The Indus Valley civilization, it transpires from the main archaeological findings, boasted of civic amenities and social norms of a high order, and an enviable agricultural system. Yet that civilization huddled into isolated fortress communities, and that spelt its doom at the hands of Trans-Caucasian Aryan invaders. Out for conquest and plunder, the latter forced the north-western passages to fall upon a land which, to them, seemed to flow with milk and honey.
This mixed grouping kept expanding into a near military vacuum, in pastoral serenity. As millennia rolled by, the savage lust and hunger ebbed, replaced by an ordered, stratified society of great orthodoxy. Its societal norms found an ethos in the workplace, the system of rights and privileges, and service under the flag.
By the tenth century BC, Army organization correlated with societal norms. Command, for better or worse, was vested in the temporal head - the king - no matter whether he was good at it. The division of the field army into four arms - the Chaturangbalas- was a superb innovation. Horse-drawn war chariots preceded war elephants, mounted soldiers, and foot soldiers. The chariot and the elephant mattered more, apparently because they provided stable weapon handling platforms. The stirrup had yet to be discovered. The moment the toe and later the full stirrup came in vogue, the chariot became merely ceremonial. It was the foot soldier that marched to war and took the brunt of attrition on his broad shoulders - the 'Poor Bloody Infantry'. The horse-mounted element was comparable to the latter-day dragoons, who rode to the battlefield but dismounted to fight.
Under good centralized leadership and uniform training standards, Indian field forces excelled. Under successive Mauryan kings there was no chance for a full-scale heartland invasion for a raider. Alexander the Great bit into the north-west periphery, veered north, and departed the scene. By 262 BC, relying on fast-moving cavalry for long marches, Emperor Ashok had unified two-thirds of the subcontinental landmass.
Under the Guptas again, Central Asian invaders like the Huns, who in their day razed and plundered a major portion of the known civilized world, were to stand checked as late as the sixth century AD. But time was marching on. Once again, a myopic civilization allowed its societal norms to pervade its military thinking, code, and even conduct in the field. The military, after all, Mirrors the society it serves; but history would have turned out differently, had the Army of those times been shielded from too much of this pious tenor. No deceit, sleight of hand or deception was allowed under strict rules of engagement, no flanking or attacks in the rear. Against a determined enemy, Prithvi Raj Chauhan scored the first time, defeating Mohammed Ghori at Tarain (1191 AD, 135 kilometers north of Delhi. Returning next year, the wily Ghori had no qualms over exploiting Chauhan's rigid battlefield code. If all is fair in love and war, Ghori richly deserved his victory.
The Hindu Age died out because of defective employment of assets and the curious habit of allowing an invader a free run. No attrition battles were waged on the enemy right from the frontiers or even during his retreat. Defensive thinking dictated policy, putting paid to prospects of victory for individual valour. Tactics were little practiced; strategies barely thought out and technologies were not imbibed.
Word had gone round, in the seventh century itself, that Hindustan was ripe for conquest, plunder and dominion. India's early history is therefore, the story of its conquest and subjugation by adventurous Arabs, Afghans, and Turks who marched into Hindustan to try their luck.
Mohamed bin Qasim, around 711 AD, was the first Arab to lead a successful reconnaissance in force into Sind. On reporting back his success, he lost his head (literally) for extraneous reasons. The Great Desert proper, however, had not yet been penetrated. It was left to later invaders to creep slowly eastward.
Between Ghori and Ghazni of Afghanistan, expeditionary looting was developed into a fine art. Desire for loot now changed into desire to rule, leading to the first Sultanate in Delhi in 1206 AD.
The Delhi Sultanate, established over time (1206-1526), by decisive campaigning brought in fresh war fighting norms, in which victory was the main objective unfettered by any heroic code. Firearms were introduced in the early fourteenth century, with pride of place going to fast moving cavalry released from a defending role in the battlefield. The pivot was still provided by a large group of war elephants and infantry.
The Mughal conquest of India is an object lesson in the superiority of technology and tactics over mere numbers. In 1526, a small army under Babur, of the house of Taimur in Central Asia sailed southward through Afghanistan and on to Hindustan. The small force, served by an artillery line protected by infantry, with free ranging cavalry under decentralized command, defeated a much larger force of Lodhi's sultanate. The kill power of the artillery combined with mobile multi-directional attacks, brought victory to Babur.
