The Military in British India: The Development of British Land Forces in South Asia 1600–1947

Preface to the Second Edition

The two decades since this work was first published have seen a steady revival of interest in the history of British military activities in South Asia. Shortly after the original publication, the National Army Museum mounted a major exhibition on the Indian Army in 1999 supported by a fine catalogue with supporting essays, including one by the author of this book, Alan Guy and Peter Boyden (eds), Soldiers of the Raj: The Indian Army (1999). A more recent exhibition at the National Army Museum has been of the early artistic legacy of the British and East India Company Armies, as demonstrated again in a catalogue, Indian Armies, Indian Art: Soldiers, Collectors and Artists, 1780–1880 (2010). The artistic legacy of the early challenge for the Company in expanding British influence over the state of Mysore was the focus of Anne Buddle (ed.), The Tiger and the Thistle: Tipu Sultan and the Scots in India, 1760–1800 (1999), accompanying an exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland.

More recently, there have been two major conferences on the subject of the British Indian Army, one at the Imperial War Museum, London, in May 2009, and another held by the British Commission for Military History at Oxford in the summer of 2012. The subjects covered by their proceedings indicate the way in which the history of events and policies, formerly seen as merely a product of post-imperial nostalgia, has been given a new relevance by the challenges of the early twenty-first century. Among these themes are the re-examination of the ‘martial class’ theory that loomed so large in the British recruitment of Indian soldiers, the problems of low-intensity operations on the North-West Frontier, the two world wars of the last century, and the consequent transformation of what had become an imperial gendarmerie into a modern conventional army, such as it had once been.

The British military in India has also been recast in the wider context of more contemporary concerns with the previously Eurocentric nature of military history. Stephen Peter Rose, Societies and Military Power: India and Its Armies (1996) puts the British experience in the much longer context of Indian history from antiquity to the post-independence era. Indian historians have also advanced new interpretations as in the essay collections, Partha Sarath Gupta and Anirudh Deshpande (eds), The British Raj and its Indian Armed Forces, 1857–1939 (2002) and Kaushik Roy (ed.), War and Society in Colonial India, 1807–1945 (2006). The latter has a useful introduction on the impact of ‘agrarian’, ‘subaltern’ and ‘cultural’ studies on the specific historiography of the Indian Army. Roy is also responsible for The Oxford Companion to Modern Warfare in India (2009).

It has become increasingly clear that, in expanding their empires, Europeans adapted to local conditions, including existing patterns of warfare. There are two useful introductions. Douglas Peers (ed.), Warfare and Empires: Contact and Conflict between European and Non-European Military and Maritime Forces and Cultures (1997), covers aspects of European military interaction with Africa, Asia and the Americas from 1415 onwards. The equally wide-ranging Wayne Lee (ed.), Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World (2011) concentrates on evidence of European adaptation of indigenous military and diplomatic norms. In India in particular, the East India Company conformed to traditional means of raising armed forces within the existing military labour market, as described in the first edition, with more recent studies by Stewart Gordon, ‘The Limited Adoption of European-style Military Forces by Eighteenth Century Rulers in India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 35 (1998), 229–45; G.J. Bryant, ‘Asymmetric Warfare: The British Experience in Eighteenth Century India’, Journal of Military History 68 (2004), 431–69; and Kaushik Roy, ‘Military Synthesis in South Asia: Armies, Warfare and Indian Society, 1740–1849’, Journal of Military History 69 (2005), 651–90. The application to India of the concept of the fiscal-military state now familiar to students of the English and British armies in the early modern period is considered by C.A. Bayly, ‘The British-Military-Fiscal State and Indigenous Resistance in India, 1750–1820’, in C.A. Bayly (ed.), Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (1998), 238–75.

