Warfare in Pre-British India - 1500BCE to 1740CE

Kaushik Roy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317586913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book presents a comprehensive survey of warfare in India up to the point where the British began to dominate the sub-continent. It discusses issues such as how far was the relatively bloodless nature of pre-British Indian warfare the product of stateless Indian society? How far did technology determine the dynamics of warfare in India? Did warfare in this period have a particular Indian nature and was it ritualistic? The book considers land warfare including sieges, naval warfare, the impact of horses, elephants and gunpowder, and the differences made by the arrival of Muslim rulers and by the influx of other foreign influences and techniques. The book concludes by arguing that the presence of standing professional armies supported by centralised bureaucratic states have been underemphasised in the history of India.

1 From tribe to kingdom

Chariots and transformation of warfare in South Asia, 1500–300 BCE

Reconstruction of ancient Indian warfare is possible for the period starting with the advent of the Aryans into the Indian subcontinent roughly around 1200 BCE.¹ The Aryans had three trump cards over the indigenous inhabitants of the subcontinent. They possessed horses, iron implements and chariots. These three elements fused together to generate an RMA which in turn formed a decisive military system. Gradually, the war-chariot-centric military organization under the Aryans spread its sway over the whole of the landmass south of the Himalayas and dominated South Asian landscape for about one thousand years. This chapter traces the trajectory of the Military Transformation initiated by the war chariots. However, the impact of chariots in different parts of the South Asian land mass was differential as their effectiveness was mediated by culture and physical geography. Now, let us have a glance into the state of warfare in the subcontinent before the advent of the Aryans.

Organized violence in pre-Aryan India

For reconstructing warfare in the pre-Aryan era, we lack written sources. The script of Indus Civilization of the pre-Aryan era is still undeciphered, and scholars have to depend mainly on archaeological sources. The archaeologists still debate about the dates regarding the evolution of pre-historic settlements in Asia. In the arid Helmand river basin, agriculture had begun before 4000 BCE. In the pre-state era, the implements for agriculture and weapons for warfare were more or less similar. The socket-hole axe, which was used for both agriculture and warfare, had originated in Mesopotamia around 4000 BCE. The diffusion of the socket-hole axe from Mesopotamia to western Persia/Iran occurred around 3000 BCE and this piece of technology reached the Helmand region in around 2600 BCE.²

Around 3000/2500 BCE, further east of Helmand region, near the River Indus an urban civilization later termed as the Indus Valley Civilization emerged. The alluvial plains of the great rivers facilitated the spread of agriculture and the emergence of sophisticated urban cultures in Mesopotamia in the Tigris-Euphrates region (around 3500 BCE), Nile Valley (3200 BCE) and Indus Valley (2800 BCE). Whether the Indus Civilization was of indigenous origin or influenced by the Helmand culture is an open question. The earliest Neolithic (New Stone Age) settlement in South Asia was at Mehrgarh (North-East Baluchistan, now in Pakistan) and could be dated to around 7000 BCE. With the help of stone tools, the settlers at Mehrgarh were able to cultivate rice, wheat and barley.³ Cotton cultivation which started at Mehrgarh around 4000 BCE, spread to the Upper Indus region.⁴

The Indus Valley Civilization was a Bronze Age Civilization. In around 6000 BCE, the Neolithic people in Anatolia experimented with copper. The bronze age proper started around 4000 BCE.⁵ The art of mixing tin and copper for making bronze (which is harder than pure copper and hence better suited for making weapons and agricultural as well as hunting implements) reached the Indus Valley roughly around 3000 BCE.⁶ The Indus Valley people practised tin and antimony alloying. They were able to extract pure copper (up to 99 per cent) from chalcopyrites.⁷ The Indus Civilization at its height covered roughly 700,000 square kilometres. The population of this region was estimated between 1 and 5 million. The two principal cities of this Civilization were Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. These two cities had about 150,000 people. Total urban population of the Indus Valley Civilization came to about 250,000 persons.⁸ As a point of comparison, in around 3000 BCE, the population of Egypt was 1 million.⁹ The average population density in the Indus Valley was about six persons per square kilometre.¹⁰

The Indus Valley Civilization domesticated sheep, goats, humped cattle, water buffaloes and elephants.¹¹ Domestication of animals and expansion of agriculture resulted in spread of sedentary settlements, which in turn gave rise to fortifications of the human settlements during the Neolithic era. The fortifications were geared to provide protection to the stored agricultural surplus as well as the domesticated animals. One of the famous Neolithic fortified settlements was Jericho. Between 8350 BCE and 7350 BCE, Jericho was surrounded by a 10-feet-thick and 13-feet-high wall. The wall probably enclosed some 765 yards. The art of fortification became sophisticated with time. Around 4500 BCE, at Yalangach in the Transcaspian Lowlands, the walls had outward-facing round towers.¹²

Back in the Indus Valley, one of the cities named Kalibangan was enclosed by a wall strengthened with rectangular towers at the corners. Further, the wall had several gates which in turn were flanked with guardrooms. Both at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the citadels were surrounded by walls constructed with mud and baked bricks.¹³ The citadel in Harappa was shaped like a parallelogram.¹⁴ Other sites in the Indus Valley like Banavali had square towers.¹⁵ Square and rectangular towers, gates with guardrooms and walls constructed with mud and baked bricks were legacies of the Indus Valley which were utilized by the fortification engineers of South Asia from 300 BCE onwards.

