The Raj at War

by Yasmin Khan

  Men entered the army in numerous different ways and for diverse reasons. ‘Voluntary’ recruitment spanned the whole spectrum from loyalist, pro-British families to those who had their arms heavily twisted and felt direct pressure from their landowners or overseers. Service in the army had long been recognised as a way of securing a guaranteed supply of rice or bread. As the war progressed, Recruitment Officers spread their net ever wider and trawled the countryside for men, changing the character of the pre-war Indian Army beyond recognition. Landlords and policemen placed casual pressure on young men to try to comply with the sarkar’s desires. Some new recruits had bodies visibly atrophied by malnutrition; they had been subsisting at the barest level, even before the war raised food prices. Even in Punjab, where incomes had been rising steadily for several decades, the early months of the war were also marked by a devastating famine which ravished tenant-cultivators in the south-eastern districts of Hissar, Rohtak and Gurgaon, the worst experienced for forty years. A place in the Indian Army meant a job and a full belly. People, in the countryside and the cities, remembered all too vividly the depression decade, when men had camped outside the factories in vain waiting for work, when those inside might be dismissed, put on short work or find their wages slashed without notice. Above all, the army promised a way to extend support to other family members; new recruits became not only breadwinners for their own immediate kin but sometimes for numerous dependants.

  Young men could also be pressurised into leaving their homes to join a remote war although many resisted such pressure. In Valasna, the following year, the political agent was still persisting in trying to root out suitable men. Three men had been identified by the thakur as potentially promising offerings to the colonial state. One of them, a Muslim tailor, had slipped away to live in a village ten miles away. Now that the day had come and they were being called to join up, the thakur reported, ‘I called him too to come and see me personally. I deputed his own cousin from here to call him but the man avoided him sending me a reply that he was sick.’ The other two men had come to see him but had agreed to go and see the Recruiting Officer ‘very reluctantly’. He had practically had to bribe them, offering the money for their travel expenses. But two days later they had not returned to collect the cash. The thakur wrote in anguished tones, ‘I myself do cherish very great zeal and interest on the subject, as a matter of personal belief and conviction and had hoped to do my possible bit,’ but he now recommended that the Assistant Recruitment Officer cancel his forthcoming trip: ‘his most precious time and labours, I fear, would not be turned to good account’.9

  A handful of potential recruits did come forward: in Vadgam two men had put their names forward and showed ‘ardent desire’ to join the army. One, a former police constable who had previously worked as a peon for three years, appeared ‘a promising young man full of budding hopes and enthusiasm’. The twenty-four-year-old Rajput had been forced to resign his new position in the police as a constable eight months earlier because of his mother’s illness. The other keen candidate was described in four simple sentences:

  Candidate Kishorsinhji is a Rathod Rajput of about 25 years of age. He has no parents. He is all alone and he maintains himself by working as a day labourer. He seems to be an energetic Rajput.10

  Both these men wished to join the army because of their personal circumstances and poverty. Both were sent to Sadra, the market town, in order to meet the Assistant Recruiting Officer at the police station at ten o’clock in the morning on the allotted day. The file runs out at this point and we are left to wonder whether they managed to achieve their ambition and what fate held for them.

  Recruitment had long relied on an idea of collective types; on the idea that certain ‘martial races’ should be the mainstay of the Indian Army and that it was possible to discern the quality of a potential soldier from the ethnic or linguistic group to which he belonged. Men had, for generations, not been assessed as individuals but as representatives of their race, a complex business in a land of such variation. They were first and foremost physical specimens, expected to match the ideal type of their caste or tribe. Breadth of chest, decent eyesight and the ability to follow basic orders were essential. If they had additional skills, or could read and write, they might have a chance of promotion. The physical inspection was rudimentary. Stripped down to their underwear, the men stood for measurement and medical inspection in a line before arriving in front of the Recruiting Officer. If he was pleased with what he saw he often inscribed their chests with a large chalk ‘tick’.

  In Rajasthan, Recruitment Officers carried with them a slim printed volume with a pale green cover, The Recruiting Handbook for the Rajputana Classes. This had been compiled by one Major Brian Cole, a Recruiting Officer for Rajputana and central India, who wrote the handbook in 1921 based on his own experiences of drumming up men during the First World War. The handbooks were supposed to be the bible for all recruiters. Although reliance on them can be exaggerated, they were still being used as reference manuals into the 1940s. The Government of India published numerous similar handbooks from the 1890s onwards which described the different martial types from Madrassis to Kumaonis to Pathans and Rajputs. These handbooks catalogued ‘types’ of men and were supposed to give the Recruiting Officer an idea of what to expect in the area he was visiting, and, most importantly, who to recruit from the various castes and tribes of India, pointing out the sub-groups seen as suitable material for military recruitment. For instance, the handbook recommended: ‘Rajputana Jats are on the whole a fine lot physically, especially those of Bikaner. They do not run to anything unusual in the way of height but have splendid chests and thighs.’11

