British Indian Army Research Articles

Otherness at war: Poles and World War II British Indian Army

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the representation of Indians and Nepalese Gurkhas of the British Indian Army in Polish Second World War memoirs. It argues that by focusing on the Other’s social, religious, and physical differences, the authors constructed an exoticised image of the South Asians that contributes to the perception of war as a site of Orientalism. Since the Poles faced the British imperial army apparatus that manipulated the relations with the Other through its hierarchical organisation, the analysis explores the power relations implicated in the Polish-South Asian encounters. The study is based on excerpts from twenty memoirs written by soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces who cooperated with the British Indian Army in North Africa, the Middle East, and Italy. It is primarily concerned with manners, customs, and appearance of the South Asians to reflect the authors’ emphasis on those components of their Otherness.

Guardians and Governors: The Multifaceted Role of the Pakistan Army in National Development and Islamic Ethics

This comprehensive study explores the multifaceted role of the Pakistan Army in the development of Pakistan, with a particular focus on its integration of Islamic perspectives and ethical considerations. The Pakistan Army, since the country's inception in 1947, has evolved from a traditional military force into a pivotal actor in national affairs, influencing political, economic, and social spheres. This paper delves into the historical background of the Army, tracing its evolution from a segment of the British Indian Army to an independent entity deeply embedded in the fabric of the Pakistani state. It examines the Army's significant yet controversial role in the political arena, where it has intermittently assumed direct control and wielded substantial influence over civilian governance. In terms of economic contributions, the study investigates the Army's direct involvement in various business ventures and its substantial impact on national economic policies. This includes an analysis of the Army's infrastructure projects and its role as a major employer, highlighting both the benefits and challenges of its pervasive economic presence.

Kate Imy. Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army.

The British gained their empire by the sword, expanded it by the sword, and held on to it by the sword. Over the last two decades the vibrant field of “new” military history has explored the manifold ramifications of British imperialism enabled by Indian soldiers. Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army belongs to this expanding genre. However, the book is not solely a study of the army. It also examines “the Indian Army’s attempt to racialize and militarize South Asian identities” (1) and “the cultural legacies of the British Indian Army from 1900 to 1940” (2) to evaluate “how the army shaped colonial society in times of “peace” (7). Faithful Fighters is divided into six chapters. The first three consider three distinct and highly recruited religious communities, the Sikhs, “Muslims,” and Nepali Gurkhas, respectively. The fourth considers food and the military, and the fifth looks at education and the army. The final chapter discusses the political consequences of military desegregation. Each of the individual chapters adds, in varying degrees, to our knowledge of the connections between military and society. While the breadth of Faithful Fighters is impressive, its diverse topics do not coalesce around a consistent thesis encompassing all its parts. The one clear thread that runs through the book is the role and impact of religion.

Military system during British period in India and its impact on post independent India

Britain's globe empire was supported by the British Indian Army, founded in 1895 from the East India Company's presidency troops. Much has been written about the Indian Army's colonial and worldwide campaigns as a vehicle of imperial power, but less about its transfer from British to Indian authority after the Second World War. While independence meant the transition of the force from imperial rule to civilian oversight by India's new national leadership, the Dominion of India inherited thousands of former colonial soldiers, including two generations of British and Indian officers indoctrinated in military and cultural practises developed in the UK, colonial India, and the British Empire. This paper examines the British Empire's impact on the Indian Army's narrative, ethos, culture, tactics, and strategies from 1945, when the army began to transition from British to Indian rule, to 1973, when the government of India reinstated the imperial rank of Field Marshal. The Indian Army's first thirty years after independence saw it fight four major wars and see the final departure of white British officers. While it became a truly national army at this period, its history as an arm of imperial authority was contested and eventually evolved into a crucial part of military identity in the post-colonial age.

Causes and Consequences of Cross-border Migration of Nepalese People to India

Nepal and India share an open border as per the agreements of a bilateral treaty signed in 1950.According to the treaty, people of both countries can travel and work across the border and are to be treated at par with the native citizens. Due to its poor economic condition, Nepal has been supplying labour to India since Nepalese were recruited as ‘Gorkhas’ in the British Indian army after the Anglo-Nepal war of 1814-16. The 1991 and 2001 Censuses of Nepal recorded that absentee population from Nepal towards India constituted 89.2 and 79 per cent of the total migrants respectively, though this phenomenon has changed over the recent years. There has been increasing a trend of migration to Gulf countries, Asian Tiger States, American and European countries. This article is based on secondary data sources. People who are not that much skilled and have not enough resources are going to south East Asian countries, mainly to Malaysia, and Middle East. Nearly more than four-fifths of per cent absenteeism from Nepal remained in India. The similar socio-cultural, religious patterns, historical and geographical setting favor in participating on cross-border migration between two countries.

