918615

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WIH0010.1177/0968344520918615War in HistoryNath

Original Article

War in History

What is military labour?

1–19
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DOI: 10.1177/0968344520918615
https://doi.org/10.1177/0968344520918615
the Mughals in early journals.sagepub.com/home/wih

modern South Asia

Pratyay Nath
Ashoka University, India

Abstract
The category of ‘military labour’ has traditionally been used to designate ‘combat labour’ – the
labour of soldiers. Focusing on the case of early modern South Asia, the present essay argues that
this equivalence is misplaced and that it is a product of a distorted view of war defined primarily
in terms of combat. The essay discusses the roles played by the logistical workforce of Mughal
armies in conducting military campaigns and facilitating imperial expansion. It calls for broadening
the category of ‘military labour’ to include all types of labour rendered consciously towards the
fulfilment of military objectives.

Keywords
early modern, South Asia, military labour, logistics, Mughal Empire, warfare

Are soldiers labourers? Scholarly opinion has largely remained split on this question.
The general mandate – at least with respect to early modern history – is betrayed by the
average labour historian’s lack of interest in exploring labour dynamics in armies.
Several scholars have argued against labelling military service as labour. Writing in the
context of South Asia, Kaushik Roy, for instance, reasons that unlike ordinary labourers,
soldiers are not simply motivated by salaries; cultural factors and ideologies play an
important role in keeping them in service. Moreover, unlike the agricultural or industrial
worker, the soldier is prepared to die in action.1 Other historians have found alternate

1. Kaushik Roy, Military Manpower, Armies and Warfare in South Asia (London and New York:
Routledge, [2013] 2016), pp. 2-3.

Corresponding author:
Pratyay Nath, Ashoka University, Plot No. 2, Rajiv Gandhi Education City, Rai, Sonipat, 131029 Haryana, India.
Email: pratyay.nath@ashoka.edu.in
2 War in History 00(0)

ways to bring in the issue of labour in the study of the military. Instead of entering the
debate about whether soldiers are labourers, some have studied the relations of soldiers
with mainstream workers.2 There have also been those who have focused on occasions
when soldiers are found to be rendering mainstream labour, mainly towards the fulfil-
ment of logistical tasks.3
Yet, there have been a small number of historians who have persuasively argued in
favour of the usefulness of the category of military labour. Erik-Jan Zürcher, for instance,
points out that one of the reasons for the lack of recognition of military service as work has
been a prevalent definition of work in terms of an ‘activity yielding surplus value’.4 This is
contrasted with the perception of military service as something essentially destructive. He
counters this argument in two ways. First, he highlights that there are times when soldiers
are not engaged in combat and when they are required to complete a variety of productive
tasks. Moreover, he points out that it is the service of soldiers that creates surplus economic
value for states and empires. Hence, this kind of activity – he reasons – does qualify as
labour and this is why the soldier needs to be considered as a labourer.5 In doing so, Zürcher
draws upon a historiographical tradition that explores enlistment or conscription into the
military profession as the creation of a form of proletariat.6 Writing about medieval and
early modern South Asia, Dirk Kolff and Jos Gommans also support the idea of seeing
soldiers as labourers. They point out that military employment shares many facets of com-
mon labour dynamics, including ‘supply and demand, recruitment, pay scales, training and
loyalty, conditions of service, brokerage and mobility of labour’.7
These are nuanced arguments and I am in favour of this approach. If a labourer can be
defined as somebody who renders labour – physical or otherwise – towards the fulfil-
ment of a particular goal in lieu of a wage, then a soldier is undoubtedly a labourer.
However, the purpose of the present essay is to complicate the issue further. Based on my

2. See, for instance, Michelle Moyd, ‘Making the Household, Making the State: Colonial
Military Communities and Labour in German East Africa’, International Labour and
Working-Class History, 80, no. 1 (2011), pp. 53-76; Joshua B. Freeman, ‘Militarism, Empire,
and Labor Relations: The Case of Brice P Disque’, International Labour and Working-Class
History, 80, no. 1 (2011), pp. 103-20.
3. See, for instance, Elizabeth Sheshko, ‘Constructing Roads, Washing Feet, and Cutting Cane
for the “Patria”: Building Bolivia with Military Labour, 1900-1975’, International Labour
and Working-Class History, 80, no. 1 (2011), pp. 6-28; Nathan Wise, ‘An Intimate History of
Digging in the Australian Army during the Kokoda Campaign of 1942’, Labour History, 107
(2014), pp. 21-34. Unfortunately, most of these works focus on the colonial/industrial era.
In comparison, there is a dearth of scholarship for earlier times.
4. Erik-Jan Zürcher ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative History of Military Labour 1500-
2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), p. 11.
5. Zürcher, Fighting for a Living, p. 11.
6. Jan Lucassen, ‘The Other Proletarians: Seasonal Labourers, Mercenaries and Miners’,
International Review of Social History, 39 (1994) Supplement 2, pp. 171-94; Jan Lucassen and
Erik-Jan Zürcher, ‘Conscription as Military Labour: The Historical Context’, International
Review of Social History, 43 (1998), pp. 405-19.
7. Jos J.L. Gommans and Dirk H.A. Kolff, eds., Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia 1000-1800
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 13.
Nath 3

own research on Mughal warfare in early modern South Asia, I push the limits of this
debate. I ask that if the contribution of soldiers should be categorized as military labour
– and I agree that it should - then how should we categorize the labour rendered by the
thousands of ordinary workers, who serve as the logistical bedrock of fighting armies?
The essay is divided into three sections. The first is primarily historiographical. Here
I discuss the scholarly treatment of the subject of military manpower and labour in early
modern South Asia. I argue that the existing body of literature is extremely rich and
focuses on various elite and non-elite military participants. Yet, it still defines military
labour solely in terms of combatants and does not take into account any other type of
participant. In the second part, I focus on one such group of participants – the logistical
workforce of Mughal armies. I discuss the various tasks this group fulfilled and how that
contributed towards the conduct of Mughal military campaigns. This workforce com-
prised ordinary workers like carpenters, woodcutters, stone-cutters, sappers, miners, and
boatmen. Although their work did not usually comprise combat, it is their coordinated
labour that created military infrastructure and the very conditions for combat to occur. In
the third part of the essay, I use this discussion of the Mughal case to argue that in order
to recognize the value of the logistical workforce in the overall process of war and con-
quest, the very definition of the military labour needs to be radically expanded. I point
out that a failure to do this so far is because of the dominant paradigm of military history-
writing across the world, where war is conceptualized primarily in terms of combat.
Almost all other military processes, including – but not limited to – military logistics, are
marginalized within the historical discourse.

