War elephants, India’s distinctive contribution to the art
of warfare. They were first recorded by Western historians at the battle of
Gaugamela (330 BC), when a squadron of fifteen was included with the Indian
contingent in the army of Darius III. They seem, like the British tanks at
Cambrai in 1916, to have been either too unfamiliar to the generals or too few
in number for decisive use. It was not until Alexander’s men reached the
Hydaspes that they were faced by a whole corps of fighting elephants which,
though eventually defeated, inflicted heavy casualties. The report that King
Bimbisara of Magadha, the next monarch to the east, commanded several hundred
of these sagacious pachyderms was an important factor in the decision of
Alexander’s army to go no farther.
What was not invented could be borrowed. After capturing
eighty battle elephants from King Porus at the Battle of the Hydaspes River,
Alexander acquired one hundred more before returning to the west. Alexander’s
Hellenistic successors made elephants the fad weapon of the era. Able to
frighten horses and terrify men, trample infantry and cavalry alike, and even
demolish wooden fortifications, elephants could charge at fifteen miles per
hour. At that speed, however, they were hard to stop, and they often tended to
run amok, trampling friend and foe alike.
Elephants were outfitted with a housing, or howdah, covered
with cloth or carpet and bells around the neck and rump. Lower-ranked warriors
armed with bows and other missiles were seated in the howdah. According to the
Greek historian Megasthenes (c. 350-c. 290 b. c. e.), who was sent as a
representative to the royal court of India, three archers and a driver rode on
each elephant.
The elephants subsequently became a major arm in Western
classical armies, some even being included with the Roman troops that conquered
Britain.
In India they were considered to be royal beasts, whose
ownership was reserved to the government. Their primary role was in the charge,
for which the strongest and largest bulls were specially trained, their tusks
tipped with sharpened steel, and their flanks protected by bamboo or leather
armour. They were also used to smash palisades or push down gates, or for other
combat engineering tasks, such as forming a bridge over shallow rivers or ditches.
Smaller bulls and cows were used as baggage animals, giving an excellent
cross-country performance in a country which until modern times had few made
roads. With the invention of the gun, they were taken into the artillery
service as draught animals. British as well as Indian commanders found them
excellent mobile command posts, and elephants continued in use by the artillery
in India until the early twentieth century.
Indian generals were fascinated by the elephant arm for over
2,000 years, despite repeated evidence of its weaknesses. Disciplined armies,
admittedly not always readily available in Indian conditions, could usually
avoid the worst impact of the elephant charge by opening lanes in their battle
line, just as the Romans did against the elephants of Pyrrhus or Hannibal. Even
the best trained elephant was liable to be panicked by the sights, smells and
sounds of battle, especially by incendiary devices, and might, joined by its
companions, turn into a common enemy, trampling friend and foe alike. Several
decisive battles were lost when a Hindu king’s elephant rushed in the wrong
direction, leading his soldiers to draw the conclusion that he was deserting
them, so that the whole host collapsed like a ruined building. Although the
Muslim invaders themselves had come to power by defeating Hindu armies that
relied on elephants, they in the course of time became dependent upon elephants
themselves and were defeated by subsequent invaders in much the same way.
Elephants generally carried a driver, or mahout, and three
to four warriors. In response, the use of large caltrops, iron-pointed
triangular devices set in the ground to impede elephant and cavalry advances,
was developed. Such Indian tactics were old-fashioned by the tenth century, but
they continued into the thirteenth. Hindu pride prevented leaders from learning
from their foreign adversaries. Hindus valued strength in numbers over speed
and mobility, a doctrine that rapidly caused their defeat.
The elephant’s tusks might also be sharpened or lengthened
with sword blades, and it might pick up enemy soldiers with its trunk or
trample them underfoot. The standard battlefield role of war elephants was in
the assault, to break up the enemy ranks, but elephants were also used in
sieges, to push over gates and palisades or to serve as living bridges. Equipped
with an iron chain in its trunk and taught to wield it in all directions, an
elephant could wreak havoc against an enemy force. Although these great animals
were impressive and could frighten an enemy, they were also unpredictable and
could retreat under attack into the ranks of panicked Indian foot soldiers.