The developing relationship between the East India Company and native sepoys is examined in Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (1995); G.J. Bryant, ‘Indigenous Mercenaries in the Service of European Imperialists: The Case of the Sepoys in the Early British Indian Army, 1750–1800’, War in History 7 (2000), 2–28; and Channa Wickremesekera, Best Black Troops in the World: British Perceptions and the Making of the Sepoy, 1746–1805 (2002). Douglas Peers, ‘Colonial Knowledge and the Military in India, 1780–1860’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 33 (2005), 157–80, posits the need for British officers to study local cultures. Indications of potential disciplinary problems with native armies were already evident with the mutiny at Vellore in 1806, for which the most recent source is James Hoover, Men Without Hats: Dialogue, Discipline and Discontent in the Madras Army, 1806–7 (2007). Indiscipline was partially a reflection of different military cultures, as explored by Douglas Peers, ‘Army Discipline, Military Cultures and State-Formation in Colonial India, c.1780–1860’, in Huw Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke and John Reid (eds), Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c.1550–1850 (2012), 282–307.

If Mysore was one early challenge for the Company, another was that posed by the Marathas, against whom three wars were fought between 1778 and 1819, for which the most recent study is Randolf G.S. Cooper, The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns and the Contest for India: The Struggle for Control of the South Asian Military Economy (2005). Cooper has also considered Arthur Wellesley’s logistics during the Second Maratha War in ‘Beyond Beasts and Bullion: Economic Considerations in Bombay’s Military Logistics, 1803’, Modern Asian Studies 33 (1999), 159–83. Recent general studies of Wellesley in India are to be found in Anthony Bennell, The Making of Arthur Wellesley (1997), and Bennell’s Army Records Society edition of The Maratha War Papers of Arthur Wellesley, 1803 (1998).

Inevitably, perhaps, the coming of the Mutiny or Revolt of 1857 looms large in studies of the early nineteenth century. Two works by Douglas Peers appeared just too late to be considered for the first edition of this volume, namely ‘Sepoys, Soldiers and the Lash: Race, Caste and Army Discipline in India, 1820–50’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 23 (1995), 211–47, and Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth Century India (1995), the latter especially emphasising the relative precariousness of Company and British rule. Military concerns thus fuelled the First Burma War (1824–26) and the seizure of Bharatpur (1825–26). The theme of a garrison state has also been followed by Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (2005).

Continuing unrest was illustrated by the mutiny at Barrackpore in 1824, covered by Premansu Kumar Bandyopadhyay, Tulsi Leaves and the Ganges Water (2003). Recent work on the Mutiny or Revolt of 1857 itself includes T.A. Heathcote, Mutiny and Insurgency in India, 1857–58 (2007); The Mutiny Letters of Colonel H.P. Pearson, August 1856–March 1859 (2008); Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, The Great Uprising in India, 1857–58: Untold Stories, Indian and British (2007); Saul David, The Bengal Army and the Outbreak of the Indian Mutiny (2009); Sabyasadhi Bhattacharya (ed.), Rethinking 1857 (2007); Kim Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (2010); and Biswamoy Pati (ed.), The Great Rebellion of 1857: Exploring Transgressions, Contexts and Diversities (2010).

One lesser known aspect of the aftermath addressed in this book is covered in more detail in Peter Stanley, White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India, 1825–75 (1998), dealing with the experience of the European regiments of the East India Company and the ‘white mutiny’ of 1859 when they were incorporated into the British Army. So far as the new Indian Army is concerned, as suggested earlier, the issue of the martial races has drawn attention as in David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (1994); Lionel Caplan, Warrior Gentleman: Gurkhas in Western Imagination (1995); Mary Des Chene, ‘Military Ethnology in British India’, South Asia Research 19 (1999), 122–35; Kaushik Roy, ‘The Construction of Regiments in the Indian Army, 1859–1913’, War in History 8 (2001), 127–48; Thomas Metcalf, ‘Sikh Recruitment for Colonial Military and Police Forces, 1874–1914’, in Thomas Metcalf, Forging the Raj: Essays on British India in the Heyday of Empire (2005), 250–81; and Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (2004), which encompasses Scottish Highlanders as well as Sikhs and Gurkhas. The literature as a whole is summarised in Kaushik Roy, ‘Beyond the Martial Race Theory: A Historiographical Assessment of Recruitment in the British-Indian Army’, Calcutta Historical Review 21–22 (1999–2000), 139–54.

