Culture, Conflict and the Military in Colonial South Asia

Kaushik Roy, Gavin Rand

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351584524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book offers diverse and original perspectives on South Asia's imperial military history. Unlike prevailing studies, the chapters in the volume emphasize both the vital role of culture in framing imperial military practice and the multiple cultural effects of colonial military service and engagements. The volume spans from the early East India Company period through to the Second World War and India's independence, exploring themes such as the military in the field and at leisure, as well as examining the effects of imperial deployments in South Asia and across the British Empire. Drawing extensively on new archival research, the book integrates previously disparate accounts of imperial military history and raises new questions about culture and operational practice in the colonial Indian Army.

This work will be of interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, war and strategic studies, military history, the British Empire, as well as politics and international relations.

1 The Indian Army

A historiographical reflection

Ian F. W. Beckett

The historiography of the army in British India has followed, as might be expected, the more general development of military history both in Britain and elsewhere. The more traditional ‘drum and trumpet’ school of military history, with an emphasis upon decisive battles and great commanders, held the field until the second half of the twentieth century. There was also an undeniable air of imperial triumphalism of the ‘Deeds That Won the Empire’ variety, itself an 1897 title by an Australian Methodist minister, W. H. Fitchett, though many of the ‘drum and trumpet’ authors were former soldiers. The traditional approach was supplanted at least in academe by the ‘war and society’ school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the 1980s and 1990s this was accepted as the ‘new’ military history, in which historians were rather more interested in the impact of war upon states, societies, institutions and individuals. It is hardly ‘new’ any longer, and military historians have increasingly drawn upon more recent approaches such as those of cultural historians, and also non-historical methodologies. In many respects, the ‘agrarian’, ‘subaltern’ and ‘cultural’ studies familiar to those who specialize in South Asian history preceded and anticipated this development among Western military historians. What follows, therefore, is an attempt by a non-specialist in South Asian history, though one whose work has occasionally trespassed on the Indian Army, to survey the broad development of the historiography. It is acknowledged that it draws largely on British and North American publications and theses, and that there will be additional South Asian publications and theses that have not come to the author’s notice.

Beginning with the traditional approach, there is no shortage of standard early histories such as John Williams’s splendidly titled An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Native Infantry: From Its First Formation in 1757, to 1796 When the Present Regulations Took Place, Together with a Detail of the Services on which the Several Battalions Have Been Employed (1817). The principal later histories are Arthur Broome, History of the Rise and Progress of the Bengal Army (1850); William Wilson, History of the Madras Army (1882); F. G. Cardew, Sketch of the Services of the Bengal Native Army: To the Year 1895 (1903); and Sir Patrick Cadell, A History of the Bombay Army (1938). Too often perhaps, early histories are dismissed when their authors trawled a great deal of primary documentation, some of which may have been lost subsequently.

Perhaps deserving of particular mention as major descriptive works in the great narrative tradition of William Napier’s account of the Peninsular War are John Kaye’s three-volume History of the Sepoy War (1864–67), and Colonel George Malleson’s completion and expansion of Kaye, the six-volume History of the Indian Mutiny (1878–80). Kaye was Secretary of the India Office Political and Secret Department until 1874. He had already written a three-volume history of the First Afghan War, History of the War in Afghanistan (1857–58). Malleson, who had held a number of posts in civilian administration in India, retired from the army in 1877. He also penned biographies of both Robert Clive and Warren Hastings. The work of Kaye and Malleson has been described by P.J.O. Taylor in his valuable A Companion to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (1996), as ‘verbose all-embracing histories: authoritative and dogmatic; entirely noble in sentiment, entirely British in attitude and sentiment’.¹ Another prolific author, whose work is not without some merit, however, was Sir George MacMunn, a former quartermaster general in India. The Romance of the Indian Frontiers (1931), for example, is at least indicative of a certain imperial mindset, not least in its pen portraits of frontier tribes, but The Armies of India (1912) and The Martial Races of India (1933) – both illustrated with the fine paintings of A. C. Lovat – have sociological interest. Of course, there is also the plethora of traditional regimental histories such as P. R. Innes, The History of the Bengal European Regiment now the Madras Fusiliers, and How It Helped to Win India (1885), or George Younghusband, The Story of the Guides (1908).

Turning to the modern historiography, there are a number of useful general works, beginning with Kaushik Roy, The Oxford Companion to Modern Warfare in India (2009). Other than Richard Holmes, Sahib (2005), the British – as opposed to the Indian – Army in India has been generally neglected, though it is touched upon in Tony Heathcote, The Military in British India: The Development of British Land Forces in South Asia, 1600–1947 (1995), and Heathcote’s The Indian Army: The Garrison of British Imperial India, 1822–1922 (1974). Heathcote also contributes to the valuable essays collected in Alan J Guy and Peter Boyden (eds.), Soldiers of the Raj: The Indian Army, 1600–1947 (1997), based on a major exhibition at the National Army Museum. Other contributors include Brian Robson, G. J. Bryant, Douglas Peers, Randolf Cooper, Mark Jacobsen and S. L. Menezes. The volume also gives full coverage to the uniforms and weaponry of the Indian Army. Douglas Peers, Erica Wald and Raffi Gregorian, however, have published essays on vice, health and discipline as they affected British troops.²

