Abstract
Air Vice Marshal Dr Arjun Subramaniam's (ret’d) new book is an important piece of scholarship that pushes forward the frontier of India's military history from the year of the country's independence in 1947 to the decades beyond the early 1970s. It is a sequel to his earlier book that provided a meticulously researched account of India's tryst with military events after 1947 – a significant achievement given the scarcity of primary sources to scholars interested in studying contemporary Indian diplomatic and military history.
This latest book is a bigger triumph for Subramaniam because the bulk of the historical data and evidence that underpins south Asian history writing is remarkably thin when it comes to the late twentieth century. Parts of the world that experienced decolonisation from the mid-1940s onwards challenge the contemporary scholar to develop inventive methods to study the political, social, economic, and military journeys of these countries in light of their unique historical experience of colonialism. Subramaniam's latest book is important in this respect with its rigorous research and insights into contemporary Indian military history.
The book offers a chronological account of different episodes through a robust and layered analysis of India's ‘military renaissance’ (p.17). It combines textual sources with larger ideational currents that have shaped military strategy in India. Thus, a seamless move from the 1970s to the 1980s in the book, for instance, is dealt with through a dual examination of the upgrade of India's air power hardware, and by laying out the intellectual context in which inter-service co-operation took centre stage in Indian military thinking. The sharpened focus on the Indian Ocean region ‘as a maritime space of great relevance’ (p.21) reflects Subramaniam's acuity and acumen in contextualising strategic intellectual developments, using them as a means of mapping India's evolving foreign policy and diplomatic posture.
Subramaniam's historical accounts of the insurgency and counter-insurgency operations in some of India's north-eastern states are a valuable means of understanding the intricate details of these operations as well as providing a precise measure of India's ‘economic and geopolitical relationship with countries on India's eastern frontier’ (p.59) from 1947 onwards. The book's clear structure and lucid prose laced with the author's clear grasp of air operations like those of the ‘Flyboys over the Glacier’ (p.106) makes the work—a piece of academic scholarship—read like a thriller. It is a significant achievement for the author to write in a style that enhances the book's research impact on non-specialist readers and scholars alike.
The discussion of India's more complex and protracted engagements in the Sri Lankan and Maldivian crisis, which peaked in the late 1980s, sheds light on India's maritime encounters and outreach with a view to mitigating domestic crises in countries in the oceanic region. India's relationship to those countries with which it shares a land border has attracted significant scholarly attention. With its focus here on maritime encounters, Subramanian's book provides important balance with its consideration of India's relationship to its maritime neighbours. As the narrative turns to the 1990s, the issue of the Kargil conflict is dealt with in considerable detail. The author examines the role and influence of the long 1990s in India's strategic and military history and situates the Kargil conflict within the larger historical, operational, and geo-political overview of the Kashmir issue. In the same vein, the concluding section of the book on India's storied contributions to the United Nations’ (UN) peacekeeping missions offers a multi-sectoral view of India's military–diplomatic portfolio. It reiterates the central point that military history necessarily involves an examination of not only armed conflicts and wars, but also events that call for diplomatic, political, or other ‘mission-based deployments’ that can mitigate security threats in a ‘diffused multilateral environment’ (p.317).
Subramaniam is one of a handful of Indian military historians ‘actively deployed’ in the field of historical research. The ‘turn’ in scholarship associated with the works of Anirudh Deshpande, Kaushik Roy, Srinath Raghavan, and many others signalled an important trend in Indian military history writing. As a result, scholars and historians are now willing to push beyond the watershed of Indian independence to explore more contemporary periods and explore untapped historical sources not just within India but abroad. Hence, access to newer and unique records and research methods has given rise to a corpus of Indian military history books located in the wider international, diplomatic context of the time. To that end, Subramaniam's latest book is essential reading for scholars interested in India's military history, strategy, and philosophy.