered the fort to the jubilation of the Mughal troops.24 Far more than the massacre at Chitor, it is these elaborate political rituals of incorporation that typify what usually transpired between victorious Mughal armies and their defeated enemies. Karen Barkey has argued that Ottoman empire-building revolved around similar processes of incorporation and assimilation of different political groups, ‘avoiding much of the contestation assumed in the European model of state-making’.25 Writing in the context of early modern China, Peter Perdue has recently observed that Manchu state-formation was characterised by similar inclusiveness, derived from their universalist ideology of sovereignty.26 This suggests that in their willingness to absorb— rather than destroy—rival political groups, the Mughals bore a strong similarity to contemporary Asian empires.

The roles of intermediaries One seemingly inconsequential incident from the siege of Chitor gives us a clue to a key aspect of the emerging Mughal Empire. As mentioned earlier, Akbar is said to have shot Jaimal, the commander of the Chitor garrison, late in the siege. Unsurprisingly, this caused immense despair among the Rajput soldiers inside the fort; they immolated their women in a bid to prevent what was considered to be their potential dishonour by the invaders, and prepared for a final stand. Describing what the Mughals saw from their camp, Abul Fazl wrote: ‘Just at the same time fire broke out at several places in the fort. The courtiers had various ideas about this, but Rajah Bhagwant Das represented that the fire was the johar (atish-i johar bud)’.27 Rajah Bhagwant Das was a Rajput prince of the Kachhwaha house of Amber—a clan that Akbar had befriended several years earlier. This incident, where Bhagwant Das explains the meaning of Chitor’s fires to Akbar, can be read as symbolic of the rise of a class of indigenous political elites as vital partners of the Mughal Empire. The Mughals designated this class—very heterogeneous in terms of its political standing, military power and cultural capital—by the blanket term zamindar.28 As mentioned earlier, in the 1560s, Akbar successfully co-opted a large number of the Rajput rulers of western India through a ‘carrot and stick’ approach. We have already come across one of them, Rai Surjan Hada.

24. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, pp. 337–9; and Beveridge (trans.), Akbarnama, Vol. 2, pp. 494–6. For a discussion of a late sixteenth-century Rajput text’s portrayal of Surjan’s submission to Akbar, see Cynthia Talbot, ‘Justifying Defeat: A Rajput Perspective on the Age of Akbar’,inJournal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 55, nos. 2–3 (2012), pp. 329–68. 25. Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 1–2. 26. Peter Perdue argues that in this respect, Manchu rule marked a distinct shift in political culture with respect to the previous Ming regime. Peter Perdue, ‘Why Do Empires Expand?’, in Geoff Wade (ed.), Asian Expansions: The Historical Expe- riences of Polity Expansion in Asia (London/New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 31–51, esp. p. 44. 27. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, pp. 320–1. 28. This class came into being due to various interrelated and multilayered socio-economic and political processes going back to the early medieval period. The members of this class varied greatly in terms of their area of inﬂuence, resource mobilisation capacity and political authority, and ranged from powerful rulers like those of the Rajput principalities of Mewar, Marwar and Amber to minor chieftains wielding authority over only a handful of villages. See S. Nurul Hasan, ‘Zamindars under the Mughals’, in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), The Mughal State, 1526–1750 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 284–98; Nurul Hasan, ‘The Position of the Zamindars in the Mughal Empire’,inIndian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. I, no. 4 (April–June 1964), pp. 107–19; and Ahsan Raza Khan, Chieftains in the Mughal Empire during the Reign of Akbar (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1977). 8 P. NATH

