British Indian Army Research Articles

The “Right to Wage War” against Empire: Anticolonialism and the Challenge to International Law in the Indian National Army Trial of 1945

This Article treats the Indian National Army Trial of 1945 as a key moment in the elaboration of an anticolonial critique of international law in India. The trial was actually a court-martial of three Indian officers by the British colonial government on charges of high treason for defecting from the British Indian Army, joining up with Indian National Army forces in Singapore, and waging war in alliance with Imperial Japan against the British. In this trial, the defense made the radical claim that anticolonial wars fought in Asia against European powers were legitimate and just and should be recognized as such under international law. The aim of this Article is to draw attention to the understudied role of anticolonial movements in challenging the premises of international law in the aftermath of World War II.

Behind the enemy line: British-led guerrilla operations in the Indo-Burma frontier during the Second World War

ABSTRACTThe paper probes the formation of local Levies among the indigenous hill people of the Indo-Burma frontier and their contributions to the British-led guerrilla operations during the Second World War. With the shift of the theatre of the Southeast Asian edition of the Second World War from the Lower Burma plains to the mountainous hilly terrain in the Indo-Burma frontier, the mode of warfare also changed. In the new terrain where conventional warfare was no longer suitable the British Indian Army resorted to guerrilla tactics largely with the support of the indigenous hill people who had the traditional expertise in guerrilla fighting. However, the valour and heroism of the indigenous hill people behind the enemy lines has not received adequate scholarly attention. This paper discusses the case of three ethnic communities in the Indo-Burma frontier – Kachin, Naga and Zo (Kuki-Chin) – who were considered by the British as ‘loyal allies’ at the risk of Japanese atrocities. Supervised by British civil and military officers the local Levies not only effectively bogged down the Japanese forces in the frontier but also supplied valuable intelligence to the Allied force in the reconquest of Burma. The paper argues that Kachin, Zo and Naga rallied behind their colonial masters with the hope that they would receive reward from the latter after the war.

Sikh Self-Sacrifice and Religious Representation during World War I

This paper analyzes the ways Sikh constructions of sacrifice were created and employed to engender social change in the early twentieth century. Through an examination of letters written by Sikh soldiers serving in the British Indian Army during World War I and contemporary documents from within their global religious, legislative, and economic context, I argue that Sikhs mobilized conceptions of self-sacrifice in two distinct directions, both aiming at procuring greater political recognition and representation. Sikhs living outside the Indian subcontinent encouraged their fellows to rise up and throw off their colonial oppressors by recalling mythic moments of the past and highlighting the plight of colonial subjects of the British Raj. Receiving less discussion are Punjabi Sikhs who fought in British forces during the Great War and who spoke of their potential sacrifice as divinely sanctioned in service to a benevolent state. Both sides utilized religious symbolism in the hope that Sikhs would again enjoy a level of self-rule that had been lost with the arrival of the British Empire.

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

Abstract This article critically analyses a set of war crimes trials, conducted by the British colonial authorities in post-World War II Singapore, which dealt, among others, with the contentious issue of deserting British Indian Army soldiers. While seemingly obscure, these trials illuminate important lessons about rule of law dynamics in war crimes trials. Although these trials were intended by their organizers to facilitate the return of British colonial rule, they resulted in unexpected acquittals and conviction non-confirmations. On the one hand, by applying British military law as a back-up source of law when prosecuting ‘violations of the laws and usages of war’, the British contravened the rule of law by retrospectively subjecting the Japanese defence to unfamiliar legal standards. On the other hand, 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. These findings speak to broader debates on the challenges of developing 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’.

