Among these communities, the contribution of lower-caste Sikhs was particularly striking. The Mazhabi and Ramdasia Sikh recruits accounted for 97.6 per cent of their total recruitable population. Put differently, almost every recruitable lower-caste Sikh served during the war. Alongside the depressed classes, the army also drew in tribal groups that stood at the margins of Indian society. The Hos and Mundas, Oraons and Santhals, Coorgs and Assamese tribal peoples: all were sucked into the military dragnet. All this was undoubtedly intended to check the possibility of the army being dominated by upper-caste Hindus – groups that were regarded as the mainstay of the Congress party.
However, the army’s fondness for the martial classes was in no way diminished by these changes. The rub was that the demands of war far outstripped the supply from these communities. When army expansion began in earnest from mid-1940, the commanders initially sought to do no more than to beef-up martial-class regiments with recruits from other classes. Soon it became apparent that this would be unsustainable. So, the recruitment net began to be cast wider. Following Japan’s entry into the war, the army was forced to restrict the raising of new units to non-martial classes, especially the ‘Madrassis’ of south India.31 ‘The pre-war classes are becoming exhausted’, noted the adjutant general, ‘and further expansion of them is only possible to a very minor degree, and then at the expense of maintaining existing units.’32
The solution lit upon by the top brass was to retain the martial classes on the front line and relegate the new class soldiers as far as possible to support, logistics and administrative functions. Indeed, only 30,000 recruits from the new classes were employed in infantry battalions. At the end of the war, the infantry units raised from non-martial classes amounted to less than 5 per cent of the total strength of infantry in the Indian army. The armoured corps was almost entirely composed of the martial classes. Artillery and air defence regiments recruited from other classes, but only those manned by the martial classes were deployed in the front line of battle.33
In September 1943, the former director of military operations, the now promoted Major General Molesworth, ruefully noted that they had managed to get through the Great War by ‘exhaust[ing] Fortnum and Mason, without tapping Marks and Spencers or Woolworths to any great extent’.34 The Indian army could not avoid this lowering fate during the Second World War, but its leaders certainly sought to limit the perceived damage.
The government’s policy was not the only determinant of the expansion of the Indian army. It was, after all, a volunteer force. Why were Indians willing to sign up? Men from the martial classes were well aware of the benefits that flowed from military service. They were also drawn by traditional notions of service and loyalty – ideas that were transmitted from one generation of soldiers in a family to the next. ‘You should continue to discharge your duties faithfully and to the satisfaction of your officers,’ advised a father from the NWFP. ‘To do so is the virtuous tradition of a Rajput.’ The father of another soldier urged him from Waziristan not to worry about home: ‘Forget everybody for the present and work whole heartedly for King and Country.’35 Loyalty to the king emperor ran particularly deep among the traditional soldiering families. Following the 4th Indian Division’s victorious run in Tunisia, a soldier wrote home: ‘our beloved King (God save him) has conquered this country’.36 Another senior soldier was ecstatic at having seen the king in Egypt: ‘You have seen His Majesty in the pictures, whereas I have seen in person with my beloved eyes and purified my thoughts and soul.’37
Recruits from the non-martial classes who swarmed to the army had more prosaic reasons. ‘I joined the Army’, confessed a south Indian soldier, ‘in order that I may get rid of this accursed devil of unemployment so very prevalent in India.’38 Beyond the mere opportunity of employment was the belief that the army looked after its own. A restaurant manager wrote to a friend that ‘While the poor suffer on account of high prices and food shortage, Govt. has made elaborate arrangements for tea and other refreshments for its Sepoys at Railway Stations. Every Sepoy gets a very good supply of tea, cold drinks and food.’39 In the past, the army’s doors were firmly shut for Indians from such backgrounds. Now it was desperately looking for recruitable men. ‘Advise Ram Singh to join the Indian Army’, wrote a soldier from the states forces. ‘He will surely be selected. At present training period is not more than 3 months. We are in need of every type of soldiers.’40 Particularly attractive was the opportunity to serve in technical and logistical services such as Signals, Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, the Supply and Ordnance Corps. ‘Earning while learning’ enabled recruits to pick up skills that would stand them in good stead in the civilian job market after the war.41
Even as Japanese planes buzzed over Indian skies, few lining up to join the army seemed to be driven purely by patriotism. Recruiting officers realized that volunteers were keener on knowing the scope for personal gain. The authorities agreed that it was best not to use emotional appeals to patriotism, especially in ‘politically advanced areas’; best to ‘rely on the solid practical advantages of joining the army’.42 A job offering decent pay, a pension or good post-war employment prospects was the bottom line for the army as well as the recruits.
