Recruiting the 'martial races': identities and military service in colonial India - by Gavin Rand...

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Recruiting the ‘martial races’:identities and military service incolonial IndiaGavin Rand & Kim A. Wagner

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Recruiting the ‘martial races’: identities andmilitary service in colonial India

GAVIN RAND AND KIM A. WAGNER

ABSTRACT British rule in India was entirely reliant on local troops, and the

mobilization and recruitment of Indian communities gave rise to a multiplicity of

discourses, traditions and identities reflecting the peculiar relationship between

colonial power and indigenous military labour. Through the late nineteenth century,

these discourses became increasingly racialized: only certain native communities

were deemed to possess the ‘spirit’ necessary for military service. These so-called

‘martial races’* including Nepalese Gurkhas, Punjabi Sikhs and Muslims from the

northern and frontier provinces*provided the backbone of the imperial military

and played a vital role in defending and extending colonial authority. By the early

twentieth century, the racialized nature of soldiering in India was invoked to explain

the composition of imperial forces and to legitimize the preservation of colonial rule.

While the theory of ‘martial races’ is the subject of an increasingly diverse literature,

relatively little attention has been paid to the practice*and practical origins*of

restricted recruitment. In this article Rand and Wagner seek to re-examine the role of

martial-race theories in British recruitment policies and practices in colonial India,

drawing attention to the incoherence and complexity that marked the relationship

between ideas of race and the practicalities of colonial military administration. They

focus in particular on long-term patterns of continuities, rather than neat period-

izations, and suggest that racialized discourses regarding soldiering have to be

considered within the context of mutually advantageous relationships between the

colonial state and its indigenous allies.

KEYWORDS British India, colonial knowledge, ethnography, identity, imperial military,martial races, military recruitment, race, racialization

. . . to understand what is meant by the martial races of India is to understand from the

inside the real story of India. We do not speak of the martial races of Britain as distinct

from the non-martial, nor of Germany, nor of France. But in India we speak of the martial

races as a thing apart and because the mass of the people have neither martial aptitude nor

physical courage . . . the courage that we should talk of colloquially as ‘guts’.

*Lieutenant-General Sir George MacMunn, The Martial Races of India (1933)1

1 George MacMunn, The Martial Races of India (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co.1933), 2.

Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 46, Nos. 3�4, 2012

ISSN 0031-322X print/ISSN 1461-7331 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2012.701495

The military forces that sustained European imperialism in Asia, Africa

and elsewhere were largely comprised of locally recruited troops. More

than military technology or metropolitan industry, it was the indigenous

troops who enabled a handful of outnumbered officers and administrators

to exercise colonial authority. The project of empire was in fact wholly

dependent on the participation of local allies. Nowhere was this general

truth more apparent than in colonial India, where the mobilization and

recruitment of Indian communities gave rise to a multiplicity of discourses,

traditions and identities reflecting the peculiar relationship between

colonial power and indigenous military labour. Through the late nineteenth

century, these discourses became increasingly racialized: only certain native

communities were deemed to possess the ‘spirit’ necessary for military

service. These so-called ‘martial races’* including Nepalese Gurkhas,

Punjabi Sikhs and Muslims from the northern and frontier provinces*provided the backbone of the imperial military and played a vital role in

defending and extending colonial authority. By the early twentieth century,

the racialized nature of soldiering in India was invoked to explain the

composition of imperial forces and, as we will see, to legitimize the

preservation of colonial rule. In this article we seek to re-examine the role

of martial-race theories in British recruitment policies and practices in

colonial India, drawing attention to the incoherence and complexity that

marked the relationship between ideas of race and the practicalities of

colonial military administration. We focus in particular on long-term

patterns of continuities, rather than neat periodizations, and suggest that

racialized discourses regarding soldiering have to be considered within the

context of mutually advantageous relationships between the colonial state

and its indigenous allies.As the East India Company evolved from a mercantile enterprise into a

proto-colonial state, armies of locally recruited sepoys, or native soldiers,

were established in the three presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay.

Trained and led by British officers, the Company’s armies, which were

initially raised to protect its commercial operations, played an important

role in extending the political influence of the emergent company� state.

The largest and most important army was Bengal’s, which was recruited

largely from among high-caste Hindus in Bihar and Berar. However, when

rule of India passed to the Crown following the sepoy uprising of 1857,

recruitment patterns changed dramatically: to replace the mutinous sepoys,

the British turned northward and westward, increasingly relying on

recruits from Nepal, Punjab and the North-West Frontier. Between 1862

and 1914, 29 of Madras’s 40 battalions were disbanded, 30 Bombay

battalions were reduced to 18, and 28 Hindustani battalions were pared

down to 15. In the same period, the number of Nepalese Gurkha battalions

was increased four-fold, from 5 to 20, and a further 29 battalions were

added to the 28 raised from the Punjab. At the outbreak of war in 1914,

GAVIN RAND AND KIM A. WAGNER 233

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some three-quarters of the Indian infantry were recruited from the

continent’s so-called ‘martial races’.2

Two principal factors are seen to have influenced this transformation.

First, at the same time as it revealed some Indian communities to be

untrustworthy, the uprising of 1857 marked out other Indian communities as

‘loyal’ to the British. These groups* including Gurkhas, Sikhs and

Pathans*were extolled as exemplary soldiers whose martial qualities

were attributed to their ethnicities. Second, the advance of Russian influence

in Central Asia encouraged the commanders of the imperial military

to reorganize their forces with a view to future engagements along the

North-West Frontier. Thus, in 1881, Lord Roberts, then Commander-in-Chief

of the Madras Army, argued bluntly:

It is no use our trying to persuade ourselves that the whole of the Indian Army is

capable of meeting an enemy from Central Asia or Europe; they are not, and

nothing will ever make them. It is not a question of efficiency, but of courage and

physique; in these two essential qualities the sepoys of lower India are wanting.

No amount of instruction will make up for these shortcomings . . .3

Roberts is widely recognized as the architect of the ideology of ‘martial

races’, and his preference for Sikhs, Gurkhas and Pathans is usually seen to

reflect the ‘lessons’ of the rebellion, and the emergence of the Russian

threat in the northwest.4 Following his reorganization of the army in the

1880s, the ‘martial races’ emerged as key protagonists in contemporary

accounts of the imperial military: George MacMunn’s account is only one

of a number that highlight the key roles played by the empire’s native

auxiliaries.5 Similar accounts, often penned by ex-officers and adminis-

trators, continued to emerge in the aftermath of Indian independence in

1947.6 Rejecting the ‘biological’ explanation of colonial narratives, David

Omissi’s The Sepoy and the Raj emphasizes the practical and pragmatic

2 David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860�1940 (Basingstoke:Macmillan 1994), 11.

3 Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Correspondence with England while Commander-in-Chief inMadras, 1881�1885, vol. 2 (Simla: Government Central Printing Office 1890), 25� 6. Theenervating warm climate and the long period of peace enjoyed under British rule hadallegedly sapped the strength of the sepoys of southern India, who would be no matchfor the Tsar’s European army.

4 This is examined in great detail in Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race andMasculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857�1914 (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress 2004).

5 MacMunn, The Martial Races of India. See P. D. Bonarjee, A Handbook of the Fighting Racesof India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. 1899).