BRITISH IMPACT UPON PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF BORDER GUARDS IN THE REPUBLIC OF INDIA

The article is devoted to the analysis of British impact upon the system of professional training of border guards in the Republic of India. The aim of the article is to investigate the British role in the system of training of border guards in the Republic of India and to point out the efficiency of some methods and forms for modern system of training. The article proves that there are a wide range of similar threats for border security systems in the Republic of India and Ukraine and therefore the author persuades that it is necessary to compare the systems of training of servicemen of border agencies of the Republic of India and the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine and to outline recommendations for creative implementations of some principles and approaches.On the basis of analysis of literature the author admits that the necessity to select the training of border guards within the system of military training due to specific functions of border guards was done in the British Indian Army and special forces were established. Also the article proves that the training was divided into three phases: basic individual training, progressive or group training and integrated training. The border guards were supposed to obtain the following skills: marksmanship, vigilance, mountain warfare, hill warfare, piqueting, map reading, intelligence, scouting, technical competence, physical endurance, etc. To train border guards there were established permanent training camps along the North-West frontier, some mountain warfare schools, and later higher educational establishments where special disciplines on border warfare were taught. The article describes the methods and forms of training of border guards. They are the following: training in real conditions, war games, project method, practical exercises, combined lectures, conferences, “sandbox” exercise, and illustrative methods. The author emphasizes that a range of official documents concerning training of border guards were issued: Operation Memorandums, Field Manual for border guards, Guidelines for border warfare, etc.

Dealing with Desertion and Gaps in International Humanitarian Law: Changes of Allegiance in the Singapore War Crimes Trials

AbstractBy studying British Indian Army [BIA] desertions during World War II, and British postwar trial responses, this paper explores the complicated dimensions of desertion and draws attention to the need for a more explicit and comprehensive approach to desertion in international humanitarian law. The paper focuses on less known British trials dealing with desertion, namely, war crimes trials conducted by the British in Singapore. It examines how these trials dealt with contested interpretations of desertion. Drawing on lessons from these trials, the paper then highlights gaps in today’s international humanitarian law framework, specifically, the need to take into account the realities of desertion, its different permutations, and the difficulties of differentiating between prisoners of war [POWs] and deserters.

Queering the Martial Races: Masculinity, Sex and Circumcision in the Twentieth-Century British Indian Army

Queering the Martial Races: Masculinity, Sex and Circumcision in the Twentieth-Century British Indian Army

David John Christopher Felton

David John Christopher Felton died while shaping up to return one of his cross court forehands for which he was respected by his fellow tennis players. It was the way...

Diasporic citizenship and militarization: Punjabi soldiers in the world wars

This article delves into the uses of history and examines how the enlisting of Indian soldiers – particularly from Punjab – into the British Indian Army during the First and Second World Wars has been memorialized and remembered in contemporary Britain. This issue has become particularly salient in the light of the politics of the so-called ‘war on terror’ or ‘new imperialism’, which Paul Gilroy and Vron Ware argue has heightened tendencies towards militarism in British society. Using examples from the public sphere – remembrance day events, TV documentaries and army recruitment fairs – as well as interview material, I argue that Britain's Punjabi communities have been organizing in order to weave themselves into the national tapestry by memorializing role played by Punjabis in the First and Second World Wars – iconic to the national fantasy, using this forgotten history to demand recognition from the state and stake a claim for citizenship. In the ‘new imperialism’, however, it is not equally possible for Sikh and Muslim Punjabis to argue for their inclusion on the terms of militarized citizenship, and the various chords within the diaspora seem to be increasingly disharmonious, effacing their composite and shared colonial history.

JAMES HEVIA. The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia.

Much of James Hevia's far-ranging study is focused on information produced by the military intelligence wing of the British Indian Army that was based in Simla, or as it is known today, Shimla. Route books, maps, martial-race handbooks, and statistical studies from 1880 to 1940 are counted among the tools of an “imperial security regime.” To Hevia's credit, the chapter on the military revolution of the nineteenth century does not follow Geoffrey Parker's well-trodden path of superior technology. Hevia is more concerned with the reform of military organizations, and he provides European models for comparison with the British. Those who know the history of the British Indian Army will appreciate why the author pays considerable attention to Afghanistan as a recurring security issue. Hevia also urges us to consider a fragmented interpretation of “Asia” as attributed to the British Indian Army, a sweeping construct painted with broad brush strokes. This rendition fails to integrate influential individuals (such as General Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton) who wrote about significant cultural shifts such as those embodied in the Russo-Japanese War. In fairness to Hevia, however, the positioning of Afghanistan against a greater backdrop of “Asia” does permit a glimpse of how a theater-based intelligence mechanism runs the risk of warping strategic perception. Not surprisingly, it is in writing about China that Hevia is at his best in terms of comfort level and fluency; no doubt a reflection of his academic specialization. Ultimately, the Afghan thread leads us back to the twenty-first century as the book's final chapter asks readers to consider historic versus contemporary military intervention in Afghanistan as seen from the standpoint of state security.

