Gajendra Singh, University of Edinburgh
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
*not to be cited or quoted without written permission of the author*
Conceptualising “Martialness”: The British Ascription and ReAscription of Martial Identities in Late Colonial India
Recent scholarship into the history of colonial India has focused a great deal upon the
psychological and epistemological effects of colonial rule upon the colonized Indian
populace, and no more is this the case than in works examining the classifications, made by
men such as Lieutenant-General Sir George MacMunn, of who were and who were not the
‘martial races of India’;
Who is the great bearded Sikh with his uncut Nazarite hair…? Where does the square-shouldered
Musalman of the Punjab fit in the system of India, or the lithe Mahratta? Does the squat, pugfaced little Mongolian Gurkha with a Kilmarnock cap on the side of his little head fit [in] at all?
… to understand what is meant by the martial races of India is to understand from the inside the
real story of India. …[For] in India we speak of the martial races as a thing apart because the
mass of the people have neither moral aptitude nor physical courage.1
It is as such that Wickremesakara concludes that the designation of some groups as ‘martial’
was part of the creation of a uniform racial hierarchy that was perniciously imposed on all
Indians by the British2, and Heather Streets exhorts that such a reordering of society was
replicated everywhere in the British Empire from Highland Scotland to British East Africa3.
Yet in this paper I will depart from these prevailing approaches by challenging the notion
that the British in India ever utilized a single, universal and unchanging martial race theory,
and instead show that many different, and often contradictory, narratives of martiality were
created by the colonial military establishment. Moreover, I shall show that these narratives
were constantly being rewritten in response to the material difficulties of garnering and
governing military recruits. This paper will start, therefore, with a detailed survey and critique
MacMunn, George. The Martial Races of India. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1933. p.1-2
‘…an Indian hierarchy was gradually constructed. Peoples from the north, with their fair skin and “noble
features” were ranked closer to the Europeans and as a consequence, above the dark-skinned peoples from the
south and east, among whom the Bengali came to represent the stereotypical Hindu – [more] feeble of both
body and mind than the European and therefore destined to be conquered….’
1
2
Wickremesekera, Channa. “Best Black Troops in the World”: British Perceptions and the Making of the Sepoy, 1746-1805.
New Dekhi: Manohar, 2002. p.21
‘…this book claims that the British Army in India was neither apolitical or marginal to British culture; rather,
its representatives exerted considerable efforts trying to shape the values of Victorian culture.’
Streets, Heather. Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. p.3
3
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Gajendra Singh, University of Edinburgh
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
of contemporary literature on the subject of ‘martial race’ discourses in India, before turning
to two case studies that show a selection of the different formulations and re-formulations
of martial identities that arose under the British Raj between 1880 and 1947.
The notion that a single theory of martialness existed in India, that it was a fixed and
unchanging colonial construction, and that it was created, at least in part, to demean the
‘non-martial Indian’ of the South and Bengal, has been commonly espoused in historical
circles ever since 1930, when Nirad Chaudhuri, the Congressman and journalist, wrote in
this regard4. Yet it was with the publication of Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy in 1983 that
the concept of a homogeneous and hegemonic colonial martial theory was most forcefully
made. For Nandy asserts that the demasculation and neutering of the majority of Indians,
and the contrasting hyper-masculation of white imperialists and Indian soldiers, was one of
the chief devices used by colonialist writers to justify British rule from 1830 onwards5. This
is the case because, not only were most Indian men portrayed as too feminized to rule and
defend themselves, but early Indian nationalists and reformers were seen by Nandy as
legitimizing this assumption further by lauding a martial masculinity in their writings and
activities6. Moreover, so influential has Nandy’s argument been that seemingly everyone
writing about the Indian military, from Ellinwood in the 1980s to Deshpande in 2005, feels
obliged to comment in the same vein;
[Because] in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries the orthodoxy of the martial
races theory reigned supreme7…without the Indian Army there would have been no British rule
in India. It was such an important constituent of the British Raj that it is taken for granted by
most scholars… .8
Thus it is clear that there exists, to some extent at least, a historical consensus over the
apparent uniform and unchanging nature of a martial race discourse in India.