I. Military labour in the historiography of early modern

South Asia
History of labour in South Asia before the eighteenth century is not a field that has seen a
lot of scholarly attention so far. There has been some work on the early modern period.
But here historians of labour have scarcely shown much interest in the various types of
labour associated with warfare.8 Until the 1980s, the study of military participants was not
particularly popular among historians of war either. There was some scattered research
on Mughal and Maratha armies, warrior ascetics, and military slaves.9 The group that

8. See, for instance, Ahsan Jan Qaisar, Building Construction in Mughal India (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1988); Neelam Chaudhary, Labour in Mughal India (New Delhi:
Aravalli Books International, 1998); Shireen Moosvi, ‘The World of Labour in Mughal India
(c. 1500-1750)’, International Review of Social History, 56 (2011), pp. 245-61.
9. See, for example, William Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghuls (Delhi: Low Price
Publications [1903] 2004); Surendra Nath Sen, The Military System of the Marathas (Calcutta:
Orient Longmans, 1928); J.N. Farquhar, ‘The Fighting Ascetics of India’, Bulletin of the
John Rylands Library, 9, no. 2 (1925), pp. 431-52; W.G. Orr, ‘Armed Religious Ascetics in
Northern India’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 24, no. 1 (1940), pp. 81-100; David
Lorenzen, ‘Warrior Ascetics in Indian History’, Journal of American Oriental Society, 98, no.
1 (1978), pp. 61-75; Gavin Hambly, ‘Who were the Chihilgani, the Forty Slaves of Sultan
Shams al-Din Iltutmish of Delhi?’, Iran, 10 (1972), pp. 57-62.
4 War in History 00(0)

received the maximum attention was the manṣabdārī corps of the Mughal Empire. The
upper echelons of this administrative cum military group comprised a big part of the
mounted imperial elite. Since the 1960s through the 1980s, several historians wrote
social, economic, and political histories of this mounted aristocracy.10 Broadly speaking,
the world of war in medieval and early modern South Asia was conceptualized in terms
of such elite warrior communities of powerful states.
Since 1990, this intellectual landscape has changed significantly. That year, Dirk
Kolff introduced the analytical category of military labour in the historiography of pre-
modern South Asia.11 Since then, he and other historians problematized the primacy that
the existing historiography had given to the state and its warrior elite. Instead, these
scholars explored the diversity of the South Asian military labour market by consciously
focusing on non-elite military participants, especially the armed peasantry and the war-
rior ascetics.12 Kolff himself expanded the ambit of the category of the military labour
market further in the introduction to a volume that he co-edited with Jos Gommans. Here
they envisaged an ‘inexhaustible’ labour market, one teeming with a vibrant population
of different types of enterprising warrior groups and playing a major role in the rise and
fall of states in medieval and early modern South Asia.13 In this context, Kolff and
Gommans interpreted the Mughal manṣabdārī organization as ‘a constitution regulating
and managing a service that presided over the military labour market’.14

10. Important works include Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707-1740
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, [1959] 2003); M Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under
Aurangzeb (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, [1966] 2015); M. Athar Ali, The Apparatus
of Empire: Awards of Ranks, Offices and Titles to the Mughal Nobility, 1574-1658 (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1985); Ahsan Jan Qaisar ‘Distribution of the Revenue Resources of
the Mughal Empire among the Nobility’, in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds.,
The Mughal State, 1526-1750 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 252-8.
11. Dirk H.A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market
in Hindustan, 1450-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
12. Douglas Streusand, Formation of the Mughal Empire (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1989); Stewart Gordon, ‘Zones of Military Entrepreneurship in India, 1500-1700’, in Stewart
Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 182-209; Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Muskets in the Mawas:
Instruments of Peasant Resistance’, in K.N. Panikkar, T.J. Byres and Utsa Patnaik, eds., The
Making of History: Essays Presented to Irfan Habib (London: Anthem South Asia Studies,
2002), pp. 81-103; Iqtidar Alam Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms: Warfare in Medieval India
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 164-90, 218-26; William R. Pinch, Warrior
Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Dirk H.A. Kolff,
‘Peasants Fighting for a Living in Early Modern North India’, in Zurcher, ed., Fighting for a
Living, pp. 243-66; Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in
Northern India, 1770-1830 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
13. Jos J.L. Gommans and Dirk H.A. Kolff, eds., Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia 1000-1800
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 13-26.
14. Gommans and Kolff, Warfare and Weaponry, p. 23. Gommans elaborated on these ideas in his
own monograph on Mughal warfare. Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High
Roads to Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 39-98.
Nath 5

In spite of these various interventions during the last 30 years, it is my contention that
we are yet to fully comprehend the complexity of this military labour market. The main
reason for this is that this labour market has been conceptualized entirely in terms of
combatants so far; non-combat participants – who were employed in huge numbers to
carry out a variety of war-related functions – have been completely excluded. In fact,
there has been very little work on the role of these non-combatants in military campaigns
in medieval and early modern South Asia.15
This tendency of showering combatants with attention while ignoring the various
non-combat participants of war is not something specific to the historiography of South
Asia alone. It is, in fact, endemic to the writing of military histories across the world.16
Several scholars of military logistics have pointed this out in the past.17 Edward Luttwak
argues that this emanates from an aristocratic view of war, one that has a lingering fasci-
nation with ‘whatever is dramatic’ as opposed to ‘what is merely important’.18 This is
what precipitated the traditional focus on combat, tactics, and technology – the aspects
of war that seemed more attractive and important to the aristocratic classes of society –
and a simultaneous neglect of the tedious non-elite world of logistics. Arguing along
similar lines, Bernard Bachrach points out that even within the domain of combat, battles
have enjoyed the most amount of attention for similar reasons.19 For medieval European
warfare – he argues – this has led historians to falsely equate warfare with the mounted

15. Exceptions include Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghuls, pp. 190-201; Andrew da la Garza,
The Mughal Empire at War: Babur, Akbar and the Indian Military Revolution, 1500-1605
(London and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 157-81; Pratyay Nath, Climate of Conquest:
War, Environment, and Empire in Mughal North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2019), pp. 120-30. Radhika Singha has noted a similar historiographical lacuna in the context
of South Asia’s participation in World War I. She observes that this is in sharp contrast to the
colonial archives, which hold a wealth of information about South Asians employed in the
Labour Corps. Radhika Singha, ‘Finding Labor from India for the War in Iraq: The Jail Porter
and Labour Corps, 1916-1920’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 2 (2007),
pp. 412-45, see 416-7. Also see Radhika Singha, ‘Front Lines and Status Lines: Sepoy and
“Menial” in the Great War 1916-1920’, in Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharaina Lange,
Dyala Hamzah and Ravi Ahuja, eds., The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and
Perspectives from Africa and Asia (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. 55-106.
16. Exceptions to this tendency are few and far between. One of the most notable ones for the
early modern period is Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-
1659 (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, [1972] 1975).
17. Edward Luttwak, ‘Logistics and the Aristocratic Idea of War’, in John Lynn, ed., Feeding
Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middles Ages to the Present (Boulder and Oxford:
Westview Press, 1993), pp. 3-7; John H. Pryor, ‘Digest’, in John H. Pryor, ed., Logistics of
Warfare in the Age of Crusades (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 275–292, see
pp. 275-6.
18. Luttwak, ‘Logistics and the Aristocratic Idea of War’, p. 4.
19. Bernard Bachrach, ‘Charlemagne’s Cavalry: Myth and Reality’, Military Affairs, 47, no. 4
(1983), pp. 181-7; Bernard Bachrach, ‘Medieval Siege Warfare: A Reconnaissance’, Journal
of Military History, 58, no. 1 (1994), pp. 119-33. Also see R.C. Smail, Crusading Warfare,
1097-1193 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 14-5; Yuval
Noah Harari, ‘The Concept of “Decisive Battles” in World History’, Journal of World History,
18, no. 3 (2007), pp. 251-66.
6 War in History 00(0)

knight, when in reality, the military role of the latter was restricted mainly to battles. In
comparison, the non-elite logistical labourer was much more important to war-making in
many cases.20 The intervention of these historians notwithstanding, the scholarly neglect
of logistics and logistical labour persists.21 In turn, this means that across the world, his-
tories of warfare are largely histories of combat and combatants, especially for the pre-
modern period. It is then not a surprise that most of the times when the category of
military labour is used in historical scholarship, it is used to refer to combatants. The
historiography of South Asia – which we have studied in this section – is a case in point.
It is this lacuna that the present essay addresses by throwing light on the workings of
Mughal military logistics.