Militarized Masculinities: Shaped and Reshaped in Colonial South-East Punjab

AbstractThis paper offers a gendered perspective to British domination in India through the British Indian Army—which in many ways was central to their entire structure of economic and political domination in India. Locating its understanding drawn from the political economy of south-east Punjab, it argues that the designated martial castes and military recruitment structurally and ideologically identified with and privileged those trends of existing masculinities in this region which suited their power structure and empire building. It was a constellation of marital caste status, land ownership, dominant caste syndrome and good bodily physique or physical strength that ideologically came to connect and configure dominant masculinity in colonial Punjab. An Army profession fully supported it. During the two world wars it emerged as the militarized masculinity, amply supported by legal and administrative measures introduced or apparently adopted in deference to certain popular cultural practices. The associated economic and political privileges turned ‘loyalty’ into an inherent and special ingredient of ‘masculinity’ which the nationalists had to confront and deal with till such times that it came to be firmly linked with nationalism and patriotism.

Ephemeral Asia: Position without Identity in the Modernist Urdu Poetry of N.m. Rashed

Modernist Urdu poet N.M. Rashed's Iran men ajnabi (A Stranger in Iran, 1957), published ten years after the partition of British India, describes the experiences of an Indian Muslim soldier in the British Indian Army occupying Iran during World War II. Rashed's narrator searches in Iran — the motherland of the Persian language and culture that pervades Urdu — for his cultural past, but what he finds instead is an extension of his colonial present. The Urdu literary establishment at this time was dominated by progressive (taraqqi pasand) critics, who promoted a Hindustani language that bridged the gap between (Muslim/Pakistani) Urdu and (Hindu/Indian) Hindi and deemphasized Persian. These critics opposed modernism (jadidiyat), a movement associated with Rashed and with Indo-Muslim identitarianism, as socially regressive. By setting the poem in Iran and using modern Persian, Rashed confronted a readership for whom those gestures could only be signs of Indo-Persian nostalgia, and the poem was largely misread as a paean to the cultural identity of the East. Yet for Rashed, Asia is not a marker of cultural heritage but closer to what Gayatri Spivak has called a “position without identity” — a geographical category that Iran and India may claim but not fully possess. In Rashed's poem the narrator's ephemeral and contingent experiences of Iran serve as a critique of the two modes of belonging then prevalent in the Urdu literary community, progressivism and Indo-Muslim identitarianism, which he reveals to be ideologies mired in imperial projects. In anecdotes that gleefully lampoon socialist ideology, Rashed's poem represents Soviet internationalism as Russo-centric imperialism. In equally scathing satires of Indo-Persian tradition, the poem exposes the connections between India and Iran made by Western imperialism. Further, it employs rich citations of modern Persian poetry in order to critique an Iranian nationalism based on continuity with a lost imperial past. In place of these ideological structures, Rashed finds in Asia a category too vast and heterogeneous to serve as a collectivity, and he imagines, in vague detail, the emergence of a new man not bound by identity at all. This article seeks to restore this more radically anti-ideological aspect of Rashed's poem while illustrating the potential of Spivak's category for the study of literature.

Celebrating the Idea of Revolution

Faiz Ahmed 'Faiz' was a committed Marxist, one of the greatest Urdu poets, a journalist, film maker, trade unionist, broadcaster, teacher, translator, Lenin Peace Prize winner. Faiz Ahmed 'Faiz' had also served the British Indian Army rising to the rank of Lt Colonel. Born in Sialkot, Faiz was educated in Lahore, the city which served as his base throughout his life.

Islam and the Army in Colonial India

After what seems like a strange absence of academic interest, the study ofMuslims in South Asia is catching up – and not all of that interest is motivatedby the contemporary concerns of counter-terrorism and Af-Pak strategy.Part of this intellectual revival has been focused on the Deccan, andone of the best and brightest young historians working in the area is NileGreen, who now teaches at UCLA.The author posits three primary contributions to wider historiographicaldebates. First, it engages the social history of how empire impingedupon communities and practices and often co-opted and promoted them,thereby allowing us greater insight into its workings to suggest that partnershipswere essential to perpetuating power, especially in India, wherethe number of actual British soldiers and administrators on the ground wasnever sufficient for an absolutist colonial empire. As such, it allows us topeek into an alternative form of subaltern interaction and agency. This issignificant, given the neglect to a large extent of the study of religion onthe part of subalternists. Second, the book demonstrates how cultural practicesand the invention of norms were central to fostering military cultureand performance of the British Indian Army, which involves the selectivepromotion of certain forms of religiosity. It provides further evidence for ...