In the Mughals' military scheme of things, cavalry and artillery got the pride of place followed by the infantry wielding muskets and bows. Logistical trains consisting of carts drawn by camels, oxen and even donkeys were streamlined such that a field army was ensured freedom of action. Elephants, again, were used at the firm base, or as 'command vehicles'.
The mansabdari system of obtaining a large army for campaigns, with minimal expenditure being incurred by the central authority, was refined and reintroduced under the Mughals. The Delhi Sultans had coined this name for a system long prevalent in the subcontinent. The military peerage, the only aristocracy, were graded according to mansab (or military rank). Princely state contributions flowed in according to the mansab grade, commencing at upkeep and command of 10 to 40,000 troops for blood relatives. Inevitably, such a system bred a wide variation in training standards, loyalty, and morale, and uneven leadership calibre of the mansabdar. Nevertheless, for internal empire building, and keeping outlying principalities in line, this system worked. But the later Mughals sold their inheritance over a period of time to that canny, British trading concern, the East India Company, also known as John Company.
Even under Aurangzeb the mansabdari system was fully stretched by an outstanding leader and military genius - the Maratha chieftain, Chhatrapati Shivaji. He had thoroughly studied, the strengths of the Mughals as well as their weaknesses, and tempered his diplomacy, military doctrine, organization and tactics to capitalize on the latter. The rugged terrain of the Western Ghats, where he operated, could be counted on to slow down large conventional columns. His cavalry, swift and decisive in battle, had great stamina, dedication and skill. It used the raid, hit and run tactics, hounding and harrying but never offering setpiece battle. Shivaji's defensive pivots were his famous hill-top forts, eminently suited for defence against anything but a long investment siege. A commander of incomparable pluck and acumen, he exploited every facet of the military art including deception, to appear where he was least expected and in sufficient strength to carry the day. He was ably assisted by such renowned captains of war as Tanaji, at whose death in battle at Singarh fort he uttered the immortal words, Sinh gele garh ale (The lion is gone, the fort is ours).
British Era
The Royal directive and Charter of the Honourable East India Company was, ostensibly, to trade with India. Trading interests needed to be protected, so the Company formed protection forces in each of its Presidencies, comprising both British and indigenous troops, although leadership and key assignments were always with the British. The British Crown, saw India as a vast and unending source of fabulous treasures, and encouraged the Company to enlarge and diversify its operations while tightening its stranglehold on a tottering and decadent Mughal Empire.
When the last of the Grand Mughals, Aurangzeb, died, Great Britain had a two fold task before it. Other European interests in India, mainly the French, had to be eliminated; and the consolidated Mughal Empire, which due to indifferent leadership and intrigue was fast crumbling, had to be taken over. Ingenuity of a rare order was required for the latter task, and successive Presidents, Governors, or Governors-General of the Company proved equal to it. The capacity for intrigue and back-stabbing that they displayed had never been witnessed in India before and has never been equalled since, even in the twentieth-century corporate world.
The advantage, too, was unfairly stacked in favour of the British. To begin with, the technology in their possession was so far ahead of native genius that there was no contest. Secondly, Britain's pre-eminence in sea power, too, put paid to any long-term and strong presence of the French or even the Portuguese. In the initial British drive for the conquest of India one only finds Hyder Ali and thereafter his son Tipu offering stout resistance. Six decades later the Army of the Khalsa would go down fighting hard, but by then the momentum of conquest was far advanced.
The British, therefore continued their empire building with unbounded energy. The three trading concessions of Bombay, Madras, and Bengal were turned into strong beach-heads. The beach-head of Bengal was extended towards Delhi and beyond, commencing with the Battle of Plassey (1757).
Plassey nevertheless was in many ways a landmark event. Political skullduggery won the day for the British, when Mir Jaffar at the last moment deserted his sovereign, the Nawab Siraj-ud-daula, to side with Robert Clive. Such warfare of betrayal was to mark many steps of the Britishers' march of conquest in India.