II. Logistical workforce in Mughal military campaigns

Mughal armies deployed enormous logistical workforces in their military campaigns.
Their numbers could go up to several times the total number of actual soldiers. These
workers performed a variety of activities, which produced the circumstances for combat
to take place. Let us look closely at some of these activities.

Road-building
Building roads and keeping them under control was an integral part of Mughal military
campaigns.22 Given that early modern South Asia had considerable forest cover, wood-
cutters and pioneers would routinely proceed before the main army, cutting down forests
and levelling the ground to ensure smooth movement of the troops.23 Nicocolao Manucci,
who journeyed with an imperial army under Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) in the
mid-seventeenth century, describes such a scene in details:

[T]here marched close to the baggage one thousand labourers, with axes, mattocks, spades, and
pick-axes to clear any difficult passage. Their commanders ride on horseback carrying in their

20. Bachrach, ‘Charlemagne’s Cavalry’, p. 184. Also see Bachrach, ‘Medieval Siege Warfare’,
pp. 119-33.
21. This is reflected by the lament of the editor of a recent volume on the subject about how less
we still know about the impact of military logistics on the conduct of war. Pryor, ‘Digest’,
pp. 275-6.
22. I have argued elsewhere that road-building lay at the heart of Mughal territorial expansion.
Nath, Climate of Conquest, pp. 172-89, 216-20. For a study of Mughal roadways, see Abul
Khair Muhammad Farooque, Roads and Communications in Mughal India (Delhi: Idarah-i
Adabiyat-i Delli, 1977). Also see Jean Deloche, Transport and Communications in India
Prior to Steam Locomotion, English translation by James Walker, vol. I: Land Transport
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).
23. Father Monserrate, for instance, noted this when he accompanied Akbar on the latter’s jour-
ney towards Kabul. Anthony Monserrate, The Commentary of Father Monserrate on His
Journey to the Court of Akbar, 1580-1582, trans. J.S. Hoyland (New Delhi and Chennai:
Asian Educational Services, 2003), p. 80.
Nath 7

hands their badges of their office, which are either an axe or a mattock in silver. On arriving at
the place appointed for the royal halt, they put up the tents and placed in position the heavy
artillery.24

These activities found a particularly important and visible role in three different regions.
First, in regions like Kashmir or the Afghan area, the terrain was dominated by hills, defiles,
and ravines. Here armies regularly needed the ground to be flattened before they could
march over it. Narratives of Emperor Akbar’s (r. 1556-1605) military operations – espe-
cially those in the Afghan region in the mid-1580s – provide us with a lot of examples of
this. The name of one Muhammad Qasim Khan – a commander holding the position of Mir
Barr wa Bahr under Akbar – comes up repeatedly in contemporary texts with respect to
these operations.25 In many cases, Qasim Khan was sent ahead of the main army with groups
of labourers to level the ground and create some sort of a path for the imperial troops to
march on. For example, describing Akbar’s march from Agra to Kabul in 1585, Abul Fazl
writes, ‘Qasim was sent on to level the roads (nishīb wa farāz rā hamwār gardand) up to the
Indus. Afterwards he was to make the Khaibar and the road to Kabul passable for carriages
(gardūn guzār sāzad)’.26 Eventually, in the context of Akbar marching towards Kabul, the
chronicler complements Qasim Khan on his good performance. He observed that roads over
which camels and horses could travel earlier only with great difficulty had been rendered so
good that even ‘carts passed through easily (ki ‘arāba ba-āsānī guzasht)’.27
In the colder parts of empire on its north and northwest, removing snow from roads was
a recurrent part of road-building. In addition, because of the hilly terrain of these parts,
existing paths were often very narrow and passed over elevations. Consequently, the army
had to frequently concentrate on building wider roads in order to proceed. The logistics of
the Mughal invasion of Balkh and Badakhshan in 1645-1647 is a case in point. As a part of
the preparations for the first campaign, one of the commanders of the army was sent in
advance to mobilize ‘as many masons (sang-tarāsh, lit. stone-cutters), carpenters (najjār),
and sappers (bel-dār) as should be required to improve the road’.28 Soon after, we are told
that a contingent of labourers was dispatched ahead of the main army. They were to render
‘the most strenuous exertions in widening narrow defiles (tausī‘ tangī-hā), leveling ine-
qualities (hamwār sākhtan-i past), and constructing bridges (bastan-i pul-hā) along the
road’.29 In spite of these efforts, the invading army found it too difficult to proceed and the

24. Niccolao Manucci, Storia do Mogor, trans. William Irvine, 4 vols. (Delhi: Low Price
Publications, 2005), II, p. 63.
25. Pratyay Nath, ‘Building the Empire: Military Infrastructure and the Career of Muhammad
Qasim Khan in Mughal North India’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Seventy-
Fifth Session (Delhi, 2014), pp. 270-4.
26. Abul Fazl, Akbar-nāma, ed. Maulawi Abdur Rahim, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of
Bengal, 1876), III, p. 470-1; The Akbarnama of Abu ’l Fazl, trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols.
(Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1904), III, p. 709.
27. Akbar-nāma, ed. Rahim, III, p. 566; Akbarnama, trans. Beveridge, III, p. 856.
28. Inayat Khan, Mulakhkhaṣ-i Shāhjahān-nāma ed. Jameel-ur-Rehman (New Delhi: Embassy
of Islamic Republic of Iran, 2009), p. 403; Inayat Khan, Shah Jahan Nama of ’Inayat Khan:
An Abridged History of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, Compiled by His Royal Librarian,
trans. A.R. Fuller (Delhi, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 330.
29. Shāhjahān-nāma, ed. Rehman, p. 397; Shah Jahan Nama, trans. Fuller, p. 323.
8 War in History 00(0)

