Measures of Manliness: The Martial Races and the Wartime Politics of Effeminacy

Abstract

Writing early in the war and exactly four years before Gurkha soldiers d on a crowd at Jallianwallah Bagh in Amritsar, the radical journalist B. K. Roy warned that “whenever there is an act of high-handedness that is to be done to suppress the spirit of new nationalism in India, the Gurkha is employed, and he acts like a veritable fanatic in his attacks on men, women, and children.” In a voice heavy with sarcasm, Roy further noted that “the educated man of India … is not allowed to enlist as a volunteer or a soldier. He is not trusted. A Bengali can never enter the Army as a soldier.”1 Anglo-Indians would have objected to the article’s mocking tone, but not its principles; there existed nearly universal agreement regarding the lack of martial qualities in the Bengali, or most Indians for that matter, who dwelled beyond those groups already recruited for the army. Roy had deployed an enormously self-conscious argumentative strategy. He was among the Bengalis who were “not allowed to enlist,” who exemplified the radical and effeminate nationalist, and who most needed careful surveillance. Contrarily, the martial races “not only underwrote British power in India,” both in 1857 and 1919, but also “marked out those Indians who could be incorporated within the imperial order.”2 It was mainly the “fighting classes,” led “properly” by their British officers, who were ultimately charged with defending the Raj and putting down politically dangerous “natives” such as Roy and his ilk.