Over time, members of this class performed increasingly important political and military functions in Mughal empire-building. They acted as intermediary ﬁgures who often inhabited two worlds at the same time; on the one hand, many of them were semi- independent rulers of indigenous—often Brahmanical—political formations; on the other, they were also allies of an expanding Perso-Islamic empire. Studying patterns of architec- tural patronage, Catherine Asher has argued that Raja Man Singh, the son of Raja Bhag- want Das, ‘simultaneously served his own interests and those of the [Mughal] emperor and as he did so, was pivotally important in establishing a Mughal aesthetic across the realm’.29 David Curley has explored the similar nature of the intermediary role played by the eighteenth-century Hindu Bengali zamindar, Raja Krishnachandra of Nadia.30 Having come to South Asia from Transoxiana, the Mughals needed at all times—but especially in their early years—the help of such intermediaries to make sense of their newly- conquered domains, and to harness the ideological, cultural and material resources of these men to comprehend and negotiate the constantly changing circumstances in various parts of the subcontinent. As Mughal armies navigated the diverse terrain, climate and ecology of South Asia, it was to such locally-rooted political classes that they repeatedly turned to gather military intelligence about local conditions. The success of the 1586 Mughal invasion of Sri- nagarintheKashmirValley,forexample,owed a great deal to the assistance the imperial forces received from local chieftains who guarded the mountain passes (rah-banan-i buzurg- ikutal); they helped the Mughal troops negotiate the difﬁcult terrain of the area.31 Zamindars also regularly negotiated with local communities—of which they themselves were often a part—on behalf of the Mughal Empire. For instance, a Qalmaq chieftain named Aman Beg, who had joined the imperial ranks during the Mughal invasion of Balkh in 1646–47, helped the army negotiate with some of the tribal populations of the region. He persuaded a section of the Qalmaqs and Hazaras to desist from resisting the Mughals, thus neutralising a consid- erable military threat to the empire.32 Thus, the seemingly unimportant incident of Raja Bhagwant Das helping Akbar make sense of the Rajput ritual of johar during the siege of Chitor symbolises the importance of the support and co-operation of this intermediate zamindari class in the process of Mughal territorial expansion.33

29. Catherine Asher, ‘The Architecture of Raja Man Singh: A Study of Sub-Imperial Patronage’, in Monica Juneja (ed.), Archi- tecture in Medieval India: Forms, Contexts, Histories (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), pp. 370–97, esp. p. 370. 30. David Curley, Poetry and History: Bengali Mangal-Kabya and Social Change in Precolonial Bengal (New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2008), pp. 198–238. 31. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 3, pp. 503; and Beveridge (trans.), Akbarnama, Vol. 3, p. 764. 32. Inayat Khan (Persian text edited by Jameel-ur-Rehman), Mulakhkhas-ị Shahjahan-nama (New Delhi: Embassy of Islamic Republic of Iran, 2009), p. 443; and A.R. Fuller (trans.), The Shah Jahan Nama of Inayat Khan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 369. 33. This is related to a more fundamental facet of Mughal Empire formation, about which historians are increasingly making us aware: the crucial role of various intermediaries. Farhat Hasan’s work shows that Akbar was able to make his conquest of Gujarat an enduring one only by sharing his sovereignty, power and resources with various local power- holders who mediated between the empire and the locality. Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India, pp. 31–51. Audrey Truschke and Kumkum Chatterjee’s scholarship has pointed out that poets and scholars writing in non-Persian languages played a very important role in legitimising Mughal rule among various religious and linguistic communities distant from the imperial court. Audrey Truschke, ‘Setting the Record Wrong: A Sanskrit Vision of Mughal Conquests’, in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 3, no. 3 (2012), pp. 373–96; and Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Goddess Encounters: Mughals, Monsters and the Goddess in Bengal’,inModern Asian Studies, Vol. 47, no. 5 (2013), pp. 1–53. Azfar Moin has also shown how Babur and Humayun allied with Suﬁ mystics of the Shattari order to harness the latter’s spiritual resources and gain legitimacy for their nascent rule in Hindustan. A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred King- ship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 97–110. The zamindars I have discussed above were just one of these many intermediaries who helped the Mughal elite establish and expand their empire in South Asia. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 9

Empire and war finance Historians working on the Mughal economy have repeatedly pointed out how the empire thrived on a robust agrarian economy. Notwithstanding the repeated—and often armed—refusals of various peasant communities to pay their revenues, the empire still managed to appropriate a good part of the agrarian surplus through a sophisticated bureaucratic apparatus. The economy was also based on a growing cash nexus centred on an increasing use of silver currency, especially during the seventeenth century, and by encouraging revenue to be paid in cash. The state also enjoyed the support of a strong net- work of bankers and moneylenders who could make cash available anywhere in South Asia at the beginning of the campaigning season, even before the peasants had harvested their crops and paid their dues to the state. The burgeoning international commerce of the early modern world also meant that handsome amounts of bullion found their way to the centres of primary and secondary production of South Asia from outside.34 Thanks to these interconnected factors, the Mughal state managed to mobilise enough financial resources to achieve much of its military ambitions over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Abul Fazl’s description of the siege of Chitor provides us with an interesting link between this world of finance and the realm of war. It illustrates one of the vital ways in which the ready disbursal of cash could be instrumental in facilitating imperial territorial expansion. The construction of the elaborate siege works at Chitor required the deployment of an enormous workforce with various specialities. Contemporary sources tell us that in the face of heavy resistance by the garrison, this workforce sustained very high casualties over the several months it took to complete the siege works.35 Abul Fazl suggests that the contradiction between the resulting possible demoralisation and dispersal of the workforce on the one hand, and the army’s desperation to get the siege works com- pleted as fast as possible on the other, was resolved by the liberal distribution of money. He graphically describes a desperate Akbar distributing gold and silver coins to the workmen in an effort to keep the construction going.36 This mirrors another reference to a Mughal commander, Mirza Nathan, distributing copper coins, rice and liquor to the boatmen of the imperial fleet during the excavation of a silted canal in eastern Bengal in the