Yet, just as Douglas Peers criticises many writings on the subject of the Indian military for
depending on the ‘reading and re-reading of a remarkably limited number of works’9, so
Nandy’s formulation of a single and static martial race theory can be critiqued on the same
basis. For Nandy, and those others that have embraced his approach, have reached their
Chaudhuri, Nirad. ‘The Martial Races’; Ellinwood, Dwight C. ‘Ethnicity in a Colonial Asian Army: British
Policy, War, and the Indian Army, 1914-1918.’ Ellinwood, Dwight C. and Enloe, Cynthia H., Ethnicity and the
Military in Asia. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 1981. p.90
5 Nandy, Nandy. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford UP,
1988. from p.6 onwards
6 Everyone from Rabindranath Tagore to Swami Vivekananda; ibid. p.9 and 25
7 Deshpande, Anirudh. British Military Policy in India, 1900-1945: Colonial Constraints and Declining Power.
New Delhi: Manohar, 2005. p.30
8 ibid. p.19-20
9 Peers, Douglas M. ‘“Those Noble Exemplars of the True Military Tradition”: Constructions of the Indian
Army in the Mid-Victorian Press’. Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1, (February 1997). p.113
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Gajendra Singh, University of Edinburgh
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
conclusions by adroitly dissecting several published works, but have ignored the extent to
which the message contained therein has been conditioned by authorial intent, the specific
time in which the works were written, and the audience for which they were produced. Thus,
for instance, the memoirs of Lord Roberts of Kandahar in 1897, the first Commander-inChief of the Indian Army, have been described by Stephen Cohen as the seminal texts of a
climactic theory of martiality in India10, in which the closer one’s home was to the cooler
climes of the Himalayas the more martial one was seen as being11, when a closer reading of
his memoirs reveals that they were more about countering criticism he had received for
disbanding the old Presidency armies of India than elucidating a commonly held belief12.
Similarly, George MacMunn’s The Martial Races of India, written in 1933, is quoted in great
depth by Heather Streets because it comprehensively groups together the martial races of
India as an undifferentiated whole and differentiates them absolutely from the debauched
Indian of the plains13, but, as MacMunn repeatedly makes clear, his purpose in writing the
work was to discredit talk of granting Dominion status to India following the Civil
Disobedience movement rather than to chart established policy;
To this day the followers of Islam and those of the faith that never dies, glare at eachother,
across the table, in the council chamber, and in the streets of the crowded cities. There is only
one set of people among whom live and let live is a principle. …The martial races of India live
side by side in friendliness so long as there is a strong hand of Government to prevent their
stouter hearts joining more seriously in the quarrel.14
Indeed such is the disjunction between this published discourse of martiality and what was
discussed in private, that pamphlets such as F. Yeats-Brown’s ‘Martial India’ of 1945,
impressing how manly and loyal Indian soldiers had been during the Second World War15,
were written at the same time as private memoranda between generals in the Indian Army
Cohen, Stephen P. The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation. Berkeley: California
UP, 1971. p.46
11 ‘…long years of peace, and the security and prosperity attending it, had evidently has upon them [the soldiers
of the South], as they always seem to have upon Asiatics, a softening and deteriorating effect; and I was forced
to the conclusion that the ancient military spirit had died in them, as it died in the ordinary Hindustanis of
Bengal and the Mahratta of Bombay, and that they could no longer be pitted against warlike races, or employed
outside the limits of southern India.’
Roberts, Frederick. Forty-One Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief, Vols. I and II. London:
Richard Bentley & Son, 1897. p.383
12 ‘[I condemn] the ignorance that was only too universal with respects to the characteristics of the different
races, which encouraged the erroneous belief that one Native was as good as another for purposes of war.’
ibid, p.441
13 Indeed Streets believes that MacMunn’s work was ‘the only monograph on the subject’: Streets, Martial Races,
p.2
14 MacMunn, The Martial Races of India, p.6
15 ‘During those difficult days in 1940, when men and munitions were short, when England faced invasion,
when Malta was in constant peril, the Empire, swaying like a storm-bent oak, like the oak endured….’
Yeats-Brown, F. Martial India. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1945
10
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Gajendra Singh, University of Edinburgh
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
admitting that Indians in the Army had never shown ‘real loyalty or patriotism towards
Britain as Britain, not as we understand loyalty’16. Therefore it is unsurprising that the
conclusion that a single and unchanging martial discourse has been reached so often, given
that those who advocate this approach are reliant on uncritically accepting the message
contained in a limited number of published sources. As such, it is only by going beyond this
limited canon, to analyze recruiting handbooks, settlement reports and private memoranda,
that I will show that a far greater dynamism and fluctuation of martial identities existed in
India by referring to two specific examples of Sikh and Brahmin soldiers.
