Abstract
Dr. Chandar S. Sundaram is perhaps the most experienced, thorough, and senior contemporary scholar of Indian military history. Even a casual browsing of his work, in general, reveals the enormous hard work embodied in it. Not only does he write good history, but he has always managed to write critical history suffused with wry humor which makes his prose delightful. His numerous references to the individuals and their conversations regarding the dilatory policy of Indianization fashioned by the British for the Indian Army prove this point. The British excelled in hypocrisy even as they made grandiloquent announcements in the British Parliament promising self-rule to India in the near future, which, as Lord Curzon observed, could stretch to 500 years. The Indianization of the Officer Corps of the Indian Army—meaning the grant of the King's or Queen's Commission to educated Indians—would, in effect, be designed to be slow enough almost never to happen. In the end, when the Empire lay in tatters, this very British conservatism led to the grant of these commissions by way of the Emergency Commissions due to the imposed exigencies of the Second World War in a manner best described as graceless. It was the mortal threat that Japan and Germany posed to an internally weakened Empire which caused the Indianization of the Indian Army during 1939–45 more than anything else.
The book under review presents a critical analysis of an important, though often understated and underexamined, problematic of British colonial policy in India. Usually, a student of modern Indian military history is given to understand the question of Indianization as one which arose during the First World War and, under the pressure of Indian nationalism, was answered by a much-debated policy of grudging concessions to the Indian middle class during the 1920s and 1930s. British officialdom, suffused with a colonial and racist mentality, was resolutely conservative and paternalistic towards the infantile colonial subjects; caution and paternalism had become entrenched in British circles after the defining moment of 1857. To military men like Frederick Roberts —a progenitor of the ‘martial races’ theory—or later Henry Rawlinson, fighting a rearguard action against the onslaughts of resolute nationalists like Jinnah, it was clear that neither was India a nation nor Indians capable of military leadership. In fact, even advocates of Indianization, like George Chesney, underlined that only a particular kind of Indian, presumably the princes and other Anglicized toadies of the British, was capable of military leadership and that too under firm British guidance. The short-lived Imperial Cadet Corps (ICC) organized by the arch conservative Tory imperialist Lord Curzon was a result of this position. If you have the princes, you have India, opined the conservative imperialist enamored of ideal villages inhabited by yeoman farmers, untouched by political India. In sum, even the limited Indianization which happened in the inter-war period pleased no one. The senior officers of the Indian Army disliked the idea intensely and the Indians were left dissatisfied by this distasteful compromise between reform and tradition expressed in the Eight Unit Scheme analyzed in some detail in this reviewer's work elsewhere. When the Indian Sandhurst was realized on the premises once used by the ICC after the Round Table Conferences of the early 1930s, the intake of officer recruits was low and this necessitated the introduction of the Emergency Commissioned Officer rank post-1939.
To his credit, Sundaram—to quote the Foreword—‘breaks new ground by arguing, and amply demonstrating, that Indianization was not the result of hasty ad-hockery, but the result of a long, continuous and complex debate, which went all the way back to 1817, when Britain's rule in India was in the early stages of an uncertain development and future’ (ix). This complex debate—as this book tells us in interesting detail—resulted from an interplay of ideas like Orientalism, Ornamentalism, Whig historiography, racist colonialist paternalism, and plain British arrogance born of imperial privilege and club networks. The question whether Indians and Englishmen were basically alike or different had troubled the colonial masters of India since the times of Warren Hastings and scholars like Thomas Metcalf have drawn our attention to this in his book Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge University Press, 1995). This issue remained unresolved till the end of Empire in India in 1947 and dogged the Indianization debate like other debates related to the promotion of self-rule in India. Nonetheless, the overall British vision of India, as the author concludes in the Introduction, ‘was essentially conservative’ (p. 6). Several early administrators of India had come to the conclusion that it was the duty of British policy to train Indians in the arts of modern governance, including military leadership, keeping in mind a future in which India would become a self-governing dominion. Others, like the die-hard archetypical imperialist Winston Churchill, remained skeptical of Indian capabilities. In fact, the Indians themselves were divided on the issue; many had digested ideas like the ‘martial races’ theory, while others refuted these ideas with reference to historical examples. This book has highlighted all this in mesmerizing detail, refreshing the entire debate on British colonial policy in India for the readers.
Although the volume is based on the author's doctoral dissertation, it raises the Indianization debate to a level usually missing from other texts on the subject. The problematic of Indianization began with the ‘creation of a hybrid military culture’ in India which fused the European and Indian military elements in the three Presidency Sepoy Armies in the period beginning around 1600 CE (see Chapter 1). This hybridity remained a constant feature of the colonial Indian military apparatus well into the late 1940s. The book is divided into six balanced chapters on Indianization based on identifiable policy phases of the debate and policy. The conclusion is aptly called ‘Of “Psychological Moments” and “Persistent Agitation”’; on the one hand was the innate conservatism of British military policy which was averse to change simply because the Raj was guaranteed by military force in the ultimate analysis. Till the end it remained an autocracy run by a handful of British living in official ghettos—their minds never free from the traumatic memories of 1857 nor from colonial ideology. What could the paranoid British depend on in tropical India, except the garrison of the British Army and their favorite Indian ‘martial races’ tied to them by a paternalism which, in British eyes, was benevolent. A fusion of Orientalism and Ornamentalism cemented this false consciousness. Finally, the author concludes, the Indianization debate was ‘one between trusteeship and participation’ (p. 235). In the process, the British were hoist with their own petard. Their promise of reform was taken seriously by a people they thought were incapable of reform. The Indians, who were familiar with the British dilatory reform tactics based on the appointment of committees and sub-committees, did not trust the colonial rulers. Limited Indianization was conceded to the Indian nationalists grudgingly by a policy underlined by a note of barely hidden hypocrisy and insincerity.
In summary, Sundaram has written the most comprehensive, informative, and critical account of the Indianization of the Indian Army's officer corps to date and his book is recommended to all students, teachers, and others interested in examining the central contradiction of British colonial policy in India from the early nineteenth to twentieth centuries.