![]() ![]() Punjab itself contributed 54 per cent of the total troops. ![]() The Simon Commission’s report of 1930 stated that ‘broadly speaking, those races which furnish the best sepoys are emphatically not those which exhibit the greatest accomplishments of mind in an examination’. But these races were not fit for becoming officers as they were mostly dumb intellectually. But they were insensibly retrenched after the war and the martial race theory again took hold. During World War I, the requirement of more hands forced the authorities to overlook the martial race theory and open the window of enrolment up to other societies, and they fought remarkably well in the battlefields. By 1914, 75 per cent of the army was recruited from the so-called martial races. People who lived in urban areas were not considered for entry. Bengalis and numerous groups from south India were deemed non-martial and kept away. Even though Marston does not look deep into this hypothesis, we know that this theory developed after the 1857 Rebellion when the British started restricting military ranks only to those groups which sided with them in the rebellion. The British presumed that only these people showed martial qualities. ![]() The Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims and Pathans were given undue opportunities to enroll as soldiers. The British favoured the Martial Race Theory for recruitment. The representation of various provinces – or races, if you prefer – in the army was not evenly distributed. His first book, ‘Phoenix from the Ashes’ is an in-depth assessment of how the Indian army turned defeat into victory in the Burma campaign of World War II. Daniel Marston is Professor of Military Studies at the Australian National University. This book is about the last decade of the British Indian Army which successfully fought a world war, was tasked with suppressing nationalist forces in other distant colonies, had to undertake internal security duty to fight sectarian forces and finally had to undergo a painful division of itself into the regular forces of two sovereign nations. ![]() The army’s experience in the events surrounding independence and partition is unique in the annals of military history. It went through a period of instability that could have destroyed any military organisation. In the last days of the Raj, the entire endeavor to broker independence rested on the loyalty and stability of the army. The army was also constantly used as ‘Aid to the Civil Power’ in suppressing communal riots which sprang out unexpectedly but with unfailing regularity. It was used even to reclaim colonies of British allies like France and Holland in Southeast Asia after the Japanese surrender. The British used this massive fighting force to combat the dirty wars of the Empire in the two world wars. The British Indian army was undoubtedly the backbone of the system with the bureaucracy as its nervous system. The most surprising thing about the British occupation of India was that it was brought about by Indian mercenary soldiers commanded by a few thousands of British officers and administered by a few hundreds of British bureaucrats who in turn controlled tens of thousands of Indians working in lower levels. ![]()
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