Race and Recruitment in the Indian Army: 1880–1918

Abstract

In 1914, the Indian Army was deployed against the enemies of the British Empire. This paper analyses the administrative mechanism as well as the imperial assumptions and attitudes which shaped the recruitment policy of the Indian Army during the First World War. From the late nineteenth century, the Martial Race theory (a bundle of contradictory ideas) shaped the recruitment policy. With certain modifications, this theory remained operational to the first decade of the twentieth century. The construction of the 'martial races' enabled the British to play-off different communities against each other to prevent the emergence of a unified anti-British sentiment among the colonized. During the Great War, faced with the rising demands of manpower, the army was forced to modify the Martial Race theory. However, a conscript army did not emerge in British-India. This was due to imperial policies, the inherent social divisions of Indian society, and because the demands for military manpower remained relatively low in comparison to India's demographic resources. Due to innovations in the theory and praxis of recruitment, the volume of recruitment showed a linear increase from 1914 to 1918, with maximum intensification of recruitment occurring during 1917 and 1918. But as the war ended in November 1918, despite the entry of several new communities, the bulk of the Indian Army still came from the traditional martial races. 1313proportioned humans whereas malarial tropical regions with swamps and marshes, such as Bengal Terai and Arakan, produced unhealthy races. 6 However, the military and intellectual circle's attitude within India, with regard to the inter-linkages between climate and courage of the communities, was ambiguous. Some pointed out that due to the operation of other factors such as discipline, public spirit, or religion, good warriors were also found in the hotter regions. 7 Hence the Kashmiris, despite hailing from a cold mountainous region, were regarded as unmartial. In contrast, one 'martial race' which British officials thought very highly of were the Jat cultivators from eastern Punjab and Delhi-Agra region-which is neither cold nor mountainous. In addition, those Jat peasants who had embraced Sikhism (the British considered it a martial religion) from central Punjab were favoured. Major A. E. Barstow of the 2 nd Battalion of the 11th Sikh Regiment noted in 1928: 'The position of the Jat Sikh, however, is considerably higher than that of his Hindu confrere. This may be attributed partly to the fact that he is a soldier as well as an agriculturist, and partly to the freedom and boldness which he has inherited from the traditions of the Khalsa'. 8 The general belief of the British officers was that peasants make good soldiers and most of the martial races (who happened to be of middle castes) were of peasant stocks. The British administrators believed the rural population of Punjab to be the paragon of virtue and the urban population as 'degenerate' villains. A modern historian writes that the positive v...

Indian Soldiers on the Western Front

“…The term … was widely used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its meaning was linguistic and cultural, rather than 'ethnological' in the late Victorian sense, when notions of progressive evolution had emerged as a generalized theory of human racial 'type'. (Bayly 1995: 172) Nevertheless, even in the later period, race as it featured in martial race ideology was not in fact a purely physical phenomenon but an admixture of the biological with various other influences, for example geographical-cum-environmental or social-cum-occupational, on the grounds that martiality as an inherited racial quality was positively or negatively impacted by contextual factors (Roy 2013(Roy : 1311(Roy -12, 1318).…”

“…(Mason 1974: 24) Although the British went further in their formulation of martial race ideology, the warrior ideal was embodied in the kshatriya varna (Kirk-Greene 1980: 396), while epic literature offered lists of foreign and domestic fighting peoples (Brockington 1995: 101). ii The Mughals made similar determinations of military prowess, and, when forming their armies in India, they preferred the Rajputs and Marathas who were perceived to be warlike (Roy 2013(Roy : 1326. Likewise, the distinction between groups eligible and those ineligible for enlistment was drawn in Nepal before the British chose to recruit their erstwhile enemies (Caplan 1995: 262-3).…”

“…The initial premise of martial race ideology was predicated upon a distinction drawn between the West, where the whole population was potentially martial, and the East, where martiality was seen as particular to specific sections of the Indian population who possessed the required military aptitude (MacMunn 1984: 129); thus the supposedly martial Northerners were favoured over the supposedly non-martial Southerners (Roberts 1898: 532). The underlying logic, if that is the appropriate word, of this selection had a climatic element in that it was believed that a bracing climate was conducive to martiality, in contrast to warmer areas, since heat was understood to be debilitating both physically and psychologically (Roy 2013(Roy : 1312. Another element was caste-based, in that peasants of the middle rank were considered martial because they were untainted by the corrupt and debased mores of the urban educated classes (p. 1313).…”