The Gurkha Knife in Polish Second World War Memoirs

The Second World War created numerous opportunities for intercultural encounters, including contacts between soldiers of the 2nd Polish Corps and the Gurkhas of the British Indian Army. This article focuses on a prominent single element highlighted in Polish war memoirs, the Gurkha khukuri knife. Used as a multi-purpose tool in Nepal, it contributes to the image of fierce Gurkha soldiers, thanks to its reputation as a lethal weapon. The Gurkha knife attracted much attention during the war and seems to have become the most-remembered element of the representation of Nepalis in the Polish Second World War memoirs.

Modernization of leather industry and chequered history of technical education in colonial Kanpur

Modernization of industry in the western world was determined by application as well as the training of man for applying science in industry. The leather industry which was manufacturing at the cottage level did not resist this modernization. The leather industry in India employed the most depressed class of the Indian society. On the one hand, modernization of leather industry was determined by application of science, while on the other by the training of the workforce. The latter invoked political and social factors like state policy for technical education, receiving of technical education by artisan class and employment opportunity for the skilled workforce. By the late nineteenth century, Kanpur emerged as the prominent centre of modern leather industry in colonial India due to military needs of the British Indian army. The reasons for slow growth of science and technology in colonial India have been extensively examined by scholars but the configuration of industry at the local level, the role of social composition of the workforce in the modernization and the inception of technical education have been less examined. The present paper seeks to address the questions as to the factors which led to the emergence of modern leather industry in Kanpur; the nature of its organization and the relationship between leather industry and institutionalization of technical education for this industry.

Book Review: The 1945 Burma Campaign and the Transformation of the British Indian Army by Raymond A. Callahan and Daniel Marston

Book Review: <i>The 1945 Burma Campaign and the Transformation of the British Indian Army</i> by Raymond A. Callahan and Daniel Marston

The noble mission of Nobel Laureate Sir Ronald Ross

The noble mission of Nobel Laureate Sir Ronald Ross

Undisciplining Englishness: Narratives of Colonial Encounter in Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four

This article explores how Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four undisciplines Englishness—English national character constructed through the nation’s racial politics from the Reform Act and beyond the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century—by drawing upon the trendy Victorian studies’ call for “undisciplining.” I define “undisciplining” as an act of undermining the disciplinary racism sustained by novelistic form and examine how the novel undisciplines Englishness—i.e. places the nation’s assumed isolated superiority in relation to unregulated colonial encounters negating racial hierarchies and criminality in narrative and urban space. Doyle portrays Englishness as a racial construct created for the purpose of clearing out a space for an artificially imagined sphere of the comfortable home secured from outside forces of colonial encounters. Episodes and characters imported from colonial India disturb the seemingly seamless narrative that incorporates them into England. I argue that the colonial elements in the novel—the British Indian Army, Jonathan Small, Indian jewelry, and Tonga—do not build toward the establishment of the superiority of Englishness, but instead reveal an unstableness and artificiality of that ideological construct. While Watson’s first-person narration endorses a form of disciplinary power, other narrative flows dissemble the narrative components working within that frame so that they cannot fit into the logic of the definite omniscient closure, and thereby reveal an undisciplined vista of Englishness, interfused by colonial encounters.

Book Review: Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army by Imy K

Book Review: <i>Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army</i> by Imy K

"Not at Home in Empire"

Amitav Ghosh opposes the “agonistic” or “reconciliatory” strand in postcolonial studies espoused amongst others by Bhabha. By fusing postcolonialism with postmodernism, this school of postcolonial thought rejects resistance and reconfigures the historical project of invasion, expropriation and exploitation as a symbiotic encounter. As a staunch anti-colonialist, what Ghosh presents in his writing is the ubiquity of the Eurocentrism of the colonized. The Glass Palace represents how colonial discourses (primarily the military discourse) have molded native identity and resulted in severe vulnerability and existential crisis. Self-alienation is apparent in the characters of the Collector, a Britain-trained colonial administrator and the soldier, Arjun, who has been transformed into a war-machine in the hands of British military discourse. The narrative attempts to revisit and reframe the colonial past by questioning the ideological, epistemological and ontological assumptions of the imperial powers, the masks of conquest. The community of the disillusioned soldiers of the British Indian army presented in The Glass Palace is one that challenges, provokes, threatens, but also enlivens, is a community of disagreement, dissonance, and resistance. Popular or insurgent nationalism thus reclaims or imagines forms of community and challenges colonial rule giving shape to a collective political identity. This article also intends to trace the failures of Burmese nationalism after a series of insurrections on ethnic grounds belied the aspirations of the postcolonial nation state.