invasion was paused. The next year, imperial commanders were once again sent to recruit
‘a vast number of the peasantry in those regions for the purpose of removing the snow from
the aforesaid [Tul] pass (barāy bar-dāshtan-i barf-i kutal-i mazkūr)’.30 Accordingly, on the
eve of the campaign in early 1646, the Amir-ul-Umara reached Kabul and concentrated his
efforts on removing snow from the passes and roads. He also started building bridges over
streams for the army to cross.31 Such instances are, in fact, recurrent.32
Finally, in certain regions like Assam, Bengal, and the Aravalli Hills, Mughal armies
had to negotiate dense forests. Campaigns and combat were hugely dependent on wood-
cutters and other workers cutting down trees and thickets and preparing a way to march
forward. Some references of this type come from narratives of imperial campaigns in
Assam. Describing the 1662-1663 campaign, for instance, Khafi Khan mentions a group
of ‘hatchet-men and wood-cutters’ marching ahead of the main army as it advanced
along both banks of the river Brahmaputra in early 1662. He narrates that ‘with great care
and caution, they cut down the trees with their hatchets and other implements and made
a broad road for the army between the trees’.33 Either due to a paucity of the number of
workers available, or because of the density of the forest cover, soldiers were also
deployed to help the workmen in these tasks. Another contemporary chronicler tells us
that Dilir Khan, the commander of the vanguard of the imperial army, and Amir Mortaza,
the dārogha of the imperial artillery, led the advance with the help of elephants and sol-
diers. Even Mir Jumla, the commander of the army and the ṣūbadār (governor) of
Bengal, participated in the chopping down of forests and filling up ravines with grass.34

Siegeworks
Siege warfare was a form of military engagement that demanded a lot of logistical work.
Mughal armies routinely began their sieges by encircling forts on all sides and enforcing
a blockade. They followed this up by constructing siegeworks – mines (naqb), saps
(sābāt̤), batteries, and defensive barricades. This would be done by thousands of build-
ers, carpenters, diggers, and other workmen with various specializations. In the siege of
Chitor (1567-1568), for instance, Akbar’s army deployed 5,000 carpenters (najjār),
builders (bannā’), stone-masons (sang-tarāsh), sappers, and other labourers.35 Part of
this contingent of labourers must have comprised skilled labour, in charge of planning
and supervising the construction of the siegeworks. Alongside this, there must also have

30. Shāhjahān-nāma, ed. Rehman, p. 412; Shah Jahan Nama, trans. Fuller, p. 338.
31. Shāhjahān-nāma, ed. Rehman, p. 412; Shah Jahan Nama, trans. Fuller, p. 338.
32. See, for instance, Abdul Hamid Lahori, Bādshāh-nāma, ed. Maulawis Kabiruddin Ahmad and
Abdul Rahim, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1867-1868), II, p. 513.
33. Khafi Khan, Aurangzeb in Muntakhab al-Lubab, trans. Anees Jahan Syed (Bombay: Somaiya
Publications Pvt. Ltd., 1977), p. 184.
34. Shihabuddin Talish, Tarikh-i Aasham, trans. Mazhar Asif (Guwahati: Department of Historical
and Antiquarian Studies, 2009), pp. 17-9.
35. Khwajah Nizamuddin Ahmad, T̤abaqāt-i Akbarī, ed. Brajendranath De, 3 vols. (Calcutta:
Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1931), II, pp. 216-7; The Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī of Khwājah Niẓāmuddīn
Aḥmad, trans. Brajendranath De, 3 vols. (Delhi: Low Price Publication, 1992), II, pp. 343-4.
Nath 9

been a substantial number of unskilled workmen, responsible for digging earth, carrying
rubble out, flattening the ground, and so on. This occupational difference and social
hierarchy is easily discernible in contemporary Mughal miniature paintings that depict
scenes of sieges. Working within the range of the projectile weapons of the garrison,
these workers put their lives in danger to get the job done. Mughal sources indicate a
very high rate of casualty among the workers owing to firing by the garrison.36 The daily
death toll was somewhere between 100 and 200. Having no time or respite to dispose of
the dead bodies properly, these were built into the walls of the sap. In order to keep the
workforce motivated and functional under such harsh conditions, Akbar – who was lead-
ing the siege – freely scattered gold and silver bullion among the workers. Abul Fazl
writes, ‘[t]he coin of presents was poured into the lap of the workmen’s hopes, and silver
and gold were reckoned at the rate of the earth (zar wa sīm khāk bahā shūda būd)’.37 One
can surmise that such financial rewards were accompanied by coercion to keep the work-
force going. As a result of their constant labour for months on end, the siegeworks were
finished. Ultimately, it was not Mughal siege artillery, but a physical assault on the forti-
fications delivered from a sap that brought the fort down.38
Contemporary accounts of the siege of Ranthambhor (1569) allow us to find these
workers in a slightly different role.39 Here, the besieging Mughal army discovered a hill
right opposite to the fort. Under the instructions of the commanders, 500 ‘iron-armed
kahars and strong-shouldered porters (kahārān-i āhanīn-bāzū wa ḥammālān-i sangīn
dosh)’ hauled 15 Mughal ẓarbuzans (big cannons) to the top of hill.40 From here, Mughals
bombarded the inner quarters of the fort and eventually scared the garrison into submis-
sion. In sieges where such nearby elevations were absent, Mughal armies would often
require their workmen to construct artificial elevations called sar kob, from where artil-
lery or handguns could be deployed.

War-fleet
In several theatres of war, including Bengal, Assam, and Sind, Mughal armies oper-
ated with war-fleets, sometimes comprising hundreds of vessels. In Bengal, war-boats

36. Akbar-nāma, ed. Rahim, II, p. 316; Akbarnama, trans. Beveridge, II, p. 467.
37. Akbar-nāma, ed. Rahim, II, p. 316; Akbarnama, trans. Beveridge, II, pp. 467-8.
38. Akbar-nāma, ed. Rahim, II, p. 316; Akbarnama, trans. Beveridge, II, pp. 467-8; T̤abaqāt-i
Akbarī, ed. De, II, p. 217; Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī, trans. De, II, p. 344.
39. ‘bannāyān-i chābukdast wa khārā tarāshān-i sakht bāzū wa haddādān wa najjārān wa sā’ir
‘amala wa fa‘ala ‘imārat kamar-i himmat dar īn kār bastand’. Akbarnama, ed. Rahim, II, pp.
336-7; Akbar-nāma, trans. Beveridge, II, pp. 493-4.
40. Kahars were a community of labourers usually specialising as palanquin bearers. Akbarnama,
ed. Rahim, II, p. 337; Akbar-nāma, trans. Beveridge, II, p. 494; T̤abaqāt-i Akbarī, ed. De,
II, pp. 224-5; Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī, trans. De, II, pp. 354-5. Badaoni says that the number of
kahars deployed was seven or eight hundred. Abdul Qadir Badaoni, Muntakhabu-t-Tawārīkh
by ‘Abdu-l-Qādir ibn-i-Mulūk Shāh known as al-Badāoni, trans. Lowe, 3 vols. (Delhi:
Renaissance Publishing House, 1986), II, p. 111.
10 War in History 00(0)

