The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c12.s1: Heavy Guns

The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c12.s1

Language: English

Heavy Guns

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The Moghuls were very fond of large ordnance, but such pieces were really more for show than use; and as Fitzclarence truly says, 243, the oriental idea seems to have been “to render this destructive engine from its size more powerful than those of the Western world”. In this direction they proceeded even to extravagant lengths. These huge guns made more noise than they did harm; they could not be fired many times in a day, and were very liable to burst and destroy the men in charge.

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Names. The large guns were all dignified with pompons names, just as elephants were, such names as Ghāzī Khān “Lord Champion”, Sher Dahān “Tiger-mouth”, Dhumdhām “The Noisy”, (Shiū Dās, 29a) Kishwar kushā “World-opener”, Garh-bhanjan “Fort Demolisher”, Fath-i-Lashkar “Army Conqueror”, (Elliot, vii, 100) Aurangbār “Strength of the Throne”, *Burj Shikan* “Bastion Breaker”, (Catrou, 256) *Jahān kushā* “World Conqueror” (Horn, 37) and so forth. At the battle of Husainpur in 1133 H. (Nov. 1720) there were present *Sher dahān* (Tiger mouth), *Ghāzi Khān* (Lord Champion), *‘Ālam-sitān* (World-seizer), *Ātash-dahān* (Fire mouth), Khushḥāl Chand, Berlin Ms. N°. 495, fol. 1015*a*. In addition to a name they were also usually provided with an inscription, sometimes in verse, stating the name of the founder, the place and the year of manufacture.

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From Bernier, 217, 218, 352, we learn that early in *‘Ālamgīr*’s reign there were in the field with the emperor seventy pieces of heavy artillery, mostly of brass. These and the camel guns did not always follow the emperor, when he diverged from the high road to hunt, or to keep near a river or other water. Heavy guns could not move along difficult passes or cross the bridges of boats thrown over rivers. Many of these seventy pieces were so ponderous that twenty yoke of oxen were necessary to draw them along: and when the road was steep or rugged, they required the aid of elephants, in addition to the oxen, to push the carriage wheels with their heads aud trunks.

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These heavy pieces had frequently to be left behind, from the impossibility of their keeping up with the army. Thus *A‘zam Shāh*, when he marched in 1707 from Aḥmadnagar to Dholpur, left all his heavy guns behind at various stages of his march, and had none left when he reached the battle field at Jājau (Kāmrāj, *A‘zam-ul-ḥarb*, fol. 19). Then in Ṣafar 1125 H. (March 1712), during the contest for the throne between the sons of Bahādur Shāh, three of the very largest guns were removed from the fort of Lāhor, each being dragged by 250 oxen, aided by five or six elephants, and it was ten days before the camp was reached, although it was not more than three or four miles distant (B.M. N°. 1690, fol. 157*b*).

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In 1128 H. (1715-6) when Rajah Jai Singh was besieging Churāman Jāt in his fort of Thūn, one of these cannon was sent from Dihlī. It was escorted with ceremony from Palwal to Hodal and there made over to the deputy-governor of Āgrah for conveyance to its destination. The shot is threw was, we are told, one maund (Shāhjahānī) in weight (Shiū Dās, fol. 13a). Again, at the siege of Āgrah in 1131 H. (July, August 1719), several of these large cannon were employed. They had there Ghāzī Khān, Sher Dahān, Dhūmdhām, and others. These guns took shot of from 60 to 100 lbs, (30 sers to 1¼ man Shāhjahānī). Attached to each gun were from one to four elephants and from 600 to 1700 draught oxen (Shiū Dās, fol. 29a). Muḥammad Muḥsin also speaks of Muḥammad Shāh having at Karnāl in 1151 H. (Feb. 1739), guns which required five hundred to one thousand bullocks, aided by five to ten elephants (Horn, 34, quoting Elliot, viii, 74).