Sikh Martiality, Islamophobia, Raj Nostalgia, a pinch of saffron: Kesari’s nationalist cocktail and the power of trailers

ABSTRACT Taking 2019 Bollywood blockbuster Kesari as a case study, this paper argues that contemporary film trailers are not just promotional para-texts: they can be powerful ideological texts too, as they become accessible, reiterative, and interactive through social media. The paper performs a discourse and visual analysis of trailer and trailer-users interactions to demonstrate that the trailer formulates and disseminates an Islamophobic, anti-secular, Hindu nationalistic discourse with coherence and complexity. It also blurs difficult questions regarding Indians' participation in the British Indian Army, and reclaims Sikhs as part of the Hindu nation in line with Hindutva ideology.

Discourse of Power under Power Play: An Analysis of Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace between Displaced Diaspora and Nondiaspora

This paper examines the causes and consequences of the shifting values infused in the displaced Diasporas in comparison to those who are not from diasporic background yet colonized. Amitav Ghosh’s critically acclaimed novel The Glass Palace introduces few dislocated figures particularly Rajkumar Raha, and his mentor Saya John, who overlook the power play of the British acting as collaborators. Arriving in Burma as orphans, they amassed enormous profit with teak business in the Burmese forests, and gradually transform themselves into business tycoons. Utilizing colonial havoc, they become affluent while fully understand the British power politics. This novel also throws light on two other Nondiasporic characters; Beni Prasad, the District Collector, and Arjun, a Lieutenant in the British Indian Army, who equally shake hands with their European masters being part of their exploitative venture and ideological network. However, interestingly they could not flourish like Rajkumar and Saya John, rather collapsed completely under British policy. Ultimately, they committed suicide through an acute remorse. This paper shows how people from displaced Diaspora become the instances of failed Cosmopolitanism who are unable to rise as transnational in their new home. It also clarifies that, the construction of identity is interrelated with the discourse of power, and the multi-dimensional impact of power and politics.

The Coolie's Great War: Indian labour in a global conflict, 1914–1921 by Radhika Singha

Reviewed by: The Coolie's Great War: Indian labour in a global conflict, 1914–1921 by Radhika Singha Ashutosh Kumar The Coolie's Great War: Indian labour in a global conflict, 1914–1921 By Radhika Singha. Noida, Uttar Pradesh: HarperCollins India, 2020. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Until very recently World War One has been evaluated as a conflict between the different European powers. Non-European involvements have been considered as "contribution." Apart from that, the writings on World War One have been hugely centred on the combatants and their role in the war. Rarely have noncombatants found any space in the discussion. Radhika Singha's book The Coolie's Great War is an attempt to fill this gap in a limited way. The book focuses centrally on the war experience of noncombatants or "follower" ranks of the Indian army such as construction workers, porters, mule-drivers, stretcher-bearers, cooks, sweepers and grooms. Singha has categorized these people as "coolies" as these were presumably unskilled labourers consigned to the lowest rung of the global market in the nineteenth century. Her aim is to create a dialogue between military history and labour history. "Coolie," the word which has been considered as derogatory by the descendants of indentured labourers, was largely used during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for all sorts of presumably unskilled labour. Since official documents excessively used the word "coolie" for menial labour in the military corps, Singha seems to go along with that. The aim of the book, as Singha states, is not only to "rescue the coolie and the menial" in military employment from their condition of historical obscurity. It is also an attempt to develop a less Eurocentric, more transnational account of World War One. Aside from an introduction and an afterword, the book is divided into six chapters with twenty-one photographs. The opening chapter focuses on the colonial military infrastructure in India. It provides details of the combatants' and noncombatants' share in the Indian army during the war. Apart from the colonial construction of martial castes and superior races, distinguished from the menial status of the camp followers, this chapter traces the localities from which noncombatants originated and networks through which they were recruited. Chapter Two focuses on the subalterns of the Indian army, permanent or temporary. Here the author has chosen the term "follower ranks" instead of subalterns and argued that "the followers' work of care bolstered both the racial standing of the British soldiers and the status of superiority of the martial castes" (7). Making the case study of "higher followers" such as stretcher-bearers or kahars, and the mule-drivers, or dhobis, cooks, bhistis (water carrier), sweepers and syces (groom or grass cutter), Singha has explored the service milieu of the above "menial workers." However, she has pointed out that there was a significant overlap in the work during the war. In many cases soldiers had to do fatigue work. In some cases, sepoys chose to enlist in "Coolie Corps" as the wages were higher for coolie work. In this chapter Singha has provided details of the wages/salary, war allowances, bonuses and other benefits to the follower ranks as well as to the sepoys. Singha has argued that the better wages and service conditions for follower ranks were tactics used to reduce desertion and produce greater efficiency. In Chapter Three Singha discusses the Indian labour and porter corps in Iraq during the war. During the Mesopotamia campaign the British Indian army felt from a huge shortage of porters and menial workers. Since the anti-indenture campaign in India was at its peak at this time, Indian army officials decided to recruit the labourers being sent to sugar colonies for labour corps for "military work overseas." Convicts and prisoners were also offered an emancipation from servitude by agreeing to undertake "war service." While discussing the experience of the labour corps in Mesopotamia, Singha shows how upper caste recruits had to do tasks commonly undertaken by low status sweeper castes, such as the cleaning of latrines. Hence their religious and caste status was disregarded. The complaints of the workers were similar to those of anti-indenture Indian nationalists who had...

