MILITARY LABOUR MARKET;

- It is a long time since historians projected the idea of India as a huge collection of
economically self-sufficient and politically autonomous village units.TWO images
presented;that of two worlds, one of settled agriculture and another of mobile, often pastoral,
labour, and of the dynamic frontiers that held them together, has taken its place.
- GOMMANS SAYS;In accepting this model, it should be noted, on the one hand, that the
pastoral world never existed independently from town and village markets, while, on the other
hand, the management of settled agriculture could rarely do without either an annual exodus
of seasonal labour during the post-harvest season or the engagement of manpower from
outside during the busiest months of the year.

- Long-term labour mobility, more often than not, was circulatory in character and did not
lack an agrarian base in the region of origin; neither were sedentary villagers always
unacquainted with far-away service, whether as weavers, soldiers, or agricultural labourers.

- The mobility and the diasporas of India's villages and regions constituted the great machine
of the subcontinent's social history. People never stopped looking for new niches in the labour
markets within their migratory reach. The cog wheels of the machine, therefore, changed
function over the seasons and the years. Their sizes waxed and waned.Both weavers and
peasants, if mobile, were generally skilled in the use of arms and would change occupation or
return home whenever it appeared advantageous to do so.

- Not all mobile labour could fall back on agrarian, village-based activity.Seventeenth-century
Baluchi cameleers found employment as armed guards with caravan leaders on the main
Gujarat to Hindustan routes. Many of them were archers, though some had fire-arms and
swords. One European observer found them an unruly lot and warned against engaging both
Baluchis and Jats as one's protectors, as they would not unlikely attack each other instead of
cooperating. Another, though convinced that in Baluchistan these people were bloody-minded
villains, found that in Gujarat, and even more towards Agra, there were many honest men
among them.
- With other men of a pastoralist origin, many of them entered the regional military labour
market of Gujarat under the denomination of qasbātis, townsmen and, it appears, acquired
some land. The Mirāt-i Ahmadi says about their activities in eighteenth-century Gujarat:
'They attacked villages, drove away cattle, escorted Mughal officials, took responsibility of
collecting tribute from landholders on a small salary, they got enlisted as recruits in the army
for a few days, served the chiefs and inspectors of the district police.' Generally reluctant to
serve outside Gujarat, some of them nevertheless tried their luck in other provinces and
"made bravery their profession" (Ali Muhammad Khan ).. Aurangzeb, for instance, gave nine
villages near Shamli in the Upper Doab to a number of Baluchis on the condition that they
exterminate the numerous highway robbers in that part of the country.

- In 1876, a group of Baluchi peddlers "tramped through the villages" of the Panjab and the
Central Provinces and spent the summer in Banda, Bundelkhand. As with so many travelling
people there were rumours about them concerning extortion and thefts (Bhattacharya )

The above case may serve as an example of the social and spatial mobility that was typical of
North India in the early modern period. The military labour market was only one aspect,
though an important one, of this world pulsating with movement. The flexible
entrepreneurship of the pastoralist Baluchis who turned travel guards, then qasbātis, regional
and imperial soldiers, landholders-cum-policemen, and finally village managers in colonial
India, is just an illustration of the kind of occupational genealogies one meets along the roads
of early modern India.
- Armed gangs in the service of rural stakeholders were a phenomenon inseparable from the
country scene. The martial skills of men, however, became essential survival tools in other
than strictly local circumstances. In combination with forms of small-scale migration, the use
of force was often an integral part of the annual agrarian cycle. Seasonal soldiering or looting
enabled quite a number of people in town and countryside to survive the slack agricultural
season. In August 1636, soon after the onset of the monsoon, plundering ceased on the roads
of Gujarat, partly because the rains made the peasants return to their fields. Similarly, the
weavers of the town of Baroda in the 1620s, usually at home during the rainy season, went to
serve in the provincial army in the dry months of the year. In times of dearth or famine, this
occupational and spatial mobility of labour was the rule rather than the exception and must
have saved many lives. No doubt, most of these men were fit to enter the regional or all-India
labour markets, military or otherwise. Yet, their services were not in demand there as a matter
of course (Kolff )

