DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

10.7 ] CAUSES OF BOURGEOIS MILITARY SUPERIORITY 397
the greatest trading organization took over the state.
On the military level, the difference between the feudal and
bourgeois modes was reflected in better equipment, far superior
loyalty, efficiency, discipline, and morale, for reasons that are known
but rarely emphasized. The British conquered and held the country
with an Indian army, paid from India’s resources. Indian feudal armies
of the 17th and 18th centuries often hired European drill-sergeants and
artillery experts. The crucial difference was that the British fed their
men properly and paid all their soldiers regularly in cash every month,
in war and peace, without peculation by the pay-clerks, or
withholding by the commanders. The Frenchman Tavernier (Travels in
India, trans. V. Ball, 2 vol. London 1889), a feudal
*
noble but also a jewel-merchant wrote :
“ One hundred of our European Soldiers would scarcely have any difficulty in
vanquishing 1000 of these Indian soldiers (of Aurangzeb’s bodyguard); but it is true on
the other hand, that they would have much difficulty in accustoming themselves to so
abstemious a life as theirs. For the horseman as well as infantry soldier supports himself
with a little flour kneaded with water and black sugar, of which they make small balls;
and in the evening, whenever they have the necessaries, they make khichri, which
consists of rice cooked with a grain of the above name (sic) in water with a little salt.
When eating it, they first dip the ends, of their fingers in melted butter, and such is the
ordinary food of both soldiers and poor people. To which it should be added that the
heat would kill our soldiers, who would be unable to remain in the sun throughout the
day as these Indians do.” (1.390)... “On the llth September all the Frank gunners went
to the Nawab’s tent (Mir Jumla, after the siege of Gandikot) crying out that they had not
been paid the four month’s wages that had been promised, and that if they were not
paid they would go to take service elsewhere, upon which the Nawab put them off till
the following day. On the 12th, the gunners not having omitted to repair to the tent of
the Nawab, he ordered them to be paid for three months, and promised them at the
close of the current month to pay the fourth. They had no sooner received this money
than they treated one another, and the balandines (dancing girls) carried off more-than
half of it.” (1.228-9).
With the later Peshwas, (as with any ruler in later feudalism
from below) the reaction to a general’s victories was to stop further
supplies lest he become too powerful. The Sikh rulers after Ranjit
Singh distrusted their followers so completely that they regularly