We are all Indians now

The contemporary importance of the old Indian Army

Writing my current book on the ‘great, bitter battle’ of Kohima in 1944 (the phrase is a Japanese one), I have been confronted once again by the triumph that was the pre-partition Indian Army.  Those of you who have read A War of Empires will know that I have long considered the Indian Army of the Raj to be the petri dish of modern Indian identity and a long forgotten but primary source of enduring national unity in modern India. Far from being a romantic view as some have suggested, it’s the hard nosed result of many years of thinking about how modern India came into being, and 1947 apart, remained and remains together. My current research reconfirms my commitment to this idea.

In 1942, when everything else around it was fracturing and under the pressure of external invasion and internal dissent, the Indian Army demonstrated what unity could achieve. By its ability to sublimate a wide set of divergent backgrounds, races, perspectives, languages and religions into a single entity with a single purpose, to wit the physical defence and protection of India, the Indian Army through to 1947 proved to be a force for good in a country that had yet to create (by virtue of it status as a colonial possession of Britain) its own modern identity. The army demonstrated unequivocally what India could be, if only the governing British, and India’s squabbling domestic political interests, many of which were sectarian in origin and motive, allowed it. The Indian Army was proof of the possibility of unity in the face of overwhelming racial, religious and cultural difference. Inadvertently or not, the British taught India, in part through the medium of the Indian Army, and in part through the medium of the application of law without fear or favour of creed or caste, that harmony and unity - where everything else seemed to speak of the reality of difference - was not just possible, but achievable. The Indian Army created its own culture of good, its own swagger and confidence, as an entity demonstrably higher and better than, division and strife. By so doing it showed what could be achieved when the skin-deep differences of colour, class, religion and caste were sublimated to a higher cause and a greater purpose.

The Indian Army was thus the best of India. It is a lesson for all divided societies. Perversely perhaps, in terms of modern arguments about the nature of imperialism, the practise of colonialism, at least in this case, could be said to have had its benefits. Imperialism created India and the Indian state; the Indian Army and its ability to unify Indians of every caste and creed demonstrated that nationhood was also possible across a vast geography that in the past - think of the Mughals - had only been united by feudal force and violence. In this respect some of the greatest Indians in the story of Indian independence and eventual nationhood were the men who created, nurtured and sustained, after 1858, this remarkable army. Many of these were Britons - think of Auchinleck and Slim for example - most were Indians, the subedars, jemadars, havildars, naiks and jawans who filled its ranks. Britain had been once created this way. It had survived the fractures of 1746 in part because of the unifying nature of the Royal Navy and the British Army. These entities helped end seven hundred years of post-Conquest squabbling along the infra-British frontiers. It wasn’t perfect by any means and fractures (such as Ireland, for example, a loci for those who relished exacerbating hatred and division) remained deep. But it worked, despite this.

India was to do the same. India was Britain’s child, its greatest offspring. Fractures led to partition in 1947, the result primarily of egregious squabbling by selfish domestic political interests in India, not, as some would suggest, by the British, who valued and sought unity above all. With the one exception of 1947, the legacy of unity has remained in modern India, the world’s largest democracy. In this unity, so long as it remains committed to the path of national harmony, it has much to teach its erstwhile parent, and the world. Niraud Chaudhuri was right: we are all Indians now. Or perhaps what he meant was that we were all Britons now?

Food for thought. Anyhow, Osprey will be publishing Kohima, The Great Bitter Battle this time next year. Look out for it.