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Mud forts

Source: TW

One of my biggest historical pet peeves is how little we appreciate mud forts. There is a widespread assumption that they were inferior to stone forts, but they often weren’t. Well-built earthen ramparts could absorb the impact of siege engines better than masonry. Describing Warangal’s outer mud fortification, Amir Khusrau wrote that it was “so strong that a spear of steel could not pierce it; and if a ball from a western catapult were to strike against it, it would rebound like a nut with which children play.”

Across Northern India, especially the Ganga plains, mud forts were the norm rather than the exception. With good building stone scarce and expensive, earth, often reinforced with timber and brick, became the principal material of fortification from the Janapada period onwards. The massive earthen ramparts of ancient Kaushambi, many of which still survive, shows how effective these earthwork fortifications were.

Mud forts did not disappear with gunpowder. They were cheap to build, easy to repair, and often absorbed cannon fire better than masonry. Mughal chroniclers and later East India Company officials describe the Gangetic countryside as dotted with countless mud forts. These were the strongholds that enabled the unruly and often ungovernable peasantry to resist the attempts of first the Mughals and later the East India Company to control and tax them.