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Vol. XXXI No. 1, April 16-30, 2021

From Madras to India, the Story of the Indian Army

S. Muthiah as my inspirational icon

Capt D P Ramachandran

I am an accidental writer, who happened to pen my battlefield experience in a narrative and was lucky to see it published. Later, Mr. Muthiah roped me in to do the essay on military history of Madras for the compendium on the city he was working on. I guess he was impressed by my completing the assignment well within the timeframe and conforming to the parameters he had set for writing the essay. Ever since that, he always made me feel more of a competent writer than I imagined myself to be, enquiring, whenever we met, what I was writing, nurturing a feeling in me that I ought to be writing instead of idling my time away. He used to prod me, like he did the rest of the contributors, to expand my essay into a book. I had indeed developed a great fascination for the military history of Madras while researching for the essay and, encouraged by the confidence he instilled in me, I took the plunge, and succeeded in producing a comprehensive, battlefield history of South Indian Soldiery spanning more than two hundred and fifty years. The book drew good reviews and found fairly wide readership. I was, of course, lauded by Mr. Muthiah for being ‘first off the mark’ with a book from among the essayists. More than anything else, the effort of creating the book developed a passion for writing in me, making it my most enjoyable pursuit. It has enabled me, over the years, to author several articles for various publications, almost a hundred blogs for my website and recently, my third book, Indian Army Through Battles Over The Centuries, which I have dedicated to the memory of Mr. Muthiah, he having been the inspirational icon in my literary pursuits.

– Capt. D.P. Ramachandran

A passage from the book Empire’s First Soldiers

Without doubt, the British Empire in India was an accident of history. To start with, the British had no political ambitions when they established trade with the subcontinent in the 17th Century. They were content with their meek role as traders for nearly a hundred years of their presence in India initially. Even afterwards they were reluctant participants to begin with, in the politico-military struggle that ensued, and that too, primarily to counter the French militarism, consequent to the extension of the rivalry between the two European neighbours to the subcontinent. In fact, but for the penny-pinching policy of the French Government, it could very well have been a French Empire that resulted in India instead of a British one. Then again, French or British, no European empire would ever have been possible in India, but for the internecine quarrels of the native rulers of the land, which presented the ideal environment for a foreign power to exploit the situation. The British, at best, were just about as much in the game as so many other players were – they just turned out to be the smartest. If anything, the native rulers, the Rajahs and Nawabs and others of their ilk, who with their indulgence and criminal stupidity gave away their sovereignty in a platter to the foreigners, were the ones guilty of inflicting the shame of the British Empire on the country than the British themselves, who after all, only took what was up for grabs, notwithstanding the utterly unscrupulous manner in which they went about it.

It is not even as if the empire was a crowning achievement of the British arms; essentially, India was conquered for the British by Indians. That’s the subject of my story, at least part of it. As it turned out, the British who began their military enterprise in India in the mid-1700s by raising an army of the natives along the Coromandel Coast, ended up, by the end of the Second World War, with the largest voluntary army the world had ever known, a highly competent fighting force called the Indian Army, which had by then proved itself second to none in battlefields all across the world. The very survival of Britain’s Indian Empire had by then, come to depend solely on the loyalty of this army. It had, in the British perspective of the day, assumed Frankenstein proportions.

Britain, weakened as she was after the war, and the dreadful experience of 1857 still haunting her, was in no shape to take on the might of the Indian Army, should it become rebellious. And there was every indication that it might, with small-scale mutinies, scattered though, being reported; the great army was getting restive. (The situation had turned so alarming, that some in the establishment had even begun working on a contingency plan, Operation ‘Bedlam’, for a possible scenario of the army turning hostile.) No wonder the British found themselves on thin ice as they were being hemmed in by the tumultuous events in the subcontinent at that juncture (the naval mutiny, the sudden volatility the nationalist movement had gained with the trial of the Indian National Army Prisoners, and the threat of an impending civil war due to communal tensions, to name the most notable of these), and meekly gave into the Indian demand for independence. There can be no doubt that they had very much been hastened in that decision by concerns of their grip weakening on the powerful sword that was the Indian Army. Historically parallel to this is the fact that, though suppressed, it was the Sepoy Rising of 1857 – a watershed like no other in India’s British Experience – that put an end to the crude hegemony of East India Company and placed India directly under the British Crown; a step which, whether the British intended it so or not, was to put India on her inexorable march to freedom.

Thus, in a strange way, the Indian soldier, without whom Britain couldn’t have created her empire, had himself proven inherently instrumental in dismantling it. Few political pundits – who espouse the theory of the independence having been solely won through the satyagraha movement – would want to admit though, that the impact of the armed forces in propelling the country towards her freedom was so profound.

Extracts from the book: Empire’s First Soldiers.

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