6 See Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men(London: Jonathan Cape 1974); and C. C. Trench, The Indian Army and the King’s Enemies1900�1947 (London: Thames and Hudson 1988).

234 Patterns of Prejudice

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elements of martial-race theory, highlighting the socio-economic and

strategic factors that underpinned Roberts’s reorganization, and down-

playing the effects of nineteenth-century ideas regarding race and evolu-

tion.7 From a different perspective, social scientists examining the

connections between ethnicity and military policy stress the administrative

efficacy of ethnic recruiting, particularly in ‘divided societies’.8 Following

the imperial and cultural turns, recent works have explored the transmis-

sions between metropolitan ideas of race and colonial administration more

thoroughly. We now have detailed studies of various ‘martial races’, as

well as a number of general accounts of colonial administration that cite

the emergence of the martial-race theory as indicative of wider shifts in the

nature of colonial rule.9 Heather Streets’s Martial Races, for example, maps

the emergence of martial-race theory across the empire, drawing connec-

tions between Scottish Highlanders, Punjabi Sikhs and Nepalese Gurkhas

in order to analyse inter-imperial representations of martial masculinities.10

Making use of metropolitan reportage and elite correspondence, Streets’s

account illuminates the pan-imperial resonance of martial-race discourse

but offers less insight into the origins and development of restricted

recruiting praxis. Conceding the difficulties of moving beyond representa-

tions to explain the institutional and social processes by which martial

7 The high political focus of much recent work concerning South Asian military history,however, leaves a number of important questions unexplored, particularly about theagency of recruits, but also about the administrative and bureaucratic systems thatinformed and enacted political decisions. See, for instance, Kaushik Roy, ‘Recruitmentdoctrines of the colonial Indian army: 1859� 1913’, Indian Economic and Social HistoryReview, vol. 34, no. 3, 1997, 321� 54; and Kaushik Roy, Brown Warriors of the Raj:Recruitment and the Mechanics of Command in the Sepoy Army, 1859�1913 (New Delhi:Manohar 2008). See also Channa Wickremesekera, ‘Best Black Troops in the World’:British Perceptions and the Making of the Sepoy, 1746�1805 (New Delhi: Manohar 2002).

8 Cynthia H. Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies (Athens: Universityof Georgia Press 1980). Enloe’s work identifies a series of connections betweenethnicity and military policy in a variety of historical contexts, highlighting the‘Gurkha syndrome’ as an example of the way in which ethnic identities weremanipulated by the state.

9 Of the various ‘martial races’, the literature on the Gurkhas is the most extensive, inpart, perhaps, because the continued recruitment of Nepalese troops has ensured theirremaining in the public eye; see, for example, Lionel Caplan, ‘‘‘Bravest of the brave’’:representations of ‘‘The Gurkha’’ in British military writings’, Modern Asian Studies,vol. 25, no. 3, 1991, 571� 97; Lionel Caplan, ‘Martial Gurkhas: the persistence of aBritish military discourse on ‘‘race’’’, in Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in SouthAsia (Delhi: Oxford University Press India 1996), 260� 81; and Mary Des Chene, ‘Relicsof Empire: A Cultural History of the Gurkhas, 1815� 1987’, PhD thesis, StanfordUniversity, 1991. Richard Fox sets out a more persuasive argument regarding thenature of the calculations that structured imperial military policy towards the Sikhs;see Richard G. Fox, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press 1985), 140� 59.

10 Streets, Martial Races.


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identities were elaborated, Streets concludes with a reading of thesecondary literature that emphasizes the dissonance betweenrepresentations of ‘martial races’ and the social and economic realities thatshaped the collective and individual experiences of martial recruits. Thus,though her account demonstrates that the colonial military can providefruitful sites for cultural histories of the imperial media, alternativeapproaches are necessary in order to account properly for the racializationof soldiering in colonial India.

While martial-race theory is the subject of an increasingly diverseliterature, relatively little attention has been paid to the practice*andpractical origins*of restricted recruitment. Similarly, few accounts haveseriously explored the ways in which martial-race recruiting ideologieswere contested or how they evolved over the course of the late nineteenthand early twentieth century. Rather, as Mary Des Chene has noted, muchof the historiographical debate has been concerned with the purpose ofrestricted recruitment. Was the martial-race discourse simply a means oflegitimizing a strategy of divide and rule? Did British officers reallybelieve that only some Indians were capable of bearing arms?11 Thoughimportant, these questions foreground the functional effects of martial-race theory, assuming that ethnic identities were mobilized by and at thebehest of the colonial state and thus effectively replaying Roberts’s andMacMunn’s formulation of the relationship between race and soldiering.This approach obscures the processes through which restricted recruit-ment developed and, perhaps more importantly, attributes to martial-race‘theory’ an epistemological coherence that is largely absent in thecontemporary sources. This article looks to present a more complicatedhistory of India’s ‘martial races’, challenging the coherence posited inmuch of the literature and emphasizing the instability and malleability ofideas regarding race and martial aptitude. We suggest that the concept ofthe ‘martial race’ has been ascribed too central a role in analyses ofcolonial recruiting. The racialization of soldiering in India was a complexprocess involving multiple interactions between British officers andadministrators, Indian communities and local elites, each framed by theeconomic, social and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century colonialSouth Asia. In unpicking parts of this process, we hope to show that amore nuanced reading of India’s ‘martial races’ is both possible andinstructive.

Early recruitment

Several Indian ethno-religious communities and castes, whose ethnic identityand status were taken more or less for granted by the mid-nineteenth century,

11 Des Chene, ‘Relics of Empire’, 70� 1.


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had emerged a mere century before.12 Typically, this process occurred in thecontext of shifting relations of power: the decline of the Mughal empirecaused significant political and social turmoil but it also enabled groups suchas the Rajputs and Bhumihars, or agricultural Brahmins, of eastern UttarPradesh and Bihar to establish a high-caste status through military service.This entailed a combination of the warrior ideal with the ritual purity andsocial privilege of Brahmin priests who were at the very top of the traditionalcaste hierarchy. These peasant soldiers were known as purbiyas or ‘east-erners’. Another notable community, the Sikhs of Punjab, developed adistinctly militarized identity under their tenth religious leader GuruGobindh Singh (1666�1708). As Mughal power waned, the Sikhs were ableto establish their own state in the Punjab, a process that came to fruitionunder Ranjit Singh as late as the early nineteenth century.13 In spite of thecommonly assumed pre-eminence of the caste system, the India that the earlymerchants and officials of the East India Company encountered was notcharacterized by fixed identities and inflexible traditions. The relationshipbetween race and soldiering thus evolved within the context of specifichistorical circumstances.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Company evolvedfrom a trading enterprise into a state in its own right. To protect its trade,honour local alliances and, latterly, expand its territorial possessions, it reliedon Indian soldiers recruiting an army of sepoys trained by British officersafter European military principles. At the time, however, the British werestill an emergent power and as such had to compete on equal terms withpolitical rivals, both Indian and European, in the recruitment of nativetroops. Much of the legitimacy of the Company army was in fact derivedthrough the continuation of pre-colonial practices, which included therecruitment of high-caste Hindu sepoys. Tapping the labour markets ofnorth India, the Company’s Bengal army used the existing networksof patronage and clan ties to recruit peasant regiments directly from Bihar,Benares and Oudh. This resulted in an extremely homogeneous body ofsepoys in the Bengal army, composed mainly of Brahmins, Bhumihars andRajputs, the so-called purbiyas.14 In order to bolster the high-status profile ofits army, the Company accommodated the dietary and ritual requirements ofHindus, and encouraged their religious festivals; at times the regimental

12 For a comprehensive account of early recruitment practices in the Bengal Presidency,see Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India1770�1830 (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995). See also Dirk H. A.Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market inHindustan, 1450�1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990).

