Richards, Warriors &the State in Early Modern India (2004).pdf

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Warriors and the State in Early Modern India Author(s): John F. Richards Source: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 47, No. 3, Between the

Flux and Facts of Indian History: Papers in Honor of Dirk Kolff (2004), pp. 390-400Published by: BRILLStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25165054Accessed: 11-08-2015 04:24 UTC

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WARRIORS AND THE STATE IN EARLY MODERN INDIA

BY

JOHN F. RICHARDS*

Abstract

This essay argues for reconsideration and greater scholarly attention to the insights of Prof.

Dirk Kolff as expressed in his 1989 book, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy and in later writings. Kolff described a fluid, pervasive military labor market in late Mughal and early colonial

North India that made vast numbers of armed, largely peasant soldiers available to military contractors, rulers, and rebels alike. His formulation permits us to see that armed Indian peas ants in this period had considerable agency and independence within a society that was riven

with conflict. Such a reconsideration underscores the magnitude of the changes wrought in

Indian society by violent British conquest, pacification and disarmament in rural society?

especially after the failed 1857 revolt.

L'article plaide pour une reconsideration et une devaluation des idees du professeur Dirk

Kolff, telles qu'elles sont presentees dans son ouvrage paru en 1989, Naukar, Rajput et Sepoy, et dans ses publications ulterieures. Kolff decrit un marche du travail militaire flexible et

omnipresent en Inde Mogole et en Inde Septentrionale au debut de l'ere coloniale, et qui a

rendu disponible aux courtiers militaires, aux dirigeants et aux rebelles un grand nombre de

soldats d'origine paysanne. Son expose nous permet de voir comment, pendant cette periode, les pay sans indiens armes avaient une importance et une independance considerables dans

une societe fendue par les conflits armes. Une telle reconsideration souligne l'importance des

changements dans la societe indienne, declenches par la soumission violente, la pacification et le desarmement par les Anglais?surtout apres l'echec de la revoke de 1857.

Keywords: military, Mughals, peasant, colonial rule, labor market, zaminddrs

In 1989, Dirk Kolff published with Cambridge University Press a remarkable

book. Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Mar

ket in Hindustan, 1450-1850, immediately captured the imagination of Indianists

with its portrayal of an armed, militant peasantry found everywhere in early modern North India. In Kolff s formulation, there existed in the subcontinent

before colonial rule an immense military labor market. Since every male peas ant cultivator was skilled in the use of weapons, including bows and muskets, this meant that there existed a vast pool of potential soldiers and warriors from

* John F. Richards, Department of History, Duke University, P.O. Box 90719,

Durham, NC 27708-0719, USA, [email protected]

? Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004 JESHO 47,3 Also available online - www.brill.nl



WARRIORS AND THE STATE IN EARLY MODERN INDIA 391

whom various chiefs, rebels, bandit chiefs, military contractors, rajas, sultans

and emperors could freely recruit their armies. Most of these peasant soldiers,

lacking horses, served as infantry and musketeers, but others could and did

obtain these valuable assets and demand higher pay and status from their

employers. For most peasants, military service was highly localized, seasonal

and part-time. For other armed peasant warrior groups, however, military ser

vice became full-time and highly mobile. In either case, earnings filtered back

to home villages and regions that supplemented the often uncertain returns from

cultivation.

Moreover, Kolff stressed that membership and enrollment in military bands

was fluid and not totally determined by caste identity. Luck and successful man

agement often brought pronounced improvements in status, wealth and power for peasant military entrepreneurs. Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy argues convinc

ingly that the peasantry of North India were scarcely the submissive, docile

stereotypical peasants toiling in their fields. Instead they displayed the confident

belligerence of warriors prepared at any time to resort to violence to defend

themselves, their families and their lands, and to mobilize in respond to either

monetary or ideological appeals. All states in pre-modern North India con

fronted an armed peasantry that could turn as easily to rebellion as to state ser

vice. This was a militarized, violent, conflict-ridden society. As Kolff (1990: 30)

points out, "the most radical change that could be brought to North India, was

the demilitarization of its politics, conflict management, and its peasantry. This

was partly achieved in 1818, perhaps only in 1858, when the last peasant army of Hindustan, very much . . . heir to the soldiering traditions of the North Indian

peasant, suffered final defeat." Accordingly, pre-colonial states "never achieved

a monopoly of the means of force" unlike that presumed for early modern

European regimes.