Frequently commanders rode on the elephants so that they had the best view of
the battlefield; this high perch made the commanders prime targets for enemy
arrows. If the commander was wounded, or if he felt the need to descend from
the howda on top of his elephant, his troops often assumed that he was dead and
scattered.
Shah Jahan is famous mainly as the builder of numerous
palaces, particularly the Taj Mahal (1632- 1653), a monument to his love for
his wife. Militarily, he succeeded to an extent in the Deccan but failed in his
numerous attempts to oust the Persians from Qandahar. His illness in 1657
triggered a fratricidal war between his four sons, who all vied to capture the
throne. Alamgir emerged the victor, becoming India’s sixth Mughal emperor and
ruling until his own death in 1707. Elephants were used with great effectiveness
in this succession struggle. At the Battle of Khajwa (1659), Alamgir’s brother
and opponent Prince Shuja (died c. 1660) utilized elephants swinging large iron
chains from their trunks, wreaking havoc among Alamgir’s troops. Alamgir,
however, remained calm and emerged victorious.
A far more terrible invasion was that of the Amir Timur of
Samarkand, more familiar to students of English literature as Tamberlane the
Great. Despite the zeal with which various Sultans of Delhi had persecuted
those guilty of unbelief, or of believing the wrong thing, the vast majority of
their subjects continued to practise the Hindu religion. This was felt by Timur
to be as pitch upon the faces of all true believers. Moreover, India contained
great riches, notwithstanding the depredations of earlier invaders, and its
defences, because of a civil war between two rival contenders for the masnad or
throne of Delhi, were weak. As he wrote in his autobiography, his purpose in
entering Hindustan was, therefore, twofold: `The first thing was to war with
infidels, the enemies of the Islamic faith, and by this holy war to acquire
some claim to reward in the life to come. The other was a worldly object, that
the army of Islam might gain something from plundering the wealth of infidels.’
In the autumn of 1398, with a force of 90,000 Central Asian horsemen, he
crossed the Indus and advanced on Delhi. On the ancient battlefield of Panipat
he was met by an army (mostly of Muslim soldiers under Muslim commanders) which
included 120 war elephants. Once again, however, the elephant threat proved to
have been overrated. Timur gained an easy victory and captured Delhi, which was
subsequently sacked with most of its citizens being killed or enslaved.
In the year 1524 Zahir al-Din Muhammad, surnamed Babur, the
Tiger, ruler of Kabul, previously of Samarkand, a descendant of Sultan Timur,
`placed my foot in the stirrup of resolution and my hand on the reins of
confidence in God’ (as he put it, in the graceful Persian idiom) and invaded
India following the example of his famous and awe-inspiring ancestor. He was
also related, rather distantly, to Chingiz Khan, though, like Timur, he was in
fact a Turk by ethnic origin, and utterly hated the Mongols. Nevertheless, it
had become the custom for the inhabitants of Hindostan to refer to any set of
invaders from Central Asia as Mongols and so it was that Babur, after some
initial setbacks, became the founder of the great Mughal empire that eventually
ruled over almost all India. His decisive victory over the Sultan of Delhi on
21 April 1526, on the old battlefield of Panipat, proved yet again how a
relatively small force of desperate but well-led horsemen from Central Asia
could almost literally ride rings round the much larger but unwieldy hosts of
the Indian plains. Sultan Ibrahim put a lakh of men into the field with a
hundred war elephants. He was, however, inexperienced in war, in Babur’s words,
a general `who marched without order, halted or retired without method, and
engaged without foresight’. Babur, on the other hand, was not only a practised
commander but had at his disposal the latest military technology, a battery of
wheeled artillery, that would become the great gun park which was the pride of
the imperial Mughal armies. After the death in this battle of Sultan Ibrahim
and 15,000 of his Muslim and Hindu soldiers, all the chivalry of the Rajputs
took the field, seeing a chance to regain Hindustan for themselves. At Khanua
(Kanwaha) on 16 March 1527 their army, including now 500 war elephants and
80,000 cavalry, tried the same tactic of a frontal attack on Babur’s field works
as had the late Sultan of Delhi, with similarly disastrous results. Babur’s
heirs and successors, ruling first from Delhi, then Agra, then Delhi again,
followed the familiar pattern of conducting campaigns, whether against each
other or in the conquest of the remaining Muslim and Hindu princes of India, in
the traditional Indian way of warfare.