Aspects of discipline are covered in Kaushik Roy, ‘Coercion through Leniency: British Manipulation of the Courts Martial System in the Post-Mutiny Indian Army, 1859–1913’, Journal of Military History 65 (2001), 937–64’; and idem, ‘Spare the Rod, and Spoil the Soldier? Crime and Punishment in the Army of India, 1860–1913’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 84 (2006), 9–23. A different perspective is that of Nile Green, Islam and the Army of Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire (2009).

Curiously, since the publication of the first edition of this book, the British soldier in India has been almost entirely neglected beyond the popular survey by the late Richard Holmes, Sahib: The British Soldier in India, 1750–1914 (2005), and Douglas Peers, ‘Imperial Vice: Sex, Drink and the Health of British Troops in North Indian Cantonments, 1800–58’, in David Killingray and David Omissi (eds), Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, 1700–1964 (1999), 25–52. European volunteers in India, however, have been covered in Kaushik Roy, ‘India’, in Ian Beckett (ed.), Citizen Soldiers and the British Empire, 1837–1902 (2012), 101–20; and Chris Kempton, The Regiments and Corps of the HIEC and Indian Army Volunteer Forces (2012). Logistics and its contribution to both sepoy welfare and military strength has also been discussed by Kaushik Roy, ‘Feeding the Leviathan: Supplying the British-Indian Army, 1859–1913’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 80 (2002), 144–61; and idem, ‘Equipping Leviathan: Ordnance Factories of British India, 1859–1913’, War in History 10 (2003), 398–423.

Military campaigns in India have continued to see the publication of popular accounts but Indian military performance has also been subjected to more rigorous academic scrutiny. Tim Moreman, The Army in India and the Development of Frontier Warfare, 1849–1947 is an important study of the Indian Army’s ‘way of war’. Moreman has also contributed ‘Watch and Ward: The Army in India and the North West Frontier, 1920–39’, in Killingray and Omissi (eds), Guardians of Empire, 137–56. Imperial policy has been discussed by R.A. Johnson, ‘Russians at the Gates of India? Planning the Defence of India, 1885–1900’, Journal of Military History 67 (2003), 697–743. Later frontier warfare has also been illustrated in Brian Robson, Crisis on the Frontier: The Third Afghan War and the Campaign in Waziristan, 1919–20 (2004); and Alan Warren, Waziristan: The Faqir of Ipi and the Indian Army: The North West Frontier Revolt of 1936–37 (2000). A recent interest has been in political officers on the frontiers as in Christian Tripodi, ‘Peacemaking through Bribes or Cultural Empathy? The Political Officer and Britain’s Strategy towards the North West Frontier, 1901–45’, Journal of Strategic Studies 31 (2008), 123–51; and idem, Edge of Empire: The British Political Officer and Tribal Administration on the North West Frontier, 1877–1947 (2011)

Aspects of Kitchener’s pre-war reforms are covered in Tim Moreman, ‘Lord Kitchener, the General Staff and the Army in India, 1902–14’, in David French and Brian Holden Reid (eds), The British General Staff: Reform and Innovation, c.1890–1939 (2002), 57–74. The problematic performance of the Indian army on the Western Front is the subject of a popular account, Gordon Corrigan, Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian Corps on the Western Front, 1914–15 (1999), which can be supplemented by Mark Harrison, ‘Disease, Discipline and Dissent: The Indian Army in France and England, 1914–15’, in Mark Harrison, Roger Cooter, and Steve Sturdy (eds), Medicine and Modern Warfare (1999), 185–203; David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18 (1999); and George Morton Jack, ‘The Indian Army on the Western Front, 1914–15: A Portrait of Collaboration’, War in History 13 (2006), 329–62. Equally difficult experiences in Mesopotamia are covered in Nikolas Gardner, ‘Sepoys and the Siege of Kut-al-Amara, 1915–16’, War in History 11 (2004), 307–26; Kaushik Roy, ‘The Army in India in Mesopotamia from1916 to 1918: Tactics, Technology and Logistics Reconsidered’, in Ian Beckett (ed.), 1917: Beyond the Western Front (2009), 131–58; and Andrew Syk’s Army Records Society edition of The Military Papers of Lieutenant General Frederick Stanley Maude, 1914–17 (2012). The problem of post-1918 ‘Indianisation’ is touched upon in Mark Jacobsen’s edition for the Army Records Society of Rawlinson in India (2002), Rawlinson’s tenure as Commander-in-Chief in India extending from 1920 to 1925.

