It was only from the sixteenth century that the word ‘Rajput’ became securely associated with territorially based, closed clans claiming deep genealogical roots and nurturing a warrior ethos of heroism and martyrdom.55 In inscriptions from western and central India dating from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, the Sanskrit term rajaputra, ‘a king’s son’, appears simply as a title indicating a rank or official position, but not one that was inheritable by subsequent generations or associated with martial heroism.56 In those earlier centuries, kings received military service from subordinate chieftains, called ranakas or thakuras, in return for gifts of land that the latter gave to their own cavalry commanders, called rautas, a term derived from rajaputra. In Persian sources dating to the early thirteenth century these commanders are called rawat, also derived from rajaputra.57 In the early fifteenth century, the label ‘Rajput’ was still associated with successful military service performed by men who had taken up soldiering on behalf of a deserving king. But by the end of that century, the word was well on the way to referencing entire aristocratic lineages bearing a martial ethos of courage, heroism and martyrdom. Such lineages included the Chauhans of Ajmer, the Tomaras of Delhi, the Gahadavalas of Kanauj and the Chandelas of Kalinjar.
An early phase in the crystallization of Rajput identities is seen in the career of a fourteenth-century soldier known as Muhammad Shah in Persian sources and Mahimasahi in Sanskrit sources.58 Revealing the fluidity of social categories and the ease with which men could move between them, an early-fifteenth-century Sanskrit text, the Hammira-Mahakavya, portrays Muhammad Shah/Mahimasahi as transitioning from an ethnic Mongol, to an Indian Muslim, and finally to a kshatriya warrior. Recruited from Central Asia, he joined the Delhi sultanate service in the late thirteenth century and participated in that state’s successful invasion of Gujarat in 1299. But when he and other Mongol retainers unsuccessfully rebelled against their commanding officers in the course of this campaign, they took refuge in the fabled fort of Ranthambhor in eastern Rajasthan, then controlled by Hammira, the last ruler of the Chauhan lineage. In March 1301 the sultan of Delhi, ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji, besieged this fort, and when its defenders foresaw their inevitable doom Muhammad Shah entered his quarters inside the fort, massacred his entire family, and gallantly sallied forth against the sultan’s forces with the intent of sacrificing his life in one final, desperate struggle. Afterwards, ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji discovered his former retainer lying wounded on the battlefield. Although the sultan offered to have his wounds healed if he would once again pledge loyalty to Delhi, Muhammad Shah refused, declaring instead his devotion to the Chauhan cause, whereupon he was executed.
Although the Sanskrit text identifies Muhammad Shah as a kshatriya and not a Rajput, his actions – exhibiting loyalty, courage and heroic martyrdom – were those that would later be acknowledged as characteristically Rajput. By killing off his own family when the defenders at Ranthambhor found their cause to be doomed, Muhammad Shah engaged in the ritual of jauhar – the destruction of elite women in order to prevent their falling into enemy hands. Only then did he hurl himself before the Delhi sultanate’s overwhelming force, expecting certain death. Composed in the early fifteenth century, about a century after the events it describes, the Hammira-Mahakavya thus appears to capture a moment when the idea of Rajput was evolving. The early-modern and modern ideology of martial heroism and martyrdom was clearly already in place, even if the term rajaputra was still an open social category, accessible even to an outsider such as Muhammad Shah, and not yet a closed, kin-based one. The career of Muhammad Shah as related in the Hammira-Mahakavya typifies the sort of accounts that circulated orally in fifteenth-century western India and celebrated the heroic exploits of single individuals. In the following century bards patronized by chieftains aspiring to be kings would weave such personal stories into connected narratives and genealogies that served to bind together members of whole clans. When such clans were mapped on to territory as kingdoms, those genealogies provided historical depth for ruling houses that could then trace their origins back to common founder-heroes. At that point, the ideology of martial prowess and martyrdom associated with earlier warrior-heroes such as Muhammad Shah was projected on to the entire clan, which in turn would self-identify as Rajput.
