The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c7.3

c7.3

Mustapha, the translator of the *Siyar-ul-mutākharīn*, gives us an instance of the length to which this cheating was carried (*Seir*; i, 609, note). In Bengal, in the year 1163 H. (1750), when ʿAlī Wirdī Khān, Mahābat Jang, was nāzim, an officer receiving pay for 1700 men could not muster more than seventy or eighty. Mustapha, who wrote in 1787—8, adds from his own experience — “Such are, without exception, all the armies and all the troops of India; and were we to rate by this rule those armies of 50,000 and 100,000 that fought or were slaughtered at the decisive battles of Palāsī [Plassy] and Baksar [Buxar] (and by some such rule they must be rated), we would have incredible deductions to make. Such a rule, however, would not answer for Mīr Qāsim’s troops (1760—1764), where there was not one single false muster, nor would it answer for Ḥaidar ‘Alī’s armies.” The admitted difference between recorded and actual numbers is emphazised by Khūshḥāl Chand’s expression, Berlin Ms. 495, fol. 1091a, *Maujūdī, nah kāghazī*, “actually present, not merely on paper”, used in reference to the force brought to Dihlī by Burhān-ul-mulk at the time of Nādir Shāh’s invasion.