Making the ‘Mughal’ Soldier: Ethnicity, Identification, and Documentary Culture in Southern India, c. 1600-1700

Abstract

AbstractThis article evaluates provincial documentary culture in the Deccan (south-central India) prior to the incorporation of this region into Mughal Hindustan in 1687. It investigates the production and content of ʿarz-o-chehrah (muster rolls), one among many documentary genres that verified the Mughal soldier and his horse circulating on the front lines of uncertain conquest. From these materials, a previous generation of scholars distilled a taxonomy of self-contained “sub-national or ethnic” or “racial” groups (“Irani,” “Turani,” “Afghan,” “Rajput,” “Deccani,” “Indian Muslim,” and “Miscellaneous”) that confirmed narratives about the Mughal nobility found in chronicle histories. However, these modern construals of “ethnicity” remain difficult to map onto the actual ones found on descriptive rolls nor do they tell us how everyday interactions between provincial scribes and the soldier-subject transformed these categories. Social identifications underwent changes when imperial officials, scribes, and soldiers shared a war front with the armies of the regional, independent Deccan sultanates. Finer degrees of specificity characterized “northern” soldiers’ labels while “southern” cavalry were defined through broad, essentialized groupings, reflecting the changing profiles of cavalry recruitment. By analyzing social identifications, this article charts the making of a pan-subcontinent system of soldier recruitment wherein the state-making processes of northern and southern India began to mirror each other, widening the ways of defining and seeing the ‘Mughal’ soldier. This unique piece of paper bound two individual creatures, man and horse, whose identities were both separate and united, into a mutually-dependent relationship. These double portraits of man and horse functioned as proxies for pay slips and not simply as pre-modern identification cards. In doing so, they also provide a window into one instance of the uneven, ambiguous professionalization of mercenary-soldiers taking place across the early modern world.