Native Troops in Colonial Armies: A Research Note on an Incident during the Bengal Army Mutiny of 1857-1858

Extract

In an article published in this journal (V (1981), 1), I argued that we will not be able to fully understand the political significance (if any) of the widespread eruption in John Company's Bengal Army in 1857, unless we hear from the “other side of the hill,” from the alienated sepoy officer and rank and file. In the interim we have heard principally from several senior British writers. And because of, for instance, a much flawed research methodology, they have reached unanimity in their analysis of the shock to British rule in India: it was simply a mutiny, one absolutely void of any organized political aims or expressions. The work of Thomas Spear is typical. He has this to say in his India: A Modern History concerning the question of the mutiny as a nationalist movement, a war of independence: “The view that the mutiny was a concerted movement against the British, a violent predecessor of Mahatma Gandhi's campaigns, overlooks the fact that there was then no Indian nation.” He adds: “The new classes with ideas of nationalism were then very few in numbers and they were wholly opposed to the movement.” Philip Mason added the weight of his distinguished reputation to this chorus of disbelievers, who appeared to cringe in retrospective horror at the thought that the good and faithful sepoy could harbor such hideous–and ungrateful–thoughts as freedom from (what was) alien tyranny. After all, Mason muses, did not every British writer up to the mutiny repeat the belief that the Indian soldier had no sense of nationalism? No, he concludes smugly, the Indian soldier had no national feeling until long after World War One. The sepoy was, then, nothing more than a mindless mercenary-child-robot. The mutiny, however, and the other disturbances among the native soldiery prior to 1857, would indicate that the British, then and now, never fully understood their Indian auxiliaries.