Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 38, ISBN 978-0-521-46548-9.
«As Dirk Kolff has argued, it was privileged, if not initially inspired, only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Mughal perceptions of Rajputs which, in a pre-form of orientalism, took patrilineal descent as the basis for Rajput social Organization and consequently as the basis for their political inclusion into the empire. Prior to the Mughals, the term 'Rajput' was equally an open-ended, generic name applied to any ‘"horse soldier", "trooper", or "headman of a village"’ regardless of parentage, who achieved his status through his personal ability to establish a wide network of supporters through his bhaibandh (lit. 'ie or bond of brothers'; that is, close collateral relations by male blood) or by means of naukari (military service to a more powerful overlord) and sagai (alliance through marriage). Thus the language of kinship remained nonetheless strong in this alternative construction of Rajput identity but collateral and affinal bonds were stressed rather than those of descent. During the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-»