The wider context is covered in Anirudh Deshpande, British Military Policy in India, 1900–45 (2005); Kaushik Roy, ‘Military Loyalty in the Colonial Context: A Case Study of the Indian Army during World War Two’, Journal of Military History 73 (2009), 497–530; idem, (ed.), The Indian Army in the Two World Wars (2011); and Alan Jeffreys and Patrick Rose (eds), The Indian Army, 1939–47: Experience and Development (2012). The fall of Singapore in February 1942 was a particularly low point, as discussed by Alan Warren, ‘The Indian Army and the Fall of Singapore’, in B. Farrell and S. Hunter (eds), Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited (2003), 207–89. It contributed to the creation of the Indian National Army, which is among the subjects dealt with in Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–45 (2006). In Burma, however, the fortunes of Indian Army were transformed, as discussed by Daniel Marston, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign (2003); and Tim Moreman, The Jungle, the Japanese and the British Commonwealth Armies at War, 1943–45: Fighting Methods, Doctrine and Training for Jungle Warfare (2005). An aspect of the demise of the Indian Army is illuminated in Daniel Marston, ‘The Indian Army, Partition and the Punjab Boundary Force, 1945–47’, War in History 16 (2009), 469–505.

For students of the British Army, which for almost a hundred years formed a third of the forces at the disposal of the Government of India, themes of transformation have again become important. As it withdraws from its cantonments on the North German plain, where it found for fifty years a comfortable exile mirroring its time in India, it is changing back from being a continental force to an expeditionary one. Its recent expeditions to Iraq and Afghanistan, though undertaken as part of USA-led multi-national forces, illustrate the unchanging problems of such operations. Among these are those of asymmetrical warfare, set amid a hostile terrain of deserts and mountains, and of recruiting local troops capable of being efficient without becoming a threat, all of which were experienced by the armies of British India. Away from the battlefield, the British Army in association with its international allies is currently helping to build new nations and new armies to succeed those left behind in the retreat from Empire. A particular contribution takes the form of training and educating local officers, a subject of major controversy in the later years of the British Raj, as shown in this book. Although the proper task of the historian, in Ranke’s words, is ‘to say what really happened’, it is allowable to speculate on what, in the light of history, might happen next. Many commentators envisage the emergence of new failed states in regions formerly within the British Indian Army’s area of responsibility, where the British Army might once again find itself deployed on peacekeeping or nation-building operations.

This book is essentially a constitutional history rather than a work of War Studies, but its themes of the importance of civil-military relations, interservice and inter-personal rivalries, and unceasing conflict between the rival demands of finance and defence remain equally important in both fields. Though recent wars in the Gulf and Afghanistan have seen the publication of numerous histories and memoirs, aimed at widely different levels of readership, the constitutional history of the armies involved there has received but little attention. It is hoped that, as a new generation of politicians and soldiers finds itself facing old problems, the re-issue of this work will prove timely in filling a gap in knowledge. History does not repeat itself, but it does resemble itself.

