The Military in British India

The Development of British Land Forces in South Asia 1600–1947

T. A. Heathcote, Ian F. W. Beckett

• Publisher: Pen & Sword
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783830640
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

T.A. Heathcotes study of the conflicts that established British rule in South Asia, and of the militarys position in the constitution of British India, is a classic work in the field. By placing these conflicts clearly in their local context, his account moves away from the Euro-centric approach of many writers on British imperial military history. It provides a greater understanding not only of the history of the British Indian Army but also of the Indian experience, which had such a formative an effect on the British Army itself. This new edition has been fully revised and given appropriate illustrations.

Chapter 1

India’s Military Heritage

The thread of military events has been woven into the robe of Indian history from the earliest recorded times. The most ancient literary source, the Rig-Veda, alludes to the conquest of the north west by the Aryans, an Indo-European people who used their superior military technology, the war chariot, to achieve the overthrow of the civilisation of the first Indus Valley cities. The Aryans themselves were followed by other Indo-Europeans, spoken of with disapproval by the early texts as unorthodox in their beliefs and ritual. The little kingdoms set up by the Aryan tribesmen became the components of larger states. By the mid-fourth century BC, when Indian events first came to be recorded by Western historians, the early Hindu empire of Magadha controlled all the Ganges basin, while that of the northern Indus was part of the Persian empire. In 326 BC Alexander the Great, having become ruler of Persia, arrived to assert his claim to its twentieth satrapy or province. After a great battle on the banks of what is now known as the Jhelum, called by the Greeks the Hydaspes, King Porus (or Paurava) of the Punjab was defeated, but the nobility of this ruler and the bravery of his men led Alexander to leave him as a vassal and march down the Indus, eventually to return home through the desolate wastes of Makran.¹ A new emperor arose in Magadha, Candragupta Maurya, who drove out the garrisons left by Alexander. This emperor’s son, Asoka, one of the greatest rulers of Indian, or indeed world, history, extended his dominions southwards to the edge of the Tamil plain and north-westwards, far beyond the passes to cover the whole of modern Afghanistan by the time of his death (c. 232 BC).² The lions which surmount the columns he put up to mark the boundaries of his empire now appear on the badges of the Republic of India, replacing the crown used during the time of British rule.

A hundred years after Asoka, invaders came again. First there were Hellenic rulers from Bactria, who first took the Kabul valley and then set up dynasties in the Punjab. Next came the Sakas or Scyths. These were replaced by an Iranian dynasty, the Pahlavas, which briefly ruled North West India around the time of Christ. Then came a Turkish people, known to the Chinese as the Yueh-chih, one of whose tribes, the Kusanas, controlled much of Central Asia and Northern India until the middle of the third century AD before losing all beyond the Indus to the Persians.³

Then, with the successors of these various invading hosts absorbed into Hindu ways, a new empire arose, that of the Guptas. Samudra Gupta, the Napoleon of India, established his authority over most of the Ganges basin, and his son Candra Gupta II extended it westwards over the Punjab and southwards over the Deccan. At the end of the fifth century AD, however, the Hunas, referred to in contemporary Byzantine chronicles as the Hephthalites or White Huns, who a century earlier had occupied Bactria, followed the customary invasion routes through the mountains into Western India and settled in Rajasthan. The power of the Gupta empire gradually weakened, though its glory was partially restored by the great King Harsa, who came to the throne in AD 606 and ruled for forty-one years until his death at the age of fifty-seven.⁴ The history of India in the four centuries that followed is not unlike that of Europe at the same time, with a once-powerful empire breaking up into successor-states, ruled over by warlike monarchs who set up their own dynasties and indulged in warfare as the true sport of kings. Although these wars maintained the martial skills of Indian commanders and soldiers at the same high level as those who had opposed Alexander the Great a thousand years previously, they ultimately proved disastrous for the political and economic strength of the Hindu kingdoms. Most disruptive of all was the practice of the ancient ritual of the asvamedha or horse sacrifice. A consecrated horse was released to wander for a year, followed by a picked band of warriors, who would demand that all kings on whose territory the horse went must acknowledge the overlordship of their own king, or give battle and capture the horse. If the horse remained free at the end of the year, it was returned to the king who had released it and was sacrificed with great rejoicing. Every king with the power to do so sought to perform this ceremony, which in effect meant that every state was always liable to invasion by its neighbour.⁵

Hindu armies were all-embracing in their composition, and assemblies of 500,000 or more strong were frequently recorded. Nevertheless, only a small proportion of the manpower so embodied actually bore arms. The caste system meant that each occupational group carried out its own special tasks–grooms, grass cutters, sweepers or sanitary orderlies, metal workers for the sharpening and repair of weapons, leather workers who provided and repaired saddlery and equipment, tent pitchers, water carriers, medical staff, veterinarians, bearers or porters, domestic servants of all kinds, merchants to supply food for men and beasts, and a whole host of the official and unofficial followers whose presence is an essential adjunct to any army at any time, but whose specialisms were developed in Indian society to such a marked extent.