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When the Jāt rajah of Bhartpur besieged his relation in Wer, about 30 to 40 miles south of Bhartpur, his biggest cannon, a 48 pounder, was sent from his capital. It was a piece that Sūraj Mall had taken from the Mah-rattas, and they had carried away from Dihlī. Although dragged by 500 pair of oxen, with four elephants to push behind, it occupied them a month to convey the gun about half way, some eighteen or nineteen miles altogether, and there it stuck. It should be noted, however, that this was in the rainy season, which added immensely to the difficulty. The writer from whom I obtain these facts adds "This may look strange, but you do not know the weight of these guns or the kind of gun-carriage used. At the very time I write this (c. 1767), it is ten days since they brought out two 24-pounders from the fortress of Āgrah, each drawn by fifty pair of bullocks and helped by an elephant. Yet at this moment they are not outside the town of Āgrah, though they are moving each day from dawn to night-fall (Orme Mss. p. 4341). In 1826 there were still large guns at Wer. Colonel Seaton in his "From Cadet to Colonel", i, 177, says "we found some enormous iron guns built up something in the style of our present Armstrongs, with this difference that over the inner core of longitudinal bars forming the bore, iron hoops and not coils, were shrunk on; over which came a layer of longitudinal bars, and outside these another layer of hoops shrunk on. The diameter of these guns at the muzzle was enormous, something like three feet, but the bore was small. I should suppose they were about 40-pounders. I don't think any amount of powder would have burst them".

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Mode of Mounting Heavy Guns. From the slow progress that was made in the transporting of these heavy guns, it may be inferred that the carriages on which they were mounted, were of a very clumsy and primitive construction. One is almost inclined to believe that they must have been dragged unmounted along the ground, by mere brute force. Otherwise the length of time occupied in going a mile seems hardly credible.

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Most probably throughout the 18th century these guns were mounted on low platforms, and were made to turn on a pivot, such carriages as in 1803 Thorn, "War", 190, called "country block carriages, turning on a large pivot". Fitzclarence, 216, says the generality of the artillery in the forts was so badly mounted that they would be dismounted at the first discharge.

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The clearest account of the way in which they mounted their heavy artillery in the field is to be found in Orme, "Mil. Trans.", ii, 173, when describing Sirāj-ud-daulah's guns at the battle of Palāsī (Plassey) in 1757: "The cannon were mostly of the largest calibres, 24 and 32 pounders; and these were mounted on the middle of a large stage, raised six feet from the ground, carrying besides the cannon, all the ammunition belonging to it, and the gunners themselves who managed the cannon, on the stage itself. These machines were drawn by 40 or 50 yoke of white oxen, of the largest size, bred in the country of Purnea; and behind each cannon walked an elephant, trained to assist at difficult tugs, by shoving with his forehead against the hinder part of the carriage”. Sir Eyre Coote, “Minutes of Select Committee H. C.”, 30th April 1772, says that the Nawāb’s cannon were “mounted on bundles of bamboos tied together and each piece drawn by 20 or 30 pairs of oxen”. On the other hand, Major Munro, “Minutes”, 14th May 1772, deposed that the 133 pieces of different sizes taken from Shujāʿ-ud-daulah at Baksar (23rd Oct. 1764) were all on carriages and most of them on English carriages.

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The Mahratta artillery in the Dakhin, so late as 1791, was still mounted on the old plan, copied from that of the Moghuls. “His (Paras Rām Bhāo’s) largest guns were brass 32 and 42 pounders cast at Poona, in length far exceeding ours: the wheels of the carriage as well as the carriages themselves, were exceedingly clumsy, particularly the limber wheels, which are generally of one piece, very low, and in a heavy road do not perhaps turn once in the distance of a hundred yards. The gun is so heaped with baggage of every description that it could not be cleared ready to fire under at least half an hour; nor could any one from its appearance iu its travelling state, were it not for the number of bullocks dragging it, conceive it to be a gun: fifty, sixty and sometimes one hundred couple of bullocks drag one of these guns; and in very heavy roads, where the cattle have been hard worked and ill-fed, an elephant is posted to the rear who pushes with his head over difficult passages. Although the improvement of having four bullocks abreast was lately adopted by the Mahrattas, there surely can be no utility in having such a string of cattle as they sometimes tack to one of these strange pieces of ordnance” (E. Moor, “Narrative, 78)”. In the Dakhin we found it necessary to employ sixty Carnatic bullocks in yoke to an iron 24 pounder, fifty to an iron 18 pounder, and forty to an iron 12 pounder (Blaeker, “War”, 283).

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One observer, De la Flotte, who was in the south of India from April 1758 to May 1760, declares that Indian cannon, when used in fortresses, were not mounted on carriages: “they are put on the very embrasure, or they are supported by two great movable timbers (*poutres*). The balls are of stone, they make many ricochets and then roll a great distance”. M. de la Flotte saw at Jinjī, the well-known fortress 82 miles s.w. of Madras, one of these pieces, which was twenty feet in length. At Arkāt (Arcot) in 1746 Clive seems to have fired a big native gun from a mound of earth, without having any carriage (Orme, i, 191, referred to by Horn, 34). Colonel M. Wilks also speaks of an occasion in 1768 when the guns of the Indians were numerous “but unmounted”. In Northern India, however, some sort of carriage seems to have been used even for heavy guns, when they were employed in the defence of a fortress.