The final coup in the expansion of the Bengal beach-head came in the form of two winter campaigns fought against the Sikh Empire, with its capital at Lahore, in 1846 and 1849. The battles of Sobraon (on the Sutlej) and thereafter Chillianwalla were decisive in linking up the Gangetic and Indus basins. The Sikh Empire was thereafter parcelled out, Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh - the largest portion by far - going to the Dogra king Gulab Singh.
This could not have been done, at least profitably, without employing indigenous fighting power. The main element of British power was the Indian component of its Army in India, completely dwarfing European troops in the Company's employ and the imperial British Army components. In accordance with the Company's/Crown's principles of 'abundant caution' and abundant profit':
Bombay : Company Troops drilling on the square
The seed that grew into the present Indian Army was sown on fertile ground. We draw our history from here because of the unbroken service of a corporate body of men who served out of many reasons, the foremost being that they knew no other profession! or would not think of another. It does not matter who we served or for what politico-military and economic reasons.
The history of this body of men is rich, profuse, and voluminous. It cannot be told with either compression or brevity without getting out of shape. All we can do is to present some of its highlights, which are:-
In any army, Command and Staff functions are the head. Leadership and management are its nub. But in the British-lndian Army this was not realized sufficiently. The muscle and bone - the combat arms -did much better as time went by. The arterial system -the logistics back-up - was strained beyond limits especially in expeditionary warfare. And the command set-up (as opposed to calibre), always trailed behind the need of the times.
Though indigenous manpower had been hired for duties which today would be termed 'security management, the first signs of interest in augmenting military assets with local resources came in the form of he Bombay Presidency bringing in two companies of l 00 men each of Rajputs into its employ, as early as 1683. The Bengal and Madras Presidencies followed suit in 1700, when they recruited people of Buxar and Telengana in small numbers, respectively.
Robert Clive gave the next impetus, by forming in 1756-57, during and after the Battle of Plassey, two battalions of infantry on a European pattern of organization. These had a Headquarters and 10 companies each, initially officered exclusively by Indians. Clive went a step further than just dressing them up in the entirely unsuitable colour of red (therefore Lal Paltan or Lal Kurti which translates to 'Red coats' - the same appellation given by the American Army of Independence to British troops). Clive also introduced British officers and NCOs into these units. A battalion totalled some 860 all ranks, which is fairly close to today's total of a standard infantry battalion. The infantry thus came into being a little before cavalry. The artillery, that elusive arm which waxed and waned more with political policy than functional need, had, on the other hand, hired artillery manpower in terms of Gun Lascars' in or around 1748.
Cavalry was built up as part of an all-arms (and all-out) build-up against the redoubtable Hyder Ali. The Honourable Warren Hastings had a mounted bodyguard, first called the 'The Governors Troop of Moghuls' which later changed its name to the Governor-General's Bodyguard. This was in 1773. The next year, the Nawab of Arcot was pleased to lease four cavalry units to the Madras Presidency. Today, the former is the President's Bodyguard, the seniormost Unit of the Indian Army, followed very closely by the 16th cavalry (1776), a direct descendant of Arcot's cavalry units.
The Corps of Sappers and Miners (now the Engineers, came along in 1780 in small numbers. Amongst the logistics services, the Commissariat (Quartermaster Branch) blossomed separately in all the three Presidencies in 1760, to cater for the needs of European as well as Indian troops. Indigenous physicians were hired in 1764 to give medical cover to Indian troops. Basic comforts having been looked into, it was also time to set up a body to procure and stock materials of war. Three Boards of Ordnance grew up in their own right in 1775. To look after the growing number of pack animals, veterinarians were inducted in 1779.
In the process, each of the three Presidencies was building up its own infrastructure, thus often needlessly triplicating effort and expense.
Command, Staff and Organization
In the beginning, local military command was vested in the body of the President himself. At no stage thereafter was military command to reach beyond that of a unified theatre in modern parlance.