numbered almost 300 in 1608.41 In a major expedition against Khwaja Usman, an

Afghan warlord, in Sylhet in 1611-1612, around the same number of boats were
deployed.42 Four hundred vessels were deployed in the Mughal invasion of Koch,
Kamta, and Kamrup to the north of Bengal in 1612.43 The number increased to close
to 1,000 in the late-1610s, when imperial armies mounted an invasion against the
Arakan kingdom to the southeast of Bengal.44 Each of these war-boats required several
boatmen as crew. Mirza Nathan, a Mughal commander who served in Bengal and
Assam in the early-seventeenth century, puts the number of sailors and crew manning
the entire war-flotilla under the command of his father at 12,000.45 On another occa-
sion, the number is mentioned to be around 13,000.46 He also mentions that there were
slightly less than 300 war-boats in the fleet at this time.47 This means that on an aver-
age, 40 to 50 people were employed in manning every vessel. Understandably, bigger
boats – especially those with artillery mounted on them – would require much more
manpower than smaller ones, which mainly served as carrier vessels for troops and
material.
Owing to the abundance of rivers and waterways in Bengal and Assam, a large part of
the imperial campaigns in these parts were amphibious. As such, the war-fleet played a
crucial role in Mughal territorial expansion here. The contribution of the corps of boat-
men – who manned the war-fleet – to this process can hardly be over-emphasized.
Moreover, contemporary sources indicate that the involvement of these boatmen went
well beyond just logistical tasks. They were, in fact, often required to perform a variety
of combat-related functions for the imperial armies. Let us consider a few examples.
Just like building roads in other regions, riverine areas would often require water-
ways to be cleared to facilitate the movement of vessels. In course of the amphibious
campaigns in Bengal, the imperial fleet would, at times, need shallow and silted water
channels to be dug up to proceed further. In one instance, the flotilla required to enter
the Ichhamati River at a certain point during an ongoing military operation against
Musa Khan in 1608. Mirza Nathan narrates that the task was assigned to him. He
instructed 10,000 out of the 12,000 boatmen of the Mughal war-fleet to excavate the
channel. He writes that he oversaw the operation personally and distributed bhāng
(Indian hemp), opium, rice, and copper coins among the boatmen to keep their morale
high.48 The boatmen worked straight for a whole week and managed to dig up the silted

41. Mirza Nathan, Bahāristān-i Ghā’ibī, JS 60-62, Jadunath Sarkar Collection, National Library,
Kolkata, JS60, folios 5a-5b; Mirza Nathan, Bahāristān-i Ghaybī: A History of the Mughal
Wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa during the Reigns of Jahangir and
Shah Jahan, trans. M.I. Borah, 2 vols. (Guwahati: Department of History and Antiquarian
Studies, 1992), I, p. 15.
42. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 42a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 102.
43. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 106a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 223.
44. Bahāristān, JS61, folio 192b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 405.
45. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 21a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 62.
46. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 17a-17b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 47.
47. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 16a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 45.
48. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 21a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 62.
Nath 11

canal. Thanks to their efforts, the imperial flotilla then sailed through it and entered the
Ichhamati river.49
Mughal texts also indicate that the boatmen of early modern Bengal were famous for
building highly resilient temporary fortifications built of riverside mud. By the time the
imperial armies made a decisive push into eastern Bengal in the early-seventeenth cen-
tury, they were well-aware of the efficacy of these mud-forts, especially when defended
with artillery, archers, and matchlockmen. During their campaigns in these parts from
this time onward, imperial armies on the march would have their boatmen build these
temporary fortifications for them at every station. In times of combat, Mughal generals
made the boatmen construct these improvised forts to defend their position.50 Given the
paucity of big stone forts in deltaic Bengal, the mud-fort became the chief defensive
apparatus of Mughal armies in course of the seventeenth century. In this case, the chief
architects of these forts – the boatmen – were labourers who had been initially hired to
fulfil a different function. This exemplifies how, in times of war, logistical labourers
often had to switch their tasks as per the military needs of the campaigning armies.
Building mud-forts was not the only way in which Mughal armies drew their logisti-
cal workforce more explicitly into the ambit of combat. Imperial texts mention that dur-
ing their campaigns in Bengal, the boatmen could be summoned to help out soldiers in
course of sieges. On one such occasion, an imperial army had besieged Musa Khan’s fort
at Dakchara in 1607-1608. At one juncture, Mughal troops were faced by constant firing
by the garrison and found it extremely difficult to approach the fort.51 Upon the com-
mand of Mughal officers, the wagons of the army were advanced in front to form a
defensive barrier. Mughal troops took shelter behind them. Next, the boatmen were sum-
moned. One half of them were instructed to accumulate mounds of earth and another to
pile up bundles of grass behind the line of wagons in order to build a wall. The firing by
the garrison caused heavy casualties in the ranks of the boatmen. Yet, they finished the
task.52 Their duty, however, did not end here. As the imperial troops closed in on the fort,
they were welcomed by a ditch. The entire area had also been planted with sharp bamboo
spikes to keep out any attack from the outside. If the Mughal army wanted to assault the
fort directly, first the ditch needed to be filled up and the threat of the bamboo spikes had
to be neutralized. Once again, the boatmen were called upon to help the soldiers out. The
captains of the fleet were instructed to divide the boatmen into two parties. One was to
deposit bundles of straw and the other basketfuls of earth into the ditch.53 This task, too,
the boatmen fulfilled amid constant firing by the garrison.54 The coordinated efforts of
the boatmen enabled the imperial army to eventually cross the ditch and storm the fort.55

49. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 22a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 64. For another example, see
Bahāristān, JS60, folio 16b -17a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 47.
50. See, for instance, Bahāristān, JS60, folio 48b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, pp. 117-8.
51. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 22b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, pp. 65-6.
52. Bahāristān, JS60, folios 22b-23a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, pp. 66-7.
53. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 23a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 68.
54. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 23a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 68.
55. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 23a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, pp. 68-9.
12 War in History 00(0)

The camp
The imperial military establishment and the camp were serviced by thousands of workers
and officials on a daily basis. They were responsible for the ceaseless production, trans-
port, and maintenance of various equipments, weapons, and war-animals used in military
campaigns. Manufacturing, storing, and guarding weapons of various kinds were a con-
stant preoccupation of the empire. One can imagine that a large number of skilled crafts-
men and workers remained engaged in producing military material at the imperial,
regional, and local levels to satiate the demands of the empire. A huge workforce was also
employed at all times at the stables of the various war-animals. Ā’īn-i Akbarī – an admin-
istrative compendium compiled in the late-sixteenth century – informs us that different
types of elephants had specific servants dedicated to their upkeep. They numbered from
two to five and a half, depending on the quality and nature of the animal.56 Every contin-
gent of 10, 20, and 30 elephants was supervised by a faujdār, who was responsible for
training the elephant for the battlefield.57 Similarly, a large number of non-elite caretakers
were assigned to the horse stables, in addition to a host of elite supervisors. The akhtachī
would be responsible for the harness, the chābuksawār would be in charge of the speed of
horses, the hāḍā would teach the animals their initial steps, the baytar would tend to their
medical needs, the naqīb would watch over them, and so on. The Ā’īn records 18 types of
offices in all.58 Similarly, the stables of camels, cows, and mules all had separate corps of
caretakers attached in various capacities to the different animals.59 Mughal military suc-
cess in South Asia owed considerably to the tactical as well as strategic mobility that these
animals – deployed in hundreds and thousands – offered imperial armies on and off the
field. The present discussion makes it clear that a large part of the credit for this was also
due to the massive workforce devoted to the service of animals. These workers laboured
round the year in the imperial stables procuring the animals, feeding and taking care of
them, and training them into fulfilling the various tasks for the empire.
The moving imperial military camp – itself an embodiment of the pomp and glory of
the empire – was similarly serviced by hundreds of labourers. Writing in the mid-seven-
teenth century, Francois Bernier puts the number of foot-soldiers at ‘two, or even three
hundred thousand’.60 He continues,