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*Descriptions of individual guns.* Dr. Horn, 36, quoting Captain Showers (J. A. S. B., XVI, 589) gives as the exact dimensions of one of Shāhjahān’s cannon, then (1847) to be found at Murshidābād,

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| Extreme Length . | . | . 17 feet. |
| Deph of Bore | . | . 15 ,, |
| Diameter at Muzzle | . | 1 ,, |
| Diameter of Bore | . | . 6 inches. |

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This cannon, *Jahān Kushā*, the world conqueror, bore a poetical inscription of eight distiches, to which were added the facts that it was made at Dhākah in Jamādī ii of the eleventh year of Shāhjahān (Oct. Nov. 1637), and that it took a charge of 28 sirs of powder. It had been made by the method of welding.

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When Dārā Shukoh was sent against Qandahār in Shāhjahān’s reign, he cast two great guns at Lāhor, which threw a ball of 1 man 5 sirs (about 90 lbs. English). Their names were *Fath Mubārik* (Blessed Victory) and *Kishwar Kushāe* (World Overcomer). He had with him two other heavy guns, the *Qila‘h-kushāe* (Fort Overcomer) from Dihlī and *Maryam* (Mary?) from Shāl (Raverty, “Notes on Afghanistan”, 22, relying on the *Latāif-ul-Akhbār* of Rashīd Khān).

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One of these large guns was to be found at Aḥmadnagar in the Dakhin. Fitzclarence, 243, says it was about 25 feet long, and it was said to have carried shot into Sir Arthur Wellesley’s camp in 1803 “though it was pitched out of range of all reasonable weapons”. It was, perhaps, the same as the *malik-i-maidān*, (King of the Battle-field), described by Horn, 132, quoting Meadows Taylor and J. Fergusson’s “Architecture of Beejepore”, which is declared by those writers to be the largest piece of ordnance in the world. The metal is an alloy of 80.427 parts of copper to 19.573 parts of tin. The dimensions are

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| Diameter at the Breech | . | 4 feet, | 10 inches. |
| Diameter at the Muzzle | . | 5 ,, | 5 ,, |
| Diameter of Bore | . | 2 ,, | 4½ ,, |
| Length | . | 14 ,, | 3 ,, |

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In the “Life and Correspondence of the Right Honble Sir Bartle Frere”, i, 56, these is a drawing by him of two large guns that he saw at Bījāpur in 1848. One was on the *Uparī-burj* (upper bastion?); the other he calls *Mulūk Juft*. Neither of them was mounted on a carriage.

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The gun *Malik-i-maidān* was cast at Aḥmadnagar in 1548, during the reign of Burhān Nizām Shāh i, by a Turk named Muḥammad, son of Ḥasan. It was first described by E. Moor, “Narrative”, 322, who believed it to have been cast by ‘Ālamgīr in 1097 H. (1685), but the copy of the inscription as given by him, does not bear this out, for it commemorates the capture of Bījāpur in that year, and not the casting of the gun. Moor was told that there were twelve large guns; of these he saw three, two being not cast, like the *Malik-i-maidān*, but made of welded bars hooped round. One of them was called *Lamchharri, which Moor translates “the far-flyer” (perhaps from lamchhar (Shak. 1795), a long musket, lamchharā, adj. tall).

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There were also two guns twenty five feet long at Nāgpūr (Fitzclarence, 108, 244), called by the English Gog and Magog, which were “finer pieces and better proportioned than the one at Ahmadnagar”. Fitzclarence also saw, 216, a heavy brass gun mounted on a sort of tower at Daulatābād, and though he did not measure it, he supposed it equal to throwing a ball of sixty pounds. There was also a 24-pounder (id. 218) on a peak at the top, said to have been raised to that position by a European in ‘Ālamgīr’s reign. At Dihlī, opposite the Lāhor gate, he also saw in 1817 a gun of a very large bore.

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Fitzclarence also describes the “great gun of Agra” as Major Thorn calls it, “War”, 188. “At Agra I have seen a gun more like an immense howitzer, above 14 feet long, 22½ inches in the bore, into which persons can get: the following is a table of its dimensions”.

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TABLE OF DIMENSIONS.

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Weight in maunds, 1469.