34. For the best survey of the various dimensions of the medieval South Asian economy, see Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I: c. 1200–c. 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For the most authoritative work on assessment and appropriation of land revenue in Mughal North India, see Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). For currency in the Mughal Empire, see Irfan Habib, ‘The Currency System of the Mughal Empire (1556–1707)’,inMedieval India Quar- terly, Vol. IV, nos. 1–2 (1960), pp. 1–21; and John F. Richards (ed.), The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). For banking and moneylending networks, see Irfan Habib, ‘Usury in Medieval India’,in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 6, no. 4 (June 1964), pp. 393–419; Irfan Habib, ‘The System of Bills of Exchange (Hundis) in the Mughal Empire’,inProceedings of the Indian History Congress (Muzaffarpur: Indian History Congress, 1972), pp. 290–303; and Om Prakash, ‘The System of Credit in Mughal India’, in Amiya Kumar Bagchi (ed.), Money and Credit in Indian History from Early Medieval Times (New Delhi: Tulika, 2002), pp. 40–57. For an interesting take on the relationship between credit networks and Mughal state-formation, see Karen Leonard, ‘The “Great Firm” Theory of the Decline of the Mughal Empire’,inComparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 21, no. 2 (1979), pp. 151–67. 35. Abul Fazl says that close to two hundred workmen were killed daily owing to firing by the garrison, while Nizamuddin Ahmad put the tally at more than a hundred. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, p. 316; Beveridge (trans.), Akbar- nama, Vol. 2, p. 467; Ahmad (De, ed.), T̤abaqat, Vol. 2, p. 217; and De (trans.), Tabaqạ t, Vol. 2, p. 344. 36. The actual expression that Abul Fazl uses is ‘zar wa sım khak baha shuda bud’, which literally translates as ‘gold and silver assumed the value of dust’. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, p. 316. 10 P. NATH course of a military campaign almost half a century later.37 However, what these Mughal texts do not say is that there must also have been a strong element of coercion to ensure the workmen and boatmen continued to work and could not flee. Nevertheless, the use of handsome financial rewards as a substantial motivating factor—not only for the workmen, but probably also for the soldiers—cannot be ignored. We know that the bulk of the regular Mughal armies were paid through land assign- ments (jagir). But the above points show that there were other participants in Mughal military campaigns who needed to be rewarded in cash on the spot for the various services they rendered. The A’ın-i Akbarı, the Mughal administrative compendium from the late sixteenth century, mentions that the state would hire and pay workmen—carpenters (durod-gar), blacksmiths (ahan-gar), water-carriers (suqa) and sappers (bel-dar)—and, according to their rank and requirements, hand them over to different mansabdars (commanders) as dakhilı troops.38 Even though a part of this workforce must have been forced to render unpaid labour as part of their social or caste obligations, the state still needed to pay the rest in cash. Without a stable cash nexus and the ready availability of bullion, keeping a workforce paid and a campaign continuing would simply not have been possible. The instance of Akbar scattering bullion among the workmen during the siege of Chitor demonstrates that for the greater part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the empire was actually able to mobilise the cash it needed to keep its military enterprises running. In turn, this implies that we need to go beyond warhorses and gunpowder weaponry in seeking to explain Mughal military success in South Asia.39 At a time when war- making was becoming increasingly expensive everywhere, and states were facing greater difficulty in mobilising enough money to realise their military ambitions, the Mughal Empire’s ability to regularly generate and make available enough cash for its armies undoubtedly played a key role in its military success.40 It is also important to note that while calling the Mughal Empire a fiscal–military state would be a stretch, it can hardly be over-emphasised how central war-making was to the economic and fiscal organisation of the empire. The entire mansabdari–jagirdari arrangement operated with the primary aim of appropriating as much of the surplus agrarian production as possible and concentrating it in the hands of the empire’s military aristocracy. While the institutions of mansabdari and jagirdari have been studied in great detail, these studies were mainly concerned with