By 1748, a Commander-in-Chief was given to the Governors for coordination of military activities. Major Stringer Lawrence, assisted by a Commander Royal Artillery, filled this post with great verve. This was the first (of many) attempts to integrate the military assets of the three Presidencies.
powers were retained by the Board of Control (Directors), which meant the British Government, including the power to appoint the Commander-in-Chief. For the Governor-General, a formal Army Headquarters was created with the Commander-in-Chief as head, two Principal Staff Officers being assigned to assist him, namely the Quartermaster General and the Adjutant General. At this point in time (1790), the total strength of the British-Indian Army was 90,000.
A Military Department was created in 1786, the forerunner to the Ministry of Defence. By 1834, a military member became an advisor to the Governor-General in Council. His nearest equivalent today would be the Raksha Mantri (Minister of Defence).
Reorganizations
After the Great Bengal Army Insurrection, i.e. our First War of Independence in 1857, Her Majesty, Queen Victoria was no longer amused with the Company's loss of control, and India came directly under the Crown along with her Army. In the interim and after, a number of commissions and committees recommended changes and reforms, of which the Peel (1858) and the Eden (1879) commissions are worthy of note. The latter suggested immediate amalgamation of all Presidency Armies.
In 1895, the Army was thoroughly reorganized, burying the Presidency Armies at long last except for traditions that lingered. In line with contemporary military thinking, four regional commands were created, each under a Lieutenant General: Punjab-West of the Yamuna river, commanding the Frontier Force as well; a truncated Bengal command; Madras (with Burma); and Bombay with Sind, Quetta and an extension in Aden.
The Frontier Force and the general North-Western orientation of the Punjab and Bombay Commands was a fallout of European imperial rivalry. As early as 1840, Britain was firmly resolved to check the expansion of Imperial Russia into South-Central Asia.
In 1902-03 Kitchener commenced streamlining every inch of the system, which finally resulted in the reforms of 1908-09. He had also managed to shake off the Military Member interposed between the Commander-in-Chief and the Political Executive on the ground of unity of advice and therefore unity of purpose. What emerged from this decade-long turmoil was an expanded Army Headquarters, with a dedicated General Staff Branch and a Director-General Ordnance Branch being added to the existing Adjutant General and Quartermaster General Branches. Two territorial commands were created - the Northern and Southern, and the Field Army was subdivided into a Field Force and Internal Security Troops totalling 152,000 (nine Divisions and eight Cavalry brigades) and 82,000 respectively.
Immediately after the First World War, a Military Council was formed, with the Secretary of Army Department and the Financial Adviser as members. Once again, four regional Commands were set up with the Field Force getting an additional element - that of covering troops for the North-West Frontier.
The Command system served for both empire building and external imperial policing (Egypt, Burma, China, Mesopotamia). In protracted expeditionary wars it had a tendency to fray, but that was more due to flaws in logistics and, administrative practices.
The Tradition of Arms
Tradition fights. The Indian Army Sepoy (from the Hindustani word sipahi) and now Jawan (young man) or Sawar (rider) and his leaders formed a cohesive collective. They lived to serve the Unit, they were willing to die for it. Nothing must happen which would tarnish its honour, its izzat. The word in Urdu is a distillation hard to explain, encapsulating in itself the code of ethics given by Dharma (faith) and Namak (literally, salt). Unflinching loyalty was to a concept and not to a transient personality or cause. Always and everywhere, the Unit came first. Everything followed from it - the Regiment, the Flag, and the Country. This was the greatest battle-winning factor bequeathed by history to the Indian Army. The men were there, ready and willing to serve a flag, with honour, glory and mutual respect. Quick to appreciate these traits, successive British governments brought in more regional groupings into the Army. A fierce undying loyalty to the Unit was evinced by the British Officer Corps, and the Indian junior leaders and men reciprocated it. The greatest ambition of a British Officer was to command his Regiment.
A 'Regiment' in some armies merely means a robotic military formation the size of a brigade. No sense of the past attaches to the word. In the Indian Army, the word can mean either of two things - battalion-sized units of arms like the Armoured Corps, Artillery, Engineers, and Signals, or a particular combination of Infantry battalions. The Artillery employs the term more comprehensively and calls the complete Artillery mass in the order of battle as the Regiment of Artillery. Others stick to Corps and even groups.