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Value of the gun, as old brass, in sonaut (sanwāt) rupees 53,400; but if serviceable it may be estimated at one lac and sixty thousand.

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“This gun was once supposed to contain much gold; and even as old brass it is valued at £ 7000; but if serviceable, it may be estimated at about £ 18,000. It at present (1818) lies near the bank of the Jumnah, outside the wall of the fort. An attempt was made to transport it down to Calcutta”. Both Fitzclarence and Thorn give drawings of the gun. Thorn, 189, says “General Lake had a great desire to remove this trophy from Agra to Calcutta, with a view to transporting it ultimately to England; but though a raft was prepared for its conveyance upon the Jamnah, the stupendous body of metal proved too heavy for the framework, and the whole sank in the bed of the river, where the gun lay buried in the sand when I (Major Thorn) last saw it”.

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At Āgrah in 1803 Lord Lake also obtained a fine 72-pouuder of the same composition as the “great gun”, together with 76 brass guns and 86 iron ones of different kinds, such as mortars, howitzers, carronades, and gallopers, with thirty-three tumbrils. The brass gnns were in geueral of the same manufacture and construction as those taken at Dihlī; and in the camp and town (Āgrah) several of the iron ones were of that description called bar guns, and the whole were mounted either on travelling carriages with elevating screws, or on country block carriages turning on a large pivot (Thorn, 190).

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There are some large guns of the Moghul period at Lāhor. There is the Zamzamah (The Thunderer), one of two cast by a man named Shāh Nazīr, by order of Shāh Walī Khān, prime minister of Aḥmad Shāh, Abdālī, (1747—1773). It is of brass and was used, so Muhammad Latīf says, at the battle of Panīpat in 1761, though this is inconsistent with the tārīkh it bears (1179 H. or 1765/6). The fellow gun was lost in the Chināb river; and this one was removed by the Sikh leader, Har Singh, Bhangī, from the village of Khwājah Sa‘īd, two miles from Lāhor, where the Abdālī had his arsenal. It bears an inscription of twenty-two lines, of which the last two are:

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*Baʿd taslīm ba guftā*: “*Top Paikar-i-azhdahāe, ātash-bāz*”. (1179 i.e. 1765/6).

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“After obeisance he exclaimed ‘The dragon shaped, fire-vomiting, cannon’.” Its length is 14 feet 4½ inches and the diameter of the bore is 9½ inches. These are also at Lāhor another large gun made in 1182 H. (1768—9) by Shujāʿat Khān, Ṣafdar Jang, a governor of Multān; it bears the name of *Kohshikan* (The Mountain Destroyer) and weighs 110 maunds (Syad Muhammad Latīf, “Lāhor”, p. 386).

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Moor, “Narrative”, 420, refers to descriptions of large guns by Dow, “History of Hindostan”, ii, 278 (a reference which I cannot trace in my edition) and by Rennell, “Memoir”, 61. The two referred to by Dow were at Arcot and Dacca. Rennell measured the second of these, but before the end of the 18th century, it and the bank on which it rested had fallen into the river. The weight of an iron shot for it was 465 pounds, and Moor calculates the weight of one for *Malik-i-maidān* to be 2646 1/7 pounds.

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Sixty eight guns were taken by Lord Lake outside Dihlī on the 16th Sept. 1803 (Thorn, 117). They were of different sorts, the whole mounted on field carriages with limbers and traces complete. The iron guns were of European manufacture: but the brass guns, mortars, and howitzers had been cast in India, with the exception of one Portuguese three-pounder. Some were made at Mathurā and others at Ujjain, but evidently from the design and execution of a European artist. The dimensions in general were those of the French, and the workmanship highly finished. The guns had belonged to the disciplined troops of Sendhiah, and the above description abundantly shows that they were not strictly Moghul weapons at all, but an equipment prepared under the supervision of Europeans in the native service.

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A somewhat later account (1809) of Sendhiah’s artillery is found in Broughton, 109. Sendhiah then had 66 guns, twenty-seven in his own park, ten of large calibre, the rest of various sizes and descriptions. Thirty one guns were attached to his regular brigade; these were all of different sizes, but few were so large as an English six-pounder. Besides these he had eight curricle guns, each drawn by a pair of bullocks: they were very small and were called the "orderly" guns from their following in the Mahārājah's retinue.