13 See Fox, Lions of the Punjab; and Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries:Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Delhi and Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press 1994).

14 Recruitment practices in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies were of a very differentnature; see Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj.


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colours were incorporated in the religious festivals of the sepoys and

worshipped as idols. Appropriating extant cultural forms, this accommoda-

tion in effect created a military religious tradition that reflected the exalted

status of the sepoys. The administration of the imperial military was an

ethnographic enterprise long before 1857: the racialization of the Indian

soldier in the late nineteenth century needs to be understood in terms of this

wider history.15

Thus, in the early nineteenth century, the military authorities framed

recruitment and administration in terms of their recruits’ ethnicity, especially

their caste. In 1807 a committee established by the Commander-in-Chief

suggested ‘that it would . . . be extremely desirable that the whole of the

native army should, if practicable, be composed of men of high caste’.16

High-caste recruits, particularly those deemed to come from communities

with a putative tradition of military service, were especially esteemed. By

contrast, Indians possessing vaguely defined (and possibly hereditary)

‘predatory habits’*often including those enlisting far from home*were

regarded as dubious potential recruits.17 Importantly, the ethnographic

frameworks that shaped colonial recruiting practices also created their own

problems: while significant numbers of high-caste recruits were obtained

during the first part of the nineteenth century, some officers began to

perceive the dominance of particular groups as a threat. In 1830 the

Adjutant-General, Colonel C. Fagan, suggested that the increasing number

of high-caste recruits enlisted reflected Brahminic exclusiveness more than it

did a tradition of military service.18 To counter this trend, he suggested that,

although ‘good Brahmin recruits’ should continue to be enlisted, a general

preference for the ‘Rajpoot’ and ‘Mahomudan’ should be established,19 a

policy adopted by the military authorities. The British authorities soon

noted, however, that a number of recruits who had enlisted as ‘Rajpoots . . .

were subsequently discovered to be Brahmins’,20 suggesting the difficulty

of regulating recruitment by ethnography and the readiness of would-be

15 Colonial ethnographies were highly inconsistent and it is worth noticing that ‘caste’and ‘race’ could at times be used interchangeably; see, for instance, Shruti Kapila,‘Race matters: Orientalism and religion, India and beyond c. 1770� 1880’, Modern AsianStudies, vol. 41, no. 3, 2007, 471� 513.

16 Quoted in ‘Copy of orders issued by the Court of Directors regarding the castes ofHindoos from which the native army is to be recruited’, 5 February 1858, House ofCommons Parliamentary Papers, 1857� 8 session (129), XLIII.123 (p. 3).

17 Despatch of 1828, quoted in ibid. (p. 8).18 Although he did not object to ‘a particularly good recruit of [this] caste’, Fagan

believed that Brahmin sepoys were abusing the system of recruiting by exclusivelyencouraging other Brahmins to enlist; quoted from circular from Fagan, 9 August1830, in ibid. (p. 11). Before 1857 most recruits for the Bengal army were foundthrough local networks of patronage by sepoys during their furlough.

19 Ibid. (p. 12).20 Military despatch, 10 January 1835, quoted in ibid.


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recruits to (re)present themselves in terms likely to satisfy their prospective

employers.Concerned at the near-monopoly of high castes in the Bengal army, a

General Order of 1834 called for the recruitment of a wider range of Hindu

and Muslim groups.21 Gurkha battalions had already been established after

the Company’s war with Nepal in 1814�16 and, following the Sikh wars of

1845�6 and 1848�9, both Sikhs and Muslims from Punjab entered the Bengal

army in increasing numbers. In the early 1850s, the Governor-General noted

the ‘high soldierly qualities of the Sikhs’, declaring: ‘In every instance these

men have behaved as good soldiers, worthy of trust, and are highly regarded

by the officers under whose command they serve.’22 However, with the

expansion of the imperial dominion, colonial service also offered a means of

pacifying the annexed population. Thus, while noting the military virtues of

the Sikhs, the Governor-General added that the recruitment of Sikhs would

also ‘lead directly to the diminution of crimes of violence and robbery in the

upper districts of the Punjab . . . [and] afford an additional security against

insurrectionary movements among the classes and in the districts where

they are most to be apprehended’.23

Wider recruitment, however, constituted an open challenge to the

social exclusivity formerly maintained by the high-caste sepoys of the

Bengal army; if low-status groups could enlist alongside the Rajputs,

Bhumihars and Brahmins, service in the Company’s military no longer

constituted a guarantee of high status. Furthermore, it fundamentally

challenged the purbiyas’ security and livelihood, preventing sons following

their fathers into the Company’s employment (as had been commonplace).

Grievances over inadequate pay, the removal of privileges and lack of

opportunity for promotion had by the 1850s made the relationship

between the sepoys and their British officers increasingly strained. The

widely resented annexation of Oudh in 1856 also had a significant impact

on the sepoys of the Bengal army since some three-quarters of the troops

hailed from that region.24 These grievances*produced by and at the

interface of colonial strategy and indigenous interests*created the context

for rebellion.

21 See Saul David, The Indian Mutiny 1857 (London: Viking 2002), 22� 3.22 Despatch of 4 July 1850, quoted in ‘Copy of orders issued by the Court of Directors

regarding the castes of Hindoos from which the native army is to be recruited’ (p. 14).23 Ibid. Whereas ‘predatory habits’ and ‘crimes of violence’ had been considered

inimical to the cultivation of high-status military identities, this shift suggests a morecalculated appraisal of strategic and political priorities, albeit one that was alsoinformed by the economic advantages of local recruiting in Punjab.

24 See despatch of Colonel Keith Young, 25 June 1858, in ‘Papers connected with thereorganization of the army in India’, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1859session 2 (2541), VIII. 647 (p. 142); and Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt 1857�1858 (New Delhi: Permanent Black 2001), 1� 63.


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The uprising of 1857 and its aftermath

In May 1857 several regiments of the Bengal army broke out in mutiny,sparking a series of popular risings across northern India. Local grievancesand idiosyncratic causes converged around general issues, among whichthe defence of religion and the social order assumed a central and unifyingrole. Popular rebellion grew out of a longstanding climate of dissatisfactionwith colonial rule but it assumed widely different characteristics indifferent locations, and was by no means universally supported. Theuprising was in fact characterized by a high degree of confusion andambivalence: among the first three regiments of the Bengal army thatmutinied at Meerut in May 1857, for instance, a quarter remained loyal tothe British.25 Ultimately, there were as many Hindus and Muslims whosupported the British as there were who rebelled against them. Theuprising was brutally suppressed and, following the restoration of Britishrule, India became a crown colony. During the rebellion and its immediateaftermath, India’s Muslims were commonly blamed for instigating theuprising. The ailing Mughal emperor was tried as the mastermind of aMussulman plot, and the Westminster Review reported that ‘Hindoo Sepoys

were made the dupes and instruments of their more crafty Mussulmancomrades’.26 Others blamed Brahminic fanaticism, though often the rebelsof 1857 were demonized simply as ‘Orientals’ with little regard to theirspecific ethno-religious identity.27 The fact was that the diffuse and complexnature of the rebellion offered few obvious, never mind practicable, lessonsthat might ensure continued British rule in India. Predictably, this was alsothe equivocal conclusion of the Royal Commission convened to considerthe reorganization of the Company’s armies.

