“A Huma, which was moving over the heavens, you seized from delusion.”- Shakebi
This article addresses the neglect of South Asia’s military history and critically examines the colonial manipulation of this narrative by the British to justify their conquest of India. It challenges the misconceptions propagated by the colonisers and investigates the broader reasons for the historical disregard for military history. The hypothesis of the Military Revolution and its implications for South Asian history is analysed while venturing beyond this Eurocentric framework to explore the distinctiveness of Medieval Indian tactics and strategies compared to those of Europe.
The evolution of early interpretations in Military history
With the rise of social sciences and area studies during the 1970s, scholars were all the more inclined to stress the socioeconomic and cultural religious features of South Asian society. Lately, the fashions of political correctness and post-structuralism, as well as the increasing interest in the subaltern, have served to preserve the atmosphere in which military history was considered old-fashioned and irrelevant. For influential scholars such as Burton Stein, military fiscalism was the driving force that turned states from segmentary into more centralised configurations. Ignorance of military history steered it into pandemonium, wherein it became vulnerable to analysis under the Eurocentric framework. This relative negligence of military history was not an exclusively Indian phenomenon. First of all, western public opinions were very much affected by the passive image of Indian politicians, primarily following the Satyagraha campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi and later, the non-alignment policy of Nehru. Even now recurrent Indo-Pak war and nuclear tests are hardly enough to emancipate the South Asian historiography from this gentle idyll of non-violence in the eyes of the West, which in the post-modern era has mastered the art of trading in white flags.
The history of Medieval India has been primarily written in political and military terms, with dauntless armies fighting heroic battles. H.A. Klaff stated this to be a lamentable result of early Indo-British historiography mainly concerned with Britain’s epic struggle to conquer the subcontinent. This perspective presents Muslim rule not only as a politically instructive antecedent but also as a gruesome epitome of ‘foreign’ occupation from which the Indian population was to be liberated. The exuberance of the British towards this liberation seemed very ironic, especially when they were able to turn a blind eye towards the impoverished masses existing in abject poverty. Repeating Orme's propagandistic tune of conquest and battle, Elliot was struck by the excessive amount of violence in the Indo-Islamic corpus of political chronicles, where figures like Muhammad Al-Qasim and Mahmud of Ghazni or Timur spent days collecting the mythical treasures of the country. The perception of Muslims killing Hindus continued to have a great deal of influence on the military historiography of South Asia. Still, such interpretations failed to capture the boundless praise and love for the allies in the Indo-Persian works. The Imperial British historians strongly stressed the excessive violence by the Muslim rulers against the passive, but peace-loving Hindus. This stereotype contrasted the intolerant, barbaric, and masculine Muslims with the tolerant and even feminine Hindus, such interpretations had a huge impact on the nationalist historiography that led to the emergence of many false notions of nationalism, often segregating some communities.
Both Gommans and Klaff doubted the existence of any mature school of military history in India. South Asianists have tended to regard wars as something beyond the purely military and closely related to the social and cultural conditions of the sub-continent. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian nationalist historians reacted against the antagonistic picture in British historical accounts. It’s commendable that despite the existence of widespread religious fanaticism, many of these historians attempted to play down the violent nature of Muslim conquests by stressing the brotherly ties between the Muslims and Hindus, which formed one nation from early onwards. Claims of subjection of Hindus during the so-called Muslim rule should be repudiated, they were co-rulers of the realm. Under Akbar, the concept of Watan Jagir was strengthened by not dispossessing the chief in ordinary circumstances and only the final authority rested with him. However, this is not the focus of the present work, although, by contrast, the British were considered the first to have imposed “foreign” rule on India. The nationalist mood around the turn of the century produced silent censorship regarding earlier antagonistic communal relations. Again, the public taboo was not conducive to the military field as it undermined the role of medieval military confrontations.
The Military Revolution thesis
In Europe, the framework of the military revolution captivated historians studying various non-European regions. Matthew Stavros, for instance, identified a military revolution in Tokugawa Japan between 1580 and 1600, paralleling developments similar in Europe. These included rapid dissemination and use of matchlocks, tactical innovations to adopt these new techniques, the concurrent rise of a disciplined soldiery, and the emergence of a strong centralised political authority. Stavros even suggested that the volley fire had already been used in the battle of Nagashino by Oda Nobunaga in 1575 before it was deployed in Europe by William the Orange in the mid-1590s. Similar conclusions were drawn in the study of the Korean case, where the rise of massed musketeer formations and volley fire, the advent of drill, discipline, and the proliferation of military manuals in East Asia occurred concurrently with Europe– and in some cases, even earlier. Several scholars connect South Asia with the Military Revolution paradigm. Gommans, for instance, highlights the failure of sixteenth-century South Asia to fully adopt gunpowder weaponry in ways that transformed military tactics or strategy. He refers to this period as the “false dawn of gunpowder” by arguing that a revolutionary change occurred only in the eighteenth century, driven by European military professionals who employed European models. Sanjay Subhramanyam juxtaposed David Aaylon’s analysis of the Middle East to analyse the hindrance of seamless integration of gunpowder technologies into regional military systems. He highlights the resistance as not merely a technological one, but a deeply rooted one that prioritised the established methods of warfare. The warrior classes of South India derived their prestige and identity from traditional modes of combat and may have perceived the gunpowder technology as undermining their status. Moreover, the reliance on skilled craftsmanship for traditional weapons and the socio-economic networks built around these industries could have further entrenched resistance to change. However, contextualising this argument within the broader historical narrative is necessary as South India was not entirely insulated from gunpowder technology, the strategic use of artillery was evident in the conflict of Talikota in 1565.