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*Wooden Guns.* Under the stress of necessity these strange substitutes for ordinary cannon were used by the Sikhs on two occasions. For instance, we learn that when the Sikhs in Dec. 1710 evacuated their fort of Lohgarh in the outer hills, they blew up a cannon "which they had made out of the trunk of a tamarind tree" (Kāmwar Khān, entry of 19th Shawwāl 1122 H.). Another writer, Ghulām Muḥī-ud-dīn Khān, fol. 37b), tells us that when they were besieged in Gurdāspur in 1715, the Sikhs, though they had the light artillery that they had taken from Wazīr Khān, faujdār of Sihrind, Bāyāzīd Khān, and Shams Khān, were unprovided with heavier pieces. These they replaced by hollowed-out trunks of trees, strengthened by heavy iron bands placed close together. From these they threw balls of stone and iron. The Mahomedans estimated these make-shift cannon to be about half as effective as the usual kind. A. Demmin "Die Kriegswaffen", 108, speaks of wooden mortars used in Europe in the Middle Ages; they were formed of hollowed tree trunks bound with iron straps and furnished with a metal touchhole. And so late as 1525 the rebellious peasants who besieged their Archbishop in Strasburg were in possession of wooden cannon. They also had leather cannon, such as at a later time were used by the Swedes! Demmin, p. 929, N°. 24bis, has a figure of a wooden cannon from Cochin China, said to be manufactured there up to the present time. It appears to be a tree trunk strengthened by thirteen strong bands in its whole length.

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*Ghabārah*. According to Steingass, 880, this is a bomb, a mortar for throwing shells. I have only once come across it; Rustam ʿAlī, Bijnorī, uses it on fol. 30*a* of his “History of the Rohelas” (written about 1780): *Top, rahkalah, ghabāre, dhamākah, gajnāl, shutarnāl, jazāīr, sherbache, qainchī bānon ke, lekar*.

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*Deg* (Mortars). We find in the official manuals a class of men among the *Ahshām*, styled *Deg-andāz*, literally “pot-throwers”. In present usage *deg* denotes a mortar, and it may have meant the same at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century, when the manuals referred to were drawn up. But it seems to me more probable that these men carried some sort of fire-pot or hand-grenade, which they threw when two armies were coming to close quarters.

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*Tīr*. This word, literally “arrow”, after acquiring the extended meaning of bullet, musket, or cannon ball (Steingass 340), was then converted into a word denoting the calibre of a gun. For instance, in the letters of Chhabīlah Rām, Nāgar, *ʿAjāib-ul-āfāq*, fol. 34*b*, we have, *Hamrāh-i-fidwīyat-irtisām sih top-i-kamtīr*, “with this loyal servant are three guns of small calibre”; and again a little farther, upon the same folio, *Wa yak zarb-i-top-i-kalān-tīr*, “and one cannon of large calibre”. With its meaning of “cannon ball” we find *tīr* in the expression *tīrah-band* for “loaded”, used by Rustam ʿAlī, Bijnorī, in his “History of the Rohelahs”, fol. 43*b*.

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*Miscellaneous*. We come now to various instruments, mostly of obscure application and use, which are mentioned here and there by the historians. These are *Bādalījah*, *Manjanīq*, *Sang-raʿd*, *Sarkob*, *Top-i-hawāe*, *Muqābil-kob*, *Chādar*, *Huqqah-i-ātash*. Most of these are named by Horn, 28, 29, 35.

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*Bādalījah*. Steingass, 140, defines it as a sort of cannon. Mḥd Kāẓim uses the form *Bādalīj* (*ʿĀlamgīr nāmah* 98, line 3, *ba zarb-i-bādalīj az pāe dar āmad*). Once Ghulām ‘Alī Khān, *Muqaddamah-i-Shāh ‘Alam-nāmah*, fol. 79b) uses this word *bādali* when speaking of the war *matériel* to be found in Lāhor fort in 1165 H. (1752). I have not seen the word elsewhere, nor can I tell what kind of thing it was.

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*Manjanīq*. This seems to have been in the nature of a catapult. Steingass 1324, defines it, a warlike engine, catapulta, balista, sling a pulley, machine for raising great weights, a crane. Horn, 35, quotes from Elliot, vi, 139, a reference to the use of a *manjanīq* at the siege of Asīrgaṛh. It is also used in the *Tārīkh-i-Alfī* (Horn 29, Elliot, v, 170). This word was applied to the scaffold raised by some French explorers when examining the upper part of the Naqsh-i-Rustam tombs in Persia, (E. G. Browne, “A year in Persia”, 250).