Several factors appear to have shaped this development, one of which was military in nature. After Timur left India, intensified conflict on India’s fragmented political chessboard created greater demands for military labour. Such demands were met by the emergence of an India-wide military labour market, which became a prominent feature of South Asia’s social landscape from at least the fifteenth century until the early nineteenth, when British colonial rulers demilitarized Indian society.59 Since no state during India’s long fifteenth century could ever achieve a monopoly of armed force, rulers were uneasily aware that armed villagers were as free to become rebels as they were to be recruited into their own military forces.60 Consequently, states and warlords alike competed for access to the countryside’s vast reservoir of armed peasants.61 They were normally recruited on an ad hoc, seasonal basis, with warrior–villagers typically spending part of the year in military service and the remainder working the fields in their home villages. Middlemen or entrepreneurs called jama‘dars negotiated deals that were agreeable both to those who hired the mercenaries and to the local chiefs, or zamindars, who had access to those labour pools. From the standpoint of the recruits themselves – especially those living along the economic margins – serving a distant warlord or sovereign seasonally was a prudent survival strategy, since such service provided income, if only a meagre one, for themselves and their families. Pre-colonial India thus teemed with armed recruits roaming the countryside with their middlemen or commanders, responding to the shifting supply and demand of the military labour market.
From the late fifteenth century rulers of the Jaunpur sultanate (1394–1483) had taken many peasant-soldiers of the eastern Gangetic plain into their armed forces. But in 1483, when the Lodi sultans of Delhi extinguished the Jaunpur regime and annexed its former territory, Jaunpur’s former recruits were forced to find military service further afield and deeper in India’s interior, especially in Malwa. These men were employed by warlords who, based in strongholds such as Raisen (near Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh), supplied them to emergent states or existing kingdoms in Rajasthan or Malwa. There they were known as ‘Purbiya Rajputs’, a name indicating their origins in the eastern Gangetic plain, or ‘Purbiya’. Notably, in the fluid social context of India’s long fifteenth century, terms such as ‘Rajput’ or ‘Afghan’ had not yet become fixed ethnic identities, but merely indicated one’s military affiliation. Men adopted the cultural identity associated with the particular military tradition into which they had been integrated, so that, in this instance, ‘Purbiyas’ recruited by brokers and employers who identified themselves as Rajputs became ‘Purbiya Rajputs’. In this way, the military labour market itself was a major generator of ethnic identities.62
Rajput status was also claimed by martial clans of pastoral nomads in northern and western India as those clans evolved into royal lineages and became displaced on to territories as petty states. This could be a very long process, taking several centuries to complete. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, nomadic clans steadily moved within proximity of settled and socially stratified agrarian realms with a large class of peasant cultivators at their base, and royal courts, Brahmin priests and state-sponsored temples at their apex. In northern Gujarat and Saurashtra martial pastoralists migrating from the north and west settled down and carved out agrarian territories over which they claimed sovereign authority. Their pastoralist kinship organization then weakened as their chiefs shed aspects of their pastoralist pasts, adopted prestigious titles, acquired courts, styled themselves kings and claimed patrilineal lines of descent linked to prestigious lineages.
In Gujarat, as in Rajasthan, genealogy proved essential for making such claims. To this end, local bards composed ballads or chronicles that presented their patrons as ideal warriors who protected Brahmins, cows and vassals, as opposed to the livestock-herding chieftains that they actually were, or had once been. As people who created and preserved the genealogies, local bards therefore played critical roles in brokering for their clients socio-cultural transitions to a claimed Rajput status.63 A similar thing was happening in the Thar Desert region, where from the fourteenth century onwards mobile pastoral groups gradually evolved into landed, sedentary and agrarian clans. Once again, it was bards and poets, patronized by little kings, who transformed a clan’s ancestors from celebrated cattle-herders or cattle-rustlers to celebrated protectors of cattle-herding communities.64 The difference was subtle but critical, since such revised narratives retained an echo of a pastoral nomadic past while repositioning a clan’s dynastic founder from pastoralist to non-pastoralist. The term ‘Rajput’, in short, had become a prestigious title available for adoption by upwardly mobile clans in the process of becoming sedentary.65
By one mechanism or another, a process of ‘Rajputization’ occurred in new states that emerged from the turmoil following Timur’s invasion of 1398, especially in Gujarat, Malwa and Rajasthan.