T.A. Heathcote

January 2013

Preface to the First Edition

This book, coming from the pen of one trained at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, is unavoidably a work of oriental history rather than imperial history. Why then is there a volume in a series on the history of the British Army which treats its subject as a British episode in the history of the Indian military rather than as an Indian episode in the history of the British military? The writer has set out to make two points. The first is that in India, as elsewhere, vixere fortes ante Agatnemnona (‘There were heroes (lit. strong men) before Agamemnon’), quite literally so in the Indian case, where there are heroes with an antiquity as great as those of Homer. Despite the fact that British orientalists have for over two centuries studied the history of South Asia, including the campaigns of its great Muslim and Hindu rulers, many popular works published in the United Kingdom during the British period of Indian history (and some published since its end) give the impression that before the coming of the British all forms of higher military knowledge were beyond not merely the experience but even the competence of Indian fighting men. The existence of Indian generals and soldiers who proved doughty opponents to even an Alexander the Great or a future Duke of Wellington was glossed over. The achievements of armies involved in the creation or destruction of empires as rich and populous as any of their contemporaries in the West were ignored. European victories over Indian troops, largely the result of temporary advantages in military technology or political organisation, were ascribed to cultural or racial superiority, despite the fact that the British conquered India largely by the use of Indian manpower. Nevertheless, Indian officers and Indian soldiers displayed their ability to master new Western techniques as soon as these appeared to advantage in Indian battles, with such success that the British ensured Indian access to modern weapons and military education was kept to an absolute minimum. For the Indian military, as for Indian society as a whole, the British represented merely a temporary change in the composition of the country’s dominant minority. This is not to say that the Indian military was unaffected by its association with the British. Indeed, it is tempting to say that those who seek examples of the culture and traditions of the old British Army should look for them among the officers and soldiers of the armies of India and Pakistan.

The second point made in this book is that India was by no means the source of military strength to the British that it seems at first sight. It is true that troops of the British Army stationed in India were paid for by Indian rather than British revenues. It is also true, however, that both the East India Company and the India Office were always concerned to keep the number of these troops as small as possible, and to ensure that they were employed for the purposes of British India rather than the British empire as a whole. The British Parliament too kept a scrutiny on the size of the British forces maintained by Indian funds, lest they be used by a British Government to implement policies for which supplies would not be voted by the House of Commons. The most that can be said is that troops in India, whether of the British or Indian armies, formed a reserve of trained manpower which the British Government could, in emergency, hire from the Indian Government. Such a purpose, however, was not that for which they were maintained, and might have been achieved more effectively by other means. In some respects India was a source of weakness rather than strength. Service there for the British Army amounted to a kind of exile and was said by the recruiters to have an adverse effect on their efforts. The Government of India, anxious to minimise expenditure, provided the military with equipment which lagged behind contemporary European standards, so that service in India did little to fit troops for service outside India except in the most basic aspects of soldiering. When ultimately re-equipment became necessary (as much for political as military reasons), it could only be achieved at the expense of other British needs, outside India. By the end of the Second World War, the costs incurred by the British Government in employing Indian troops outside India, and in maintaining additional British troops inside India, were so great as to wipe out all India’s financial debts to London and so remove one of the greatest obstacles to the ending of British dominion in South Asia.

It is now over sixty years since the British Army left India. During that time the British Empire has become, as its poet Rudyard Kipling forecast, ‘one with Nineveh and Tyre’. Although the population of post-imperial Britain includes two million of all classes whose origins lie in the Indian subcontinent, no more to them than to their English fellow-citizens does a recollection of the achievements of Anglo-Indian arms loom large. Yet a general interest lingers, encouraged by adventure films of the 1980s, or even by televised repeats of those of the 1930s, whose welcome suggests that each new generation continues to re-act against the conventional attitudes of its predecessors. Thus as ‘revisionist’ history has become ‘mainstream’, the writer claims to be ‘post-revisionist’. It is his hope that this work will encourage the renewed interest in Indian history and give a greater understanding of those khaki-clad figures who, for a few rupees a month, held the garrisons and outposts of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen.

Southern Asia at the beginning of the twentith century.

