Culture, Conflict and the Military in Colonial South Asia

Abstract

Military power was central to securing, policing and defending colonial rule in South Asia. Even in peacetime, the military was the largest drain on the colonial exchequer, typically employing more than 200,000 troops through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Indian Army also played a crucial role in projecting and asserting British imperial power beyond South Asia, most obviously during the global wars of the twentieth century, in which millions of Indians served. These conflicts did much to shape South Asia’s engagements with, and place in, the emergent postcolonial world order, just as war and the military informed metropolitan engagements with, and understandings of the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century. In South Asia, as in Europe and beyond, war was one of the principal vectors for the movements of people, and ideas, through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.