![]() Breaking Psychological BarriersAnirudh Deshpande IN DEFENCE OF HONOUR AND JUSTICE: SEPOY REBELLIONS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY By Sabyasachi Dasgupta Primus Books, New Delhi, 2015, pp. 143, Rs. 795.00 VOLUME XL NUMBER 3 March 2016 Almost all studies of
the colonial Indian
military establishment
which impinge on the
relationship between the
British and Indian personnel
of the colonial Indian
armed forces focus attention
on the existential crisis
of the colonial subjects
in military uniform. This
existential crisis arose from
the peculiar colonial circumstances
which governed
the lives and societies
of these, to use a cliched
term, peasants in uniform.
There is no dearth of books
and articles written on the subject of obedience and disobedience
among the Indians who served as soldiers and junior officers first in
the three Presidency Armies and later in the Indian Army. Many of
these narratives are mentioned and discussed in the Introduction by
Dasgupta. Since the colonial armies raised in India by the British
were not national armies in the strict sense of the term, mutiny was
never far from duty in them. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
the British raised and managed to effectively use a variety of
Indian armed forces in their colonial interest but, as the book under
review states, they could only do so by constantly negotiating and
re-negotiating the terms on which the native Indian troops were
willing to serve their colonial superiors. The agency of the sepoy is
revealed to the historian who researches this process of negotiation.
The book also underlines an important fact governing the Indian
soldier’s service to the Company Bahadur. The monetary incentive
was certainly important to elicit a positive response from the
colonial martial types but equally, if not more, important were the
issues of honour and justice because almost all sepoy rebellions which
occurred in the nineteenth century were caused when the rebels felt
that these two virtues of soldiering had been violated by the British
beyond the point of redress. The book highlights the importance of
analysing the day-to-day actions of defiance indulged in by the sepoys
and native officers in order to perceive the sepoys as active agents of
a history which continued to happen in the sepoy armies. It calls for
a ‘wider understanding of mutinies’ which were often underpinned
by less dramatic acts of disobedience which characterized the mundane
functioning of the sepoy armies (p. 115). This tightly written
book shows why and how the sepoys broke the ‘psychological barrier
erected by the professional training to obey unquestionably’ (p. 115).
The book is divided into five well balanced chapters. The first
describes some ... Table of Contents >> |