For those whose specialism was actually to do the fighting, the warriors themselves, battle was a great religious rite, a high sacrifice in itself.⁶ Astrologers were consulted as to the most propitious time for the commencement of operations. Purification ceremonies were performed on the eve of battle and troops going into combat were addressed by their priests, just as is the case in even the most sophisticated of modern armies at the present day. Another practice, still common everywhere, was the delivery of inspiring messages from the king or ruler, although the promises of booty, if not of glory, which accompanied such messages in former times are nowadays discouraged. Battle was considered to be merely a series of individual combats, with the courage and morale of the mass depending upon the visible performance of their leaders. As in most other armies of ancient and medieval times, if a leader fell, only the noblest or the bodyguard continued to fight on, while the rest made their escape as best they could.

Most orthodox Hindu texts argued that fighting was part of the warrior’s dharma, the duty appointed for his class. Rules of conduct, similar to those of Christian chivalry, were laid down, which had the effect of minimising the adverse consequences of warfare upon those who took part in it. Ideally, a mounted man should not strike a dismounted one; soldiers fleeing, wounded, disarmed, or asking for quarter, should not be slain; poisoned weapons were forbidden; the proper reward for victory was the homage rather than the dispossession of the conquered.⁷ Women, children, priests and other non-combatants should be spared. Conversely defeat was a disgrace, the stain of which might only be wiped out by suicide. Cowardice in the face of the enemy was the greatest of shames, incurring not only disgrace in the present life, but suffering in the hereafter. The Hindu belief in samsara or the transmigration of souls, and the general assumption that the innumerable changes through which the life force passed were governed by its conduct in each preceding stage, did something to mitigate the harshness of war and to lessen the fear of death (if not of the process of dying), just as do all higher forms of religion. Thus, although a man might be born into a high position in society as a reward for good deeds in some previous existence, if he behaved badly he might be abased in some future one, perhaps being reborn as a snake or a worm, or even a woman. A king who slew the sacrosanct person of an envoy for example, could expect to be reborn in torment, along with all his advisers.⁸ This particular law no doubt expressed the strong personal interests of the brahmans, the priestly class, who were the most likely to be used as envoys, as well as those of the rulers who needed the free passage of heralds and ambassadors for the making of war and peace alike. Most civilised societies protect the persons of envoys for much the same reason. There was thus a disposition on the part of Hindu kings and of Hindu soldiers to make war in as humanitarian a way as the business of killing and being killed allows.

It must be admitted that in and after the stress of battle, when men’s baser passions are aroused, the rules were not always observed, any more than were those of medieval chivalry. Indeed, in modern times, the broadly similar provisions of the Geneva conventions are not invariably observed by all parties. Campaigns were commonly associated with massacre, pillage, and rape, especially if the forces involved were those of petty warlords rather than enlightened and powerful emperors certain of victory. The Dravidian south always displayed a greater degree of ruthlessness towards defeated enemies and non-combatants alike, but even in the Aryan north military necessity was accepted as a justification for departure from the ideals of behaviour. The Arthasastra or Treatise on Statecraft, attributed to Candragupta Maurya’s great minister Kautilya (also known as Canakya and Visnugupta), predated by a thousand years the unscrupulous (or realistic) views of Niccolo Machiavelli in its recommendation that a king should do everything necessary to win a war, including the destruction of crops, assassination and treachery.⁹ The Arthasastra also taught that a live dog was better than a dead lion, advice that many Hindu rulers would remember when faced with the necessity of reaching an accommodation with an overwhelming invader and which permitted Hindu soldiers to surrender when further resistance was hopeless, in the same manner as is allowed by Western convention.

Hindu armies drew their troops from a variety of sources. The six categories usually listed were the hereditary troops, who rendered military service to their ruler by virtue of their belonging to the ksatriya or hereditary military class of the divinely ordained four-fold division of Hindu society; mercenaries, who had no stake in the country, but were efficient and would fight for whoever paid the best wages; corporation troops, in effect private armies normally employed by merchant guilds for the defence of caravans and centres of trade in unsettled areas; contingents sent by subsidiary allies; defectors from the enemy; and wild tribesmen from the hills and jungles, suitable for unconventional or localised campaigns. Traces of all these categories continued to be found in forces maintained by the British when they ruled India, and medieval Hindu armies also included units with a corporate and continuous existence like that of British regiments. Such armies and such endemic warfare required great resources. The standard texts recommended that, after putting one-sixth of his revenues into his treasury in jewels and precious metals, a ruler should spend 50 per cent of what remained on what modern governments call ‘defence’ expenditure. Most of the revenue came in the form of the government’s share of the crop, a tax from which some villages were exempted in return for providing troops. The vast deposits in the royal treasury, however, did little to assist the economy of the kingdoms or to create the wealth to pay armies. Frequently they had a negative effect, in that displays of opulence, intended to demonstrate the greatness and prestige of their owner, served only to attract the envy of his neighbours and invite aggression from beyond his borders.

