From the barrel of a gun

Gunpowder and Firearms: Warfare in Medieval India
By Iqtidar Alam Khan,
Oxford, $ 35

Iqtidar Alam Khan?s articles about gunpowder manufacture and firearms technology, which spread in early medieval times from China to Europe, on the one hand, and through central Asia and the Middle East into India, on the other, have been an important source of information for a quarter century now about the use and changes in firepower in the medieval Gangetic Plains, Bengal and the Deccan. Khan is a distinguished member of the Aligarh group of historians, which is devoted to critical analyses of Persian (and also Arabic and Turkish) texts so as to place them in a systemic perspective, informed by a secular approach to history as a record of class struggles. He has covered many aspects of Mughal history in his writings ? the early Turco-Afghan ideas of governance, Muslim theologians, the Rohilla and Bangash chieftains in the Doab, and evidence of a ?middle-class? in Mughal times. This volume gives information about the social character and political significance of technological change, or tardiness in accepting it, in pre-colonial India. It is embellished with black-and-white reproductions of artefacts, paintings, sketches and photographs of cannons and handguns, or of soldiers carrying them during a sieges, a battle or on the move.

The four chapters deal with early references to gunpowder and rockets. Hawais or baans were commonly used throughout the period and still survive in our fireworks. Missile scientists nowadays see them as forerunners of European reformulated rocketry, which have become so common in low-intensity terrorist warfare. Khan looks at the effectiveness of various kinds of artillery cast in bronze or brass, as against the Europeans? lighter and easier to manoeuvre cast-iron guns, which Clive used to decimate Sirajuddaulah?s troops at Plassey. Indian state power controlled the market for artillery, but it was lax in ensuring cost-effectiveness. This helped late 18th century British victories. When regional potentates in Mysore, Gwalior or Lahore sought to compete, they were ?too late? to challenge the colonial domination of the sub-continent. Khan is interested in a more significant innovation than cannons, the mechanical aspects of improved musket power in the hands of actual people who were the agents of the state, or who resisted it.

The next two chapters give a novel interpretation of Indian musketmen as part of the interaction between imperial centralization and peasant revolt. Armed contingents were raised by the emperors to use firepower to cow down the countryside. But, if muskets made it easier than heavier cannons for the rulers to reach and to probe into village recalcitrance, the emulation effect also made muskets cheap for the peasantry themselves. Many areas are classified in the revenue records as mawas (rebellious), or zortalab (brought to order only by force). Here the new banduqs could be used against imperialist surplus extraction. Even in Akbar?s days, Badauni had described zamindars getting ordinary villagers (gawaran) to fix planks on trees to station musketeers to fire down on approaching government levies. The Italian traveller Manucci (an expert artillery man himself) described, a hundred years later, peasants outside imperial Agra, firing at state troops, from the shelter of ?slight walls? with women standing just behind them, holding their spears and lances, and reloading their matchlock guns. Interesting examples are given of how the low caste Dhanuks or archers; sweepers among the Jats; or Paiks, the footmen of the Bengal-Orissa borderland, were gunmen for the rebels against superior authority, thus contributing to the Mughal breakdown. Khan could have continued giving data for the first century of British rule, since it was not until 1857-59 that such ?civil disturbances? were crushed. An analogy is possible with the early Marxian tag of the 1840s about religion ? musketry too was ?the cry of the oppressed as well as the oppressor?. Khan clearly bears out the mechanics of Irfan Habib?s thesis that elements of the agrarian crisis led to the dissolution of the Mughal Empire.

The conclusion is comprehensive. It re-emphasizes that ?a possible response of the Mughal military system to the widespread use of muskets by agrarian rebels was the creation of a new corps of mounted musketeers; some of them were manned by horsemen of Ottoman origin. They came to be designated as barq-andaz.? Their guns ?were in most cases, unwieldy matchlocks, which could be fired only after dismounting?. As the Mughals and their successors-principalities failed to resist powerful neighbours like the Marathas or the Afghans, not to speak of the British, there were the menials themselves ? men of the sweeper class ? who, by the mid-18th century, were moving from village to village, hiring their own matchlocks and renting themselves out to Rohilkhand landowners for ?one ser of flour and a little dal?a little tobacco? (and) after victory, some grain?. Three hundred of a band of such men had begun to call themselves ?Barkis?. The menials, inverting themselves into subalterns of alternative authority, were as important factors as colonialist aggrandizement in the collapse of the old order during the first century of British rule in India. It was left to colonialism to effectively subjugate the lower classes.