The Kolff thesis supports a view of South Asian peasants as energetic, mili

tant controllers of their own destiny?not passive victims of an oppressive soci

ety. In Mughal and early colonial India, rural resistance to the imposition of

state power and/or the demands of bandits and warlords was violent and often

successful. Armed Indian peasants did not resort to the dissimulation and protest of the weak?instead they fought hard and to the death if it came to that. This

long-standing confrontation between centralizing states and militarized rural

warriors has markedly influenced the nature of political life in both premodern and modern India.

These fundamental insights, provocative and significant as they were, aroused

much interest and swiftly placed Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy firmly in the canon

of must-read books for aspiring Indianists. However, I am not at all certain that



392 JOHN F. RICHARDS

subsequent scholarship has done full justice to the importance of Dirk Kolff's

arguments. We do not find a paradigm shift in the subsequent historical lit

erature of the sort that might have been expected. For example, in her lucid

sociological analysis that appeared in 1997, Andrea Hintze, devoting only a

paragraph to the Kolff thesis, dismisses his argument as an attempt at a mono

causal explanation that uses conflict to explain "every aspect of the structures

of societal life" in India.

Subsequent writings from prominent historians have not fully acknowledged the importance of Kolff's insights. In their incisive introduction to the Mughal state volume of the Themes in Indian History series from Oxford University

Press published in 1998, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam devote only a single paragraph to the notion of a military labor market?and that in the con

text of the state-building efforts of Sher Shah Sur in the sixteenth century (Alam and Subrahmanyam 1998). They reproduce Kolff's book chapter on this topic rather than other of his writings that would foreground his larger arguments.

Similarly, in 1999, the leading Mughal historian Irfan Habib finally published his long-awaited revised version of The Agrarian System of Mughal India that

had first appeared in 1963. Despite its obvious relevance to Habib's theme of

peasant rebellion against Mughal oppression, we find no direct discussion of the

labor market theory in Habib's analysis of the North Indian peasantry even

though Kolff's book is listed in the bibliography. Habib incorporated new mate

rial on the widespread use of firearms by these peasants, but did not pursue the

implications of this new trend (Habib 1999).1

Recently, within Mughal scholarship there has been a long-overdue revival of

the empire's military history. Kolff himself has emphatically restated his argu ments in the introduction to Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia 1000-1800, another in the Themes in Indian History series. In this volume, Kolff and his

Leiden colleague, Jos Gommans argue for a renewed military history of South

Asia that stresses the military labor market with its "inexhaustible supply of sol

diers" and the impact of the new firearms technology on the societies of the

Indian subcontinent (Gommans and Kolff 2001: 15). The next year, in 2002, Jos Gommans published Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers

and High Roads to Empire, 1500-1700, an excellent analysis of the military his

tory of Mughal India. Gommans devotes an entire chapter to Kolff's concept of

the military labor market in the context of the recruitment and supply of soldiers

for the Mughal imperial armies. He underscores the increasing importance and

1 See Chapter 4 "The Peasant and the Village Community" and Chapter 9 "The Agrarian

Crisis of the Mughal Empire."




what appears to have been the growing assertiveness and confidence of the rural

aristocracy, i.e., the zamlnddrs. By the end of the seventeenth century, armed

zamlnddrl revolts became much more noticeable in many regions in the empire.