This will not be deemed an extraordinary computation if we bear in mind the immense quantity
of tents, kitchens, baggage, and even women, usually attendant on the army. For the conveyance
of all these are again required many elephants, camels, oxen, horses, and porters.61

56. The translator of the Ā’īn explains that this implied ‘either eleven servants for two elephants,
or [that] the last was a boy’. Abul Fazl, The Ā’īn-i Akbarī by Abu ’l-Faẓl ‘Allāmī, trans. H.
Blochmann, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1948-1949), I, pp. 132-3.
57. Abul Fazl, Ā’īn-i Akbarī, ed. H. Blochmann, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal,
1869-1872), vol. p. 135; Ā’īn, trans. Blochmann, I, p. 133.
58. Ā’īn, ed. Blochmann, I, pp. 143-4; Ā’īn, trans. Blochmann, I, pp. 145-7.
59. Ā’īn, ed. Blochmann, I, pp. 148-9, 151-153; Ā’īn, trans. Blochmann, I, pp. 155, 159-62.
60. Francois Bernier, Bernier’s Travels in the Mughal Empire, A.D. 1656-1668, trans. Archibald
Constable (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company, 1891), p. 220.
61. Bernier’s Travels, trans. Constable, p. 220.
Nath 13

At all times, two sets of camps would be maintained; while one would be pitched at one
station, the other would be sent ahead to be ready at the next. This whole operation,
carried out meticulously for months on end, necessitated the involvement of very large
numbers of labourers and officers with diverse duties and specializations. Aside from
the soldiers employed as guards and beasts of burden deployed to carry the material,
food, and furniture, the Ā’īn mentions that each encampment would be worked by ‘a
thousand Farrashes [sic], natives of Iran, Turan, and Hindustan, 500 pioneers (bel-
dārān), 100 water-carriers (suqā), 50 carpenters (durodgar), tent-makers (khaima-doz),
and torch-bearers (mash‘al-chī), 30 workers in leather (charm-doz), and 150 sweepers
(khāk-rob)’.62

Recruitment
The one obvious question that emerges from the above discussion is whether the Mughals
maintained permanent corps of logistical workforce. Unfortunately, Mughal texts do not
give us any direct answer to this question. It is understandable that some of the work
described above were perennial in nature. Taking care of war-animals, producing weap-
onry, and serving the camp fall within this ambit. It is possible that workers were employed
on the long term for these tasks. It appears that beyond this, the bulk of the logistical work-
force needed in military campaigns for the performance of specific military tasks were kept
in employment only on the short term. They would often be recruited at the onset of cam-
paigns directly from the region the army would operate in. For instance, we find a Mughal
army headed towards Qandahar in mid-seventeenth century waiting for several days at
Kabul for gathering pioneers and road-builders from the area from Jalalabad.63 Mughal
texts designate these various groups of workers by their specialization – like carpenters
(durod-gar), pioneers (bel-dār), and blacksmiths (āhan-gar). This indicates that these were
workers already specialized in these fields. They were recruited with the hope that they
would bring their specialized skills to the service of the imperial campaigns. Hence, the
armies did not have to train these workers. In early modern South Asia, communities ori-
ented towards different professions would be organized on the basis of their caste status
and religious background. Inevitably, this social basis of their occupation would play a big
role in shaping the nature of recruitment, pay, and supply of these workmen in Mughal
armies. Dirk Kolff has investigated this social angle to some extent with respect to the non-
elite ‘spurious’ Rajput soldiers of eastern and northern India.64 The issue needs further
investigation in the context of the logistical workforce in early modern South Asian armies.

62. Ā’īn, ed. Blochmann I, p. 42; Ā’īn, trans. Blochmann, I, p. 49. As for the supply of food,
Mughal armies depended on mobile communities of grain merchants, the most prominent of
whom were the Banjara(s). These were tribes of nomadic pastoralists who moved with armed
caravans of thousands of pack animals at a time, transporting primarily food grains across
most of South Asia from surplus to deficient areas. For further details, see Nath, Climate of
Conquest, pp. 148-52. By far, the most detailed study of the Banajaras is Manisha Choudhury,
Trade, Transport and Tanda: Shifting Identities of the Banjaras (New Delhi: Manohar, 2018).
63. Shāhjahān-nāma, ed. Rehman, p. 502; Shah Jahan Nama, p. 426.
64. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, pp. 71-116.
14 War in History 00(0)

As to the method of their recruitment, once again we have very little direct informa-
tion. In one case, a text mentions Mirza Nathan requisitioning boatmen from Khwaja
Mutahhar Karori.65 Elsewhere Nathan is mentioned to have deputed mutāṣaddīs to
recruit boatmen from the neighbouring localities.66 Their official titles indicate that these
were imperial officers, usually involved in revenue administration. Hence, they would
have strong connections with or would have been recruited from the rural elite, which
would give them access to the local labouring communities. At the other end, it seems
that the leaders or commanders whom Manucci saw among the woodcutters employed in
the Mughal armies in the mid-seventeenth century negotiated with the representatives of
the Mughal state on behalf of the labouring communities. They appear to be the middle-
men through whom the state would recruit and control these vast populations of workers.
In this sense, they were similar to the jam‘dārs or jobber-commanders Kolff finds lead-
ing the peasant-soldiers of North India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They
could also be compared with the military entrepreneurs who supplied troops, money, and
equipments to early modern European states.67 Our sources also indicate the fairly easy
availability of these workers.68 The state would usually hire and pay these workmen and
then assign them to individual commanders as per their rank and need as dākhilī troops.
The Ā’īn clearly mentions that this would be the case, for instance, for carpenters (durod-
gar), blacksmiths (āhan-gar), water-carriers (suqā), and pioneers (bel-dār). 69 Finally,
the zamīndārs – a heterogeneous social group comprising the rural elite of various stat-
ures – who joined Mughal ranks played an important role in facilitating the process of
labour recruitment owing to their intermediate status between the imperial circles and
village communities. In one such instance, Raja Satrajit – the zamīndār of Busna – lent
Mirza Nathan 100 boatmen for a period of three months to reconstruct some Mughal
residential buildings in Gilah that had been gutted by fire.70

Motivation
What led these thousands of people in the logistical workforce to serve the Mughal
Empire? Ravi Ahuja points out that in the second half of the eighteenth century, the war
between the English East India Company and the Mysore sultanate caused massive dis-
ruption to the society and economy in the Tamil Plains of South India. Military conflict
destroyed the economy and devastated rural communities. This left a large part of the

65. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 15b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 43.