Following the rebellion, fewer than one-third of Bengal infantry regimentswere retained and the reconstruction of the military became vital to thecolonial administration.28 More than 300 pages of depositions weresubmitted to Peel’s Royal Commission and, unsurprisingly, there was littleagreement regarding the future composition of the Indian army. TheCommission’s conclusions were thoroughly vague: beyond recommendinga reduction in the number of native troops employed and an increase in the

25 George Carmichael-Smyth, Papers regarding the Indian Mutiny (n.p.: 1871), 16; StuartRyder, ‘Everard Lisle Phillipps VC: first memorandum qualifier’, Royal United ServicesInstitute, vol. 143, no. 3, 1998, 70� 5 (71).

26 Address of Major Harriott, Deputy Judge Advocate-General, 9 March 1858, in PramodK. Nayar (ed.), The Trial of Bahadur Shah (Hyderabad: Orient Longman 2007), 161; andquoted in Lewis Pelly, ‘The English in India’, Westminster Review, vol. 13 NS, no. 1,January 1858, 180� 209 (197).

27 See, for instance, G. O. Trevelyan, Competition Wallah (London: Macmillan 1866), 429.28 Gavin Rand, ‘Learning the lessons of ’57: reconstructing the imperial military after the

rebellion’, in Crispin Bates and Gavin Rand (eds), 1857: Military Dimensions (Sage 2012forthcoming).


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size of the European garrison, no definite recommendations were offered asto the composition or distribution of the native armies. Though the ‘races,tribes [and] castes’ from which the army was recruited were central to theCommission’s enquiries, few clear decisions were taken as to the groupsfrom which recruits should be taken: the high-caste monopoly of the Bengalarmy was widely deplored, but the commissioners found it more difficult topropose future recruiting practices.29 As a result, the Commission’s principalrecommendation was ambiguous: ‘That the Native Army should becomposed of different nationalities and castes, and as a general rule, mixedpromiscuously through each regiment.’30

Nevertheless, the uprising, and the campaigns to suppress it, hadsignificant impact on the racialization of soldiering in colonial India.Although the dominance of particular communities was recognized ashaving contributed to the mutinies in the Bengal army, most of the units thatemerged from the uprising were organized in terms of the recruits’perceived ethnicity, particularly by religion and caste.31 An importantconsequence of the reorganization was thus to entrench the connectionsbetween ethnography and the imperial military: thereafter routine enquiriesinto matters of organization, discipline and economy, as well as issues ofregimental identity and esprit de corps, were increasingly treated in terms ofthe racial or religious make-up of the troops involved.32 After 1857 officerswho wrote about their experience with Indian regiments described com-manding certain ‘races’ or ‘castes’, rather than (as previous officers had)their experience in charge of composite regiments. Inevitably, these accountsfrequently stressed the ‘distinctive’ characteristics of the officers’ troops. Bythe early 1870s several pseudo-ethnographic accounts appeared in theIndian military press, emphasizing the unique characteristics and martialproclivities of particular ethnic groups. These early papers, which includedshort, ethnographic studies of Sikhs, Gurkhas and Dogras among others,33

both reflected the practical effects of 1857 and paved the way for theextension of military ethnography*and the emergence of the martial-race

29 See ‘Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the organization of theIndian army’, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1859 session 1 (2515), V.1 (pp.xiv�xv); and ‘Appendix to minutes of evidence taken before the Commissionersappointed to inquire into the organization of the Indian army’, esp. 181� 3. For ananalysis of the Peel Commission’s recommendations, see Mason, A Matter of Honour,325� 40; and T. A. Heathcote, The Military in British India: The Development of BritishLand Forces in South Asia, 1600�1947 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1995),103� 26.

30 ‘Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the organization of the Indianarmy’ (p. xiv).

31 See Roy, Brown Warriors of the Raj.32 See papers on the reorganization of the Indian army in the British Library, London:

India Office Records (hereafter IOR), L/MIL/7/7241.33 Goorkha, ‘Notes on the Goorkhas’, Proceedings of United Service Institution of India, vol.

1, no. 4, 1871, 17� 32; H. C. P. Price, ‘Notes on the Sikhs as soldiers for our army’,


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theory* in the latter part of the century. In 1874 Napier (then Commander-in-Chief) ordered the preparation of short ethnographic surveys ofthe principal races from which the army was recruited, explaining that thepapers were designed ‘to place at the disposal of British officers, the meansof informing themselves of the class characteristics of their men’.34 Suchdevelopments were not unique to the military, however, and the increas-ed focus on ethnographic knowledge actually reflected contemporarytendencies in the sphere of colonial governance more generally.

Ethnography and the emergence of ‘martial races’

Following the uprising of 1857, the need to understand local society,peoples and customs assumed greater significance in the colonial admin-istration.35 It was accepted by the British that the uprising had in part atleast been provoked by their own interference in local religious beliefs andtraditions. One of the guiding principles of Crown rule in India was thatthe government could never again be seen to interfere in religious matters,lest they alienate the local population. And, during the following decades,strict non-interference policies were maintained. The civilizing mission andreformist impulse of the colonial project was thus counterbalanced by theperceived need to preserve Indian beliefs, practices and traditions, asthe British understood them. This led to the development of what NicholasDirks has described as the ‘ethnographic state’ during the latter half of thenineteenth century, with the first census of 1871 and an accompanyingvast array of surveys and collections of statistical data effectively attempt-ing to map India and Indians according to western metrics.36 The castesystem was considered to be the main organizing principle of Indiansociety and as such it was recorded and codified through colonial laws andcensuses. Caste supposedly determined the social status, profession and

Proceedings of United Service Institution of India, vol. 2, no. 12, 1872, 57� 70; J. J. H.Gordon, ‘The Dogras’, Proceedings of United Service Institution of India, vol. 3, no. 15,1873, 31� 44. These papers were the precursors of ‘official’ recruiting handbooks(which often built directly on them).

34 Robert Napier, ‘Ethnic elements of Native Army: Armies of Bengal, Bombay andMadras’, 1874: IOR, Papers of Field Marshal 1st Baron Napier of Magdala, Mss EurF114 5(4), no. 515/B.

35 See Thomas Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857�1870 (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press 1964); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: TheBritish in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1996); and C. A. Bayly,Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780�1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996).

36 Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton,NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2001). See also Norbert Peabody, ‘Cents,sense, census: human inventories in late precolonial and early colonial India’,Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 43, no. 4, 2001, 819� 50.