As regards weapons, stone arrow heads, along with arrows made of bronze and copper have been found in the various Indus sites. The arrow heads were flat and thin with long narrow barbs.¹⁶ Bows were invented in Eurasia at least 20,000 years ago by the hunter-gatherers.¹⁷ Knives and daggers of copper have also been unearthed. The handles of these weapons were made of wood which was split for the insertion of the tangs and the blades. Spear heads, which were double edged and pointed (average length of each varied between three and four inches), made of copper were also excavated. Around 2500 BCE, swords were used. In the Indus Valley sites, double-edged heavy swords were unearthed. Bronze blades increased penetrating power compared with stone or copper blades. In addition, mace heads of stone, copper and bronze were also found at Harappa and Chanhu-Daro. Clay bullets (each weighed about six ounces) for use by slingers have also been found.¹⁸ It goes without saying that these weapons were also used for hunting purposes.

The weapons of war along with the art of fortification probably spread from Anatolia to Mesopotamia, then to Persia and finally to the Indus region. Diffusion occurred through the medium of immigrants and merchants. Rather than overland merchants, probably sea-borne commerce aided the diffusion of techniques from the Middle East to the western fringes of South Asia. We have evidence of sea-borne commerce between Mesopotamia and the Indus Civilization. At Lothal (now in Gujarat), 720 kilometres south-east of Mohenjo-Daro, besides the ruin of an urban settlement, a brick dockyard was excavated. It was connected with the Gulf of Cambay by a channel. Further west, Sutkagen-Dor, 48 kilometres from the Arabian Sea in the Makran Coast (now in Pakistan), was a sea port.¹⁹

We have no solid data about the political system prevalent in the Indus Valley Civilization. Probably no super state existed. Some speculate that the cities were ruled by the priests and large landowners. Each city was probably independent like a polis. From around 1500 BCE, the Indus Valley Civilization started declining. We lack data about the organization of the defense force (if any) maintained by the Indus Valley cities. The hunter-gatherers’ ‘primitive warfare’ was comprised of raids and ambushes rather than pitched battles.²⁰ We could speculate that the Indus cities used their defensive fortifications and close-quarter hunting/combat weapons to ward off raids and ambushes by inhabitants of the countryside. Lots of ink has been poured over the issue of decline. Some scholars harp that desiccation of the Indus Valley, flood due to climate change and man-made inundations, etc., resulted in the collapse of the Civilization. The traditional view was that the Indus Valley Civilization collapsed due to the attack by the incoming Aryans.²¹ Archaeological excavations in the various Indus Valley sites have yielded toy ox carts with solid wheels but no trace of horse-drawn chariots with spoked wheels, which find frequent mention in the Vedic literature generated by the Aryans²²

Warfare in the Vedic period

Who were the Aryans? At present, it is a politically incorrect question to ask in India. Till the 1970s, the view within India was that the Aryans were part of the Indo-European race which originated in South Russia and the Kirghiz steppe. The original homeland of the Indo-Europeans is also vigorously debated. For some scholars, the Indo-Europeans’ original homeland was the Baltic regions (modern Lithuania, Poland and East Germany).²³ One branch of the Aryans known as the Indo-Iranians moved eastwards into Iran and a sub-branch of them called Indo-Aryans moved into India. While entering India, they destroyed the Dravidian Indus Valley Civilization. From the 1980s, the dominant view pushed by Liberal Marxist historians within the Indian academic circuit is that the Aryans did not constitute a race, but a language group. For reasons of political sensitiveness, historians assert that the Aryans did not launch any large-scale invasion when they entered the subcontinent. Rather, the Aryan language group slowly absorbed and assimilated the non-Aryan speakers of North-West and North India.

It would be illogical to claim that no fighting occurred between the two ‘language’ groups. Even if we discount the idea of large-scale campaigns between the Aryans and the non-Aryans, we cannot do away with the possibility of sporadic small-scale confrontations between the Aryans and pre-Aryan inhabitants of the subcontinent. Even if an Aryan invasion occurred, it was no blitzkrieg. The Aryans took about 700 years (1200 BCE till 500 BCE) to establish control over Brahmavarta and Aryavar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• List of maps
• Introduction: Warfare in pre-modern South Asia in the Eurasian context: 1500 BCE–1700 CE
• 1 From tribe to kingdom: Chariots and transformation of warfare in South Asia, 1500–300 BCE
• 2 Theory and practice of warfare in the Maurya and Gupta Empires: 300 BCE–500 CE
• 3 Theory and practice of warfare from the post-Gupta era to the beginning of Islamic intrusion in South Asia: c.500–1000 CE
• 4 Horses and government under the sultans: 700–1500 CE
• 5 Horses, guns and warfare in South Asia: 1500–1740 CE
• 6 Naval warfare in pre-modern South Asia
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Size of armies in pre-British India
• Appendix B: Battles and sieges of pre-modern India
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index