However, Kolff s provocative thesis raises further questions that have not

been satisfactorily addressed by other historians of early modern India. In part, this neglect results from the overwhelming strength of the new post-modern forms of social and cultural history in North America, Europe and elsewhere

that have marginalized the study of the state, organized violence and warfare. I

think it is now possible, however, to begin to restore the balance. Kolff s

insights and the issues they raise have certainly not lost their importance. We

must ask: What were the social forces that shaped such extreme peasant mili

tarization in early modern North India? Is it possible to define more precisely the various types of armed peasants found across the land in early modern

North India? How did extreme peasant militarism and the military labor market

affect the shape of state power in pre-colonial India? Finally, how did the

British colonial regime succeed in demilitarizing and disarming the North Indian

countryside in an achievement that has been largely ignored by historians of

South Asia? After 1857, the Viceroys of the Raj ruled a demilitarized and dis

armed peasantry that can reasonably be compared to that of Czarist Russia, the

Ottoman Empire and Meiji Japan, or other regimes across Eurasia. I do not pro

pose to offer definitive answers, but, more modestly, to offer a few thoughts that

might draw more scholarly attention to these profoundly important questions. As Kolff suggests, many peasant groups were descended from militarized

pastoral nomadic formations turned to sedentary cultivation. That is certainly one source for the bellicosity of Indian peasants. Unfortunately, very little in the

way of ethnohistory has been done to trace the origins of well-defined castes or

ethnic groups. To date, however, historical scholarship on medieval and early modern India has largely ignored the expansion and contraction of settlement

frontiers.2 One impetus to land clearing and agricultural expansion in the period of Indo-Muslim state-building was probably the dispersal of Hindu-Buddhist groups, under pressure from Muslim armies, rulers and states. These broken and de

feated formations retreated toward jungles or wastelands occupied by various

'tribal' shifting cultivators and pastoralists. Alternatively, population growth and

2 The only serious work attempted on the issue of internal colonization and land settle

ment dates from the studies done by historical geographers at Banaras University forty years

ago (Singh and Singh 1963; Singh 1968). They built upon the ethnographic observations of

early British administrators in the region. Their data informed the analysis of Richard Fox

(1971).




land hunger alone may have driven frontier expansion at the expense of tribal

populations. In either scenario, militarily and technologically superior pioneer colonist groups attacked, killed, enslaved and evicted the indigenous inhabitants

in ferocious little wars. The victors in these miniature wars cleared the jungle, built fortified settlements and introduced draught animals and plow cultivation

of food grains. As colonial outposts survived and flourished over one or more

generations, cadet lineages or breakaway cohorts moved outward to clear jungle and fortify new satellite settlements. As a result, rural martial cultures remained

intact and vigorous. The mass of evidence from the Mughal period confirms that in every rural

settlement throughout North India and probably elsewhere, male agriculturalists were armed with long, metal-bound staves, spears, bows, lances and muskets.

These were peasant warriors who were skilled and experienced in the use of

such arms. They were not soldiers who were paid and organized into a military

force, but they were militant?ready and willing to use their weapons and, if it

came to that, to die using them. They formed a peasant militia that could be

called upon to abandon cultivation and fight when needed.

Village militias often engaged in violent disputes with neighboring commu

nities over boundaries, cattle-theft or other provocations. Village militias read

ily defended their villages, often fortified, against the depredations of bandits

and armed raiders as well as foraging soldiers. Their warriors responded to calls

of their zamlnddr to join in a common defense against invaders. Village war

riors plundered and killed defeated soldiers caught fleeing major battles. Peasant

militias at times engaged in armed robbery of travelers moving along major

highways or river routes.

Unlike armed peasants who were tied to their lands and settlements, we find

another type of armed warrior resident in the Indian countryside. These were

the retainers of zamlnddrs who recruited, paid and armed men according to their

needs and resources to be resident at their headquarters. Frequently, zamlnddrs

looked to kinsmen as recruits for their retinues, but they also turned to other

men seeking the life of a soldier. Paid in cash or in subsistence or both, zamlnddr troops probably numbered in the hundreds of thousands. By and large such retainers seem to have been full-time professional soldiers who had aban

doned cultivation. Zamindar relied on their retinues to guard their women,

households and treasure. They deployed their troops to enforce collection of

revenues from their tenants or to defend themselves against rivals, bandits, or

marauding armies. Some became predators themselves engaged in banditry or

raiding. Some especially refractory zamlnddrs (labeled zor-talab by the

Mughals) fought imperial agents seeking to collect tribute or taxes from them.