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primary identity of individuals, and it followed that, if a street sweeperinevitably belonged to the street sweeper caste, soldiers and warriorswould belong to a warrior caste.37 Categories such as ‘race’, ‘caste’,‘tribe’ and ‘clan’ lacked precise definitions and were often used inter-changeably; nevertheless, personal characteristics such as loyalty andmanliness gradually became associated with regional, ethnic and racialidentities.38 The development of racialized ideas about the martial aptitudeof certain Indian communities is thus best understood in the wider contextof an ethnographically orientated colonial governance, and as part ofa general attempt to classify and order Indian populations along scientificlines.39

At the same time that Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims and Gurkhas were beingexalted as loyal and manly soldiers, thousands of Indians, following asimilar logic, were being legally classified as criminals by birth under theCriminal Tribes Act of 1871.40 This particularly affected communities ofnomadic pastoralists, itinerant traders, tribals and Gypsies, groups at themargins of sedentary Indian society whose way of life was incommensurablewith colonial notions of law and order. Relying on the same kind ofethnographic ‘knowledge’ that had facilitated the identification of the‘martial races’, the act was aimed at identifying criminal elements withinthe Indian population and enabling colonial control via their settlement orpossible reform. Just as ideas about martial identities pre-dated 1857,however, so the notion of hereditary criminality and collective punishmentdated back to the establishment of early colonial rule in India.41 Equally,attempts to legally codify indigenous identities and their respectivecharacteristics, whether noble or ignoble, had always been accompaniedby confusion. For example, Regulation VI of 1810 referred to the punishmentof ‘Dacoits, Cozauks, Thugs, Buddecks, and other descriptions of publicrobbers’.42 The first four groups designated various types of bandits and

37 For a general discussion of caste in colonial India, see also Susan Bayly, Caste, Societyand Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press 1999).

38 See also Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (Delhi and Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press India 1996).

39 See Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1999).

40 See Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and policing the ‘‘criminals by birth’’, Part 1: Themaking of a colonial stereotype* the criminal tribes and castes of North India’, IndianEconomic and Social History Review, vol. 27, no. 2, 1990, 131� 64; Sanjay Nigam,‘Disciplining and policing the ‘‘criminals by birth’’, Part 2: The development of adisciplinary system, 1871� 1900’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 27, no.3, 1990, 257� 87; and Meena Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History: ‘Criminal Tribes’ andBritish Colonial Policy (Hyderabad: Orient Longman 2001).

41 See, for instance, Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early ColonialIndia (Calcutta and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998).

42 Regulation VI, 9 February 1810: IOR, V/8/18, 345� 7 (345).


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highway robbers, while the ‘Buddecks’ (Badhaks) were a distinct tribe that

was considered to be inherently criminal.43 One British official noted

however:

No man will ordinarily call himself a Dakoo, a Kuzzak, or a Thug, but a Budhuk

will avow himself a Budhuk* it is in fact the designation of a Race, which neither

Dakoo, Thug, nor Kuzzak is* the provisions of Regulation VI.1810 appear to me a

virtual order of expulsion from the Company’s Territories of the Race of Budhuks.

They are certainly a people infamous for robbery . . . but the name expresses

nothing otherwise than by popular estimation the Character of a Robber, and it

appears contrary to the principles of penal Law . . . to conclude from a person

being of a particular Race that he is a robber.44

During the early part of the nineteenth century, British officials thus

grappled with a complex social reality that frequently defied their

categorization.45 For example, early colonial phrenologists typically

failed to explain the alleged criminal proclivities of executed Indian

prisoners, and could find no common ground for the respective significance

of heritage and environment.46 Comparable confusion characterized later

theories of India’s ‘martial races’ and, in this respect, applied colonial

ethnography was defined by contradictions and ambiguities rather than

dogmatic certainties.47 In the context of the criminal tribes, for instance,

some officials suggested that caste and racial characteristics were immutable,

while others assumed a paternalist attitude informed by the notions of

reform: given the right colonial ‘guidance’, even hereditary criminals could

become law-abiding citizens pursuing socially profitable vocations.48 Yet,

if born criminals could be reformed, it also followed that their moral

antithesis, the ‘martial races’, could degenerate and become enfeebled.

43 See W. Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (Calcutta1896), I, 100� 1. Crooke was one of the foremost ethnographers of colonial India andhis writings were even incorporated into the army recruitment handbooks.

44 Transcript of a letter from J. W. Laing to George Dowdeswell, 3 April 1810: IOR,Bengal Criminal Judicial Proceedings, P/130/15 (21 April 1810, no. 16).

45 Some of the earliest ethnographies were taxonomies of criminal communitiesproduced to make sense of India and Indian society. The work of William HenrySleeman is notable in this respect. See Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the Britishin Early Nineteenth-century India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2007).

46 See Kim A. Wagner, ‘Confessions of a skull: phrenology and colonial knowledge inearly nineteenth-century India’, History Workshop Journal, no. 69, Spring 2010, 28� 51.

47 For an excellent comparative discussion, see David Arnold, ‘‘‘Criminal tribes’’ and‘‘martial races’’: crime and social control in colonial India’, paper presented at thepostgraduate seminar ‘Comparative Commonwealth Social History: Crime, Devianceand Social Control’, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, 4 December 1984.

48 See Andrew J. Major, ‘State and criminal tribes in colonial Punjab: surveillance, controland reclamation of the ‘‘dangerous classes’’’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 1999,657� 88.


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In spite of the putative ‘scientific’ underpinning for categories such asthe ‘martial races’ or ‘criminal tribes’, the identities ascribed to indige-nous communities were anything but stable. A community such as theMeenas could for instance be branded as unruly and prone to violence bythe local authorities at the same time that these very same characteristicsmade them attractive as military recruits for the army. In fact, somecommunities were simultaneously designated as a ‘criminal tribe’ and a‘martial race’.49

Though increasingly influenced by racial science and social Darwinism,the censuses, ethnographic surveys and army recruitment handbooks of thesecond half of the nineteenth century thus drew upon a long genealogy ofcolonial knowledge in India. In the age of Gobineau, Lombroso and Spencer,studies of the lower classes or orders of subject populations, includingdebates on race, degeneracy, miscegenation and national efficiency, were byno means limited to the colonies. Racialized ideas regarding criminality andmartiality were sustained by many of the same scientific impulses ofgovernance, both in the centre and at the periphery of empire, althoughwith hugely varied consequences.50

Ethnographic ‘knowledge’ could also be mobilized in response to economicand political constraints, and the drive for greater efficiency providedsignificant impetus for the development of martial-race theories.51 By the1880s, and in the face of sustained pressure to reduce the enormous spendingon the military, ethnographic knowledge had come to play an increasinglysignificant role in the recruitment and administration of Indian troops. By theend of the decade, the recruiting of Gurkhas was made the responsibility of anofficer ‘specially selected’ for his knowledge of the Nepalese peoples.Eden Vansittart’s pioneering work as district recruiting officer forGurkhas*work that drew extensively on pre-existing ethnographic researchand earlier writings of military officers*was vital to the hardening of themartial-race theory, not least because his work provided (or seemed toprovide) a coherent framework and rationale for the reorganizationsfavoured by Lord Roberts.52 Vansittart’s 1890 volume, Notes on Goorkhas*the first of the army’s long-running series of recruiting handbooks*providedlists of Nepalese social divisions that were intended to assist recruitingoperations by allowing European officers to distinguish ‘genuine’ Gurkhas

49 See Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, 34� 5.50 This is in part Heather Streets’s main argument in Martial Races, but see also John

Marriott, The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination(Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003).

51 This was the overriding motivation for the Eden Commission of 1879; see BrianRobson, ‘The Eden Commission and the reform of the Indian army, 1879� 1895’,Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, vol. 60, no. 241, 1982, 4� 13.

