The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c5.18

c5.18

*Māhī-o-marātib*. — Some words must be added with special reference to this dignity, which was borne on elephants or camels in a man's retinue. It was one of the very highest honours, as it was not granted to nobles below the rank of 6000 *zāt*, 6000 *suwār* (*Mirāt-ul-Iṣṭilāḥ*, fol. 3). *Māhī* (literally, a fish), was made in the figure of a fish, four feet in length, of copper gilt, and it was placed horizontally on the point of a spear (*Seir*, i, 218, note 150, and 743, note 51). Steingass, 1,147, defines *māhī-marātib* as “certain honours denoted by the figure of a fish with other insignia (two balls).” But in careful writers I have always found it as *māhī-o-marātib*, “fish and dignities,” and, as I take it, the first word refers to the fish emblem and the second to the balls or other adjuncts which went with it. The *marātib* Thorn, “War,” 356, describes as a ball of copper gilt encircled by a *jhālar* or fringe about two feet in length, placed on a long pole, and, like the *māhī*, carried on an elephant. Can this be Gemelli Careri’s “golden ball”? Perhaps it was identical with the *qumqumah* or *kaukabah* already described above. The translator of the *Seir-Mutaqherin*, i, 218, note 150, tells us that the fish was always accompanied by the figure of a man’s head in copper gilt. This must have been in addition to the gilt balls. The *māhī*, as conferred on Lord Lake on the 14th August, 1804 (*Thorn*, “War,” 356), is described as “representing a fish with a head of gilt copper and the body and tail formed of silk, fixed to a long staff and carried on an elephant.” James Skinner, who recovered Mahādajī-Sendhia’s *māhī-o-marātib* in a fight with the Rajputs, speaks of it as “a brass fish with two chourees (horse-hair tails) hanging to it like moustachios” (Fraser, “Memoir,” i, 152). Gentil, “Mémoires,” 62, calls the *māhī* simply “the head of a fish on the end of a pole.” As a sign of the rarity of this dignity, he adds that while in the Dakhin (1752—1761) he only saw four of them.