INDIA

The armies of Delhi and its assorted successor states employed the traditional Moslem battle-formation, comprised of centre {qul or qalb), left-wing (jaranghar or maisarah), right wing {baranghar or maimanah).

Vanguard (harawal) and rearguard {chandwal), plus advance flank units (jinah, or ‘wings’) and an advance reserve (iltimish) on the flanks of the centre. The 3 principal divisions, i. e. the centre, left and right, seem to have occasionally been of equal strength, but normally the centre was the strongest since this is where the sultan was invariably to be found. Also in the centre, ahead of the sultan, would be the army’s war-elephants, followed and preceded by infantry, the job of those preceding them being recorded by al-’Umari as ‘to attack the sawars of the enemy in order to make way for the elephants. They hamstring their horses with swords and then the archers in the towers [of the elephants] shoot arrows from the rear and put the rival sawars to flight. Thereafter the sawars of the right and left wings encircle the rival army and fight round the elephants and in the back of them. As a result the rival army does not find room to break through and fight.’ The ‘Adab-u’l-Muluk’ recommends that the infantry should be drawn up in 4 lines, with gaps for their cavalry to sally out. For all that the cavalry were more highly regarded, in the 15th century Nikitin too observed that in battle ‘the men on foot are sent first’, though clearly it was the cavalry who normally decided the outcome.

Clearly elephants were not expected to break through the enemy’s ranks unsupported (though they sometimes did), and it is readily apparent from the sources that they were not particularly employed because they gave any kind of tactical advantage at all, but rather more because they lent pomp and prestige to an army. Indeed, Indian claims that a single elephant was as effective in battle as 500 horsemen were sadly misplaced, since they could be so easily neutralised by the simple expedient of killing their mahouts. Their psychological effect, however, could be considerable; Tamerlane himself wrote in 1398 how ‘it had been constantly dinned into the ears of my soldiers that the chief reliance of the armies of India was on their mighty elephants; that these animals, in complete armour, marched into battle in front of their forces, and that arrows and swords were of no use against them; that in height and bulk they were like small mountains, and their strength was such that at a given signal they could tear up great trees and knock down strongly-built walls; that on the battlefield they could take up a horse and his rider with their trunks and hurl them into the air.’ In the ensuing battle, however, the Timurids, like most of those before them who had ever been confronted by elephants, ‘brought the elephant drivers to the ground with their arrows and killed them’ before attacking and wounding the elephants with their swords; Ferishta adds that ‘these unwieldy beasts, deprived of their mahouts, fled to the rear, and communicated confusion to their own ranks’ (i. e. rendered many of their own side two-dimensional).

Certainly few of the elephants themselves were ever killed, because of their armour, their thick hides and their own intelligence (they sometimes threw off their drivers and ran for it); Simon Digby, in his War-horse and Elephant in the Dehli Sultanate, records that the largest number of elephants known to have been killed in battle in the mediaeval era was 30, out of 200, at Kill in 1299, this high figure resulting from the Delhi army having been completely surrounded by the Mongols. More usually only 2 or 3 elephants were killed in a battle, though it was not uncommon for large numbers to be captured; in 1354, for instance, of the 50 elephants fielded against Firuz Shah Tughluq by the sultan of Bengal, 3 were killed and 47 taken captive. If wounded they would normally flee (Barbosa says ‘they take to flight at once, and overthrow one another, even those of their own side’), though Clavijo, who saw Tamerlane’s elephants (captured from the sultan of Delhi), wrote that ‘when they are themselves wounded, they become more fierce, rush about more wildly and fight better.’ Varthema reported that ‘if at any time they are put to flight it is impossible to restrain them’.

As already noted, the elephants were usually positioned in front of the sultan’s position in the centre, but they could also be found ahead of the wing divisions too — ’Islami records 200 to have been positioned on the wings at the Battle of Kill in 1299, while descriptions of Firuz Shah’s campaigns of 1354 and 1362 state that his forces were drawn up ‘in 3 divisions, a centre and two wings. The elephants were divided among the 3 divisions.’ In Hindu armies it was even possible to find them all positioned on one or other wing — Barbosa records of the king of Vijayanagar that his elephants were ‘well drawn up in line on the right before him’. They might not always have been preceded by infantry either, since it is apparent that they sometimes actually charged the enemy (in ‘a fast shuffle of about 15 miles an hour’), under which circumstances it would not have been practical to place one’s own infantry before them.

Hindu tactics concentrated on archery, skirmishing and the use of elephants, the last apparently being a hindrance more than a help since the Moslems more often than not seem to have succeeded in stampeding them back through their own lines by the use of fireworks or by charging them with cavalry (whose horses were accustomed to them through the presence of elephants in their own armies; not so Tamerlane’s horses, which ‘were afraid of the elephants and would not advance’). Indian historian S. T. Day has written that throughout this period ‘the elephant — the so-called living tank of Rajput armed forces — remained the cause of their defeats, and yet they do not appear to have thought of abandoning the animal or employing it in such a manner as would make it less dangerous to their own armies.’ The cavalry of the Hindus was similarly rather unimpressive in the field, being outclassed by the Moslems, who almost invariably scattered them; given the chance, their most characteristic battlefield tactic was to charge headlong towards the enemy’s front and then suddenly wheel and fall unexpectedly on his flanks instead.