‘A Conquerable Yet Resilient Foe’: British Perceptions of the Imperial Japanese Army's Tactics on the India-Burma Front, September 1942 to Summer 1944

Britain's ability to discard its image of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) as an invincible enemy during the Burma campaign hinged upon two key factors. First, accurate assessments of the appropriate means to overcome the IJA not only hinged upon reliable intelligence, but of greater importance, the level of experience which the British-Indian army had in engaging its opponent. Second, the uncertainty was compounded by concerns arising from the IJA's ability to inflict considerable delays and casualties on its Allies counterparts, in spite of its shortage of modern weapons and lack of adequate training in their use. Apprehensions could not be lifted until Allied forces had proven themselves capable of conducting operations against the Japanese without incurring excessive losses. The Fourteenth Army's victories at Imphal and Kohima in June 1944 did not discredit the IJA's ability to pose a difficult challenge. The only reassurance which field commanders could draw was that their own forces had developed the skills necessary to undertake their quest to dislodge the IJA from its positions in Burma.

Gender Matters in the Singapore Mutiny

In 1915 a rebellion broke out among the Fifth Light Infantry of the British Indian Army which was stationed in Singapore. Several historical studies on the Singapore Mutiny are already available but so far no analysis has been offered of the ways in which gender issues became entwined within British constructions of the significance of the rebellion. This article explores some gender matters arising from the Singapore Mutiny. It considers how the British colonizers created gendered interpretations of the uprising with images of lecherous as well as treacherous Indian rebels targeting British womanhood. A comparison is suggested between the ways in which the British mythologized the Singapore Mutiny and their constructions of the significance of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. (authors)

Indigenous Mercenaries in the Service of European Imperialists: The Case of the Sepoys in the Early British Indian Army, 1750-1800

When the British got drawn into a series of wars against the French and a variety of Indian princes in south-east India (the Carnatic) in the latter half of the eighteenth century, they were short of men to fight them because few lower-class Europeans could be enticed to the East. So they had to turn to the large indigenous Indian military labour market and found many willing to serve for the regular pay which, unusually for India, the East India company offered them. The British had to overcome their own initial scepticism that the Indian troops (sepoys) who fought for them, with their very different cultural values and military traditions, could be trained and disciplined to fight as well as Europeans in the European manner. However, as the company's imperial attitude grew, it had no choice but to rely on its sepoys. A way was eventually found to raise the sepoy battalions' performance by partially replacing their Indian officers with British ones. This solution also to some extent allayed growing fears that, as the sepoys became more tactically competent and disciplined, they might one day turn on their employers. It did however blight the career prospects of the company's Indian officers and this was one of the elements of the great mutiny eight years later which challenged the integrity of the mighty Raj.

Indigenous Mercenaries in the Service of European Imperialists: The Case of the Sepoys in the Early British Indian Army, 1750–1800

Indigenous Mercenaries in the Service of European Imperialists: The Case of the Sepoys in the Early British Indian Army, 1750–1800

Beyond Beasts and Bullion: Economic Considerations in Bombay's Military Logistics, 1803

A previous work on British Indian Army logistics from 1757 to 1857 called into question the accuracy of labeling Arthur Wellesley ‘The Logistical Architect of the British Indian Army’. As the ‘soldier brother’ of India's Governor-General Richard, Marquis Wellesley, Arthur was bound to have drawn some attention while in India; but secondary sources have tended to be too ethnocentric in their interpretation of his South Asian military experience. Arthur Wellesley's successful command-apprenticeship, during the Dhoondiah Waugh Campaign, led him to the promotional track which culminated in his appointment as the Commander of the Southern Theatre in the 1803 Anglo-Maratha War. However, one should not confuse his prominence with precedence and I have argued elsewhere that East India Company (EIC) logistical policy was essentially South Asian in origin.

‘Bullocks treading down wasps’?: The British Indian army in Waziristan in the 1930s

‘Bullocks treading down wasps’?: The British Indian army in Waziristan in the 1930s