Tarak Barkawi. Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II.

Abstract

With Soldiers of Empire, Tarak Barkawi adds a new and important dimension to our understanding of the Indian Army’s effectiveness and role in the Second World War. There has been a revival of interest in the role, battlefield performance, and understanding of the Indian Army since the New Military History of South Asia conference at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in 1997; that event identified the need for a new historiography on the study of the army from its inception to its final days in 1947. This renewed focus has informed works focusing on both the Indian Army’s battlefield performance and its impact on society; in particular, works by Alan Jeffreys, Yasmin Khan, Tim Moreman, and Kaushik Roy come to mind as notable examples of this new movement. Barkawi’s book provides another facet to this historiography: he takes an innovative approach by assessing the sociological aspects of the Indian Army during the Second World War. This work has been in the making for many years, and is stronger as a result, drawing as it does on the best recent scholarship and reflecting the author’s mature approach to the topic.