Following the annexation of Punjab by the East India Company in 1849, the Board of
Administration established to govern the new colony immediately raised five regiments of
infantry and cavalry from the former Kingdom consisting of ‘men, habituated from
childhood to war and the chase’17, but Sikhs, and particularly the Jat Sikh cultivating classes
of the Majha or central areas of Punjab, were largely excluded from this category and their
numbers were restricted to no more than two hundred in infantry and one hundred in
cavalry regiments18. To some extent this changed with the outbreak of the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857
and with the recruitment of 23,000 Sikhs to quash it, in that the language describing the Jat
Sikh peasantry as a soldierly class came to be used in reports drafted by colonial officials in
India, and in the weekly reportage of Friedrich Engels in Britain;
There are now nearly 100,000 Sikhs in the British service, and we have heard how saucy they are;
they fight, they say, to-day for the British…[and they are] Brave, passionate, [and] fickle….19
It was, however, only with Denzil Ibbetson’s supervision of the first census of Punjab that
was completed in 1883, and the subsequent ‘Handbook for the Indian Army’ for the
recruiting of Sikhs written in 1899, that Sikhs came to be compartmentalised further and that
martial qualities were ascribed to those Sikhs that followed the correct religious beliefs,
professions and cultural norms. For whereas Sikh Brahmans were condemned for their caste
prejudice20, urban Sikh Khatris for their reluctance to take to the plough21, and low caste
Typewritten minute marked “Strictly Personal and Secret” from General Auchinleck, concerning the effect
on the Indian Army as a whole of the first trial of members of the Indian National Army, Major-General
Thomas Wynford Rees Papers, Asia And Africa Collections, British Library, MSS Eur/F274/95, p.3
17 Punjab Administration Report, 1849-1851: Mazumdar, Rajit K. The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab,
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. p.9
18 Mazumdar, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab, p.8
19 Engels, Friedrich. ‘The Revolt in India’, published in the New York Daily Tribune, 1 October 1958. Marx,
Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The First Indian War of Independence, 1857-1859. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988
repr. p.152
20 Bingley, A.H. Handbooks for the Indian Army: Sikhs. Simla: Government Central Printing Office, 1899. p.37
21 ibid. p.39
16
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Gajendra Singh, University of Edinburgh
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
Sikh Mazbhis for their supposed criminality22, Sikh Jats were praised for being devoid of all
these sins and blessed with an impressive stolidity and obedience;
Hardy, brave and of intelligence too slow to understand when he is beaten, obedient to
discipline, devotedly attached to his officers, and careless of the caste prohibitions which render
so many Hindu races difficult to control and feed in the field, he is unsurpassed as a soldier….23
Indeed so sturdy and uncomplaining were Sikh Jats seen as being, that by 1925 they
constituted some twelve percent of the 219,523 men in the Indian Army24, despite the total
population of Sikhs in India being little above four million.
Yet this notion of the archetypal Sikh Jat being a ‘rather stupid yeoman farmer’25, and
therefore an uncomplaining soldier, was not one that was maintained for long by the colonial
military establishment in India. For although, following the First World War, official
histories still praised the ‘Black Lions’ of the Khalsa who died nobly defending the honour
of the King-Emperor26, in confidential reports examining the role of Sikh soldiers in
mutinies, insurgencies, demobilization riots, and the Akali movement for the control of Sikh
Gurdwaras, the conclusion was quickly reached that the character of the Sikh Jat had
changed for the worse;
With the high-spirited and adventurous Sikhs the interval between thought and action is short. If
captured by inflammatory appeals, they are prone to act with all possible celerity and in a fashion
dangerous to the whole fabric of order and constitutional rule.27
Moreover with the advent of the Second World War this new language used to describe the
Sikh soldier hardened even further, in part due to more mutinies and revolts occurring that
culminated in a large number of Sikh sipahis joining the Indian National Army to fight
against the British, but also because there was a preference for Sikh recruits to join technical
rather than combat units, in which they could avoid battle and gain vocational training. Thus
not only did the proportion of Sikhs in the Indian Army fall from the twelve percent it stood
at in 1925, to ten percent in 1942 and even lower in 194628, but Sikh Jats as a whole were
seen to be unsuitable military material, for whereas other soldiers were seen as being immune
to ‘the influence of Congress’29, the Sikh was seen as being naturally seditious;
ibid. p.49
Griffin, Lepel, ibid. p.93
24 Mazumdar, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab, p.18
25 MacMunn, The Martial Races of India, p.252
26 Yeats-Brown, Martial India, p.31
27 East India Sedition Committee, 1918. Report of Committee appointed to investigate Revolutionary Conspiracies in India.