One suspects that zamlnddri troops, employed full-time, were more skilled in

the use of weapons and more proficient in tactics than village warriors and mili

tias. Presumably, each retinue developed a shared identity that distinguished these local soldiers from the surrounding peasant cultivators. They were mov

ing, in short, toward a military professionalism that distinguished them from the

village warrior. Again without much evidence, it seems plausible that troops

employed by zaminddrs might enjoy limited mobility. That is, they might be

able to seek employment from amongst a group of neighboring zaminddrs or

even beyond in a regional labor market.

The latter suggestion brings us to a third category of armed men: profes sionals for hire singly or in groups. Unlike peasant warriors or zamlndar retain

ers, they were mobile. If hired to guard a caravan they might travel several

hundred miles. If recruited to serve in a larger army?whether Mughal or dis

sident?they might travel equal or greater distances in campaigns that lasted months

and even years. They left wives, families, homesteads and lands behind to

return only at the end of the contract or during the rainy season when armies

were more reluctant to fight and march. It was these men, found readily in

larger towns and cities, that formed the core of what Kolff has labeled the mil

itary labor market of North India. But this core could enlarge rapidly. If demand

surged for troops as it did suddenly in the 1657-68 war for the Mughal suc

cession, zamlndar troops or peasant militias might be tempted into military service by high pay. If the monsoon failed and times were hard, supplies of

potential recruits would be reinforced by either unemployed zamlndar retainers

or peasant warriors seeking subsistence for themselves and their families.3

By the end of the seventeenth century several distinctive groups of peasant soldiers relied on their proven skills as infantry musketeers to attract employ ers. These included the Bhojpuris or Purbias of eastern North India described

by Kolff and the Bedars or Berads of the Deccan.4 Such elite groups of foot sol

diers commanded higher wages for their skill and accuracy with muskets, for

their group discipline and cohesion and for their confidence and bearing as

exemplary professional soldiers.

The Sayyids of Baraha first came to prominence as elite infantry shock

troops for the Mughal emperors.5 Members of an extended lineage, the Sayyids

3 For more detailed discussion of militarized formations in Indian society, see Gommans

2002: 67-80. 4

For the Bhojpuris, see Kolff 1990: 159-92. For the Bedars or Berads, see Richards and

Narayana Rao 1980. 5

For the Sayyids, see Richards 1993.




could mobilize hundreds of armed infantry and horsemen from their ancestral

domains in North India. Continuous imperial service marked by conspicuous

bravery in battle after battle brought their leaders promotions to high rank as

members of the elite imperial nobility. In the second decade of the eighteenth

century the Sayyid brothers had become kingmakers embroiled in the kaleido

scopic struggles for power at Delhi. Similarly, the various Rajput commanders

who held higher mansabs in Mughal service used a kinship idiom to list kin and

clients as heavy cavalrymen that their positions required them to maintain.

Again, although linked to rural home territories, these Rajput horsemen were

detached from their peasant background to join bands of elite warriors at the

service of the Mughal Emperor.

Although they certainly sustained ties to their rural homes, groups such as

these were full-time professional soldiers who were reliable instruments of lethal

violence, not seasonal peasant soldiers or armed retainers of rustic lords. They asserted a new identity: that of elite warriors in the service of powerful rulers.

Like elite warriors in every culture their claims rested upon fluent proficiency with weapons and tactics; hardihood and endurance on campaign; and corporate

discipline and unit cohesion. Their codes of honor demanded resolute, even

reckless bravery in battle coupled with a willingness to die for their master.

Pronounced strands of asceticism and detachment emerged in the ethos of the

warrior. Distinctive clothing, flags, symbols, combinations of weapons and hair

and beard styles marked off these groups from more ordinary and casually-employed soldiers. Internal solidarity and relations were often expressed in kinship terms.

The huge armies of the Mughals were composed of many such bands of elite

warriors. They increasingly shared an ethic of imperial service and submission

to the Mughal Emperor as men of honor. However, each warrior group sus

tained strong ties to a rural homeland and to lands and families to which they could retire at the close of their service. These rural homelands with their strong

martial traditions were also reservoirs of recruits and reinforcements. As Kolff

has observed, the vast imperial armies were directly dependent upon the mili

tary labor markets of North India. However, I suspect that the best, most

reliable sources of imperial soldiery lay in local and regional military labor

markets, not in a broadly undifferentiated market that operated across the Indo

Gangetic plain. From one perspective a source of imperial military strength, the martial rural

classes of North India also constituted one of the Mughal empire's greatest

political and administrative challenges. As I have argued in other writings, one

of the most important goals for successive Mughal rulers was to penetrate the

defenses of the countryside. Mughal imperial officials tried to weaken and by




pass the hard shells of localized zamlnddrl power embedded in each pargana.