In terms of other general histories, there are popular histories of the Indian Army by Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (1974), and S. L. Menezes, Fidelity and Honour: The Indian Army from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century (1993). More recent academic interpretations can be found in Partha Sarathi Gupta and Anirudh Deshpande (eds.), The British Raj and its Indian Armed Forces, 1857–1939 (2002); Daniel Marston and Chandra Sundaram (eds.), A Military History of India and South East Asia: From the East India Company to the Nuclear Era (2007); and Kaushik Roy (ed.), War and Society in Colonial India, 1807–1945 (2006). Each has a range of useful essays. Gupta and Deshpande, for example, have essays by Chandar Sundaram and Gupta on considerations of Indianization between 1885 and 1891 and between 1918 and 1939 respectively, and Vivien Ashima Kaul looks at Bengal sepoys’ links with society between 1858 and 1895. Marston and Sundaram have a more straightforward chronological coverage and include essays by Sundaram on the Indian National Army and by Marston on partition. Roy is thematic in approach with sections on discipline, military culture and military effectiveness, and has an excellent introduction on the impact of ‘agrarian’, ‘subaltern’ and ‘cultural’ studies on the specific historiography of the Indian Army. Roy is also responsible for The Army in British India: From Colonial Warfare to Total War, 1857–1947 (2013), which is primarily concerned with operational and tactical developments. Stephen Peter Rosen, Societies and Military Power: India and Its Armies (1996), puts the British experience in the much longer context of Indian history from antiquity to the post-independence era, and the longer time frame is also presented in Pradeep Barua, The State at War in South Asia (2005). Whereas Rosen tends to follow the theme of inherent Western dominance then current in the historiography, Barua looks beyond societal and cultural interpretations to analyze the military effectiveness of successive Indian states. In some respects, however, this still leads back to greater European military prowess in later periods. The latest ‘long durée’ approach is Kaushik Roy, Military Manpower, Armies and Warfare in South Asia (2013), which argues that class and culture have shaped the composition of South Asian armies from antiquity to the present.

Rather less known perhaps are the details of the British presence in the East Indies and on the China coast, for which there are three studies by Alan Harfield, British and Indian Armies in the East Indies, 1685–1935 (1984); British and Indian Armies on the China Coast, 1785–1985 (1990); and Bencoolen: A History of the Honourable East India Company’s Garrison on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1685–1825 (1995).

To stay for the moment with the wider context of Indian military history, there was the assumption, as in Rosen, that what has been come to be characterized as the early modern ‘military revolution’ was essentially a phenomenon in the West, and explains Western dominance as Europe began to expand. It has become increasingly clear that, in expanding their empires, Europeans adapted to local conditions, including existing patterns of warfare. Concentration on North America had tended to mean that less attention has been paid to the consolidation of British power in India that followed from victory in the Seven Years War. Nonetheless, there has been an increasing body of scholarly work on warfare in India that leads back to the debate on the military revolution and the adaptation of European methods to the subcontinent. There are two useful introductions. Douglas Peers (ed.), Warfare and Empires: Contact and Conflict between European and Non-European Military and Maritime Forces and Cultures (1997), covers aspects of European military interaction with Africa, Asia and the Americas from 1415 onwards. Three are essays on the East India Company’s fortifications and army by Bruce Watson and Seema Alavi, and coverage of the Maratha Wars by John Pemble and Randolf Cooper. The equally wide-ranging Wayne Lee (ed.), Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World (2011), concentrates on evidence of European adaptation of indigenous military and diplomatic norms, with an essay on the ‘military revolution’ in India by Douglas Peers. In India in particular, it is apparent that the East India Company conformed to traditional means of raising armed forces within the existing military labour market, as suggested by Dirk Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market of Hindustan, 1450–1850 (1990).

There have also been a number of suggestive general surveys of the merging of Western and Indian systems in chapters or articles by Peter Marshall, Dirk Kolff, Bruce Lenman, Pradeep Barua, Jos Gommans, Stewart Gordon, Kaushik Roy and G. J. Bryant.³ Bryant’s unpublished 1975 thesis remains the most detailed coverage of the early period of the East India Company (EIC), albeit that much of it has now appeared in separate essays or chapters.⁴ Also unpublished is John Bourne’s 1978 thesis on the Company’s later civil and military patronage.⁵ Based on his earlier London thesis, there is also Amiya Barat, The Bengal Native Infantry: Its Organisation and Discipline, 1796–1852 (1962), as well as the solid narrative focus of James Lawford, Britain’s Army in India: From Its Origins to the Conquest of Bengal (1978).

The application of the concept of the fiscal-military state to India is considered in C. A. Bayly (ed.), Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (1998). It is also worth noting that the concept of the garrison state – the military-led mind-set – has been the subject of study in the Indian context. Douglas Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth Century India (1995), emphasises the relative precariousness of Company and British rule. Military concerns thus fuelled the First Burma War (1824–26) and the seizure of Bharatpur (1825–26).⁶ The theme of a garrison state has also been followed for the later period by Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (2005), who argues that the administration, political economy and society of the Punjab became highly militarized through the army’s dependence on recruits from the area.

Turning now more to the chronology, the developing relationship between the East India Company and native...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Indian Army: a historiographical reflection
• 2 Sepoys and sebundies: the role of regular and paramilitary forces in the construction of colonialism in Bengal, c. 1765–c. 1820
• 3 Intelligence and strategic culture: alternative perspectives on the first British invasion of Afghanistan
• 4 ‘At Ease, Soldier’: social life in the cantonment
• 5 ‘The blind, brutal, British public’s bestial thirst for blood’: archive, memory and W. H. Russell’s (re)making of the Indian Mutiny
• 6 From the Black Mountain to Waziristan: culture and combat on the North-West Frontier
• 7 Deciphering the Maizar military tribunal, 1897: civil–military tensions and Pukhtun resistance on the North-West Frontier of British India
• 8 The Indian Army in defeat: Malaya, 1941–2
• 9 Churchill, the Indian Army and The Second World War
• 10 War and Indian military institutions: the emergence of the Indian Military Academy
• 11 ‘Home’ front: Indian soldiers and civilians in Britain, 1939–45
• Index