To begin with, the Presidencies recruited their soldiers from their increasing territorial holdings. By 1802, however, recruitment by class or ethnic lines had begun. The British penchant for recruitment in terms of 'martial and non-martial' classes is difficult to explain, but this legacy persisted for sometime even after independence, to be finally buried in the cauldron of 1962.
Certainly, there were some outlying 'tribes" who were not considered for regular employment mainly on the score that they did not take well to rigid military discipline. These bodies were converted into irregular local levies, scouts, and frontier corps and did better in their frontier habitats.
Cavalry
Indian cavaliers had the sweep of a whole subcontinent before them like their equivalents - the Cossacks of Russia or the Light Dragoons of the United States. This arm came up through a mixture of raising methods: directly recruited cavaliers were grouped into 'regular' units; yeomen of means who bought themselves in with mounts and essentials, formed Irregular units, under the silladar system. Very 'irregular' Cavalry raised by gentlemen of fortune and in the employ of local powers were also welcomed to join the growing Cavalry arm.
Local state forces which had demonstrated their prowess on the battlefield were also invited to join the Britishers. Among these were the Arcot Cavalry and some from Hyderabad; Maratha Cavalry raider forces (including the highly irregular Risalas of Gardner and Skinner). The last to join the irregulars were of the Army of the Khalsa, Hodsons Horse being the best 'known among them. This formidable Cavalry arm, largely named after the Presidencies, e.g., the Bengal Cavalry, caught the romance of those times. Units were given to calling themselves 'Horse', 'Cavalry', 'Light Cavalry' or 'Lancers'. Some time after independence, the equine connotation died out and newly raised regiments now call themselves 'Armoured Regiments:
The Gunners
British policy was clear in the matter of handling of artillery by Indian troops. Guns, the main firepower component of a field army, were to be shielded from them. In the waxing and waning of Indian-served artillery, the start was auspicious. Thereafter, by the beginning of the nineteenth century there was much 'retrenchment'. A few mountain battery trains flourished and kept the Indian component alive as part of the Royal artillery. Recently, it has been established that 8 Company Bombay Artillery survived axing and is now 5 (Bombay) Mountain Battery. It was raised on 28 September 182 7, which is now celebrated as the Raising Day of the Regiment of Artillery.
Legends abound about the screwgun-equipped Mountain Batteries of Derajat, Bengal, and Hazara serving in the North West frontier. No flag or pennant is needed by the Artillery as colours for rallying. Without fail, gunners rallied round their guns and defended them to the last.
It was in January 1935 that 'A' Field Brigade (actually a four-battery 'regiment') was raised with Indian troops. As late as that, it was horse-drawn artillery on the lines of the older Royal Horsed Artillery. The tradition of a quick gallop into battle and on deployment serving the gun to the end was strongly established right from the beginning.
The Sappers and Miners
The need for accurate survey arose before combat engineering. Vast holdings had to be carefully delineated and mapped out, to plan the correct form of commercial extraction. By 1780, serious attention began to be given to the art of sapping and mining.
Mining involves boring through and placing very large demolition charges for making a breach in the walls of the fort and/or placing the charges under key areas in the fort. The sapping technique has been used to great advantage on modern battlefields as well,
They have emerged on today's battlefield as the 'Engineers'. In India, the Engineers were spawned in three groups - the Madras Sappers followed by the Bengal Sappers and finally the Bombay Sappers. They were formed into field companies (a sub-unit organization that exists to this day) grouped into regiments. Till 1911, the Sappers also had the onerous charge of passing battlefield messages. Between 1911 and 1920, they handed this burgeoning task to a batch of their own kinsmen who then formed the Corps of Signals.
The Corps and Services
Logistics back-up to the fighting forces has specialized over the decades and centuries, splitting when expedient to form specialist corps, and merging where necessary. The Supply and Transport departments merged to form the Royal Indian Army Service Corps in 1884; Remount and Veterinary Services merged to form the Remount and Veterinary Corps. The Boards of Ordnance merged and formed the Indian Army Ordnance Corps, out of which emerged the Corps of Indian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in 1943.