By means of insistent revenue demands and, if necessary, punitive military action, the empire aimed to discourage and render compliant defiant localities

and their leaders. Nonpayment of the revenue triggered punishing raids by

heavy cavalry and the killing and enslavement of rebels. In the aftermath, offi

cials recruited new pargana and village officials to replace those killed and dis

graced who would collaborate with the regime in return for fixed rewards.

Imperial faujddrs occupied much of their time and energy with this sort of local

pacification (Richards 1993: 79-90). Standard language in appointment letters

for faujdars ordered them to prevent smiths from manufacturing firearms.

However, the Mughal effort at internal consolidation of power failed. By the

last twenty years of Aurangzeb's reign (1656-1707), as he was mired in the

Deccan Wars with the Marathas, the imperial drive toward internal pacification and socialization of local elites faltered. During the bitter factional struggles and

wars of succession between 1707 and 1720, all imperial officials paid little

attention to their stipulated duties as they maneuvered to survive at a precari ous time. Although some stability returned during the long reign of Muhammad

Shah (1719-1748), imperial officials found themselves trying to administer

North Indian provinces that were becoming nascent regional kingdoms in a

drastically loosened imperial structure. Governors becoming de facto rulers

faced newly-confident zamlnddrs and peasant elites many of whom had rearmed

and refortified their holdings as the imperial grasp weakened. As revisionist

scholarship has shown, rural society in North India had prospered under the

empire from quickening commercialization and a growing economy. Under

these circumstances North India was, if anything, even more militarized and tru

culent in the mid-eighteenth century than it was in the mid-seventeenth century.

By comparison with other strongly centralizing state regimes in the early modern world of Eurasia, the Mughal empire confronted sharp-edged rural resis

tance rooted in a common martial ethos widely shared by both peasant-cultiva tors and rural aristocrats. For example, the Tokugawa regime in early modern

Japan effectively disarmed its peasantry and moved armed warrior elites, the

samurai, forcibly into castle towns. The peasantries of early modern England and France, while certainly capable of violence and resistance, resorted to arms

only in exceptional circumstances and did so at a manifest disadvantage when

facing professional soldiers. These, and many other comparative examples across Eurasia suggest that the bristling militarized rural society of North India

under the Mughals was an outlier in world historical terms. And, consequently, that state building and administrative consolidation in early modern India faced

unusually difficult obstacles.




The British colonial regime succeeded where the Mughals ultimately failed.

By the end of the nineteenth century, North Indian rural society was disarmed

as thoroughly as any similar social formation across Eurasia. Zamlndars and

peasants undoubtedly continued low-level sporadic conflict, but with severely limited access to firearms. Military values and attitudes surely lingered on but

must have been somewhat attenuated.

Why this success? Kolff mentions two important changes that so constrained

the formerly vast military labor market of North India as to make it unrecog nizable. First, the East India Company gradually imposed an imperial peace across North India?a peace that largely ended large-scale manpower recruiting

by those Indian rulers and chiefs that survived conquest. Second, the Bengal

Army evolved recruitment strategies and patterns that focused on narrowly defined regions in the eastern Gangetic plain. Such catchment areas for Bengal

army recruits found martial virtues still expressed in popular culture, but with a

new, narrowly-defined sphere for their expression. Peasant-soldiers in these

regions joined the Bengal Army as the last, best refuge of the professional sol

dier. When remittances, pensions and land grants flowed back to the homes of

the Bengal soldiery, imperial service became a desirable destination for peas ants would-be soldiers. Martial qualities were to be expressed only in service to

colonial rule; not in rebellion or resistance.