66. Bahāristān, JS60, folio 9b-10a; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, I, p. 30.
67. For early modern North India, see Kolff, ‘Peasants Fighting for a Living’. For early mod-
ern Europe, see David Parrott, ‘Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years’ War: The Military
Revolution’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 18 (1985), pp. 7-25; Jeff Fynn-Paul, eds.
War, Entrepreneurs, and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean, 1300-1800 (Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2014).
68. Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, Bāburnāma: Memoirs of Bābur, trans. Annette Susannah
Beveridge, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1998), II, p. 520.
69. Ā’īn, ed. Blochmann, I, p. 190; Ā’īn, trans. Blochmann, I, p. 264.
70. Bahāristān, Persian text, JS61, folio 149b; Bahāristān, trans. Borah, vol. I, p. 281.
Nath 15

surviving population with no other option for livelihood than to join as camp followers
those very armies that had caused their destruction in the first place.71 Did something
similar happen in the Mughal Empire as well? One argument against this could be that in
contrast to war-ravaged South India of the second half of the eighteenth century, Mughal
territories were relatively less contested between Akbar’s rise to power in the middle of
the sixteenth century and Aurangzeb’s death in the beginning of the eighteenth. True,
there were repeated rebellions and insurgencies, and the state’s response was usually
swift and violent. Yet, the picture of war driving societies to pauperization and destitu-
tion that Ravi Ahuja unravels for late eighteenth-century South India is difficult to trace
in the Mughal Empire at its height.
Instead, it is possible to argue that financial rewards held out a sizable incentive for
various communities. The logistical labourers were mainly paid in cash.72 This is indi-
cated by Shireen Moosvi, who points out that by the seventeenth century, paying skilled
and unskilled labourers as well as domestic servants in cash was standard practice.73 In
contingent times, more cash and other rewards would be held out. Abul Fazl’s descrip-
tion of Akbar scattering gold and silver bullion among the labourers who were deputed
to construct the siegeworks at Chitor under heavy firing by the garrison74 or the mention
of Mirza Nathan freely distributing bullion, rice, and intoxicants among the workers
deployed to dig up the silted channel in eastern Bengal are cases in point. In addition, it
is likely that some labourers had to render their services without any remuneration
(be-gār) as a part of their social and caste obligations.
Dirk Kolff argues that the itinerant non-elite Rajput soldier/trader/herder, who hired his
services out to various states in early modern South Asia, was strongly inspired by an ideal
of naukarī (service).75 Is it possible that aside from financial remuneration and some ele-
ment of coercion, the same ideal of service also inspired the woodcutters, pioneers, carpen-
ters, stone-cutters, and other workers in the Mughal logistical workforce? Unfortunately,
the imperial sources are completely silent on this. Here one reaches one of the many limits
ingrained in the elite and state-centric nature of the Mughal archives. Perhaps vernacular
sources of this period might be able to throw more light on such socio-cultural issues per-
taining to the logistical workforce. This, however, is beyond the ambit of the present essay.

III. Logistical workforce and the category of military labour

The preceding discussion highlights the diverse nature of the tasks carried out by the
Mughal logistical workforce. Some of these tasks – like cutting trees and building

71. Ravi Ahuja, ‘A Crisis Disremembered: Towards a Social History of War in Eighteenth-
Century South India’ in Ravi Ahuja and Martin Christof-Füchsle, eds., A Great War in South
India. German Accounts of the Anglo-Mysore Wars, 1766-1799 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019),
pp. 55-77.
72. William Irvine provides a table detailing the wages of various logistical labourers. Irvine, The
Army of the Indian Moghuls, p. 174.
73. Moosvi, ‘The World of Labour’, p. 246.
74. Akbar-nāma, ed. Rahim, II, p. 316; Akbarnama, trans. Beveridge, II, pp. 467-8.
75. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy, pp. 71-116.
16 War in History 00(0)

roads – enabled Mughal forces to reach the theatres of war to engage their adversaries in
combat. Some – like manufacturing weapons and taking care of war-animals – made
available the military infrastructure necessary for the execution of combat. Yet others –
like rowing the war-fleet – comprised logistical tasks that needed to be managed before,
after, as well as during combat. Finally, certain activities – like building mud-forts, fill-
ing up ditches around forts during sieges, and constructing siegeworks – were actions
that directly complemented actual combat. It should also be noted that several of these
actions were executed under constant enemy-fire, often resulting in enormous casualties
among the workforce. Collectively, these labourers made an enormous contribution to
the conduct of Mughal military campaigns and the course of imperial territorial expan-
sion – something that modern scholarship has hardly acknowledged. The intimate con-
nection of their mundane organizational activities with combat, their centrality to the
production of military infrastructure, and the willingness of the labourers to risk their
lives to fulfil them in many cases makes it clear that this kind of labour cannot be clubbed
together with the forms of manual labour of peacetime societies, like domestic labour,
agricultural labour, or construction labour. How should we categorize it then?
One is tempted to suggest the term ‘logistical labour’, while continuing to reserve the
term ‘military labour’ for designating the labour of combatants. This, however, is deeply
problematic. The category of ‘military’ does not comprise only combat; it also comprises
logistics and a whole range of other things like ideology, finance, infrastructure, and repre-
sentation. As I have pointed out earlier, it is only through a skewed understanding of war
primarily in terms of combat that the category of ‘military labour’ has become interchange-
able with combat labour. Historically, this conceptual distortion has led to the erasure of
many social groups which have performed various important non-combat tasks related to
the production of war. Women are a case in point. Throughout the ages and across the
world, men have usually barred women from participating in combat and have jealously
defended the latter as largely a masculine domain. But recent scholarship shows that even
while being excluded from combat, women have always been indispensable to the overall
process of war. They have played vital roles as wives, mothers, sutlers, care-givers, sex-
workers, rulers, defenders of property at home, manufacturers of weapons, producers of
food, and so on.76 However, the focus of the bulk of military history on combat has meant
that the history of war has traditionally been written in terms of the exploits of men. It is
they who are projected as the real actors and heroes of war, while women are mostly seen
as rendering labour that is ‘support’ or ‘auxiliary’ in nature. Combat thus emerges as the
discursive core of war; all other actions are relegated to the periphery as ones that merely
support the core action. This has resulted in an utter lack of recognition of women’s contri-
bution to the process of war-making throughout human history.
This epistemic violence has had expressions in various fields. Deborah Tyler-Bennet
talks about one of them in her work on the poetry of the World War I. She points out that