What Can a Song Do to You? A Life Story of a Gurkha Prisoner in World War I

We have heard and read much about the wartime bravery of Gurkha soldiers, the idea of the Gurkhas as a martial race and how British recruitment practices targeted them. But much less is known about the experiences of Gurkha prisoners of war in World War I. The Germans captured thousands of soldiers fighting in the British Indian Army, and among these were a large number of Gurkhas. This imprisonment of soldiers not only served German strategic goals, but also offered a good opportunity to collect source material for research. This paper will briefly shed light on the scholarly activities engaged in by German scholars in Halbmondlager (Half Moon Camp), with a focus on the self-referential writing of one of the Gurkha prisoners of war, Jas Bahadur Rai, who never returned from the camp, but who did bequeath to posterity a song which he sang for the Germans. We will discuss whether Jas Bahadur had freedom of agency while recording his song, and if this song indeed qualifies as life-writing.

Colonialism and the Construction of Religious Identities in Punjab: The Case of Muslims

The colonial state of India referred to as the Raj introduced multiple changes and sought modifications in the socio-cultural, political and economic spheres in the province of Punjab. Being the last province annexed and rendered the part of British Indian Empire, forming North Western area with proximity to the Russian Empire and contributing heavily, never lower than fifty per cent of the total British Indian Army, Punjab attained a special significance for the Raj. By the turn of nineteenth century, the extensive network of canals turned this area into a ‘basket of bread.’ Similar to the unprecedented physical infrastructure feats, the British carried out social-engineering as well to attain calculated goals. In addition, the colonialism was conjoined by colonial modernity which included, inter alia, decennial census and its concomitant process of enumeration, massive use of printing press and burgeoning press and publications market, electoral arenas of politics, and formation of a large number of social organizations. It provided impetus to the redefinition of social and political identities and an assertive quest for social mobility. This redefinition of increasingly religiously informed social and cultural identities among Muslims of Punjab in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is the focus of this paper.

Punjab under the British Rule: Historicising the Local Transformations

This article is a preliminary attempt to map the changes and transformations of Punjab, which had undergone during the British rule. It had remained the model province for benefits of the British colonial rule. Ever since its accession in 1849, Punjab received particular attention in the colonial policies due to its strategic and political importance to the empire. The colonial rule unleashed a slew of transformations in diverse fields including education, agriculture, irrigation, transport and communication and social institutions. This article particularly focusses on the transformations that took place in the modernisation of agriculture, canals colonisation and Punjabisation of the British Indian army during the colonial rule in Punjab. Behind the plotting of modernisations, the study will dig out the imperial designs and motives of the Raj.

Mountbatten, Auchinleck and the End of the British Indian Army: August–November 1947

Juxtaposing the private papers of Louis Mountbatten and Claude Auchinleck, this article seeks to shed light on the most influential factor in the reconstitution of the British Indian Army into the Indian and Pakistani armies, namely, the two men's worsening relationship between April and November 1947, in view of what each saw as the other's partisan position, and its consequences: the closure of Auchinleck's office and his departure from India. In doing so, it brings to the fore another aspect of that fraught period of transition, at the end of which the British Indian Empire was transformed into the dominions of India and Pakistan, and highlights the peculiar predicament in which the British found themselves during the transfer of power.

The Curious Case of Singapore’s BIA Desertion Trials: War Crimes, Projects of Empire, and the Rule of Law

This article studies a set of war crimes trials that dealt with the contentious issue of deserting British Indian Army soldiers and were conducted by the British colonial authorities in post-Second World War Singapore (BIA desertion trials). Though the British intended for these trials to facilitate the return of British colonial rule, these trials resulted in to unexpected acquittals and non-confirmation of sentences. While seemingly obscure, these trials illuminate important lessons about rule of law dynamics in war crimes trials. By applying British military law as a ‘back-up’ source of law when prosecuting “violations of the laws and usages of war”, these trials contravened the rule of law by retrospectively subjecting the Japanese defence to unfamiliar legal standards. However, by binding themselves to a pre-existing and relatively clear source of law, the British were constrained by the rule of law even as this empowered the Japanese defence. This article’s findings also speak to broader debates on the challenges of developing a universally legitimate international criminal law, by provocatively suggesting that, from a rule of law perspective, what is most important in a body of law is its clarity, accessibility, and comprehensiveness rather than its source or its purported ‘universality’.