There were, however, other dimensions to colonial demilitarization. It is use

ful, I think, to stress that violent colonial repression accompanied and often pre ceded collaboration in British India. In every region the British conquered? from Bengal in the late eighteenth century to Peshawar in the 1850s?there followed

several decades of varying forms of violent resistance to the new regime. Much

of this the British labeled banditry or dacoity. Demobilized soldiers facing

unemployment and poverty readily turned to armed robbery and extortion.

Military and police patrols frequently were hard pressed to find and imprison or

kill these marauders. But slowly they succeeded in imposing a degree of pub lic order.

At the same time, many rural landlords remained defiant and refused to pay tribute and/or land revenues at all or, if they did so, paid only threat of mili

tary force. Tendencies toward excessively high and severe revenue assessments

imposed in the first years of Company rule to the following sentence: Excess

ively high and severe revenue assessments imposed in the first years of Com

pany rule intensified violent landlord resistance . After sieges and assaults on

zamlndar! forts, army commanders tried and hung rebel chiefs and burnt their

buildings and property. Violent pacification remained a routine practice from

Bengal to the Panjab. No military historian or any other scholar has as yet




assembled the hundreds of discrete narrative accounts of such ferocious little

local actions occurring between 1757 and 1857. These lie buried in district gazetteers, in regimental histories and in military dispatches that have yet to be read or

examined. Only when these tasks are completed will we be able to correct the

current impression that British conquest was somehow benign and bloodless.6

Demilitarization was also at work within the borders of the Indian native

states, but far less rapidly than in the districts of British India. Although the

internal history of these states is not well documented after their incorporation into the British Indian empire, it is likely that peasants were not disarmed and

that rural pacification did not occur with the same vigor as in fully-annexed ter

ritories. Effective disarmament in the Indian states was the end result of con

tinuing colonial policies. British controls over modern firearms prevented their

import and purchase by residents of native states (save in the Northwest Fron

tier Provinces). By the twentieth century antiquated muskets rather than modern

rifles were the only weapons widely available. Pressures from Calcutta forced

the Indian princes to reduce the size of their armies and prevented them from

buying modern weapons. These trends helped to attenuate rural military tradi

tions in the states.

In fact, it is probable that zamlnddrs and peasants retained their warrior

ethos, their weapons and their capacity for resistance far longer than was pos sible in British India. What was usually cited as disorder and instability by the

British in such regimes as that of the Nawab of Oudh (Awadh)?and often the

pretext for annexation?can be traced to this difference. When, as in the case

of Oudh, final annexation took place in 1856, the rural martial culture was not

attenuated and found expression in the proto-national rebellion within the 1857

sepoy mutiny. As is well recognized, British suppression of this revolt was fero

cious, deadly and all encompassing. Brutal repression produced a disarmed and

thoroughly demilitarized rural society in the Oudh districts. Sweeping disarma

ment of colonial India, already begun, swiftly proceeded after 1859. The details

of that process, however, remain mysterious since, strangely, no historian has

addressed the issue?an issue made more salient by the Kolff thesis.

Even though Kolff confined his analysis to North India, I believe that his

insights can be extended to the rest of the subcontinent. Peasant-soldiers, arms

6 Penderel Moon's (1989) exhaustive narrative military history, by virtue of its bulk and

narrative approach, successfully conveys the continuing violence of the century-long conquest and pacification of the Indian subcontinent. These unfashionable qualities, however, ensure

that it has not been widely read or highly regarded.




and militant rural societies flourished in the Deccan and South India as well.

The Mughal state faced even greater problems from armed resistance and tough skinned local society in the south than in the north. The lives and treasure

expended in the quarter-century-long Maratha wars amply testify to this point. After British conquest, society underwent the same forced demilitarization. Un

like North India, however, recruitment for the East India Company armies, far

less extensive, did not preserve militarized social formations in the same way that it did in the eastern Gangetic valley, or later, in the Panjab. Further atten

tion to these issues in South India by specialists should be a fruitful area for

new research. To close, I can only repeat that Professor Kolff's scholarship pre sents us with a new, powerful prism with which to view the societies of the

Indian subcontinent in the past several hundred years. It is time that we

Indianists made better use of his insightful observations and analysis.

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Richards, Warriors &the State in Early Modern India (2004).pdf