76. For the early modern period, see Barton C. Hacker, ‘Women and Military Institutions in
Early Modern Europe: A Reconnaissance’, Signs, 6, no. 4 (1981), pp. 643-71; John A. Lynn
II, Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008); Barton C. Hacker and Margaret Vining, eds., A Companion to Women’s Military
History (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012).
Nath 17

from the very beginning, this genre of poetry came to be defined in terms of the experience
in the battlefield. And since the battlefield of the World War I was completely dominated
by men, this meant that war-poetry too has largely been dominated by the way men expe-
rienced and thought about the war. Through the institutionalization of poetry of the World
War I in various anthologies and collections over the twentieth century, it is this masculine/
combatant version of the World War I – in the form of ‘elegies, the poetry of incident or
poetic “testimonials”’ – that got canonized as the authentic poetic expression of the experi-
ence of the war.77 But women – while often being forced to remain away from the theatres
of war – too experienced the World War I in their own ways and composed poetry about it.
Tyler-Bennet argues that far from the battlefield, they often engaged with the idea of the
war in allegorical and abstract terms using ‘mythic, folk or fairy tale narratives’.78 But the
conceptualization of the war in terms of combat has led to the systematic marginalization
of the woman’s voices within the genre of World War I poetry and a lack of recognition of
women’s voices as an authentic experience of the military conflict.79
The case of the marginalization of logistics within the historiographical discourse on
war is similar. Here the victim is typically the non-elite labourer, whose services pro-
duced the conditions and infrastructure for combat to take place. Hence continuing to use
the category of ‘military labour’ only for combatants while using a separate category to
designate the logistical workforce is deeply problematic.
Another tempting possibility is to scrap the category of ‘military labour’ altogether and
use two new ones instead – ‘logistical labour’ for the labourers of the logistical workforce
and ‘combat labour’ for the soldiers. These categories have the merit of being descriptive of
the nature of labour being rendered. There is evidence to indicate that states that raised and
employed armies in fact maintained this loose distinction between the two groups of people
in terms of the nature of labour they rendered. For instance, Radhika Singha points out that
during the World War I, the British Indian army designated the contingent of labourers (fol-
lowers) meant to render menial labour as ‘Labour and Porter Corps’. She highlights that the
distinction between them and the sepoys (soldiers) was maintained rigorously in terms of
recruitment guidelines, payments, benefits of service, rations, and even gifts.80
Yet, Singha demonstrates through the case of the British Indian army that several factors
frequently threatened and repeatedly broke down this distinction. They included the actual
recruitment practices of the government, the way the outside world perceived the Indian
soldiers and followers, and the logic of market demand for military manpower. In addition,
certain regimental practices like making soldiers do logistical work (‘fatigue duty’) and a
certain militarization of the professional culture of the camp followers also contributed to
the distinction between the soldier and the logistical labourer becoming hazy.81

77. Deborah Tyler-Bennett, ‘“Lives Mocked at by Chance”: Contradictory Impulses in Women’s

Poetry of the Great War’, in Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout, eds., The Literature of the
Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001),
pp. 67-76, p. 68.
78. Tyler-Bennett, ‘Lives Mocked at by Chance’, p. 68.
79. Tyler-Bennett, ‘Lives Mocked at by Chance’.
80. Singha, ‘Front Lines and Status Lines’, pp. 59-60.
81. Singha, ‘Front Lines and Status Lines’, pp. 64-71, 77-83. Also see Singha, ‘Finding Labour
from India’, pp. 441-5.
18 War in History 00(0)

Evidence from Mughal South Asia also indicates that ‘logistical labour’ and ‘combat
labour’ were never water-tight categories. As we have seen earlier, combatants were
often called upon to render logistical labour, as was the case with the soldiers and com-
manders of Mir Jumla’s army in 1662-1663. They were forced to take up the task of
cutting down forests during the Mughal invasion of Assam.82 At the same time, activities
like constructing siegeworks while braving enemy-fire could take logistical labourers
dangerously close to performing combat-related tasks. As to whether the logistical and
combat labour had become interchangeable at the level of recruitment at any point of
time under the Mughals as it did in South Asia during the contingent time of the World
War I is unknown. All this makes it quite clear that while the categories of ‘logistical
labour’ and ‘combat labour’ could sometimes be used as methodological shorthands to
designate two largely different forms of labour related to the production of war, one
needs to be cognizant of the fluidity of these categories.
I would rather argue that it is more appropriate for us to recognize that the older cat-
egory of ‘military labour’ actually encompasses both of these two types of labour, and
much more. For the sake of historical accuracy, it is essential to reclaim the category of
the ‘military’ from the exclusive ambit of combat and have it include the myriad non-
combat – albeit equally important – activities that comprises the overall domain of war.
In other words, any and every labour rendered consciously towards the fulfilment of
military objectives should be conceptualized as military labour. Only then will it be pos-
sible for us to recognize the importance of the various non-combat military tasks, which
modern scholarship has neglected. Otherwise, they will continue to remain in the mar-
ginal spaces of historical knowledge as ‘support’ or ‘auxiliary’ tasks. These labels seem
to be harmless and descriptive at first glance. But as I have shown earlier, they are actu-
ally the products of a highly distorted view of war and perpetrators of great discursive
violence. Once we have successfully broadened the ambit of the ‘military’ beyond com-
bat, it will be easier for us to recover the histories of the various non-combat tasks that
have contributed to the production of war as well as the peoples and communities who
have carried them out. Logistics, whose history has remained an extremely neglected
field within military history, is one of them. It is high time we inquire into the role of
logistical operations in shaping the military fortunes of states, nations, and empires
across the world. We also need to ask that if we restore the logistical labourer into the
category of military labour, what implications that would have for the writing of military
history in general.
Broadening the category of military labour and subsuming logistical labour within it
has important implications for South Asian history. It helps us rethink the category of
‘military labour market of Hindustan’ that Kolff introduced three decades back. In the
light of the preceding discussion, one can definitively say that the nature of this labour
market was even more complex than what has been argued till now. Thousands of ordi-
nary workers with diverse occupational specialization were as much as part of it as

82. Tarikh-i Aasham, trans. Asif, pp. 17-19. One is reminded in this context of the fact that in
both the World Wars, soldiers were made to render logistical labour. Singha, ‘Front Lines and
Status Lines’, p. 58; Wise, ‘An Intimate History of Digging’.
Nath 19

combatants like peasant-soldiers, military slaves, and warrior ascetics. Early modern
South Asian states not only vied with each other to attract the various types of soldier-
participants of this labour market into its ranks, but also competed over recruiting the
workmen for performing the indispensable logistical, organizational, and infrastructural
tasks. Analysis of the interaction between states and this logistical workforce bears the
potential of enriching our understanding of the interactions between war, empire, and
society in South Asia. It also has important repercussions for the historiography of early
modern warfare globally. Traditionally dominated by studies of combat, operations, and
technologies, this field has been enriched in recent years by social histories of various
groups of military participants.83 Recognizing the logistical workforce as one such group
and acknowledging their importance by including them within the category of military
labour nuances our understanding of this history further and opens new avenues for
analysis. In turn, this contributes to the analyses of the relationships between war-mak-
ing, labour mobilization, and imperial expansion in the early modern world.

Acknowledgements
This paper has benefitted from the comments and suggestions of Ravi Ahuja, Ritajyoti
Bandyopadhyay, Camille Buat, Maria-Daniela Pomohaci, Anna Sailer, and the two anonymous
referees of War in History.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Pratyay Nath https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0446-9661

Author biography
Pratyay Nath is an Assistant Professor of History, Ashoka University, India. He specialises in the
history of war and empire in early modern South Asia, with a focus on the Mughal Empire. He is
the author of Climate of Conquest: War, Environment, and Empire in Mughal North India (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).

83. See, for instance, Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living; Jeff Fynn-Paul, eds., War, Entrepreneurs,
and the State; David A. Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military
Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2012).