Yet, the ballooning demand for troops forced the government to rely on a range of techniques for recruitment. In the first two years of the war, recruitment had been undertaken solely by the army without any involvement of civilian and local authorities. This had limited the army’s ability to carry out propaganda for recruitment. The ignorance among the villagers, noted a civil servant from the Moradabad district of United Provinces in December 1941, was ‘appalling’: ‘I asked one chap, if he had ever heard of Hitler Budmash [unscrupulous] and he said he supposed it must be the new Patwari [village accountant].’43
By early 1942, the army realized that it could do with some help. Joint military and civil conferences were held to consider policies that would offer greater incentives for recruitment. One proposal adopted was to name the new regiments and battalions after the classes that comprised them. Another was to offer financial incentives, honours and recognition to civilians who helped with the recruitment drive.44
A third was to adopt the techniques of modern marketing to attract potential recruits. A sizeable recruitment advertising financial grant was sanctioned in 1942 and increased every subsequent year. This was used to mount a press campaign as well as to produce posters and booklets. Carefully designed advertisements were placed in a number of vernacular newspapers. Large colour posters with details of the pay and perks on offer were put up on prominent sites in catchment areas. These posters typically had a photograph of a soldier on duty and exhorted young men to sign up or their parents to allow them to join. Around forty pocket-sized booklets were published with colour photographs and attractive descriptions of life in the army. A popular booklet published in 1943, Mutu Joins Up, was designed as a pictorial record of the transformation of a young recruit in the 3rd Madras Regiment into a strapping jawan (soldier). Copies were circulated via the families of recruits in villages across south India. So keen was the interest that the booklet was republished several times.45
A range of other marketing tools were adapted for the army’s purposes: static and mobile information kiosks, models and clothing displays, advertisements on radio and in the theatres. Several short recruitment films were specially shot and screened by mobile cinema units. Their titles often left little to the imagination: Taraqqi (Progress), Future Leaders of India, Soldiers of the South, Johnny Gurkha, and so forth. In 1941–42, a defence services exhibition train displaying the equipment and tools used by soldiers was sent on a 1,500-mile journey through recruitment grounds in central and southern India, often chugging deep into the hinterland.46
Despite its best efforts, the army continually struggled to meet its targets. Several factors were at play. First, there was competition with the civilian labour market. The onset of war provided an economic boost to the middle and upper
strata of the Indian peasantry. After a decade of depressed agricultural prices, the demands of war led to a boom. This trickled down to tenants, farm labourers and artisans as well. In consequence, there was a marked reluctance even among the martial classes to leave the land.47
The governor of Punjab was told, for instance, that Jat Sikh recruits were unwilling to come forward in numbers because the boom had ‘brought them such prosperity that the economic argument for enlistment has no longer much force’.48 ‘In the more prosperous Provinces and Districts’, New Delhi informed London in early 1944, ‘the high wages being paid for civil labour and the favourable prices obtainable by Zamindars [landlords] for grains have reduced the economic urge to enlist, particularly for low-paid non-technical categories.’49 A survey conducted in the Lahore and Amritsar districts of Punjab asked: ‘What keeps the young man from joining the Army?’ The crisp response: ‘Hearty meals at home.’50
Similarly, by 1943 war-related industrial activity in India had gathered pace. This opened avenues of employment, especially for men with technical aptitude. As the central army commander observed, ‘the pay of the Indian rank, particularly in the infantry, no longer compares favourably with that of the civilian labour’.51
Second, the physical quality of the men joining up was appalling. Even recruits from north-west India were found to be ‘under-weight and anaemic and often exhibited frank signs of deficiency. Their dietary intake before enlistment was far from being satisfactory.’52 The widespread incidence of famine and hunger in 1943–44 led to severe under-nourishment and placed large numbers of young men beyond the pale of recruitment. Indeed, monthly recruitment figures for 1944–45 show an unremitting decline.53