- Hindustan, the great fertile regions between the Panjab and Bengal, dominated by the rivers
Ganga and Yamuna, saw relations between state and peasantry deteriorate. During the 1620s
and 1630s, forms of enslavement, deportation and extermination came to mark these relations.
It is reported that Abdullah Khan Firuz Jang, then in charge of the Kalpi-Kanauj region,
defeated all the hitherto un-subdued Chauhan rajas and rebels there, had the leaders beheaded,
and the peasant wives, daughters and children, to the number of 200,000, transported to Iran
and sold there.
. Certainly, Abdullah Khan was more given to tyrannical methods of pacification than most of
his contemporaries. But many peasant communities left their rulers with no choice but to take
stern measure against them. Another aspect of this is the demand for labour in Iran and
Central Asia, where many of these deported Indians must have been employed as peasants
and artisans, as were the 120 slaves.

- Clearly, however, no state could be formed on the basis of the systematic deportation of
potential tax payers, certainly not an 'early modern', military-fiscalist state. Any policy aiming
at the actual disarming of the countryside would have been even more impractical. Only the
English East India Company would, in the 1798 to 1818 period, achieve something
approaching the demilitarisation, though not the disarmament, of India.

The Mughal empire, in other words, never overcame the problem of its being faced, not with
just recalcitrant individual landholders, but with armed peasantries that represented the
backbone of society and could not be destroyed without dire consequences to the agrarian
productivity on which the regime depended for its survival. Let us, therefore, examine another
course open to the empire, that of engaging as infantry a significant and well-selected number
of those it could not otherwise control. This also leads us to a second reason for the difficult
access to the all-India level of the military labour market: the fact that employment there was
a semi-monopoly of those already active within it. The question is whether the Mughal
government was in a position to make its own choice of recruits from amongst the enormous
human resource potential seemingly at it disposal. To an extent it was. A provincial Mughal
force, sent against uncooperative subjects in Gujarat in 1684, included "a numberless
multitude of men of the country, consisting of Grasiyas and Kolis, who are tillers of the soil
but follow the army by command in exchange for freedom of tribute; as they receive nothing
for food, they keep themselves going mostly by theft" (Kolff )

- A more important role was played in Mughal armies by highly mobile professional peasant
soldiers. It is clear their services were in demand with the Mughal and the provincial armies
of the empire. At the same time, the imperial officers were not entirely free to recruit
whomever they wished, any more than the East India Company was when it drafted its sepoy
army in the eighteenth century. It was only after 1857, when the modern British colonial state
made the radical decision to shift its recruitment away from Hindustan, that such top-down
authority was exercised in India. Before that time, the negotiating position of some of the
village-based military service traditions was far stronger than, as far as I am aware, that of
their contemporaries in Europe. EXAMPLE;, the recruitment history of Avadhi and Bhojpuri
Hindi speaking Hindustan, exactly the part of North India where Abdullah Khan performed
his atrocities.

- The soldiering tradition of this region deserves to be treated as a whole. For almost four
centuries, it tenaciously retained its position as a recruitment area for units of infantry that
occupied a crucial role in imperial and regional state formation. As a tradition of peasant
soldiering, it is traceable at least to the fifteenth-century Jaunpur sultanat of the Sharqis.
Rajput agency made sure the sultans were served by war-bands of peasant soldiers. Evidence
of the intimate nature of the alliances between the sultans and his Rajput warlords is that in
the latters' households the presence of Muslim women was considered regular. After the last
Sharqi sultan lost control of Jaunpur in the1480s, a clan of local Rajputs spearheaded an
insurrection in support of him in which 200,000 or even 300,000 footsoldiers were said to
have participated.

- Subsequently, the conquest of Hindustan by the Lodi Afghans from the west reduced the
chances of military employment in their own region for these levies. Many moved west and
south in search of naukari, the term then and later used for the honourable service of roaming
warriors. Thus these professionals made possible the renewed growth and splendour of the
royal Tomar Rajput court at Gwaliyar, as well as of courts in Malwa and elsewhere.

