Need for greater historical accuracy for Indian Army Lists

[Hari72]

Or perhaps it's an artistic convention to sometimes depict barded horses.It isn't a real barded horses?

[newbiesoldat]

Question - on the Hoysala friezes and elsewhere, you often see what appear to be unarmored riders on barded horses. I assume it's an artistic convention to sometimes depict warriors without armor that they would normally wear in battle, as the Greeks sometimes did?

To be honest, it is difficult to say, different scholars have different opinions.

Indian texts do talk about a wide variety of armors, but the sculptures are mostly shown unarmored, and in fact mostly bare chested though with jewels and martial accoutrements. Though I think the current consensus is that it was more of an artistic choice.

The Ghazvanid and later Ghurid and Sultanate accounts don't describe much of the Indian armors or weaponry. There are mentions of Indians wearing armor in passing, that's it. However, the accounts do mention the exceptions, what they found peculiar compared to their own sensibilities (Central Asian and Iranian sensibilities). So they recorded that a contingent of Khokhar tribesmen fought barefeet and bare headed, with no armor. So not wearing armor was probably the exception, since the Ghazvanid sources mention it as something noteworthy in Khokahrs. Apart from this the only reference to armor is made in the case of Assam in the far North East, which the Sultanate sources mistake as Tibet. Here they state that the armor and weapons were crude and made of bamboo mostly.

Based on all of the above things, the depiction of bare chested soldiers in Medieval Mainland India in sculptures was most probably artistic interpretation, otherwise we would have been told so in the Persian or other sources of the time, for example Marco Polo records that Tamil and Keralite Indians in the Far South only wore loin cloth and some other small vestments, and their extensive textile industry was mostly for export. Such an observation would have been made and recorded if the majority soldiers would have dressed like their majority sculptural counterparts.

There are a small number of sculptures that do show armored figures, some I have posted here, and the Indian texts mention some armors such as the Surtraka (Quilted Armor), Lohajalika (Iron-Net, mail armor basically), Kavacha (Cuirass), Varavana (Some sort of Anti Arrow Armor) and Kancuka (Long Coat coming to the knees). I think that for the Persianized Turks, this sort of armor would've seemed normal, comparable to their own, and so did not consider it worth reporting for any peculiarities.

[Nijis]

That interpretation of the texts makes sense. Thanks for the extensive answer!

[newbiesoldat]

Just adding a few representations of the Gupta period cavalry. Both are from around the early 5th century CE. One is a coin that depicts Emperor Kumaragupta slaying a rhinoceros, the other is plaque of a horseman who seems to be a mounted archer considering the quiver he is carrying. This should give some idea about the Gupta and Early Medieval North Indian Cavalry. One thing to note here is that these are quite different than the contemporaneous depictions of soldiers in Ajanta caves in the Deccan. Showing the difference in the army set up between the North and the South, with North Indian armies having more armored cavalry and horse archers.

vh9qm4vrxild1.jpeg (204.85 KiB) Viewed 980 times

Plaque_with_Galloping_Horse_and_Rider_Gupta_period_4-5th_century_Uttar_Pradesh_India.jpg (218.59 KiB) Viewed 980 times