The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c13.33

c13.33

Muhrah-i-rahkalah. This is an expression used by Mḥd Qāsim, Aurangābādī *Aḥwāl-i-khawāqīn*, 210a, for which I can find no meaning in the Persian dictionary. Describing his preparations for resisting an expected night attack of the Mahrattahs, he says, *Ba har jānib kih dar-rasand jamīʿ-i-mubārizān farāham āmdah, muhrah-i-rahkalah ba muqābilah-i-ān nā-pākān bāyad kard*. From this I infer that it means the nozzle or mouth of the gun. The same word is used, id. 126b, where it evidently means “chessman”. J. Shakespear, 2003, gives muhrī (which he derives from muṇh, face) as the bore of a gun. This must be Mḥd Qāsim’s meaning in the first of the above passages; but is not the word more probably connected with the Persian morī or muhri, a drain pipe? Khushḥāl Chand, Berlin Ms. 1004b, uses the expression az muhrah-i-bandūq majrūḥ gash-tah: and again id. 1015b (twice) and 1019a. In the second of these four cases the word seems to refer to the mouth of the cannon; in the first, third, and fourth, to the ball or bullet itself. Ashob, fol. 262b, uses Muhrah quite plainly for the muzzle of a gun. He tells us that in 1739, during Nādir Shāh’s general slaughter in Dihlī, having no weapons to defend their warehouses, some merchants resolved on frightening the Persians into leaving them unmolested. They removed the poles and bambus from their thatched roof, laid them on the walls and the top of the gate, with their ends toward the street, so that they looked like the barrels of matchlocks or wallpieces, with their muzzles (muhrah) showing.