The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c6.29

c6.29

The *Aḥadīs*. — Midway between the nobles or leaders (*manṣabdars*) with the horsemen under them (*tābinān*) on the one hand, and the *Aḥshām*, or infantry, artillery, and artificers on the other, stood the *Aḥadī*, or gentleman trooper. The word is literally ‘single’ or ‘alone’ (A. *aḥad*, one). It is easy to see why this name was applied to them; they offered their services singly, they did not attach themselves to any chief, thus forming a class apart from the *tābinān*; but as they were horsemen, they stood equally apart from the specialized services included under the remaining head of *Aḥshām*. The title of *Aḥadī* was given, we are told (*Seir*, i, 262, note 201), to the men serving singly “because they have the emperor for their immediate colonel.” We sometimes come across the name *Yakkah-tāz* (riding alone), which seems, when employed as the name of a class of troops, to mean the same body of men as the *Aḥadīs*. Horn, 20, 56, looks on the *Aḥadīs* as a sort of body-guard or corps *d’élite*; and in some ways that view may be taken as true, though there was not, as I think, any formal recognition of them as such. The basis of their organization under Akbar is set out in *Āīn* 4 of Book ii (Blochmann, i, 249), and they are referred to in several other places (i, 20, 161, 231, 246, 536). In the strictest sense, the body-guard, or defenders of the imperial person, seem to have been the men known as the *Wālā Shāhī* (literally, of or belonging to the Exalted King), and, no doubt, these are the four thousand men referred to by Manucci (“Catrou,” English ed. of 1826, p. 297) as ‘the emperor’s slaves.’¹ Whether slaves or not, the *Wālā Shāhī* were the most trusted troops of the reigning sovereign. From various passages I find that they were chiefly, if not entirely, men who had been attached to his person from his youth and had served under him while he was still only a royal prince, and were thus marked out in a special manner as his personal adherents and household troops. The *Yasāwals* or armed palace guards were something like the *Wālā Shāhī* so far as they were charged with the safety of the sovereign; but they differed from the latter in not having the same personal connection with him. The *Aḥadīs* received somewhat higher pay than common troopers. In one instance we are told expressly what those rates were in later times. On the 2nd Ṣafar of his second year (1120 H. = 22nd April, 1708), Bahādur Shāh, as Dānishmand Khān tells us, ordered the enlistment of 4,700 extra *Aḥadīs* at Rs. 40 a month, the money to be paid from the Exchequer.