37. Mirza Nathan, Baharistan-i Gha’ibı, transcribed copy of the original Persian manuscript preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, JS 60-62, Jadunath Sarkar Collection, MS JS60, folio 21a, National Library, Kolkata; and M.I. Borah (trans.), Baharistan-i Ghaybı: A History of the Mughal Wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa during the Reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, Vol. 1, Vols. 1–2 (Guwahati: Department of History and Antiquarian Studies, 1992), p. 62. 38. Dakhilı troops were troops that the state hired and paid, but handed over command of to mansabdars. Abul Fazl (Per- sian text edited by H. Blochmann), A’ın-i Akbarı, Vol. 1, Vols. 1–3 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1869–72), p. 190; H. Blochmann (trans., Vol. 1) and H.S. Jarrett (trans., Vols. 2 and 3), The A’ın-i Akbarı by Abu ’l-Fazḷ‘Allamı, Vol. 1 (Cal- cutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1948–49), p. 264. 39. One is reminded, for instance, of the work of Dirk Kolff in highlighting the role of treasure and cash in the early military success of Sher Shah Sur. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy. 40. Jan Glete argues that it was these factors that led to the development of the ﬁscal–military state in Western Europe in the early modern period. Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal–Military States, 1500–1660 (London/New York: Routledge, 2002). Also see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Ahsan Jan Qaisar, ‘Distribu- tion of the Revenue Resources of the Mughal Empire among the Nobility’, in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahma- nyam (eds), The Mughal State, 1526–1750 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 252–8. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 11 comprehending the imperial economy, the nature of class struggle and the social dynamics of the ruling aristocracy.41 Investigating them afresh in an effort to understand the emergence of imperial war ﬁnance that would support the expansionist agenda of the empire will help us understand both Mughal war-making and state-formation better.

Non-elite military labour and Mughal empire-building Mughal state-formation is primarily understood by existing historiography as an elite enterprise. This is reflected by the sustained interest in studying the functioning of the mounted aristocracy and its role in the process of empire-building.42 The fact that a good part of surviving Mughal texts comprise chronicles either written or sponsored by that same class means that its achievements received far more attention in these texts than those of any other participants. The modern historian’s reliance on these texts as one of the principal sources has helped foster the idea that the mounted aristocracy was the backbone of the empire in every way possible;43 by extension, it is projected in many histories as the principal force of the Mughal armies, although such conclusions have not been borne out by exhaustive studies of actual campaigns. Undoubtedly, deployment of cavalry was the centrepiece of Mughal battle tactics around which other wings of the army revolved,44 but as Streusand has pointed out, the Mughals fought surprisingly few pitched battles;45 other forms of military engagement were much more common. In the forested highlands of central and western India, as well as in the Deccan, siege warfare comprised the bulk of substantial military encounters; engage- ments on the river-infested flood-plains of Bengal and Assam were mostly amphibious. In both these areas, cavalry played only a marginal role, while other military participants assumed far more importance. Our case studies help us to identify one such group of participants—quasi-military labourers.46 The sources describe thousands of workmen being involved in the construction of siege works at both Chitor and Ranthambhor. Nizamuddin Ahmad tells us that around ‘five thousand expert builders (banna’) and carpenters (najjar) and stonemasons (sang-tarash)’ were employed in the construction of the saps and mines at Chitor.47 In the course of construction, anywhere between one hundred and two hundred of these