Third, a considerable percentage of the intake into the army was lost due to desertion and discharges for unsuitability. In December 1941, monthly desertions touched a high-water mark of 2,161 – up from 1,858 in October 1941. The bulk of these were recruits and young soldiers and the main reasons for desertion were believed to be ‘homesickness, change of environment and family difficulties’.54 There was also the curious phenomenon of the ‘professional deserter’: men who ‘enrolled in unit after unit with the deliberate intention of deserting with the proceeds’. A man from the Gujrat district of Punjab had successfully deserted from nine different units. The army authorities were particularly miffed that men from the ‘newly enlisted classes … do not comprehend the gravity of the offence’.55
Tribal recruits like the Santals seemed resistant to the straitjacket of military life. Groups of up to two hundred recruits were apt to leave their lines and head to the nearest town for entertainment. There was more than a dash of Orientalism in the army’s treatment of these groups:
The Santal loves his individual independence and is liable for this reason to break away from authority, but he is loyal to his village councils and has a strong communal feeling. He has little or no idea of the value of money, and as a normal good wage will enable him to live in comparative comfort for a week on the earning of two or three days he is liable to expect only part-time work and to get into trouble if he has money in his pocket.56
The last factor, and perhaps most worrying for the Raj, was the impact of politics on recruitment. Officials tended to be concerned about the anti-war propaganda of the Congress. In the United Provinces and Central Provinces, the Congress machinery was active. Visits by recruiting officers to various districts were often preceded by teams of Congressmen seeking to dissuade men from signing up. The authorities felt that it was ‘difficult to get any response from areas where large numbers used to come forward’.57 Although the government tended to overstate the Congress’s influence, one theme of the latter’s propaganda certainly resonated with potential recruits. This was the disparity in pay between Indian and British soldiers serving in the Army in India. As Recruit Behari Prasad put it to his company commander in the 17th Dogra Regimental Centre: ‘In the eyes of Mahatma Gandhi all are equal, but you pay a British soldier Rs. 75/- and to an Indian soldier you pay Rs. 18/- only?’58
Yet the party that had the most adverse political impact on recruitment was not the Congress but the Muslim League. And the impact was not on the new groups being brought in but on the army’s favourite martial class: the Jat Sikhs of Punjab. The umbrella organization of the Sikhs, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), was divided in its attitude towards the war. The nationalist factions of the SAD were loath to support an ‘imperialist’ war, while others argued that the Sikhs stood to gain much by supporting the Raj. Besides, there was the propaganda of radical, communist-influenced Sikh organizations like the Kirti Kisan that caused unrest among the ranks of Sikhs in the army. The increasing numbers of deserters led the government to conclude that ‘all was not well in the Sikh community’.59
Adding to the disharmony was the Muslim League’s ‘Pakistan’ declaration of March 1940. Fearing that they would end up in a Muslim state, the Sikhs staunchly opposed handing over Punjab to the Muslim League. Relations between Muslims and Sikhs slid rapidly down the communal slope. The latter’s fears were aggravated by the Cripps Mission in 1942, which conceded the essence of the Muslim League’s demand. The governor of Punjab warned the viceroy that this would ‘seriously affect recruitment as all communities will wish to keep their young men at home to defend their interests’.60 This was prescient with respect to the Sikhs. In the aftermath of the Cripps Mission, the Sikhs began focusing on the defence of their own community and there was a steep decline in Jat Sikh recruitment. Indeed, of all the martial classes it was the Jat Sikhs who proportionately contributed the least to wartime recruitment: only 27.67 per cent of their recruitable men signed up, compared to 35.18 per cent from Punjabi Muslims and 53.51 per cent from Pashtuns.61
How did the experiment with recruiting diverse castes and communities work out for the Indian army? It would be hasty to link the army’s performance directly with its social composition. For one, this would mirror the martial races fallacy. For another, fighting efficiency depends more on training, leadership and morale than on ethnicity. Yet the coming together of so many diverse groups of Indians made the army an interesting social laboratory.