Thus it came about that between 1001 and 1027 Mahmud the Iconoclast, Sultan of Ghazni, in Afghanistan, raided the rich and divided kingdoms of Western India seventeen times, returning to his hill kingdom with great caravans of slaves and booty and leaving behind him a trail of defeated Hindu armies, desecrated temples, and ruined cities as far south as Kathiawar and as far west as Bundelkhand. He annexed the Punjab and the Arab kingdoms of Sind but then left the rest of India to its own devices.¹⁰ It was not until 1191 that a Muslim army again pressed into India. The first invasion, overconfident and for once faced with a united opposition, was thrown back, but in 1192 Muhammad of Ghor returned with a larger force, whose mounted archers routed the traditionally organised army of Hindu rulers, who put their faith in elephants as the decisive arm of warfare. During the next ten years, all the northern plains of India fell to the Muslims. In 1206 Muhammad of Ghor was assassinated and his general and former slave, Qutb-al-Din Aibak, became Sultan of Delhi.¹¹

Qutb-al-Din, ‘the Pole-Star of the Faith’, was followed by other sultans, mostly of Turkish descent, ruling from Delhi under whom Muslim rule in India was consolidated and extended until, by AD 1340, only the southernmost tip of the peninsula remained unconquered by the hated Turuskas. Muslim historians give numerous accounts of fortresses stormed, treasuries seized, cities sacked, temples burnt, garrisons slaughtered, priests massacred, and the surviving men, women and children enslaved in such numbers as to bring about a collapse in the price of slaves all over Central Asia. Nevertheless, the rule of the Muslim sultans was far from being a continuous holy war. Many rulers were men of piety and learning, whose respect for scholarship (as evidenced by the employment and respect they gave to historians) was better than that of some modern governments. Strictly speaking, Hindus were, as polytheists, guilty of giving God a partner, and so were not entitled to the concession offered to Christians and Jews, of paying the jizya or poll tax as an alternative to the choice of conversion or death. In practice, the successful generals who conquered India were more concerned with dividing up the spoils of victory God had given them, than with depopulating it of those whose labours created the spoils. Many of those enslaved were indeed converted to Islam, either by force or in despair at ever being received again in their own society. Others, outcasts in Hindu society, saw in the egalitarian faith of the Prophet some improvement in their lot, and those of little conviction had no objection to a religion which promised salvation and lower taxes. Thus a substantial Muslim population grew up from these sources, as well as from settlers and their descendants.

At the same time, however, no prudent Muslim ruler, whether sultan or local garrison commander, could ignore the still powerful, warlike and proud Hindu chieftains whose ancestral holdings lay around them. Even Mahmud of Ghazni himself, the man who refused to accept ransom for the Siva-lingam of Somnath, one of the holiest shrines in India, because he would not answer on Judgement Day as one who had taken money to spare an idol,¹² maintained a strong force of Hindu troopers. His son Mahsud ordered his Muslim officers to respect the religious scruples of their Hindu comrades, and almost every Sultan of Delhi confirmed Hindu rulers in their positions of authority in return for a tribute of money, men or military support. Subordinate rulers, Hindu and Muslim alike, paid as little tribute as they could when the Sultan was weak, and as much as they were forced to when he was strong, and all might take up arms in rebellion if extortion, oppression or ambition drove them so to do.

The people who led Hindu resistance, first to the Muslim invasions and subsequently to the establishment of Muslim dominion over India, called themselves the Rajputs, the Sons of Kings. Their ancestors are generally believed to have been those who invaded and colonised India during the middle centuries of the first millennium AD and who, like other invaders before them, were absorbed by the culturally superior society of the Hindus. The myth was created that the original ksatriyas had grown impious and were destroyed, in response to the prayers of the brahmans, by the gods who then created the Rajputs as the new ksatriyas. This was a rationalisation of the defeat of the country’s previous defenders and the incorporation of their successors into the Hindu system literally with the blessings of the brahmans.

The new masters held sway over all northern and central India, and some long re...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Transliteration of Indian Words and Names
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Chapter 1 - India’s Military Heritage
• Chapter 2 - The Origins of British Military Power in India, 1600–1764
• Chapter 3 - The British Conquest of India, 1764–1822
• Chapter 4 - The Culmination of the Company’s Raj, 1822–1858
• Chapter 5 - The Reconstruction, 1858–1864
• Chapter 6 - The Army of Occupation, 1862–1902
• Chapter 7 - The Staff and the Staff Corps, 1850–1902
• Chapter 8 - Kitchener’s Army, 1902–1914
• Chapter 9 - The Officer Problem, 1902–1947
• Chapter 10 - The Army of India, 1914–1947
• Appendix I - Presidents of the Board of Control for India, 1784–1858, and Secretaries of State for India, 1858–1947
• Appendix II - Governor-Generals in British India, 1774–1947
• Appendix III - Commanders-in-Chief in the East Indies, 1748–1947
• Appendix IV - Military Members of the Council of India, 1858–1929
• Appendix V - Secretaries of the Military Departments of the Court of Directors, 1809–1858, and at the India Office, 1858–1947
• Appendix VI - Military Members of the Governor-General’s Council, 1834–1947
• Appendix VII - Secretaries to the Governments of India and Bengal in the Military Department, 1800–1906
• Appendix VIII - Secretaries to the Government of India in the Departments of Military Supply, the Army, Defence and War, 1907–1947
• Bibliography
• Index