Chapter 1

India’s Military Heritage

The thread of military events has been woven into the robe of Indian history from the earliest recorded times. The most ancient literary source, the Rig-Veda, alludes to the conquest of the north west by the Aryans, an Indo-European people who used their superior military technology, the war chariot, to achieve the overthrow of the civilisation of the first Indus Valley cities. The Aryans themselves were followed by other Indo-Europeans, spoken of with disapproval by the early texts as unorthodox in their beliefs and ritual. The little kingdoms set up by the Aryan tribesmen became the components of larger states. By the mid-fourth century BC, when Indian events first came to be recorded by Western historians, the early Hindu empire of Magadha controlled all the Ganges basin, while that of the northern Indus was part of the Persian empire. In 326 BC Alexander the Great, having become ruler of Persia, arrived to assert his claim to its twentieth satrapy or province. After a great battle on the banks of what is now known as the Jhelum, called by the Greeks the Hydaspes, King Porus (or Paurava) of the Punjab was defeated, but the nobility of this ruler and the bravery of his men led Alexander to leave him as a vassal and march down the Indus, eventually to return home through the desolate wastes of Makran.¹ A new emperor arose in Magadha, Candragupta Maurya, who drove out the garrisons left by Alexander. This emperor’s son, Asoka, one of the greatest rulers of Indian, or indeed world, history, extended his dominions southwards to the edge of the Tamil plain and north-westwards, far beyond the passes to cover the whole of modern Afghanistan by the time of his death (c. 232 BC).² The lions which surmount the columns he put up to mark the boundaries of his empire now appear on the badges of the Republic of India, replacing the crown used during the time of British rule.

A hundred years after Asoka, invaders came again. First there were Hellenic rulers from Bactria, who first took the Kabul valley and then set up dynasties in the Punjab. Next came the Sakas or Scyths. These were replaced by an Iranian dynasty, the Pahlavas, which briefly ruled North West India around the time of Christ. Then came a Turkish people, known to the Chinese as the Yueh-chih, one of whose tribes, the Kusanas, controlled much of Central Asia and Northern India until the middle of the third century AD before losing all beyond the Indus to the Persians.³

Then, with the successors of these various invading hosts absorbed into Hindu ways, a new empire arose, that of the Guptas. Samudra Gupta, the Napoleon of India, established his authority over most of the Ganges basin, and his son Candra Gupta II extended it westwards over the Punjab and southwards over the Deccan. At the end of the fifth century AD, however, the Hunas, referred to in contemporary Byzantine chronicles as the Hephthalites or White Huns, who a century earlier had occupied Bactria, followed the customary invasion routes through the mountains into Western India and settled in Rajasthan. The power of the Gupta empire gradually weakened, though its glory was partially restored by the great King Harsa, who came to the throne in AD 606 and ruled for forty-one years until his death at the age of fifty-seven.⁴ The history of India in the four centuries that followed is not unlike that of Europe at the same time, with a once-powerful empire breaking up into successor-states, ruled over by warlike monarchs who set up their own dynasties and indulged in warfare as the true sport of kings. Although these wars maintained the martial skills of Indian commanders and soldiers at the same high level as those who had opposed Alexander the Great a thousand years previously, they ultimately proved disastrous for the political and economic strength of the Hindu kingdoms. Most disruptive of all was the practice of the ancient ritual of the asvamedha or horse sacrifice. A consecrated horse was released to wander for a year, followed by a picked band of warriors, who would demand that all kings on whose territory the horse went must acknowledge the overlordship of their own king, or give battle and capture the horse. If the horse remained free at the end of the year, it was returned to the king who had released it and was sacrificed with great rejoicing. Every king with the power to do so sought to perform this ceremony, which in effect meant that every state was always liable to invasion by its neighbour.⁵

Hindu armies were all-embracing in their composition, and assemblies of 500,000 or more strong were frequently recorded. Nevertheless, only a small proportion of the manpower so embodied actually bore arms. The caste system meant that each occupational group carried out its own special tasks–grooms, grass cutters, sweepers or sanitary orderlies, metal workers for the sharpening and repair of weapons, leather workers who provided and repaired saddlery and equipment, tent pitchers, water carriers, medical staff, veterinarians, bearers or porters, domestic servants of all kinds, merchants to supply food for men and beasts, and a whole host of the official and unofficial followers whose presence is an essential adjunct to any army at any time, but whose specialisms were developed in Indian society to such a marked extent.