The barriers of caste and religion proved far less insuperable than imagined by the army leadership. The British commander of an Indian field engineering company was ‘surprised at the depth of feeling against the caste system’. His troops appeared to realize that ‘the caste system is holding back progress and unity in India’. The pre-war non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and viceroy commissioned officers (VCOs – the equivalent of warrant officers) tended to be strict in enforcing the caste divide, owing to ‘a “diehard” sense that the Corps has always been run that way and any change was contrary to “Standing Orders” ’. The ‘time was ripe’, he felt, to break down even single-caste companies in mixed battalions. Religious barriers, too, seemed to be thinning on the war front:
Already we have some Xtians [Christians] as cookhouse orderlies with no ill feeling at all … Mussulmans, I think, would forgo their Halal if given a lead – but it is a bit of a wrench for them. All Coys. [Companies] once ate New Zealand frozen mutton – faute de mieux. The position seems to me that established corps customs are in retard of contemporary feeling and restricting any progress.62
The expansion of the Indian army also resulted in far-reaching changes to the officer corps. Until the First World War, Indians were not allowed to hold the King’s Commission. The best they could hope for was a Viceroy’s Commission – granted only to senior soldiers who had risen from the ranks. From 1917, however, ten places at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst were reserved every year for Indians. These King’s Commissioned Indian Officers (KCIOs) were carefully selected: most of them hailed from the martial classes that had fought in the war.
Following the political reforms of 1919, Indians in the new Central Legislative Assembly (CLA) began to take a keen interest in the ‘Indianization’ of the army. In response to the Esher Committee report of 1921, a set of
resolutions was tabled in the CLA by P. S. Sivaswamy Aiyer, a leading liberal from Madras. These included demands for setting aside 25 per cent of the places at Sandhurst for Indian cadets and for the provision of preparatory training in India.63
The commander-in-chief of India, as well as the India Office, rebuffed the resolutions, arguing that their provisions would dilute the efficacy of the Indian army and that no British officer would deign to serve under an Indian. Even a plan drawn up by the commander-in-chief in 1923, proposing complete Indianization in forty-two years, was swatted aside in London. The summary rejection of even so conservative a plan riled the Indians. Speaking at the next budget session of the CLA, Jinnah noted that the Indian army had 2,078 British officers. At the going rate, he asked, ‘how many centuries will it take to Indianise the Army?’64 Concerned about a nationalist backlash, the viceroy, Lord Reading, protested to London. This resulted in a plan to ‘Indianize’ eight units (six infantry battalions and two cavalry regiments). Thenceforth the KCIOs would be posted only to these segregated units.65
The Indians saw the establishment of a military college in India – along the lines of Sandhurst – as the fastest way to Indianize the officer corps. After several resolutions were tabled in the CLA, the government constituted the Indian Sandhurst Committee under the chief of the general staff. The Indian component of the committee included Jinnah and Motilal Nehru (the father of Jawaharlal). The committee proposed a large-scale increase in Indianization, including the immediate doubling of places for Indians at Sandhurst; the setting up of an Indian academy by 1933 with an intake of three hundred cadets for a three-year course; and the abolition of the eight-unit scheme in favour of unrestricted induction of Indian officers.
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