London: HM Stationary Office, 1918. p.68
28 Class Composition of the Army in India, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, (L/WS/1/456), p.31
29 ibid. p.23
22
23
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Gajendra Singh, University of Edinburgh
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
The Sikhs present a somewhat different problem from other classes. They are a separate, warlike,
and politically minded community.30
In contrast to what occurred with regards to Sikh Jats, Gaur Hindu Brahmins from
Northern India were lauded as the closest thing to Europeans in the East before the
Uprisings of 1857, and were afterwards condemned for their adherence to caste prejudice,
their poor physique and being morally ‘deep and tricky’31, as Peers, Wickremesekara and
others have shown32. Yet, although the recruitment of Brahmins from the United Provinces
was curtailed, to the extent that they were only enlisted in two regiments of the old Bengal
Army from June 189233 and only one battalion on the eve of the First World War34, the
recruitment of Brahmins never ceased entirely and the perception of the U.P. Brahmin as a
soldierly class came to be revived as British Imperial power in India began to wane;
There…arose [in India] a class of Brahmans [sic] who, while retaining the privilege of a Levite
class, were in all essentials an agricultural people, of naturally pacific tendencies, but ready and
able to defend themselves whenever occasion required…. They were more docile and easily
disciplined; they were quicker to learn their drill; and their natural cleanliness, fine physique and
soldierly bearing made them more popular with their European officers than the truculent
Muhammadans from the north, to whom pipeclay and discipline were abhorrent.35
The first instance of this was Captain A.H. Bingley and Captain A.H. Nicholls’ Caste
Handbook for the Indian Army: Brahmans produced in 1897, and which was less of a recruiting
aid, as it was supposed to be, than it was a proselytizing tool to show that Brahmins could
once again be placed ‘on an equality with the most warlike races of India’36. To that end
both authors accepted that many Brahmins could be ‘ignorant and bigoted’37, thrifty to
excess38 and have ‘wearisome formalities’39, but in the guise of Kanoujiya Brahmins found
in the area south-west of Muthura and along the Nepal border a new reformed Brahmin was
ibid. p.24
Bingley, A.H., and Nicholls, A. Caste Handbooks for the Indian Army: Brahmans. Simla: Government Central
Printing Office, 1897. p.15
32 Peers, Douglas M. ‘“The Habitual Nobility of Being”: British Officers and the Social Construction of the
Bengal Army in the Early Nineteenth Century’. Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3, (1991): and
Wickremesekera, “Best Black Troops in the World”
33 Kaul, V.A. ‘“Sepoys” Links with Society: A Study in the Bengal Army, 1858-1895’. Gupta, P.S. and
Deshpande,, A. (eds.), British Raj and its Indian Armed Forces, 1857-1939. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2002. p.32
34 ‘Statements Showing “Class Composition” of newly raised Indian Infantry Battalions, 1 January 1917’. Class
Composition of the Army in India
35 Bingley, and Nicholls, Caste Handbooks: Brahmans, p.7-9
36 ibid, p.10
37 ibid, p.18
38 ibid, p.42
39 ibid, p.42
30
31
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Gajendra Singh, University of Edinburgh
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
found that would not only eat animal flesh and put his hand to the plough, but who would
reject all of the supposedly troublesome aspects of Hinduism;
…besides the parohits there is a large body of Brahmans [among the Kanoujiya] who supplement
the offerings of their clients by field labour, or who have become cultivators pure and simple. …It is
from these secular Brahmans that we obtain the majority of our recruits.40
Furthermore as narratives of martiality in India changed, so that those once imbued with
soldierly qualities were no longer perceived as being so, it was the old valiant Oudh Brahmin
that helped to fill the material gap by contributing 37,000 soldiers during the Second World
War in the Artillery, Engineers, Infantry and Royal Indian Army Supply Corps41, and that
helped to fill the gap in the psyche of the colonial military establishment by being designated,
along with others, as a new ‘manly class’;
Madrassis and Brahmans of course are the oldest of the classes to be enlisted in the Indian
Army…. For many years past, however, the enlistment of Madrassis [and Brahmans] has been
very limited, so it may be said that the great increase [in recruitment] which has taken place in the
last three years constitutes an innovation.42
Thus it is clear, through an analysis of martial race narratives relating to Sikh and Brahmins,
that there was no single colonial construction of martialness in India, but that this enterprise
was composed of several different strands that could at times entwine and at times diverge
from each other. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, at least two of these strands had
to be reworked in response to the material challenges posed by sipahis being unwilling or
unable to fully embrace the martial identity that had been imposed upon them, and I dare to
hypothesize that the same could be said were I to investigate other soldiers enlisted under
the British Raj, be they Pathan and Garhwali, or Dalit and Adivasi;
Three or four letters have come from Master Abd-Ul-Qaiyam of which one is enclosed in this
letter. This was read out before everybody and in it he says “Distinguish yourself thus and thus”
[and prove worthy of your race]. You write and tell him that one letter of that sort is enough. He
must write no more. Everybody laughed at it….Tell him not to write another letter like that. It makes
everybody laugh.43
ibid, p.20
Typewritten minute marked “Strictly Personal and Secret” from General Auchinleck, p.4
42 ibid, p.1
43 Naik Ibrahim Khan, 55 Rifles attached 57 Rifles, France, to Sepoy Akbar Khan, 57 Rifles, Hospital No. 12,
Marseilles, France, 29 October 1915. Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France, 1914-1915. Asia and Africa
Collections, British Library, L/MIL/5/825, Part 7. p.1187
40
41
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Gajendra Singh, University of Edinburgh
Researching the Colonial and Postcolonial workshop
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Gajendra Singh, University of Edinburgh
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