The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c24.1

c24.1

Dr. Horn devotes many pages (71—105) to reproducing detailed battle pieces. These comprise Bābar's first battle at Pānīpat, 21st April 1526, Bābar's battle against Rānā Sangā, 16th March 1527, Akbar's battle at Pānīpat, 5th Nov. 1556, the battle at Korah between Shāh Shujāʿ and ʿĀlamgīr, 3rd Jan. 1659, and the taking of a mountain pass near Ajmer. Most of these serve more as specimens of style than as plain and direct reports of what happened at these actions. All of them, except Bābar's own description of the battle of the 21st April 1526, are written in that deplorably inflated, rhetorical style, of which Persian and Indian writers are so proud, where sense is drowned in sound and plain facts are buried under far-fetched metaphor. Such turgid stuff reduces the translator to despair and engenders disgust in the European reader. As will have been noticed, Dr. Horn brings his specimens no further down than the first year of ʿĀlamgīr's reign. There was much fighting in the rest of that reign and in the following reigns, and from the later historians it would be possible to put together accounts of many other battles. I may instance those of Jājau (1707), Āgrah (1712), Hasanpur (1720).