Although Akbar was young, was inexperienced, and lacked
validity for his imperial title, he nevertheless showed determination and
valor. At the age of thirteen, he was victorious at the Second Battle of Panitpat
(1556) against the Sur descendants of Shir Shah, who were led by an admirable
Hindu general, Himu Bhargav, also known as Hemu (died 1556). It is significant
that at this battle Himu girded his war elephants in plate armor and stationed
both musketeers and crossbow archers on their backs. Clearly, the innovative
changes of the Mughal invaders were being adopted and adapted to traditional
Indian methods of fighting. Himu was mortally wounded on the battlefield, which
led to a rout of his troops and victory for the hard-pressed Mughals.
The Battle of Talikota (1565), considered one of the most
decisive battles in this period of South Indian history, demonstrated the
importance of having well armed, appropriately dressed troops in combat. The
forces of the southern state of Vijayanagar commanded massive numbers but
failed to equip their men with armor or even practical clothing. The Indian
infantry, with their bamboo bows, short spears and swords, and foreign
mercenaries wielding outdated artillery and muskets, were no match for the
Deccan sultans who rode on Arabian horses, their armor-clad Iranian and
Turanian soldiers carrying steel bows, metal javelins, and 16-foot lances.
Additionally, the Muslims had mobile artillery carried on camels and elephants.
B3bur’s tactic of using supplies as a wall of protection for the front line of
gunners was utilized once again. Historians estimate that the defeat of
Vijayanagar resulted in the deaths of 16,000 troops. The great southern empire
of Vijayanagar and its capital were destroyed by the invaders.
The military system of the Mughals likewise soon came to
resemble in many ways those of their predecessors. Essentially these systems
were dictated by the problems of governing a large area with no faster system
of communication than that which could be achieved by dispatch riders
travelling by post horses over unmade roads. ‘Dihli dur ast’ (Delhi is far
away) was the saying of many a Mughal official, reluctant to comply with
unwelcome instructions such as those requiring the transmission of revenue.
Most rulers worked on the sponge principle, allowing their subordinates to soak
up the revenue and then squeezing them to obtain the proceeds.
The military and revenue systems in fact were
interdependent. Although at times the major officers of the state were paid a
regular stipend, the usual method adopted was one of jagir, the assignment of
the revenue of a given area, in return for which the jagirdar or holder of the
assignment was required to perform his civil duties and to maintain a stated
number of cavalry troopers or sawars (literally, ‘riders’). This arrangement
allowed a ruler to divide up the proceeds of conquest among his followers,
while at the same time producing the military garrisons by which the conquest
was subsequently maintained. The disadvantages included a reluctance of
assignees to give up (or of rulers to resume from their old supporters) their
assignments when the holders became too old to perform military service in
person, and the tendency of the more ambitious assignees to use the armed men
whom they retained under this system for purposes other than those approved by
their ruler. Indeed for a ruler to assign too much of the revenue invited
disaster, since, without forces of his own, he was dependent on the reliability
of the magnates of whose contingents his army was composed.
A further problem was that assignees who actually lived in
the areas whose revenues were assigned to them and who, in most cases, were
actually involved in collecting the revenues (normally the government’s share
of the annual crops) tended to become local chiefs. Indeed, often they
originally had been local chiefs, Hindu rajas whose lands were not worth the
trouble of absolute conquest, or whose military resources made them too hard a
nut to be worth cracking as long as they passed on the proper share of the
revenue and acknowledged a nominal subjection. At the other extreme, assignees
tended not so much to misuse the military contingents they were expected to
keep up, as not to keep them up at all and pocket that element of the revenue
intended for their upkeep, with the result that when the army was called out,
the expected numbers of trained, properly equipped, and well mounted men failed
to materialise. When, in an attempt to enforce assignees to meet their
obligations, periodic musters were ordered, the same men and horses moved round
from assignee to assignee ahead of the muster-masters, to be counted over and over
again, hired by each assignee in turn for the duration of the muster. The
abuses were countered to a certain extent by systems such as branding the
horses and describing the troopers, but all depended upon the honesty,
efficiency, and energy of those operating the system, just as it did in Europe
at the same time.
The highest officers of the Mughal empire, the Subadars,
holders of a Suba or province, were at first called Sipahsalars, ‘commanders of
the troops’, and the senior officials of the Mughal state were known as
mansabdars, ‘holders of commands’. There were thirty-three levels of mansab,
each grade distinguished not by a title but by a number, from 10,000 down to
ten, according to the number of troopers the mansabdar was expected to
maintain. The later Mughal emperors recognised that many who were granted high
rank would not in fact produce the appropriate number of men, and introduced a
system of parallel ranks, with the higher figure being honorary (zat) and the
lower being that of the actual number of troops (sawar) to be maintained. The
proportion of permanently employed soldiers in Mughal armies was small and
comprised the household troops, artillerymen and other specialists, including
the elephant drivers. All could be used for the many ceremonial functions
inseparable from Indian court life. Otherwise the army was composed of the
contingents produced, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by assignees who
tended to become hereditary local governors, where sons were allowed to succeed
fathers in office if central authority was too weak to enforce the appointment
of another nominee.
The relationship between the revenue and the military
systems in India was, until well after the Mughal era and well into that of the
British, virtually one of symbiosis. The main purpose of collecting the revenue
was to ensure payment for the military on whom the power of the government was
based, while the main purpose of the military was to ensure the collection of
the revenue from which it was paid. Even inter-state campaigns can be
considered as having been undertaken with a view to increasing the base of the
revenue, which in turn paid for the army which made the conquests, and the
still larger army required to hold them. The expansion of the British Indian
forces which took place in step with the expansion of British territorial
possessions in India simply maintained a pattern set by the Mughals. Troops not
involved in campaigning were required to accompany the agents of government
whose task it was actually to collect the revenue, in cash or in kind. It is
not without significance that the official title of the British district
magistrates in the first provinces to be acquired by the British in India was
‘Collector’. The method of gathering the land revenue from the cultivators
varied from region to region, but the conventional method in Hindustan was
essentially one of tax farming. Wealthy individuals contracted with the
government, or its assignees, to hand over an agreed sum and retain the
remainder of what they had raised. Generally these tax-farmers (zamindars or
land-holders) had a hereditary interest in the villages whose revenue they
levied, and through custom and practice all sides knew what could reasonably be
yielded, with reductions allowed in times of drought or other natural disaster.
Where an area was the subject of disputed control, however, cultivators might
be subjected to demands from rival rulers. Distress was also caused when, as in
the early British period, market forces were left to determine what could be
raised. Rival contractors tried to outbid each other in promises of what they
could raise, in order to secure or retain their holdings, regardless of the
productive capacity of the land and its cultivators. Troops were required to
accompany the collectors, in order to ensure that zamindars actually disgorged
all that they had contracted to hand over. Sometimes even artillery was
included in such expeditions. As British rule became fully established, the
military presence became a guard of honour rather than a threat to reluctant
payers. Nevertheless it long continued, partly as a customary way of
recognising the social status of those involved, and partly in acknowledgement
of their martial spirit. While local chiefs expected to pay what was due, it
was thought something of an insult to imply that they would have done so except
under compulsion. In most societies taxpayers tend to pay their dues only in
response to the threat of force majeure. In Indian society the threat took the
colourful and visible form of a body of troops. When the revenue was collected,
the troops were required to act as escorts against what was, in unsettled
areas, a very real threat of raids by armed gangs or bandits (sometimes, the
same people who had just paid it over) as it was taken back to the local seat
of government.
It was with a military system based on these principles that
the Mughal empire and its rivals conducted their campaigns during the course of
more than 300 years. These included struggles against those Muslim states in
Bengal and in the Deccan, which had previously been subject to the Sultanate of
Delhi; wars of rebellion and succession among the Mughal princes themselves;
invasions by Iranians and Afghans from those Central Asian territories where
the Mughals themselves had originated; and, within India, risings by new or
reviving Hindu powers. Akbar, the greatest of the Mughal emperors, came to
power after a victory at Panipat in 1556 over a Hindu army which, in defiance
of the lessons of military history, had relied on its 1,500 elephants.
