4| Wait, Where did the Martial Races go?

The class company formula still doesn’t reconcile with the composition of regiments that India inherited in 1947. That is because the class company formula was fraught with problems from the onset. Intra-battalion discipline proved hard to achieve as each company coalesced together against any perceived or imagined slight. ‘Company elders’ engaged in rank nepotism in recruiting (pardon the pun). Moreover, entire battalions could seldom be deployed on internal policing duties against a nationalist movement which was gathering steam because of suspect company loyalties.

These problems, however, were absent from the newly fanged class regiments. Battalions of men from a single caste and region seemed impervious to the divisions rife in class company regiments.

Mazhabi Sikhs and Gurkhas were prime examples. Social identities reinforced the regimental one and the foremost murmurs of izzat began to be heard. It was as much communal izzat as regimental and now, they became one.

The Great Game ensues.

Russian Czars had spent the 19th century expanding southwards and eastwards, through Central Asia. In 1868, they seized Samarkand and by 1881 they absorbed the lands bordering Afghanistan. After all that had transpired in the decades gone by, the 19th century version of the Red Scare brought about the most cringe-worthy addition to the British-Indian Army lexicon — The Martial Races.

This was largely the creation of one man — Field Marshal Frederick Roberts, who was commissioned into the Bengal Artillery in 1851 (i.e. the Company Army). Though born in Cawnpore, he was no native son. He led campaigns in Afghanistan and Abyssinia and was even appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Madras Army in 1881 (despite never having fought or served alongside them).

Anti-southern prejudice was rife in the Bengal Army of the day — especially in the officer class, who were all British. This meant they never faced the fact that their ‘upper caste’ men had mutinied while the ‘lower castes’ of the Madras Army had maintained their discipline and remained true to their salt. Perversely though, they celebrated the fact that the Sikhs and Gurkhas remained ‘loyal’. Roberts had served continuously in Northern India, with this Bengal Army, for over 30 years. In 1885, he became the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army.

Were Bengal officers to be polled, it was said, the entire Indian Army would be made up of only ‘Sikhs, Pathans and Gurkhas’. These biases were important because the C-in-C spent much of his time in the North and under Roberts, anti-Southern prejudice became widely accepted.

The British deliberately sought communities with a lax observance of religion and a heavy attachment to land — with the exceptions of the Sikhs, where a militarised religion worked to their advantage. As a matter of written policy, the British persisted with cultivating a separate Sikh identity.

“It is the British officer who has kept Sikhism up to its old standards” — George MacMunn

Of course the statement reeks of typical British overestimation, but there are also kernels of truth in the statement. Army authorities showed a marked preference for recruiting staunchly observant Sikhs and areas with a heavy recruitment showed a distinct trend of conversion to Sikhism.

While it is certainly true that some Madras and Bombay Army battalions were inferior to their Northern counterparts the explanation was simple — units seldom fought too far away from their ‘native’ lands. ‘The lack of warlike want and manliness’ was due to the fact that for a generation, between the War of Independence in 1857 and the invasion of Upper Burma in 1885, the Madras Army hardly saw any action. In the absence of ‘action’, these men tended to, quite literally, grow old and unfit.

In 1879, only 11% of the Bengal Army had served more than 15 years, while that number was 23% in Bombay and 37% in Madras. Put simply, they were denied action for a generation and by the time the time came to invade Upper Burma — they were old, unfit and untrained. This impression was hard to get rid of, and they never did.

Source: GO MD to SSI, 24 June 1881, L/MIL/7/5445; Shibly, PhD thesis, p. 308

Of course, the old adage, ‘there are no bad troops only bad officers’ — is also true in Madras’ and Bombay’s case. Young, able and ambitious, officers did all they could to secure a position in the Northern Regiments, and thus the Bengal Army. The chance to win honours and, later, emoluments in the civil service were higher. The brightest example of this was Lord Roberts himself. Officers in the South tended to get older, at the same ranks, with no funding for pensions to induce them to retire. Without the ‘josh’ of the Y.O. — these armies, predictably, lost their edge. See the adjoining table — the ‘josh’ of more than a 1,000 Captains and Subalterns replaced with nearly 500 Majors and Colonels. Steep pyramid be damned. In fact, even today, the Indian Army’s biggest grouse is not having enough Young Officers.

In 1882, 40 infantry battalions in Madras were disbanded, and corresponding numbers raised from Punjab and Nepal. Declines in recruitment from ‘Hindustan’, Bombay and Madras were nakedly evident as Punjab and Nepal were heavily favoured.

By 1904, when the three Armies united into a single Indian Army — the tilt towards these ‘martial races’ was jarring.

Source: GI Advance Despatch, 27 August 1920. Annexure IIL/MIL/7/5483

The Sikh identity was nurtured along these ‘martial’ lines, as I have also mentioned earlier. After the Armistice, the Sikh identity showed further vigour — no doubt driven by the discharged veterans who brought home the separate identity fostered on the killing fields in France and West Asia, where new class regiments had their first run-out. The Sikh Gurudwara Act of 1925 cemented the differences by granting control of Gurudwaras to those Sikhs who ‘declared they had no other religion’.