  Running through these handbooks was the assumption that different ethnic groups in India had entirely different levels of physical fitness, intelligence and martial qualities, alongside a host of other attributes. The handbooks also gave stern warnings about the types to avoid recruiting: in the Kumaoni hills, for example,

  the short stocky lad with a fair complexion of about 5 ft. 4 in. (or 5 ft. 2 in. if young) with a chest measurement of at least 33 inches at the age of 17 years or 18 years is likely to provide the best material. The types found in the bazaars of Almora and Ranikhet and in the vicinity of the larger temples should be definitely rejected. The long lanky lad who will have outgrown his strength should not be taken.12

  Underpinning these assumptions about race (which had pan-imperial appeal in the 1920s and 1930s) was also the idea that certain types of personality and psychological disposition could be detected by the physical appearance of the potential recruit. On the Rajputs again, the recruiting handbook opined,

  As soldiers they are brave, obedient and undemonstrative and have great pride of race. They are singularly free from caste prejudices and would never subordinate military efficiency to religious prejudice. They give no trouble in barracks and are singularly free from intrigue. When led by officers that they know and trust they will go anywhere and do anything.13

  The handbooks also featured appendices, maps and population statistics, all intended to make the job of the Recruiting Officer easier. The numbers of men, district by district, taken from the government’s decennial census, were published in tables at the back of the handbooks. The officers were also urged to consider rainfall and the best seasons for recruiting. Sometimes districts would be malarial or men would be preoccupied with harvesting. These efforts to catalogue, map and identify India for the benefit of its own administration had a long history and had often been completed with the willing assistance and participation of Indians themselves, who by 1940 were making up an increasing proportion of the Recruiting Officers. Yet the notions expressed in these handbooks belonged to an earlier age and would soon be of little use. The extended scope of recruitment in the 1940s and the sheer need for manpower changed the basis of the army, even if, in the most highly prized infantry regiments, regimental traditions appeared on the surface to look continuous with the past. During the 19
40s, imperial systems dating from the nineteenth century and present wartime realities would become ever more dissonant.

  As the Indian Army grew and the demand for recruits surged, so the recruiting methods changed and became less selective. ‘I found that the most productive source of recruits were the melas or country fairs which would be held almost every week in different parts of Bihar – thousands buying, selling, beggars, holy men, stalls’, John Ffrench, a British Recruiting Officer, recalled. ‘We had only to drive our truck onto the ground, raise a flag and bang a drum. The problem then was to sort the men from the boys and weed out the few with medical problems, leaving us with forty or fifty strong young men.’14

  The reasons why men entered the army also became more diverse and spurred by individual circumstances. Many of those raw recruits themselves were struck with wonder, as older men, looking back at their own youthful lack of inhibition, the bold naivety and the cavalier way that some of them approached war. ‘Actually there was a teacher of mine who said that when you join the army and you swear an oath you should fully carry out what you have sworn to do so even if that meant your fellow soldiers dying next to you. You should strive to fulfil your duties’, recalled Sardar Ali. Some were driven by a sense of adventure and exploration. ‘I had no idea about what I was headed for. I was just so excited because I was young and safety was not a priority’, Sardar Ali added.15 In Punjab, a seventeen-year-old named Mohammed Khan was keen to join up, freely going to his local recruiting station and soon signed to the 9th Baluch Regiment. He later recalled that it was because he wanted to defend Britain. But what was Britain to him? He came from a village of agriculturalists and had seen two British families in his life before joining up, living about thirty miles away from his village. He did not know any English, although he would come to learn it to a point of fluency in the army.16

  The traditional recruiting area would quickly be drained of men. New kinds of recruits, untouchable leather-workers or Bengali urbanites, became temporary soldiers. These men came into the army because of hunger, the chance for a steady wage and the opportunity to become a breadwinner for their family. Enthusiasm for recruitment depended not only on family traditions but also on familiarity with the military and an understanding of what joining the army meant. In places like Punjab and United Provinces, where proud and relatively comfortable veterans resided in pukka houses with decent furniture, wearing wristwatches and good-quality clothes, it is hardly surprising that young men might be interested in becoming sepoys. In other places, doubts about leaving farms untended or the pull factor of high wartime prices for crops like cotton meant that some farmers had less incentive to leave than others. Elsewhere, especially if people had heard stories of terrible wartime experiences, injuries and losses, or where there was deep suspicion of the army and of the colonial state, recruiters did not have such an easy task.