41. See, for example, Abdul Aziz, The Mansabdari System and the Mughal Army (Lahore: Al Faisal, 1945); Satish Chandra, Medieval India: Society, the Jagirdari Crisis, and the Village (Delhi: Macmillan, 1982); M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, repr., 2001); and Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707–1740 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, repr., 2003). 42. See, for example, Ali, The Mughal Nobility; Chandra, Parties and Politics; Afzal Husain, The Nobility under Akbar and Jahangir: A Study of Family Groups (New Delhi: Manohar Publishing House, 1999); and Firdos Anwar, Nobility under the Mughals (1628–1658) (New Delhi: Manohar Publishing House, 2001). 43. To be fair, this article also relies squarely on these chronicles. However, it consciously looks for references to the involvement of other social groups in the formation of the empire in order to present a more balanced picture. 44. Even so, it was not always the cavalry that actually won the Mughals their battles. In their campaign in Balkh, for instance, the Mughal heavy cavalry was quite helpless against the highly mobile units of mounted archers of the Uzbegs and their allies. It was the Mughal matchlock men who proved much more effective in warding off the harass- ment of their adversaries. Khan (Rehman, ed.), Shahjahan-nama, pp. 433–5, 452–4, 460–1, 464, 465; and Fuller (trans.), Shah Jahan Nama, pp. 360, 361, 377–8, 385, 388, 389. 45. Streusand, Formation of the Mughal Empire, p. 52. 46. I use the term ‘quasi-military’ because while the people grouped under this category were not always combatants— although there are instances when they did take part in combat—their labour created the conditions for combat to take place. 47. Ahmad (De, ed.), T̤abaqat, Vol. 2, pp. 216–7. 12 P. NATH workmen died daily due to gunfire by the garrison.48 No source mentions how many were injured or incapacitated, but there is no reason to assume that the number was any less. Given such a high casualty rate over a period of several months, there must have been an extremely high number of people needed to complete the task.49 At the siege of Ran- thambhor, Abul Fazl provides a graphic description of the transportation of Mughal artillery by porters and labourers. He describes how five hundred ‘iron-armed kahars50 and strong-shouldered porters (kaharan-i ahanın-bazu wa hammạ lan-i sangın-dosh)’ hauled extremely heavy artillery pieces (zarbuzan-hạ -i buzurg)—each of which needed two hundred pairs of oxen to be dragged over level ground—up the hill of Ran.51 The involvement of such huge workforces was a constant feature of Mughal war-making, especially during sieges. Another major sphere of activity was road-building. Khafi Khan describes a group of ‘hatchet-men and wood-cutters’ marching ahead of the army on its way into Assam in early 1662, and how ‘with great care and caution, they cut down the trees with their hatch- ets and other implements and made a broad road for the army between the trees’.52 Very large numbers of workers and officials were also recruited for the production, procurement and maintenance of the empire’s military equipment and war animals. For example, every mast (in heat) elephant was supposed to have five and a half servants (panj wa nım nafar) assigned to it for its maintenance.53 An imperial army on the march would require thousands of labourers with diverse specialisations to take care of various duties. The A’ın- i Akbarı states that each setting up of the imperial camp required the participation of ‘a thousand Farrashes,54 natives of Iran, Turan, and Hindustan, 500 sappers, 100 water- carriers, 50 carpenters, tent-makers (khaima-doz) and torch-bearers (mash‘al-chı), 30 workers in leather (charm-doz), and 150 sweepers (khak-rob)’.55 The sieges of Chitor and Ranthambhor afford us a glimpse into this world of quasi- military labour. Without this co-ordinated and monstrous effort, the very conditions for combat could never have been created. Mughal military campaigns—and, by extension, imperial territorial expansion—depended as much on the elite mounted aristocracy as on this non-elite labour. In fact, one could go a step further and argue that no matter how central a role existing historiography assigns to the empire’s mansabdari elite, had it not been for the labour force involved in the production of military infrastructure, the mansabdari elite would never have been able to demonstrate their military prowess, let alone win wars for the empire. Akbar having to distribute bullion to keep these labourers working at Chitor is a rare view of the empire’s dependence on this workforce; it also exposes the empire’s vulnerability when faced by the prospect of losing command over the

48. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, p. 316; Beveridge (trans.), Akbarnama, Vol. 2, p. 467; Ahmad (De, ed.), T̤abaqat, Vol. 2, p. 217; and De (trans.), Tabaqạ t, Vol. 2, p. 344. 49. We use these figures with caution. With such a high casualty rate, a workforce of five thousand would not last more than one and a half months. Either the daily rate of casualties must have been lower, or the Mughals must have constantly replenished their labour force to keep the numbers close to the initial figures. 50. Kahar is a labouring caste employed through the centuries as palanquin bearers. 51. It is possible that Abul Fazl inflated these numbers to magnify the Mughal exertions at Ranthambhor. However, they still give us an idea of the key role played by the labour forces and draught animals in facilitating the Mughal bombardment of Ranthambhor. Fazl (Rahim, ed.), Akbar-nama, Vol. 2, p. 337. 52. Anees Jahan Syed, Aurangzeb in Muntakhab al-Lubab (Bombay: Somaiya Publications Pvt. Ltd, 1977), p. 184. 53. Blochmann, a translator of the A’ın-i Akbarı, explains that this implied ‘either eleven servants for two elephants, or [that] the last was a boy’. Blochman (trans.), A’ın-i Akbarı, Vol. 1, p. 132. 54. Farrashes are people who lay out carpets and cushions. They could be chamberlains or superintendents overseeing the pitching of tents. Given the large number quoted, I suspect it is the former. 55. Fazl (Blochmann, ed.), A’ın-i Akbarı, Vol. 1, p. 42. SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 13 workforce. At the end of the day, Mughal war-making and empire-building were probably far more broad-based and participatory processes—ones that involved very large sections of the South Asian population—than is usually acknowledged.

