Bandagī and Naukarī

Abstract

This chapter offers a long-term history of relations of military servitude in north and eastern India from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, offering correctives and elaborations of D.H.A. Kolff’s reading of the fifteenth-century military labour market. The chapter argues that we should pay attention to the political trajectories of déracinés, those who were slaves or not born to privilege, as they emerged from natal alienation and began to establish links with new and sometimes non-Muslim allies. This was a time when texts for aspiring elites came to be produced, such as Vidyapati’s Puruṣa parīkṣā, and groups such as the Afghans negotiated transitions between slavery and military service. By foregrounding continuities between the pre- and post-Timur periods, the chapter calls attention to emic terminology and its subtle transformations.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.