The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c15.4

c15.4

The vague word *Ahshām* (Steingass, 21, A, pl. of *Hasham*) is defined in the dictionary as servants, domestics, followers, attendants, retainers, a kind of militia or armed police. In the official manuals (*Dastūr-ul-ʿAml*) it comprehends the infantry, the personnel of the artillery, the artificers, and the attendants on the court. The incident of service which was common to all these men, and caused their inclusion under one head, was the fact that they were all borne direct on the imperial books, and received their pay from the imperial treasury, without the intervention of a *manṣabdar*. This fact also accounts for Abul Fazl's apparently anomalous classification of the artillery as part of the Household in Book i of the *Āīn*, instead of with the rest of the army in Book ii, *Āīn* 1 to 10. I have also found *Ahshām* used with three more restricted meanings: 1) The light artillery which attended the emperor's person wherever he went were called the *Ahshām* (*Mirāt-ul-Iṣṭilāḥ*, fol. 5*b*). This artillery is described by Gemelli Carreri, French ed., iii, 244, and by Bernier, 217, 363, who calls it "artillery of the stirrup" (i. e. *rikāb*); 2) the word *Ahshām* is used constantly in the 18th century for the gunners of the garrison artillery; and 3) we find *Ahshām* used as a general term for petty zamindārs serving in any campaign, and the half-armed militia or levies which they brought in their train. Khāfī Khān, ii, 953, names the *dāroghah-i-ahshām* separately, between the *mīr ātash* and the *dāroghah-i-top-khānah-i-jinsī*, which would make the *Ahshām* something distinct from both the artillery generally and the light artillery.