- After the collapse of Tomar hegemony in Central India, the Purbiya tradition of naukari
launched its next soldiering incarnation. It now introduced in the north Indian military labour
market a more distinct identity and under a new brand name, that of ‘Ujjainiya’. During the
first decades of the sixteenth century, the members of the 'spurious' Rajput clan of the
Ujjainiyas of Bhojpur in the southwest of Bihar indeed made themselves indispensable as
specialised recruiting agents and jobber-commanders (jamadārs) of the peasant soldiers of the
area, the Purbiyas. Their mediating role in selling the services of Bhojpuri men, in negotiating
for them their conditions of employment and in leading them in the field was a cardinal one
and explains how the name ‘Ujjainiya’ became the trademark and identity of the men they
led.

- THE STORY OF Gajpat-Sher relationship suggests that the degree to which one's dream as
a naukar would come true was dependent on the diplomatic and entrepreneurial talent of the
dealer in manpower or the recruiting warlord one joined and entrusted one's fate to. Agency,
however, was as fluid as the circulatory labour market it served. In the case of Sher Shah, his
bitter struggle with Humayun not only involved North India in civil war, but also split the
Ujjainiya agency into rival factions. Both Sher and Humayun needed Ujjainiya
subcontractors, in order to reach the best niches of the military labour market, as much as the
local Rajput lineages needed the treasure and loot of major campaigns in order to maintain
their pivotal position as brokers.

- In the military labour market, all identities were multiple, flexible, and possibly temporary,
which meant that, instead of going home, one just might end one's life at a place that was not
one's village of origin and that one might pass on to one's children an identity different from
the one received from one's parents.

- During the early modern period, neither the Ujjainiyas nor any other group of men could
maintain themselves in a dominant position as brokers for very long. Though they hung on as
managers of extensive agricultural tracts in western Bihar and as pugnacious leaders of
undoubted regional notoriety, by the time of Shahjahan's reign they had been compelled to
give up their role as the principal recruiters and middlemen of the military labour of central
Hindustan. At least partly, their place was taken by the clan of the Bundela Rajputs of the
region east of Gwaliyar and west of the home of the Ujjainiyas. No Bundela leader was ever
as spectacularly successful in linking Hindustani peasant soldiering to imperial fiscal
resources as Bir Singh Deo. It was his talent to put numerous units, mainly infantry, at the
disposal of Jahangir, the emperor, without ever having to relinquish personal command over
them.
Jahangir gave Bir Singh Deo, "than whom in the rajput caste there is no greater nobleman", as
he wrote of him, the title of maharaja.

- The religious side of the story of Bundela recruitment is further illustrated by the
phenomenon of the veneration in which the peasant-soldiers who followed Bir Singh Deo and
his successors, came to hold Hardaul, one of the sons of the great Bundela. Hardaul was
murdered by a brother of his and became the centre of a soldiers' cult that struck root in the
core region of Purbiya recruitment. i.e. in all the districts that supplied young men (jawāns) to
Bundela middlemen or jamadārs.

- The market for infantry as a longue durée phenomenon once more entered a new phase, this
time emancipated from clan brokerage.
- Soon, large numbers of soldiers derived their identity from a real or supposed connection
with Baksar. Significantly, they became known as Baksariyas, a name that, until the end of
the eighteenth century, would almost be synonymous with Hindustani matchlockmen. A
Mughal source of 1690 still mentions Baksariyas and Bundelas as the categories that summed
up the presence of regular matchlock men in the imperial army. But soon one finds only the
first identity. The quintessential sepoy was a Baksariya.

- In the absence of the old clan brokers, another kind of middleman became prominent:
Baksariya jamadārs who had risen from the ranks and performed the task - well-known in the
labour history of India - of jobbers, in this case jobber-commanders. These men now became
the figures on whose loyalty the political fortunes of the Mughal's successor states often
depended. Already in the second decade of the eighteenth century, the British East India
Company had some of them in its pay.

- Then the break came. It is true, that the Company's sepoy army was a straight descendant
and a new incarnation of the Purbiya-Tomar-Ujjainiya-Bundela-Baksariya tradition of
Hindustani peasant soldiering. But the fact that, under the British near-monopoly of military
recruitment, independent brokerage by jamadārs was no longer possible or tolerated, meant a
revolution in the labour market. For centuries, circulatory military labour had contributed to a
circulation of states, none of which, except that of the Sharqis and of Sher Shah, had the
Bhojpuri recruitment region as its centre.