  There was also the influence of role models and respected elders, teachers or British officers, friends or relations who may have been met in a chance encounter but made a strong impression on a youthful mind. Nineteen-year-old Nila Kantan met a British officer and within two days had signed a commitment to going anywhere in the world on service: ‘They gave me a uniform and the rank of Indian Warrant Officer. Then, my God! I got in this troopship, without any training whatsoever – it was very peculiar.’17

  Young people made decisions without the agreement of their parents, ran away from home or found themselves overseas for far longer than they had ever expected. This could also be a way of escaping family feuds, domestic violence, unwanted marriage arrangements or strained relations with parents. The official recruitment age was far from set in stone. Indian teenagers and even boys presented themselves, and pressurised Recruiting Officers did not strictly adhere to the age limit. There were few birth certificates in a peasant society with high rates of illiteracy. It was very easy for keen aspirant soldiers to pass themselves off as older than they were and for collusion to occur between Recruiting Officer and recruit. Mangal Singh went to see the Recruitment Officer when his parents were away from his village in Punjab. That same day he passed the cursory medical inspection, signed enrolment certificates, was issued with railway passes and kit, given advance money on his wages and a small bonus for joining up and instructed to proceed to the Signal Training Centre at Jabalpur, several hundred miles away from his village. He did not see his parents again for two years. He sent a letter to his family to tell them that he had joined the Indian Army.

  * * *

  In Nepal, at the same time, the recruiting parties set out in trucks, travelling rocky, treacherous roads, reaching up into remote villages, and stripping the hills of all the young and able-bodied men: Gurungs, Rais, Limbus. These men from widely different ethnic groups and long-distant parts of Nepal would become famous under one label, known collectively as the Gurkhas. The Gurkhas have long played a distinctive role in the military history of Asia. Very old traditions of migration to find military labour or other work on the warmer plains to the south pre-dated British rule in South Asia. The local word for Gurkha, ‘Lahure’, suggests a man who travels to the city of Lahore to join the military and probably dates back to at least the eighteenth century. The British perception of the Gurkhas as tough, unified, loyal and willing fighters was well crafted by wartime propaganda which never failed to celebrate their role.

  The rulers of Nepal, who resisted British conquest, and constantly and cleverly defended the sovereignty of their mountain kingdom, had since 1815 sent men to the British as a trade-off for Independence. It was a way to secure their kingdom’s relative isolation from the West and their own power; only 153 Europeans even set foot in Nepal between 1885 and 1925. The British warmed to the sturdy hill-men, celebrating their loyalty and toughness, and turning their bravery almost into a mythic cult. Gurkhas seemed distinctive and stayed aloof from the Indians and therefore appeared perfect for suppressing revolts and doing garrison duty inside India. Their origins in the hills, their valleys surrounded by the exquisite crystalline peaks of the Himalayan range, captured something in the imagination. Disparate men from the hills were recast into an ideal type, the valiant but boyish Gurkha who gave unquestioning loyalty to the empire.

  High up in the Himalayas, recruitment was being intensified among the Gurkhas of Nepal. The Maharaja Jhuddha of Nepal gave his blessing and encouragement to the recruiters, but he was more cautious about some of the more extreme British demands. Recruitment in Nepal was not straightforward. Rainy summer months made it difficult to communicate across the mountainous terrain and for the young men to come down from their villages into the valleys. Labour parties competed to acquire healthy young men. The British recruiters also had to tread carefully to make sure that they did not interfere with harvest season. Recruitment was staggered between eastern and western districts. The British agent at the court in Kathmandu used sycophancy, gifts and gentle persuasion to extract more men from the mountain kingdom:

  There is just now a slight tendency to show a natural drying up of the well, but with his Highness’ magic wand he [the British Recruiting Officer] feels sure that sufficient water can be obtained from the well so that complete demands may be met by 28th February after which the weather really gets too hot for recruits to come in. Knowing what wonders your Highness’ magic wand can work and knowing also how wonderfully good your Highness has been in assisting our demands for the expansion of the Gurkha Regiments, I wonder if your Highness would be so good as to wave it so that Col. Strahan may be able to complete the demands by 28th February. It would indeed be a marvellous achievement.18

  The maharaja soon applied his ‘magic wand’ and the initial British appeal for an extra six battalions had soon swollen to ten. Extraordinary measures were used – all reservists were called up and then men on leave from the army were encouraged to return with willing recruits from their villages.

  The Gurkhas, like the Indian soldiers, would play crucial roles in the combat to come. However, again, the
freedom to join the army voluntarily can be exaggerated. For many, there was no choice at all. After all, Nepal had abolished slavery only fifteen years earlier. Headmen and landlords, responding to demands from higher up the hierarchy, needed to supply men as proof of loyalty to the regime. The poorest or the indebted would be sent off to the army. Tempting gifts of land or money lured other men into service, and those changing their mind or deserting had land confiscated. ‘What do the young men know? Nothing!’ recalled a Lahure who would become a prisoner of war in Singapore: