Artillery

If the 16th century Persian historian Mohammed Kasim Ferishta is to be believed, gunpowder artillery appeared in India at a relatively early date. He says that in 1365/6 Sultan Mohammed Shah Bahmani ‘despatched orders asking for cannon and darb-zan [light guns, firing shot of about 40 lbs in the 16th century] from all his territories. He collected a train of artillery, which had not been employed by the Moslems of the Deccan before then. He established a separate department for it under Muqarrab Khan, son of Safdar Khan of Seistan, who was a trusted nobleman, attaching to him Rumis and Farangis [i. e., Turks and Europeans] acquainted with the art of gunnery.’ Other gunners were apparently provided by Persians, Abyssinians and Arabs. In his next battle against the army of Vijayanagar some months later Muqarrab’s new artillery corps proved its worth, disorganising the Hindus so that a decisive cavalry charge was able to sweep them from the field.

It is debatable whether or not Ferishta’s account, based on the ‘Tuhfat-ul-Muslimin’, is trustworthy, but many modern authorities tend to accept that in the Deccan at least artillery was in limited use by the end of the 14th century. From other sources we know that it was introduced into Kashmir in 1423, and into Bengal by the late-15th century. The sultan of Gujarat certainly fielded artillery against Malwa in 1422, attaining military supremacy over all his neighbours through his use of‘organised artillery’; by 1482 Gujarat was employing cannon and handguns shipboard too, as against the pirates of Bulsar. As we have seen, handguns also occur in Nikitin’s survey of the Bahmani forces in the 1470s, where it seems from several passages that he considered them to be the principal weapon of the elephant crews.

Other firearms often found in use in India comprised grenades, fireworks and rockets, the last two doubtless having been introduced at some stage from China. Several sources record the sultan’s elephants at Delhi to have been crewed or accompanied by ra’d-andaz (grenadiers), atash-baz (throwers of fireworks) and takhsh-andaz (firers of rockets), though none refer to what effect, if any, these had on Tamerlane’s army. The fireworks at least, and possibly the rockets, were intended principally to scare the enemy’s horses.

Older forms of artillery, i. e. the manjaniq (trebuchet) and arrada (ballista) are also often referred to in contemporary sources, sometimes used on the battlefield as well as in attacks on and the defence of fortresses, as by Mohammed Shah Bahmani at the Battle of Telingana in 1361.