- The sepoys of the Bengal army compensated their loss of negotiating power by inventing a
cult of themselves as 'high-caste' Brahmans and respectable Rajputs. Sepoys with lesser ritual
pretentions, such as the Pasis and Dusadhs, who had contributed much to the centuries old
Purbiya tradition of mobile labour and had helped fighting Clive's battles, were soon squeezed
out of the labour supply by their 'high-caste' colleagues ( Kolff)

- Even then, the Bhumihar Brahman and Rajput sepoys would never reconcile themselves to a
condition that deprived them of all alternative options of service other than those one-sidedly
imposed upon them by the British. Their last bid to renegotiate their terms of service and
regain their old freedom according to the ancient code of honourable naukari would come to
nought in 1857. After that, as the British shifted recruitment to the Panjab, options on the
market for mobile labour would be much more meagre than before; the top-ranking
opportunities had gone.

= Zones of Military Entrepreneurship in India;

- The first zone was what we term Rajput;Over the course of more than 150 years—from the
early sixteenth century to the mid seventeenth century—the Mughals and certain armed
indigenous cavalry groups figured out how to integrate.
- Simultaneously, a second zone of military recruitment was developing south of the Mughal
heartland in the Muslim kingdoms of the Deccan, especially Ahmadnagar and Bijapur.
- At exactly the same period, a third zone for serving and gaining rights was forming at
Vijaynagar, south of the Tungabhadra River. Once again, building on earlier models, there
was the development of a warrior ethos which we might term nayak, complete with symbols
and codes of conduct.

- By the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Mughal Empire with its Rajputs came
into contact and conflict with the Marathas, there were critical differences in symbols,
weaponry, codes of conduct, and literature. These differences had already crystalized into
‘tradition’, marriage patterns, and created genealogies.
- this work shows the presence across much of India of opportunities for military
entrepreneurship and a substantial variety of men taking up those opportunities.We found a
willingness to migrate, sometimes long distances, such as the Rajputs moving back and forth
across North India in search of service and Tellegu warriors moving south into Tamil country.
This is the local context in which we must see the various waves of Muslim immigration—
from Persia, Afghanistan, Central Asia-also seeking service at the same time.

- The limits on indigenous military entrepreneurship were, it has been argued, cultural rather
than economic. Recall the Rajput/Mughal ethos with its heavy cavalry (mounted on expensive
imported horses), bow and arrow, curved sword, ethic of dying for the leader, marrying into
the Emperor’s house, capital-intensive,.difficult entr6’, long-distance service, the mansabdari
system, and patronage of a few Rajput families who had become wealthy and ‘kingly’
through Mughal service.

Our first conclusion is that the strength and persistence of different military cultures offers a
fresh answer to why the Mughals were so successful north of the Tapti River and why they
were so unsuccessful in the Deccan. The Mughals had only one model for the integration of
indigenous military talent. That was the Rajput. It had been mutually developed in the North
over several generations before the Mughals crossed the Tapti. By and large, it was a
successful amalgamation of prior Rajput ideas and Mughal core values.

MARATHA;
- WHAT GORDON IS SUGGESTING THAT there is a huge difference between hiring
Marathas and somehow converting them into loyal soldiers, willing to take high risks and die
for the Empire. For example, during the first thirty years of the Mughal invasion of the
Deccan (1600-30), though the Mughals recruited many Maratha units in its wars with
Ahmadnagar, not a single Maratha entered the mansabdari system, the loyal and trusted upper
level of Mughal service.
Through a century of fighting in the Deccan, the Mughals were utterly unable to ‘plant’
Rajput families to control the local population as they had only a few hundred miles north in
Malwa; those positions were already filled by Marathas with strong ties to the land and local
forts. (We, thus, find no Rajput princely states south of the Tapti.)
- At a more general level, the argument highlights the importance of military entrepreneurship
in the formation of ‘castes’ and the confining of this entrepreneurship to broad cultural zones.

HISTORIOGRAPHY
JOHN F. RICHARDS; SAYS -IN Kolff s formulation, there existed in the subcontinent
before colonial rule an immense military labor market.
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.

- Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy argues convin 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.

- As Kolff 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.

JOS GOMMANS; He underscores the increasing importance and what appears to have been
the growing assertiveness and confidence of the rural aristocracy, i.e., the zamindars.

- 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.