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*Sangra’d*. Steingass, 702, calls this a stone ball for a cross-bow, a stone roller for smoothing flat roofs. Is it not more probably another name for a catapult throwing large stones?

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*Sarkob*. Horn, 132, referring to the *Akbarnāmah*, iii, 622, line 11, speaks of it as a wall breaker or battering ram. Steingass, 676, has, “a machine erected to overtop a wall, a battery, a battering machine, any eminence which commanded a fortress or houses, a citadel”. Several of these definitions seem to make it the same thing as *sībā*, which we shall speak of a little further on. The word *sarkob* for a battering ram is used by Jauhar, Āftābchī, fol. 16b, when describing the siege of Chunār in 942 H. (1535). Nizām-ud-dīn, *Tabaqāt-i-Akbar Shāhī*, fol. 151b, in his account of the same events calls the ram a *muqābil-kob*.

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*Top-i-hawāe*. Horn, 28, calls attention to a passage in Khāfī Khān, ii, 226, where this expression is used. He is writing of Sīdī Ya‘qūt in the Dakhin during ‘Alamgīr’s reign (year 1079 H.—1668-9), and he says *o tophāe hawāe ba-ham rasāndah, bar darakht-hāe bastah, waqt-i-shab taraf-i-Dandā Rājpūrī ātash mīdād*. “Having provided some topi-hawāe (air guns?) and having fixed them on trees, at night time fired them in the direction of Danda Rājpuri”. This is all we know of this mysterious weapon.

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*Chādar*. In the *Maāsir-i-ʿĀlamgīrī* 295, line 13, year 1098 H. (1686), when the army was before Gulkandah, I find this passage, *o yak tassūj pesh qadam na shudan-i-mardum az bārish-i-tufang o bān o chādar o ḥuqqah ghair az kushtah shudan o zakhmī gardidan maqsad ṣūrat nagirift*. “From the rain of matchlocks and rockets and ‘chādar’ and ‘ḥuqqah’, the men could not advance a single inch, and no purpose was effected but to be slain or wounded”. The context shows that *chādar* is here something that was fired off, but I do not know what. Elsewhere, as the context shows, the word denotes some kind of tent. As for instance in Ashob, fol. 265*a*, *ba pāl wa chādar wa tambū*, where *chādar* cannot possibly mean anything but a kind of tent. I have also seen the word *chādar* employed in a way that made it mean a sort of mantlet used as a field protection to gunners. I have mislaid my reference to the passage.

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*Ḥuqqah-i-ātash*. Horn, 29, refers to Budāonī, i, 376, line 7 from bottom, but I think it must be, i, 371, 372. (Ranking, 482). It was at the siege of Kālinjar in Bundelkhand in 952 H. (1545—1546). Sher Shāh stood near the wall and ordered *ḥuqqah* to be thrown into the fort. By chance one of these struck the wall and coming back with force broke in pieces, and the fragments falling on the other *ḥuqqahs*, set fire to them and blew up Sher Shāh. This passage does not show whether they were bombs fired from a mortar or thrown by the hand; but it is clear that they must have been one or the other. It shows that the projectile itself was called *ḥuqqah*, a name derived no doubt from some resemblance in shape to the ordinary *ḥuqqah* used in smoking. Steingass, 426, has *ḥuqqah-i-ātash*, a kind of rocket used in war. *Ḥuqqah* were used in 1044 H. (1634—5) by the defenders of Dhāmonī in Bundelkhand, *Bādshāhnāmah*, i, part 2, p. 108. The Central Asian word for the same thing seems to have been *qārorah*, see *Mujmil-ut-tārīkh ba‘d Nādirīyah*, p. 78, line 13. We meet with another mention of these *huqqah* in an account of an assault on Dīg by Najaf Khān’s troops in 1191 H. (1777), see Khair-ud-dīn Mḥd, *‘Ibratnāmah*, i, p. 425. The Rohelahs scaled the wall by digging their knives into it and helping each other up, then *hiṣārīyān, ḥairān-i-nairangī-i-rozgār, sabūchahā o ḥaqqah-hāe bārūt bar sar-i-shān mī andākhtand*. “The garrison, harrassed by the instability of fortune, threw on their heads small pots (*sabūchah*) and *huqqahs* of gunpowder”. This goes to show they were hand-grenades. The same author, i, 75, speaks on an earlier occasion of the garrison of Paṭnah in 1173 H. (1759) resisting an assault by *sabūchah-i-bārūt*. There are some farther remarks on the *huqqah* under the head of Sieges.