The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c23.40

c23.40

*Sipāhī-i-fālez*. This phrase, literally “soldiers of the melon bed”, has often puzzled me. It is used as a description of a defeated, non-resisting body of troops. Presumably the metaphor means that in such a case their heads are as easily cut off as melons can be gathered from a melon-bed. Mīrzā Ḥaidar (Ross and Elias, 323) puts words something like it into the mouth of a prince, looking on at a review of raw undisciplined troops: “with such a troop as this it would be dangerous to try and rob a kitchen-garden (*pālīz*)”.