The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c19.13

c19.13

Harem women with armies (Horn, 57). On all campaigns a harem of women with their attendants seems to have accompanied the emperor and the chief men. On the day of battle these women were put on elephants and carefully guarded by the force forming the rear guard, which was posted at some distance behind the centre, where stood the emperor or other chief commander. Many references might be quoted in illustration of this statement. The habit of being followed by a harem might be justified in cases where the camp was the only home, for perhaps years at a time. But the practice was the same even on short campaigns. For instance, the redoutable Ghāzī-ud-dīn Khān, ʿImād-ul-mulk, who became wazīr at sixteen years of age and had deposed two emperors before he was five and twenty, was born in his maternal grandfather, Qamr-ud-dīn Khān’s, camp. This noble, who was Muḥammad Shāh’s wazīr, was then on his way to Mālwah on an expedition against the Mahrattas. Wilks, ii, 38, writes as if it were a peculiar weakness of the particular noble, that the Nizām of Ḥaidarābād was in 1768 “accompanied in the field by his favourite wives”. But in so doing Nizām ‘Alī was only following the usual practice of Moghul commanders.