The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c23.32

c23.32

Qazāqī. The word comes, of course, from qazāq, Steingass, 968, a partisan, a light armed soldier, a highway robber, a Cossack. Qazāqī he defines as a military incursion, guerilla warfare, free-booting, brigandage. But in Indian writings it seems to me to have a more definite application, and is used for something equivalent to a loose attack in open order, followed by retreat as soon as the attack has been delivered, in short something the same as the taulqamah movement already referred to (ante, p. 227). Modern writers speak, I notice, of the Cossack “lava-like” form of attack, and I suppose the above-named is what they mean. Horn, 64, rejects, and I think rightly, the use of this word as one of the divisions of an army, but he does not give any definition to replace the one rejected. I fancy that Dr. Oskar Mann’s reading of farāqī فراقي, on p. 95, line 6, of Mujmil-ut-tārīkh might be better قزاقي, qazāqī.