52 Eden Vansittart, Notes on Goorkhas: Being a Short Account of Their Country, History,Characteristics, Clans, &c. (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing 1890); andDes Chene, ‘Relics of Empire’.


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from impostors.53 By 1895 similar volumes on Sikhs, Pathans, Rajputs, Jats,Brahmins, Garhwalis as well as ‘Hindustani and Punjabi Mohademans’ hadbeen received in the Military Department, where they were reproduced anddistributed across the subcontinent. In 1897 a general compendium had beenassembled and, in 1899, P. D. Bonarjee’s A Handbook of the Fighting Races ofIndia was published. Bonarjee’s account, in many ways the immediateprecursor of MacMunn’s more familiar volume, sought to provide ‘a clearand brief account for the use of young British officers’, signifying thecodification of martial-race theory and the first attempt to commercialize thefunctional military ethnographies of the previous quarter-century.54 In anyevent, from the 1890s and at the behest of Lord Roberts, the recruitment andorganization of the Indian army was shaped by the tenets of martial-racetheory. Yet, even as the martial-race discourse appeared near hegemonic, itspractical effects and administrative implications could be deeply ambiguous.

1897

Though colonial notions of martial aptitude were increasingly racializedduring the latter part of the nineteenth century, the putative relationshipbetween ethnicity and military efficiency remained problematic. Duringoperations on the North-West Frontier in 1897, for example, the militaryauthorities were alarmed to receive ‘unfavourable reports’ regarding theperformance of certain ‘martial’ regiments. Hindustani Muslims werereported to have refused to advance on the enemy and abandoned theirpositions in a disorderly retreat.55 The officer charged with investigatingthe ‘fighting qualities of the races’ involved, A. P. D. Harris, identified the‘deterioration’ of Bengal’s Muslim population as the principal cause of theregiment’s poor performance.56 Drawing on a selection of ethnographic

53 Vansittart, Notes on Goorkhas. This suggests that Nepalese peasants, much like theBrahmins pretending to be Rajputs decades earlier, were adept at recognizing, andeven manipulating, colonial recruitment strategies. Over the course of time, colonialrecruitment practices resulted in the emergence of distinct indigenous identities, suchas the Gurkhas, which the British had effectively constructed, much as had been thecase with the purbiya sepoys of the pre-1857 period. Martial-race theory was not justan abstract product of Orientalism but one that had a very real impact on colonizedcommunities.

54 Bonarjee, A Handbook of the Fighting Races of India.55 Despatch of Major-General Duff, 17 September 1901: IOR, Military Department

Proceedings, P/6397, 189.56 A. P. D. Harris, Report on Muhammadans in the Cis-Sutlej, Punjab, North-Western

Provinces, Oudh, North-Western Bengal, Central India and Rajputana (Calcutta: Office ofthe Superintendent of Government Printing 1901), and related despatches and letters,1901: IOR, L/MIL/3/165. The deterioration, Harris believed, was caused by the‘degeneration’ of recruits: the upper classes preferred the ‘ease’ of city life and civilemployment, while the lower classes now preferred ‘menial employment in towns’over field labour and military service.


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literature produced by men such as J. C. Nesfield and William Crooke, aswell as on the census returns and correspondence with district recruitingofficers, Harris’s report testifies to the range of ethnographic expertisemobilized by the imperial military. However, it also indicates the limits ofthis knowledge. One of the difficulties in ascertaining the ‘martial quality’ ofthe recruits was the impossibility of accurately delineating the ethnic status

of the various communities that were taken to comprise HindustaniMuslims. The difficulty of dealing with the so-called ‘original Muhamma-dans’, Harris reported, lay in ‘ascertaining with any correctness the numbersof those so returned at the census who may truly be considered originalMuhammadans’.57 Similar problems were reported when dealing with theregion’s Pathan population: ‘The census numbers [of so-called Pathans] are

swelled by the inclusion of low class Muhammadan servants of Pathanfamilies, by the descendants of Pathans and low class women, as well as bymany Hindu converts.’ As the report made clear, ‘the selection of suitablerecruits is rendered difficult by the impossibility of verifying the classes towhich the men really belong’.58

Similar difficulties were experienced by other agents of the state: censusenumerators, for example, were bound to record their subjects’ ethnographicstatus as it was reported to them. According to Harris, this led to a grossoverestimation of certain ‘esteemed’ communities, whose numbers wereinflated by the wilful misrepresentation of certain ‘inferior’ communities.

While the 1891 census reported that Allahabad contained some 43,000 male‘original Muhammadans’, Harris’s own enquiries revealed that no morethan 2,000 of these men could properly be regarded as such.59 Despite thebest efforts of colonial administrators*Ridgway’s handbook for Pathansdevoted more than 200 pages to cataloguing ‘tribes and castes’60*the

verification of ethnographic status remained highly questionable. As Harrisglumly noted:

It requires very little knowledge of India to see that a recruit can usually

arrange with the village headman to be returned whatever caste he wishes

to represent himself as belonging to. . . . thus a low class man is palmed off

on a regiment as being a true Pathan, Sayad, Shaikh or Mughal, as the case

may be.61

57 Harris, Report on Muhammadans, 3.58 Ibid., 5� 6. In the Punjab, Harris reported, so many low-class men had attempted to

enlist by falsely declaring themselves ‘Mughals’ and ‘Shaiks’ that recruiting fromthese sections of the population had been abandoned (5).

59 The 1891 census reported 43,262 ‘original Muhammadans’ in Allahabad; Harris found1,650, and reported: ‘In almost every district and Native State enquiries give similarresults, though not in all cases so marked a discrepancy’ (ibid., 4� 5).

60 R. T. I. Ridgway, Handbook for the Indian Army: Pathans (Calcutta: Office of theSuperintendent of Government Printing 1910).

61 Ibid., 5.


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Somewhat paradoxically, Harris recommended that the regiment be

reconstituted and the Hindustani Muslims replaced by men ‘of a superior

fighting class’. The Commander-in-Chief endorsed Harris’s ‘exhaustive

enquiry’ and supported his conclusion that it had become ‘impossible to

recruit good fighting regiments of Hindustani Mahomedans’.62

The principal issue at stake in the debate over the future of the

regiment was the extent to which its recruits had ‘lost their martial

instincts’. One of the authorities consulted on the question was F. G. R.

Ostrehan, formerly a recruiting officer for Hindustani Muslims. While he

acknowledged that many of those who had enlisted within the regiment

had probably done so under false pretences, Ostrehan insisted that

such men need not be considered undesirable. Though they could not

properly be regarded as ‘original Mohamedans’, they could, he suggested,

be serviceable recruits in their own right. Moreover, Ostrehan declared

bluntly that the ‘effective elimination of individuals, on the score of class

is neither possible nor necessary’.63 In rejecting ‘race’ as a measure of

martial aptitude*at least so far as the ‘original Muhammadans’ were

concerned*Ostrehan illuminates the operational limits of the martial-

race theory: the abstractions that gave the theory its overall coherence

could also obscure the practice of recruiting and officering Indian recruits.

