Colonialist notions of a soldier along with loyalty, discipline and dharma were internalised aspects of military life and continue to be so, writes ANANYA BORGOHAIN
When US Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was released by the Taliban on May 31, 2014, concerns were subsequently raised about his priorities — whether he actually despised his own motherland as reported or he was indeed a homecoming victor. That right there is one of the classic examples of military identity crises. The debate between the personal and the political, the confrontation of varying subjectivities, the idea of the self changing in a war, the battle between the right and wrong and the most fundamental question of all —who decidesIJ The warped psychology operating in the Bergdahl case isn’t nascent; it’s deep rooted in military history and is universal. In fact similar conundrum concerning a soldier’s (and the likes) misplaced sense of identity is, on its own, a political sub-culture and needs to be located in its own context. In India, a policeman may not be different in attitude from a common citizen but once he dons his uniform, he becomes an element of a dehumanised force. The Indian Police Service (IPS) did not exist before Independence. There was only the Imperial Police (IP). The colonial Government did not deem the imperial police a ‘service’, probably in an attempt to avoid a relationship between the police and the community. The force never had a human face and was always associated with the uniform. Worse, they were authorised to employ ‘third degree’, torture on suspects to elicit information. In situations like these, how does one distinguish between the authority of uniform and the human being wearing itIJ This raises the essentially post-structuralist question: Is certainty possible in identity and beliefIJ
Post-colonial histories of recent times project resistance less with reference to the events in history and more in a subalternist approach where the rebel, or the person, is emphasised (as seen in the works of James C Scott or Ranajit Guha). In particular, the colonial archives focus upon the figure of a rural Indian. Be it a nationalist or a Marxist method of chronicling, peasant-rebels would be the metaphor that rehabilitates the notion of ‘ideal’ rebellion. Gajendra Singh’s latest book The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between self and sepoy (published by Bloomsbury) chronicles the Indian sipahi (soldier) and Indian military history with an orientation towards both time (with reference to the event) and space (with reference to the approach) in history. In the World Wars, thousands of Indian sepoys were recruited to fight for the British Crown. Singh’s documentation seeks to explore how those sepoys understand and explain their own war experiences, and in the process, positions the colonialist vision through the corpus of Indian military law and testimonies. Divided into six chapters, it covers a range of topics such as the martial race theories, censorship in the Army, the letters of the sipahis, court testimonies, and so on. Meticulously arranged, the first chapter for instance, details what attributes of which communities have led to the formation of several military race theories: “The Sikh Jat was broadly understood to have a soldierly bearing but distinctions were made between Sikh cultivators from the Manjha (Amritsar, lahore, and Sialkot etc) and Malwa areas of Punjab. The Manjha is brighter and quicker, the Malwai is as conscientious but less cheerful. The Sindhu Jats were the ‘finest specimens of the human race’…their martial spirit and dogged courage exhibit themselves in crimes of violence. The Pathans of Hindu Kush were naturally given to martial endeavour because they hailed from the frontier. They were first recruited after the annexation of Punjab and a distinct image emerged following the creation of the NWFP. Because of the equation made between tribalness and martial bearing, different types of Pathans were seen as more ‘tribal’ and thereby more martial…The caste exclusiveness and intricate purification ceremonies performed by Brahmins were seen to be inimical to military efficiency. Brahmin sub-castes recruited in the army such as the Kanoujiya Brahmins of UP or the Punjabi Dogras were shorn off their Brahminness by all military handbooks”.
World War I recorded a high incidence of war trauma among British soldiers and colonial troops. The Indian Army Act was amended in 1923 to make allowances for the Indian sipahis. By World War II, they had over a thousand beds in psychiatric wards reserved for victims of war neuroses. Beyond the psychology, Singh’s book also explores a chain letter and the consequence it had upon Muslim troops of the Indian Army during the World War I. The letter was read, rewritten and passed on — as soldiers to purify their own bodies and oppose interracial sexual relationships — and formed the basis of the Ahmadiyya Movement. It was a careful critique of the British approach towards the Ottoman empire: “The snowball letter emerged as part of the conversation that Muslim sipahis were engaged in about their religion…it reflected and furthered the ability of the Muslim sipahis to act as religious conduits and catalysts”. The most interesting chapter in the book is, as the title itself suggests, ‘Mutiny, Fabricating Court Testimony and Hiding in the latrine’ and it also happened to entail plenty of testimonies by the soldiers themselves.
The book covers myriad schools of thoughts — orientalism, historicism, post-colonialism, modernism, and even racial essentialisations. It underlines the colonialist visions of the soldier and how loyalty, discipline were internalised aspects of military life which “could be provoked by invoking izzat, dharma and shahadat; as part of a duty to one’s sex, kin, religion, or to traditions and martyrdom”. It brings to the fore the colonial ideologies as pronounced by European powers, akin to the works of Homi Bhaba, Aijaz Ahmed, and the likes.