The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c17.14

c17.14

*Horsemanship.* The cavalry had their horses trained to a sort of *manège*, where the horse was made to stand on its hind legs and then advance by bounds for a considerable distance. This manœuvre was resorted to in Bundelkhand whenever a man on horse-back attacked any one on an elephant. Once, when Muḥammad Khān, Bangash, invaded Bundelkhand in 1727, he was thus attacked. As he writes in his report to the emperor: “I drove my elephant straight into the thick of the enemy, where my men seemed to be struggling hopelessly against them. At this moment two of the enemy’s horsemen, one after the other, rode their horses with the greatest boldness at my elephant, so that their forefeet were on the elephant. By God’s aid they were, one after the other, dispatched by our arrows” (see the official report in Shākir Khān’s *Gulshan-i-ṣādiq*, my copy). This caracolling is still adhered to by the cavalry in the Bundelkhand native states, as could be seen by those who witnessed the review of their troops at Āgrah in 1876, in the presence of the then Prince of Wales.