Conclusion Let me sum up by highlighting three counts on which this article seeks to contribute to the existing body of scholarship. First, it engages with a rarely-studied form of military encounter in South Asia—sieges.56 In fact, across the world, the fascination of the military historian with pitched battles has pushed sieges and various other forms of military encounters to the margins of historiographical inquiry;57 the scholarship on Mughal warfare mirrors this global tendency. For instance, in contrast to battles where Mughal cavalry occupied centre-stage, sieges involved a lot of mundane, slow and arduous techni- ques of war like blockading, mining and sapping. As demonstrated above, the study of sieges reveals a vast sphere of military enterprise in which the role of the much-hyped Mughal cavalry was heavily circumscribed, and this, in turn, helps us appreciate the importance of various other players on whose contribution siegecraft—and indeed other forms of military enterprise—rested. A more thorough analysis of sieges and other neglected forms of warfare will help nuance this picture further. At the same time, in discussing these sieges, I have moved away from issues of combat, ﬁrearms and army organisation—themes that have traditionally dominated historical inquiry into Mughal warfare and kept its scope extremely narrow. It is only recently that historians have started exploring various other dimensions of the Mughal military experience. For instance, the recent monographs by Jos Gommans and Andrew De La Garza on Mughal warfare each raise issues as diverse as the mobilisation of manpower and war animals, environment, logistics, training, recruitment and frontiers.58 This is a welcome and much-needed shift that deserves to be wholeheartedly embraced and extended. This is what I have tried to do in this article by way of conceptualising war in a very broad sense and seeking to write a social, economic and cultural history of Mughal warfare via these three sieges. Finally, with this broad conceptualisation, I have gone beyond the technical concerns of military affairs and used war as a point of entry to engage with some of the larger questions about Mughal empire-building. The issues of Mughal ideologies of war, the role of political intermediaries, military labour and military ﬁnance are key to understanding the dynamics of both war-making and state-formation. As a reconnaissance of more detailed

56. In contrast to pitched battles, there is not a single monograph dedicated to Mughal siege warfare. Discussions of sieges have mostly come as parts of larger works, as in Streusand, Formation of the Mughal Empire, pp. 57–64; Gom- mans, Mughal Warfare, pp. 136–45; Kaushik Roy, Military Transition in Early Modern Asia, 1400–1750: Cavalry, Guns, Governments and Ships (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 89–126; and Kaushik Roy, Warfare in Pre-British India—1500 BCE to 1740 CE (London/New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 113–55. See also Pratyay Nath, ‘Siege Warfare in Mughal India, 1519–1538’, in Kaushik Roy (ed.), Warfare and Politics in South Asia from Ancient to Modern Times (New Delhi: Manohar, 2011), pp. 121–44. 57. This tendency is the result of a somewhat uncritical acceptance of the theoretical paradigm advocated by the famous Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). For a thorough analysis, see Yuval Noah Harari, ‘The Concept of “Decisive Battles” in World History’,inJournal of World History, Vol. 18, no. 3 (Sept. 2007), pp. 251–66; and R.C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, 1097–1193 (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 14–5. 58. Gommans, Mughal Warfare; and Andrew De La Garza, The Mughal Empire at War: Babur, Akbar and the Indian Military Revolution, 1500–1605 (London/New York: Routledge, 2016). 14 P. NATH explorations of the relationship between these two processes in early modern South Asia, this article highlights the kind of results that such inquiries have the potential to bring forward.

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to Anke Fischer-Kattner, Jamel Ostwald, John A. Lynn., Kaushik Roy, Kaustubh Mani Sengupta, Lakshmi Subramanian, Rajat Datta, Kashshaf Ghani, Ranabir Chakravarti, Sumathi Ramaswamy and Peter Wilson for their invaluable comments on previous versions of this paper. I am also grateful to the two anonymous South Asia reviewers for their comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are entirely mine.

Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.