The Institutes of Akbar 160.2.650

160.2.650

As the author of the Pádisháhnámah does not mention the restriction as to the number of months for which the Mançabdárs drew the income, we may assume that the difference in strength of the contingents mentioned after the name of each grandee depended on the value of their jágírs.
From an incidental remark (Pádisháhnámah, I. p. 113), we see that the pay of a Commander of sihaspah duaspah troopers was double the pay allowed to a Commander of yakaspahs. This agrees with the fact that the former had double the number of men and horses of the latter.
The strength also of Aurangzéb’s army, on a statement by Bernier, was conjectured to have been 200,000 cavalry, vide Elphinstone’s History, Second Edition, p. 546, last line.
Akbar’s army must have been smaller. It is impossible to compute the strength of the contingents, which was continually fluctuating, and depended rather on emergencies. We can, however, guess at the strength of Akbar’s standing army. At the end of Ain 30, Abulfazl states that there were alive at the time he wrote the Ain 250 Commanders of 100 (Yúzbáshís) 204 Commanders of 60 260 Commanders of 40 250 Commanders of 20 224 Commanders of 10 As these numbers are very uniform, the regular army could not have been larger than 250 X 100, or 25,000 men (troopers, musketeers, and artillery). The Imperial stables contained 12,000 horses (vide p. 132, l. 6 from below), which were under the immediate charge of Mírzá Abdurrahím Khán Khánán, Akbar’s Commander-in-Chief. Hence there may have been about 12,000 standing cavalry. The rest were matchlock-bearers and artillery. In Ain 6, Abulfazl states that there were 12,000 matchlock-bearers. The number of Ahadís, of which Sháhjahán had 7000, cannot have been very large. Many of them were on staff employ in the various offices, store-houses, Imperial workshops; others were employed as adjutants and carriers of important orders. They were, at Akbar’s time, gentlemen rather than common soldiers, as they had to buy their own horse on joining. Badáoní mentions an Ahadí of the name of Khwájah Ibráhím Husain as one of his friends (II, p. 394). The number of Mançabdárs, which under Sháhjahán amounted to 8000, was also much less. Of the 415 Mançabdárs, whose names are given in Ain 30, about 150 were dead, when Abulfazl wrote it, so that there would be about 250 higher Mançabdárs, to which we have to add 1388 lower Mançabdárs, from the Commanders of 150 downwards; hence altogether about 1600 Mançabdárs.
But Akbar’s Mançabdárs, on the whole, had larger contingents, especially more horses, than the Mançabdárs of the following reigns, during which the brevet ranks (zát) were multiplied.
In the beginning of Akbar’s reign, Mançabdárs had even to furnish men with four horses (chaháraspah). A Dahbáshí, or Commander of Ten, had to furnish 10 men with 25 horses; but in later times, (vide Aín, 5) the Chaháraspahs were discontinued, and a Dahbíshtí furnished 10 men with 18 horses. As the other ranks had to furnish horses in proportion, one of Akbar’s Hazárís would have had to bring 1800 horses, whilst a Hazárí at the time of Sháhjahán only furnished 650.