Soldier Of The Raj

Soldiers of the Raj

With a profusion of anecdotes conveying the character of India under British rule. Farwell offers a panoramic survey of the Indian army during the 90 years between the Sepoy Revolt and the births of independent India and Pakistan ...

A unique examination of the role of the Indian army in post-World War II India in the run-up to Partition. Daniel Marston draws upon extensive archival research and interviews with veterans of the events of 1947 to provide fresh insight into the final days of the British Raj.

Two and a half million Indians volunteered in the Second World War. Their stories had been lost and silenced, until now. Award-winning historian Yasmin Khan marshals interviews, newspaper reports and unseen archival material to tell the forgotten story of India’s role in the Second World War. We meet soldiers, sailors and non-combatants – prostitutes, nurses, cooks, peasants – whose lives were upended by a war far, far away. From a small Muslim boy arrested for singing anti-recruitment songs, to cooks preparing chapattis on army boats, to a family listening to illicit German radio broadcasts, and a love letter from the first Indian soldier to receive the Victoria Cross, Khan makes us feel and hear the lost voices of a people involved in a war that wasn’t of their choosing. Dramatizing a cataclysm that transformed the subcontinent and led to its independence, The Raj at War undeniably inserts South Asia back into World War II history and confirms that the Empire – and all its subjects – formed both the heart and limbs of Britain’s war efforts and eventual victory.

This is the first scholarly study of the subject for twenty years, and the only one based on extensive archival research. The Indian Army conquered India for the British, and protected the Raj against its enemies within and without. In this evocative and compassionate work, David Omissi examines the origins, motives and protests of the several million Indian peasant- soldiers who served the colonial power.

The Sepoy Army was one of the pivots of Britain's overseas empire. After 1857, this army policed the subcontinent as well as Britain's extra-Indian overseas possessions. The importance of the Sepoy Army for the Raj could be gleaned from the fact that it consumed about 30 per cent of the government's revenue. For the colonised also, the colonial army was one of the largest government employers in India. Nevertheless, it remains an underdog both in Indian and the British-Imperial historiography. This volume focuses on recruitment and the mechanics of command. It attempts to answer pertinent questions like: who were recruited and why, how the recruits were conditioned into soldiers, etc. Recruitment was the product of two opposing ideologies: the Martial Race ideology and the Anti-Martial Race ideology. The Sepoy Army was the largest volunteer army in the world. The Indians joined the army and remained loyal to it mostly because of a host of tangible and intangible incentives offered to the soldiers and institutionalisation of the coercive apparatus by the British command. The Study begins at 1859 and ends at 1913. This is because after the 1857 Uprising, the Bengal Army experienced a sea change in its organisation and social architecture. And again, 1914 constituted a break since the army went through a fivefold expansion. The author attempts a cross-cultural comparative analysis with other armies in order to flesh out the specificity of the Sepoy Army. This much awaited study is invaluable for scholars of military and modern Indian history.