For example, many of the soldiers who were recruited to fight in Egypt, Afghanistan, and Mesopotamia were Muslim, as colonial perceptions held that such men were naturally militaristic. It also enabled some soldiers to find commonalities with civilians in other occupied places. Despite the army’s military successes, soldiers wrestled with the mounting internal and external pressures of their service.Ī major source of controversy within and outside the army was the recruitment theory of “martial races,” which defined some religious, ethnic, and regional identities as inherently “martial.” 4 Indian nationalists criticized the policy for fomenting racial and religious tensions and depicting some Indian men as effeminate and un-martial. Each act of violence renegotiated and threatened to destabilize soldiers’ devotion to colonial rule.
Soldiers also used violence to put down domestic rebellion in India. They helped to militarize colonial borders near Afghanistan through brutal, expensive, and recurring campaigns. Soldiers served as enforcers of colonial expansion in Britain’s League of Nations mandates of Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine. However, colonial rule blurred the lines between war and peace. Their efforts helped Britain to become the largest empire in world history. The war compelled soldiers to serve in battlefields as distant as the ports of Singapore, the trenches of France, the swamps of Mesopotamia, and the deserts of Arabia.
3 This “Indian Army” ranged from 150,000 to 250,000 in peace and swelled to 1.4 million combatants and non-combatants during the First World War. These became shared ideals across cultures, as many British Christians, Hindustani Muslims, Punjabi Sikhs, Hindu Rajputs, Pathans, and Nepalis fought together in this colonial institution. It would help to harden the gendered view of citizenship that emphasized military service and masculinity for self-governance. As a result, the army was at the center of debates about rights to bear arms or cross borders, to access food and education, and to claim a religious or political identity. These destabilized national and imperial borders as well as gender, national, and religious identities.
2 The first four decades of the century witnessed wars, international migration, and anti-colonial rebellions of unprecedented scale. Reprinted with permission.įaithful Fighters examines the cultural legacies of the British Indian Army from 1900 to 1940, as it fought to expand Britain’s empire and combat anti-colonial rebellion in the twentieth century. Source: Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. It became a hospital for soldiers during the First World War. The Royal Pavilion was built as a palace for King George IV but Queen Victoria sold it to the city of Brighton. Soldiers, in turn, shaped, rejected, or spread colonial ideas to find a place for themselves in a world divided by nations and empires.įIGURE 1 First World War Sikh re-enactors at the Royal Pavilion War Stories Open Day, September 2014. Faithful Fighters explores the Indian Army’s attempts to racialize and militarize South Asian identities to secure the loyalty of its multi-racial, multi-linguistic, and multi-faith Indian Empire. The desire to remember Indian loyalty and imperial service as unique to Sikhs reflects patterns of religious and military hierarchy that began long before the First World War. So, too, were any of the diverse Muslim communities whose presence in the colonial army was nearly double that of Sikhs. Individuals who traced their heritage to Dogras from the Himalayan foothills, or Rajputs from western India, or Nepali men recruited as “Gurkhas” were noticeably absent. Yet missing from this commemoration was an accurate reflection of the diverse South Asian soldiers who served in the Indian Army.
After all, there were more South Asian combatants and non-combatants in the First World War than Australian, New Zealander, South African, and Canadian combatants combined. 1 Celebrating the contributions of South Asians in the First World War has done much to correct the erasure of colonial troops in popular memories of the conflict. Wild and enthusiastic crowds-including many British women-chased and fawned over the uniformed men. IN 2014, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton invited Sikh Britons to dress in First World War uniforms to commemorate the Pavilion’s history as a wartime hospital for Indian soldiers (Figure 1).
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