Mughal Cavalry: The Backbone of the Imperial Army
The mounted warrior was the basic unit of the Mughal military system from the moment Babur led his Chaghatay-Timurid host across the Indus in 1525 until the disintegration of imperial authority in the eighteenth century. The army that fought at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 and the army that reeled before the Maratha light horse a hundred and fifty years later were both, in their essential composition, cavalry armies. The official returns of the mansabdari system counted men, horses, and beasts of transport rather than infantrymen and cannon, and the entire architecture of military rank, pay, and reward was calibrated to the mounted trooper and his mount.
The Steppe Inheritance and the Indian Adaptation
The Mughal cavalry was, in its origins, a Central Asian institution. Babur and his companions were heirs of the Timurid house of his father and the Chinggisid descent of his mother, and the army he brought into India in 1525 was a Turko-Mongol mounted force whose tactics centred on the classic steppe tulughma, the encirclement or divisionary attack, and whose principal striking weapons were the bow, the sabre, and the lance. The matchlock-armed cavalryman, the banduqchi sawar, was already present in Babur’s forces, and the araba wagon-laager that helped decide the issue against Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat was a synthesis of Central Asian, Ottoman, and possibly Hussite practice.
The Indian environment, however, required an immediate adaptation. The Afghan and Rajput adversaries that the Mughals confronted commanded substantial cavalry resources of their own, and their war elephants, heavy lances, and entrenched fortified positions forced the Mughals to develop new categories of mounted soldier. Within a generation of the founding of the empire, the Central Asian kernel had been surrounded by a much larger Indian periphery, and the cavalry of the mature Mughal state was a deliberately hybrid force in which Central Asian, Iranian, Indian Muslim, Rajput, and Afghan elements were combined under a single imperial framework.
The Categories of Mughal Cavalry
By the time of Akbar, the mansabdari returns distinguished several formal categories of cavalry. The dakhili cavalry were those maintained from the revenues of jagirs assigned within the officer’s own province or area of recruitment. The dakhili trooper was, in theory, locally raised, locally equipped, and locally paid, and the mansabdari noble was responsible for ensuring that the prescribed number of horsemen, with the prescribed number of horses of the prescribed quality, were present at each imperial muster. The dakhili was the most numerous of the formal categories and formed the backbone of the provincial armies.
The ahadi cavalry were a class of household cavalry directly maintained by the emperor. The ahadis were, in origin, the personal retainers of the ruler, and the term was later extended to denote troopers maintained directly from the imperial treasury or the khalisa (crown) lands rather than from assigned jagirs. The ahadis were typically better paid, better equipped, and more directly under imperial discipline than the dakhili horsemen, and they formed the hard core of the imperial army on campaign.
The walashah or qasabah contingents were hereditary tribal levies, particularly Afghan and Rajput, incorporated into the imperial system on a largely traditional basis. The walashah trooper was typically a member of a tribe or clan with a hereditary obligation of military service, and his pay, equipment, and conditions of service were governed as much by tribal custom as by the formal mansabdari regulations. The personal following of the emperor, the shagird-pesha and other household cavalry, formed a fourth category: the emperor’s own cavalry, often several thousand strong, was the most prestigious and best equipped in the army, and it was typically deployed as the reserve or as the decisive striking force in the great set-piece battles of the dynasty.
Recruitment: Irani, Turani, Indian Muslim, and Rajput Sources
Recruitment of the Mughal cavalry was largely informal and was carried out by the individual mansabdari noble out of his own household, kinship, and regional connections. The result was a force in which the social and ethnic composition of each noble’s contingent reflected the composition of his own following, and the imperial court found it difficult to enforce a uniform standard of recruitment across the army as a whole. The principal recruitment pools were the Irani, the Turani, the Indian Muslim, and the Rajput communities.
The Irani contingent was drawn from the Persian-speaking Muslim populations of Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. The Iranis had a long tradition of military service under the Timurids and the earlier Delhi Sultanates, and they brought to the Mughal army a sophisticated tradition of cavalry warfare, a high level of administrative culture, and a strong sense of ethnic solidarity. The Turani contingent was drawn from the Turkish-speaking populations of Central Asia, particularly the Uzbeg, Turcoman, and Chaghatay communities, and was the closest to Babur’s own tribal following. The Turani nobles were, on the whole, more martial and less literary than their Irani counterparts, and they dominated the higher command of the army in the reigns of Babur, Humayun, and the early part of Akbar’s reign.
The Indian Muslim cavalry was drawn from the descendants of the earlier Arab, Turk, and Afghan conquerors, from converts, and from the indigenous Muslim communities of the Deccan, Bengal, and the upper provinces. The Indian Muslim cavalryman varied considerably in equipment and effectiveness, but at his best was a formidable mounted warrior well adapted to the Indian environment. The Rajput cavalry deserves separate mention: from the submission of Mewar in the 1580s onward, and especially from the reign of Jahangir, the Rajput princes of Mewar, Marwar, Amber, and Bikaner provided substantial contingents of heavy cavalry whose distinctive characteristic was the lance charge. The political marriage alliances that bound the Rajput houses to the imperial house, beginning with Akbar’s marriage to the Kachhwaha princess of Amber in 1562, were closely tied to the military integration of the Rajput contingents into the imperial army.
Weapons, Armor, and Equipment
The Mughal cavalryman of the seventeenth century was equipped with a combination of weapons drawn from the Central Asian, Indian, and, increasingly, European traditions. The principal weapons were the bow, the matchlock, the sword, the lance, and the shield, together with a range of secondary weapons including the axe, the mace, the dagger, and various forms of pole arm.
The bow, in its Mughal form, was a composite weapon of horn, sinew, and wood. The Mughal bow was a formidable weapon in the hands of a trained archer, with an effective range of perhaps two hundred metres, and it was only slowly displaced, from Akbar’s reign onward, by the matchlock. The matchlock, known in Mughal usage as the banduq or toradar, was a heavy, long-barrelled weapon fired from horseback with the aid of a forked rest attached to the saddle. The matchlock had a slower rate of fire than the bow, but it was more accurate at longer ranges, and its penetrating power against armor was considerably greater.
The sword, in its Mughal form, was the talwar, a curved single-edged weapon of Indian or Persian design. The lance, the nezah or barchhi, was the characteristic weapon of the heavy cavalry, particularly the Rajput lancers, and was typically three to four metres in length. Body armor, in the form of the zarah baktar (watered-steel mail), was worn by the heavy cavalry and by the personal guards of the emperor and the highest nobles. The armor was effective against arrows and against sword cuts, and it gave the heavy cavalry a substantial advantage in close combat.
Horses: The Foundation of the Mounted Arm
The quality of a noble’s cavalry was judged in large part by the quality of his horses, and the acquisition, training, and maintenance of cavalry horses was a major component of imperial military expenditure. The principal sources of high-quality cavalry horses were Central Asia, Iran, and Arabia, and the Mughals maintained a network of horse traders in Kabul, Qandahar, and Bukhara to ensure a steady supply of mounts.
The Arabian horse, prized for its endurance, intelligence, and quality, was imported in substantial numbers through Surat and across the northwestern frontier and was the favoured mount of the light cavalry. The Persian and Turcoman strains, larger and heavier than the Arabian, were preferred for the heavy cavalry of the imperial guard, and the central Asian Uzbeg strain, famed for its hardiness, was the principal mount of the long-range cavalry of the frontier campaigns. The Indian breeds, though numerous, were generally regarded as inferior to the imported strains, and the empire remained dependent throughout its history on the importation of high-quality cavalry horses from across the northwestern frontier.
The Mansabdari System and the Provision of Cavalry
The mansabdari system was the principal mechanism by which the cavalry of the empire was raised, equipped, and paid. Every imperial officer was assigned a numerical rank (mansab) on a scale that ran from ten to, in rare cases, ten thousand or higher, and the rank determined the size of the contingent of cavalry that the officer was required to maintain. The system was, in its ideal form, a mechanism for preventing the emergence of independent regional power bases: by posting officers far from their homelands and rotating them frequently, the court ensured that no mansabdari noble could convert his official command into a hereditary territorial principality.
The jagir assignment, the grant of the right to collect the revenue of a specified tract of land in lieu of cash salary, was the principal financial mechanism by which the mansabdari cavalry was maintained. The system worked reasonably well in the heartland of the empire, where the density of cultivation permitted large bodies of troops to be sustained, but it broke down in the more remote regions of the Deccan and the northwest frontier. The crisis of the mansabdari-jagir system, which became acute in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, had a direct and catastrophic effect on the cavalry of the empire: as the jagirs shrank, the bejagir or landless mansabdari rose in number, and the imperial court found itself unable to enforce the discipline and rotation on which the system’s effectiveness had depended.
Tactics and Battlefield Deployment
The tactics of the Mughal cavalry evolved over the course of the dynasty’s history, but the basic principles of mounted combat established by Babur remained influential throughout. The standard Mughal army on campaign was divided into the qulam (vanguard), the qarawal (right wing), the jawwal (left wing), and the reserve, with the additional deployment of tulughma columns whose task was to swing wide of the enemy’s flanks and fall upon his rear. The disciplined use of this doctrine required careful rehearsal, exact timing, and a commander capable of orchestrating a complex manoeuvre under fire, and the great Mughal victories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries owed much to the imperial commanders’ mastery of the tulughma.
The Mughal cavalry combined the standard steppe tactics with the Indian practice of the lance charge. The Turko-Mongol and Iranian horsemen typically opened the battle with a series of skirmish and missile attacks, using the bow and the matchlock to disorder the enemy formation, before the heavy Indian Muslim and Rajput lancers delivered the decisive close-combat charge. The integration of the cavalry with the other arms is treated on the Mughal artillery and Mughal war elephants pages, and the great set-piece battles of the dynasty, examined in detail on the Mughal battles page, typically featured all of these arms in coordinated action.
The Decline of the Cavalry Arm
The cavalry was the backbone of the Mughal army for nearly two centuries, but its effectiveness declined sharply in the eighteenth century. The financial crisis of the mansabdari system, the deterioration of the jagir assignments, the increasing reliance on mercenary and tribal cavalry of doubtful loyalty, and the tactical superiority of the lighter, more mobile cavalry of the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the Afghan and Iranian invaders all contributed to the decline.
Sources
- M. Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966), on the sawar obligation.