The Indian Army

Abstract

Both modern historians and contemporary Anglo-Indian commentators have placed great emphasis on the role of the British East India Company’s (EIC) army in establishing and consolidating colonial authority over a vast Indian population, particularly its importance in countering violent resistance from within civil society. This chapter aims to refine that view through an examination of the EIC’s deployment of its regular and paramilitary forces in Bengal during the half-century after 1765, the year in which the Mughal Emperor granted it the province’s diwani (revenue-collecting rights). It seeks to demonstrate that, in contrast with widespread practice in the nineteenth century, the regular army was, in fact, rarely used to police Indian society in this early period, and that this role was principally undertaken by a variety of paramilitaries who have largely been ignored in the modern historiography. This chapter illustrates the EIC’s policy in action, considers the reasoning of Calcutta’s Supreme Council in deploying its regular and paramilitary forces in this way, and draws out the consequences of that policy for the character of early colonial rule and the wider development of the EIC state.