Though the imperial authorities eventually acceded to the military’s

request that the 12th Bengal Infantry be disbanded, Lord Hamilton, the

Secretary of State, surmised that the ‘attempt to recruit upon a strict

application of the test of caste, race, or original stock, will almost

certainly be found to fail in practice, because it is impossible to ascertain

whether a recruit really belongs by descent to the class which his name

denotes’. Citing earlier correspondence from the Commander-in-Chief,

Hamilton wryly noted that even Sir Power Palmer seemed to concede the

limits of the martial-race theory:

No amount of writing or opinion will establish the fact of their being a good

fighting class or otherwise. No doubt some are good and many are worthless. It is

more by careful selection than by anything else and by officers studying

the classes from which their men are enlisted that reliable material can be

obtained.64

62 Despatch of Major-General Duff, 17 September 1901: IOR, Military DepartmentProceedings, P/6397, 189. The government of India, however, rejected the proposals,suggesting that the deficiencies of the 12th Bengal Infantry might be explained by‘careless recruiting’ or deficient leadership (despatch from Major-General E. G.Barrow, 16 January 1902: IOR, Military Department Proceedings, P/6397, 193).

63 Despatch of F. G. R. Ostrehan, 26 February 1902: IOR, Military DepartmentProceedings, P/6397, 201� 3 (202).

64 Despatch of Lord George Francis Hamilton, 12 December 1902: IOR, MilitaryDepartment Proceedings, P/6627, no. 1983.


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Colonial ideas of race: inconsistences, contradictions andcontingencies

In focusing on the strategic purposes of restricted recruitment, the

existing literature has tended to flatten the contradictions and tensions

within martial-race discourse. Such accounts rest on the colonial construc-

tions sketched by Lord Roberts and popularized by the ubiquitous

MacMunn, whose 1933 work has assumed a seminal place in the secondary

literature.65 Ironically, by the time that MacMunn’s account was published,

the restrictive recruiting practices that were, ostensibly, the subject of the

work had been disrupted by the expansion of recruiting during the First

World War. Idealized and outdated in its depiction of military recruiting

strategies, MacMunn’s account was principally concerned with the

military’s position vis-a-vis Indian nationalism. As MacMunn himself

made clear, it was distaste for the concessions offered to Indian

nationalists, particularly the opening of senior administrative posts to

Indians, that had motivated his writing of the book.

The races that are likely and fit to take the lead in an awakening India can only be

those races which have been described in this book as the folk who have the

character and physical characteristics that fit them for the more energetic side of a

native life. From them only can the more active servants be drawn: The curious

temperamental feud between them and the effeminate intelligentsia which is as

old as India itself, is likely to endure, and as the Simon Commission states without

British control can only end in the complete and ruthless domination of the

masses by the martials. Given however, sufficient discipline and control from the

outside, it may safely be said that the martial classes present the great hope of

India in all more virile development.66

In reformulating a strategy of divide-and-rule in response to political

nationalism, The Martial Races of India presents a blueprint for maintaining

British rule in which stable ethnic identities are yoked to the interests of the

65 MacMunn’s The Martial Races of India drew extensively on official recruit-ment manuals but, with lavish illustrations, was clearly intended for publicconsumption.

66 MacMunn, The Martial Races of India, 353� 4. In 1930 the Simon Commission publishedits report on constitutional reforms in India, which was to determine the future ofBritish rule on the subcontinent. The British government had publicly declared thatIndia was to move towards dominion status but the proposals of the all-whiteCommission fell far short of this and were met with widespread protests from Indiannationalists. The Commission suggested that Indians should be allowed to occupylesser positions in provincial administrations, while all key posts would be retainedby the British. On the Simon Commission, see also MacMunn, The Martial Races ofIndia, v, 235, 238.


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colonial state.67 Where Roberts had envisaged the ‘martial races’ ranged

against Russian troops in Afghanistan, MacMunn imagined them as a

bulwark against the ‘effeminate intelligentsia’ of Ghandian nationalism.68

Both Roberts and MacMunn, then, presented an image of India’s ‘martial

races’ that simplified the complexities of indigenous society and elaborated

categories of Indian ethnicity according to imperial imperatives. Alongside

the fantastic Orientalism that framed his analysis of India’s ‘martial races’,

however, a more careful reading of MacMunn can reveal an admission of the

limits of imperial ethnographies. His description of the Jats, for instance,

concedes the impossibility of mapping martial proclivities with (evolving)

ethno-religious identities:

We have seen the great Jat or Jat race of history contend and mix in earlier

times with those who had obtained their footing in the great fraternity of

Rajputs, and how they had for reasons not explicable remained outside. We

have also seen how a portion adopted Sikhism to found a solid basis of the men of

the religion that is becoming a race, and we have also seen how some have

turned to Islam and have noticed the warning that ‘Jat’ in the Punjab is

almost synonymous with cultivator, and cannot be taken entirely as denoting

race.69

As in the discussion of the Bengal Infantry, above, it is notable how diffuse

and malleable colonial perceptions of the ‘martial races’ actually were.70 The

instrumentalized vision of colonial racism that underpins postcolonial

explanations of the martial-race theory tends to obscure the inconsistencies,

contradictions and contingencies that shaped the relationship between

recruiting patterns and colonial ideologies of race.While MacMunn’s caricature of Indian ethnography was overdeter-

mined by the rise of Indian nationalism, Streets’s Marital Races locates the

construction of the ideology firmly outside of the subcontinent, in

the discourses of high imperial politics and popular representations. Streets

thus offers a postcolonial counter-narrative to the racism implicit in

MacMunn’s account, emphasizing the strategic and administrative purposes

67 Heather Streets suggests that, after the establishment of the Indian National Congressin 1885, the ‘martial races’ were promoted as loyal alternatives to the stereotype of theenfeebled Indian nationalist, an account oddly reminiscent of MacMunn’s descriptionof India in the 1930s. See Streets, Martial Races, 158� 73.

68 MacMunn’s book denounced Indian nationalists who clamoured for self-governancewhile simultaneously identifying as loyal Indians those who had ‘resisted inoculationwith the Gandhi poison’ and were thus ‘fit to inherit the estate’; MacMunn, TheMartial Races of India, v�vi; see also Streets, Martial Races, 267� 8.

69 MacMunn, The Martial Races of India, 276.70 MacMunn’s argument is furthermore not representative of the various ideas that

informed British recruitment practices after 1857, the discourse of which heappropriated in an attempt to legitimize colonial policies of the twentieth century.


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served by martial-race ideology.71 This approach overlooks the contra-dictions inherent in the discourses, and marginalizes the agency of those

Indians who helped to elaborate colonial articulations, and who frequently

adapted and appropriated such discourses to their own ends. Tracing the

history of martial-race recruiting through imperial ideologies and dis-

courses*as manifested in literary representations and popular culture*distorts the messy realities and contradictions that actually shaped recruiting

practices in colonial India. In redeploying colonial discourse to explain the

behaviour of the ‘martial races’*as Streets does*the argument comes full

circle: the ambiguities of martial-race ideologies are obscured and the social,

economic and political contexts in which colonial ideas of race (like colonial

recruiting operations) were shaped are marginalized. Those examples thatrecord the ‘failure’ of martial recruits to perform as expected provide a much

more telling insight in to the interplay of racial ideologies and military

efficiency.In terms of chronology, the Indian uprising of 1857 was certainly a

crucial event in the construction of racialized martial identities in colonial

India, as Streets suggests, though this was largely for practical reasons rather

than discursive ones. The commonly accepted narrative of 1857*that

the sepoys who mutinied were excluded from future recruitment, while

those who remained loyal were transformed into the ‘martial races’*needs to be reconsidered.72 The exclusion that took place after 1857 was

geographic more than it was ‘racial’ or indeed gendered. Brahmins were not

in fact excluded from the ranks of recruits after the mutiny, as the 1897

handbook on Brahmins demonstrates, and, although their prominence in

the army diminished radically following the uprising, two corps of

Brahmins fought in the First World War.73 The other high-status Hinducommunity that had been prominent among the mutineers was the Rajputs

whose proverbial martial status ensured their continued recruitment far into

the twentieth century. The mutiny in the Bengal army and the uprising in the

homeland of the rebel sepoys rendered mass recruitment in these regions

impossible but that did not preclude specific communities from all future

recruitment. Similarly, though India’s Muslims were widely blamed for

71 Streets is worth discussing at some length, especially since her book has becomerecognized as ‘the best treatment’ of the subject, according to at least one reviewer; seeTony Ballantyne, ‘The changing shape of the modern British empire and itshistoriography’, Historical Journal, vol. 53, no. 2, 2010, 429� 52 (439).