For those whose specialism was actually to do the fighting, the warriors themselves, battle was a great religious rite, a high sacrifice in itself.⁶ Astrologers were consulted as to the most propitious time for the commencement of operations. Purification ceremonies were performed on the eve of battle and troops going into combat were addressed by their priests, just as is the case in even the most sophisticated of modern armies at the present day. Another practice, still common everywhere, was the delivery of inspiring messages from the king or ruler, although the promises of booty, if not of glory, which accompanied such messages in former times are nowadays discouraged. Battle was considered to be merely a series of individual combats, with the courage and morale of the mass depending upon the visible performance of their leaders. As in most other armies of ancient and medieval times, if a leader fell, only the noblest or the bodyguard continued to fight on, while the rest made their escape as best they could.

Most orthodox Hindu texts argued that fighting was part of the warrior’s dharma, the duty appointed for his class. Rules of conduct, similar to those of Christian chivalry, were laid down, which had the effect of minimising the adverse consequences of warfare upon those who took part in it. Ideally, a mounted man should not strike a dismounted one; soldiers fleeing, wounded, disarmed, or asking for quarter, should not be slain; poisoned weapons were forbidden; the proper reward for victory was the homage rather than the dispossession of the conquered.⁷ Women, children, priests and other non-combatants should be spared. Conversely defeat was a disgrace, the stain of which might only be wiped out by suicide. Cowardice in the face of the enemy was the greatest of shames, incurring not only disgrace in the present life, but suffering in the hereafter. The Hindu belief in samsara or the transmigration of souls, and the general assumption that the innumerable changes through which the life force passed were governed by its conduct in each preceding stage, did something to mitigate the harshness of war and to lessen the fear of death (if not of the process of dying), just as do all higher forms of religion. Thus, although a man might be born into a high position in society as a reward for good deeds in some previous existence, if he behaved badly he might be abased in some future one, perhaps being reborn as a snake or a worm, or even a woman. A king who slew the sacrosanct person of an envoy for example, could expect to be reborn in torment, along with all his advisers.⁸ This particular law no doubt expressed the strong personal interests of the brahmans, the priestly class, who were the most likely to be used as envoys, as well as those of the rulers who needed the free passage of heralds and ambassadors for the making of war and peace alike. Most civilised societies protect the persons of envoys for much the same reason. There was thus a disposition on the part of Hindu kings and of Hindu soldiers to make war in as humanitarian a way as the business of killing and being killed allows.

It must be admitted that in and after the stress of battle, when men’s baser passions are aroused, the rules were not always observed, any more than were those of medieval chivalry. Indeed, in modern times, the broadly similar provisions of the Geneva conventions are not invariably observed by all parties. Campaigns were commonly associated with massacre, pillage, and rape, especially if the forces involved were those of petty warlords rather than enlightened and powerful emperors certain of victory. The Dravidian south always displayed a greater degree of ruthlessness towards defeated enemies and non-combatants alike, but even in the Aryan north military necessity was accepted as a justification for departure from the ideals of behaviour. The Arthasastra or Treatise on Statecraft, attributed to Candragupta Maurya’s great minister Kautilya (also known as Canakya and Visnugupta), predated by a thousand years the unscrupulous (or realistic) views of Niccolo Machiavelli in its recommendation that a king should do everything necessary to win a war, including the destruction of crops, assassination and treachery.⁹ The Arthasastra also taught that a live dog was better than a dead lion, advice that many Hindu rulers would remember when faced with the necessity of reaching an accommodation with an overwhelming invader and which permitted Hindu soldiers to surrender when further resistance was hopeless, in the same manner as is allowed by Western convention.

Hindu armies drew their troops from a variety of sources. The six categories usually listed were the hereditary troops, who rendered military service to their ruler by virtue of their belonging to the ksatriya or hereditary military class of the divinely ordained four-fold division of Hindu society; mercenaries, who had no stake in the country, but were efficient and would fight for whoever paid the best wages; corporation troops, in effect private armies normally employed by merchant guilds for the defence of caravans and centres of trade in unsettled areas; contingents sent by subsidiary allies; defectors from the enemy; and wild tribesmen from the hills and jungles, suitable for unconventional or localised campaigns. Traces of all these categories continued to be found in forces maintained by the British when they ruled India, and medieval Hindu armies also included units with a corporate and continuous existence like that of British regiments. Such armies and such endemic warfare required great resources.