Andrew de la Graza stated that the changes that engulfed the Mughal armies during the sixteenth century in many ways paralleled the early stages of the ongoing “Military Revolution” in early modern Europe. Roberts enumerated four processes that triggered a revolutionary transformation in Europe: formations such as a linear infantry formation of pike, the rise of a wider strategic consciousness among states, rapid growth in army sizes, and a general increase in the impact of war on society. Graza argued that these military developments enabled the Mughals to conquer much of South Asia and establish dominance over the landmass in the sixteenth century. Ironically, this success also robbed them of the further need to pursue the course of the revolution. An important intervention was made in this debate by focusing on the use of gunpowder weaponry in combat with the architectural changes that forts of the Deccan region underwent in response to the proliferation of gunpowder artillery. Richard Eaton and Phillip Wagoner argued against using the concept of Military Revolution in a rigid European sense, otherwise, it would negate the occurrence of any revolution in Deccan.
Geoffrey Parker connected the Military Revolution hypothesis with the great divergence, Parker suggested that the Military Revolution equipped and enabled Western Europe to attain a militarily dominant position in the world but, his proposition has been challenged on the ground of ignorance of other factors including military synthesis, local collaborations and population transfer in European overseas conquests. Although the Military Revolution hypothesis has a tremendous capacity to interpret military change and facilitate cross-regional comparison, judging the non-European parts of the world through European parameters is no sense different from applying the concept of European Feudalism to other parts of the world. This framework assigns an inferior position to the non-European world for not aligning with European parameters. During the colonial period, this framework further legitimised European conquests under the guise of “civilising missions”, even as European societies struggled with the profound social and economic upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, during which their citizens were brutally suppressed for demanding better living conditions.
Looking beyond the thesis
Several historians have highlighted the variations across the different polities, emphasising the need to analyse these differences through the lens of heterogeneities. The Mughal military tactics and strategy depended upon the nature of the terrain, distance from the imperial heartland, logistical constraints, and military techniques of the adversaries. Even the hypothesis of the Mughal Empire being classified as the gunpowder empire is now refuted as a single military element that never spearheaded all the Mughal victories. In the Mughal annexation of Sind, the war boats proved decisive when the river current favoured the army of Khan-i-Khanan, forcing the armies of Mirza Jani Beg to retreat. Interactions of the Mughals with the Rajput traditions led to an ever-increasing role of war elephants in battles from the 1570s, as they were used alongside the heavy cavalry to deliver the shock charge.
During the early phase of their conquests, the Mughals focused on capturing the fertile plains of the Punjab and Gangetic basin. It was mainly their cavalry that helped them achieve this. In the 1560s, however, the imperial armies ventured into the forested highlands of Central India, and after the 1590s, the Deccan plateau. Aravalli range offered plenty of easily defensible locations, and local politics had erected formidable forts on the hilltops or in the middle of forests. Streusand stressed the limited role of gunpowder in subduing the South Asian forts. William McNeil identified the logistical challenges of transporting cannons to these interior parts due to the lack of navigable rivers. Abu’l Fazl in his short chapter on cannon pieces (A’in-i top), attributes to Akbar the invention of a cannon piece that can easily be transported during expeditions by dismantling the parts and assembling them while firing.
Water bodies often prevented close combat in the riverine regions like Sind, Assam, and Bengal. Under such circumstances, both the Mughals and their adversaries had to rely on archers and matchlockmen to engage their adversaries. In both Bengal and Assam, a lot of artillery was deployed due to widespread riverine channels of communication that offered easy transportation and scope for efficient deployment of artillery.
Iqtidar Alam Khan highlights the borrowing of gunpowder technology knowledge from European, Safavid, and Ottoman military professionals in the sixteenth century. However, over the seventeenth century, there was a gradual shift to flintlocks in various regions of Europe. However, this was not the case in the Mughal Empire where matchlock remained the dominant weapon of Mughal gunners through the seventeenth century. This lack of evolution presents a deviation from the general global pattern and poses a conundrum for historians of South Asia but in a sense implies a lack of technological awareness, as Andrew de la Graza points out a lack of existential threat to the Mughal empire between the mid-sixteenth century and the late-seventeenth century. Thus, the impulse for a constant search for better technology was not a dominating factor in the Mughal strategic consciousness unlike Europe, which was focused on expanding its overseas empire.
Conclusion
The neglect of military history made it vulnerable to vitriolic interpretations, which showcased the colonisers as a liberating force that saved the masses from the alleged abusive rule of the Mughals thereby, hiding the heinous crimes and exploitation carried out by the British. A fresh outlook on military history is necessary to liberate it from the grapples of generalisations that downplay the military achievements and breakthroughs in various periods of Indian history. As Black argues, the long-term focus on the idea of the Military Revolution and the search in non-European parts of the world for processes that define it in the European context blinded historians for a long time to such specificities in the historical process and the immediate factors that generated them. One direct implication of locating variations in the military process and looking beyond the Military Revolution framework permits us to study the military process of any particular region in its terms. Furthermore, it helps us analyse the factors that unfolded unique techniques and trajectories in different circumstances and opens up the avenue to write about new forms of comparative military history.
By Lokesh Choudhary
Lokesh Choudhary is a third-year student in the Department of History. His interests in the discipline lie in the Early-Medieval and Medieval periods, which he finds fascinating due to their often misunderstood nature. He is passionate about debunking misconceptions that have been used as tools for political legitimation. Additionally, he is an avid reader of philosophy, literature and Medieval-era poetry.
References
Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia 1000-.1800, edited by Jos J.L. Gommans and Dirk H.A. Kolff
Akbar and his India, edited by Irfan Habib
A good read for people interested in topics of history.
Well written and structured
Absolutely amazing articles deeply highlights the facts and does'nt rely on anglo-saxon fiction