72 Streets, Martial Races argues: ‘The high-caste Hindus who comprised so much of theBengal Army in 1857 were particularly cast as treacherous, faithless, deluded andeasily incited to passion*all characteristics believed to be at odds with contemporaryBritish conceptions of manliness, and all characteristics that would help legitimisetheir later ‘‘racial’’ exclusion from the Indian Army’ (11).

73 A. H. Bingley and A. Nicholls (eds), Brahmans, Caste Handbooks for the Indian ArmySeries (Simla: Intelligence Branch 1897); see also MacMunn, The Martial Races of India,272.


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instigating the rebellion, Muslim recruits constituted the majority of thePunjabi troops used to defeat the rebels in 1857�9 and remained a vital

component of the colonial Indian army right up to 1947.Today martial identities are often assumed to have been principally a

colonial imposition. Yet simply locating the origins of martial-race

discourse in imperial high politics and popular culture does not explain

sufficiently how and why Indian communities subscribed to suchidentities. Such an approach furthermore fails to account for the fact that

local identities, beliefs and traditions were constantly evolving: in

considering the martial origins of communities such as Sikhs or Rajputs,colonial (re)constructions of martial identities were no more or less

‘authentic’ than pre-colonial ones.74 Martial-race ideologies can therefore

only be properly understood in terms of the multiple contexts, agentsand authors that helped to produce the theories. Only an approach

sensitive to the agency of recruiters and recruited can explain Indian

engagements with*and appropriations of*colonial constructions of race.

For example, colonial recruitment of the Sikhs*which, as we have seen,significantly pre-dated the ‘watershed’ of 1857*built on pre-existing

identities, beliefs and traditions. Though colonial recruitment undoubtedly

helped to codify aspects of Sikh tradition and identity, this was adynamic process in which the material rewards of military service were

negotiated alongside supposedly martial identities: for a time at least, then,

the recruitment of Punjab’s martial Sikhs reflected the convergence ofstrategies of colonizers and colonized. British constructions of Sikhs as

particularly valiant were not simply the result of the Sikh wars or the

1857 uprising; rather, they attempted, in true Orientalist fashion, to

maintain Indian identities and continue local practices, as they understoodthem, with as little interference as possible.75 The production of loyal

colonial subjects was vital to the reconstruction of the Indian army after

1857 but correlating popular perceptions of the ‘mutiny’ against theemergence of martial-race ideologies and the evolution of recruiting

patterns is far from simple. Moreover, foregrounding the effects of 1857

(largely, perhaps, because of the plentiful source material) can over-

shadow subsequent re-workings of martial identities. By the early decadesof the twentieth century, Punjabi Sikhs were among the most active in

anti-colonial agitation: their position as staunch loyalists, and martial

recruit par excellence, became increasingly untenable in the face ofrevolutionary conspiracies in India and abroad from 1907 onwards.76

74 See Fox, Lions of the Punjab, and Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries.75 We are here referring to Orientalism in the classical sense; see David Kopf, British

Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773�1835(Berkeley: University of California Press 1969).

76 Though in relation to the time period covered in Martial Races, Streets’s work does notconsider this important shift.


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By the time of the Second World War, Sikh recruits played leading roles inthe Axis-sponsored Indian National Army, leading several British com-mentators, rather paradoxically, to bemoan the decline of ‘Sikh spirit’.77 Infact, the erstwhile heroes of the rebellion had defaulted on their loyaliststatus in much the same way (and for much the same reason) that Sikh

troops had originally taken up service with the British in 1857. The martial-race discourse provided a means of disguising the more complex motivesthat conditioned relationships between colonizer and colonized: it is the jobof the historian to unpick these motives, not to find discursive props that

sustain the fiction.As we have shown, the constituents of martial identities were flexible,

contextual and contingent: Brahmins were not entirely excluded nor wereSikhs simply exalted. While the martial status of particular groups

could wax and wane, so the theory itself was subject to critique andproblematization. A more detailed reading of the colonial archiveindicates the instability that marked the emergence and development ofmartial recruiting. The assumption of a direct link between the ‘lessons’ of

1857 and a coherent, instrumentalized ideology of ‘martial races’ isultimately unsustainable. In fact, the recruitment practices that developedin India during the late nineteenth century were more traditional, anddeep-rooted, than many accounts have suggested. Though the ethniccomposition of the imperial military was thoroughly transformed in this

period, the restricted recruiting of the latter nineteenth century producedan army with a distinct geographic and ethno-religious profile similar tothat which existed in the Bengal army before the uprising of 1857.Martial-race discourses were also informed by wider tributaries andcannot be properly understood without reference to parallel developments

in other spheres of colonial administration. Recruiting and enlistingpatterns thus responded to a contingent series of social, economic andorganizational pressures: the emergence of the martial-race theory wasone of these factors but it was not the only one and was not, perhaps,

even the most important one. If the discourse regarding the racialization ofsoldiering in India appears to have hardened in the late nineteenthcentury, this should not obscure the fact that the realities of martial-racerecruiting were contested and unstable across the period. In short,recruitment patterns were shaped by a variety of pressures and impera-

tives; only some of these were directed by the commanders of theimperial military.

77 See Gajendra Singh, ‘Between Self and Soldier: Indian Sipahis and Their Testimonyduring the Two World Wars’, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009; and GavinRand, ‘Allies to a declining power: the martial races, the Second World War and thedecline of the British empire in India’, in Kaushik Roy (ed.), The Indian Army in the TwoWorld Wars (Leiden: Brill 2011).


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Gavin Rand teaches history at the University of Greenwich in London. Mostof his work explores the cultural history of empire, and he is currently writinga monograph examining the Indian army and imperial military culture in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries. E-mail: [email protected]

Kim A. Wagner is a lecturer in British imperial history at Queen Mary,University of London. He has published extensively on crime, rebellion andthe colonial imagination in British India, including Thuggee: Banditry and theBritish in Early Nineteenth-century India (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), Stranglersand Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee (Oxford University Press 2009),and The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the IndianUprising (Peter Lang 2010). He also co-edited (with Ricardo Roque) EngagingColonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History (PalgraveMacmillan 2011). E-mail: [email protected]


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Recruiting the 'martial races': identities and military service in colonial India - by Gavin Rand...

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