Officering
Resistance to providing Indian leadership for the Indian Army persisted for quite a while. Roberts, a long-standing Commander-in-Chief of the Army was of the view that no Indian officer could have serving under him a British officer, or even a British NCO. The most an Indian could aspire for was an Indian commission, with 'Subedar Major' being the highest rank. The first major change came in l919-20, in response to the then Indian political leadership's strident demands for 'Indianization' of the Army, in that ten vacancies were reserved for suitable' Indians at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.
Indian political demands also impelled the British to set up the Indian Military Academy (IMA) at Debra Dun on 1 October 1932. The training was for a period of two and a half years. The IMA was formally inaugurated by the Commander-in-Chief in India, FM Sir Philip Chetwode, on 10 December 1932. In his inaugural address to the trainees, he enunciated three principles which were to guide the future officers of the Indian Army:
The first batch of Gentleman Cadets who passed out of the IMA were commissioned in December 1934. This batch was to produce India's first Field Marshal, SAM Manekshaw MC of the 8th Gorkha Rifles. On independence, Indian officers, junior in service and experience to their British mentors (the highest rank holders were Brigadiers Cariappa and Thimayya), were able to step into their elevated ranks and responsibilities, with confidence.
The First World War
Imperial Germany did complain about the use of 'colonial troops' in the main European theatre. Indian troops were proving to be dogged and unrelenting in resistance. Higher command failed them in the tough conditions of Mons and Flanders, and the Dardanelles. In Mesopotamia, the logistic system repeatedly failed and abysmal reinforcement methods became glaring. Yet through it all, the Indian Army put on a sterling performance, and the many theatre and battle honours that adorn the 'colours' of its regiments bear proud witness to this.
The Second World War
When the Second World War broke out, not a single unit of the Indian Army was mechanized to respectable standards. Motorization was selective, and scales of weaponry extremely sparse. But the number of men that India gave to the Allied Cause has never been equalled since. In 1939, the Army had 189,000 in its ranks -rising to 2,644,323 at peak strength in 1945.
In the Western Desert, in Eritrea and Italy, Indian Divisions engaged the Germans and-ltalians. The 4th, 5th, and 8th Divisions distinguished themselves in a series of hard-fought campaigns. A time came when the British 8th Army depended on the 4th Division to crack up Axis formations in their long (and final) retreat. At Cassino, the best that the German Parachute Regiment had were slowly reduced by equally motivated Indian troops of all shades. German breakthroughs in the Desert saw Indian Gunners standing to their guns, despite being cut off, and fighting heroically. The 3rd (Indian) Motor Brigade badgered the Africa Corps using trucks and machine guns.
In Malaya, Singapore, and Burma the Indian Army initially gave ground to what at first seemed an unstoppable Imperial Japanese drive through South-East Asia to the very gates of India. None was there to stop them - not the Chinese, nor the Americans, nor British or Indian Army formations. 17 Indian Division's agonizing withdrawal in 1942, over vast stretches in Burma, was the longest in British military history. The Division was to subsequently extract terrible retribution from the Japanese Army when Field Marshal 'Bill' Slim's 14th Army went on the counter-offensive, sweeping the Japanese out of Burma and South-East Asia. Out of one million men of the Allied Armies in South-East Asia, 700,000 were Indians.
It was the Indian Army units, who in the words of 'Bill' Slim, were the 'best in the world' that merited recognition as superb fighting machines. Identical sentiments were echoed by Bernard Montgomery (Monty) in the West; Rommel, the 'Desert Fox', had the 'healthiest regard' for the Indians.
The war in Burma sprouted some of our outstanding middle-level and junior leaders such as Brigadier KS Thimayya DSO, Major Srikant Korla DSO, MC, Major NC Rawlley MC and Major Rajwade, to name but a few. The Victoria Cross (VC) - the first award of it's kind to an Indian Commissioned Officer was awarded to Second Lieutenant Premindra Singh Bhagat of the Bombay Sappers for an act of unparalleled bravery and inspiring leadership, on the night of 31 January/1 February 1941, when commanding a detachment of 21 Field company of the Bombay Sappers on the road to Gondar, in Abyssinia.
"Ayo Gorkhali" (The Gorkhas have come)
The Indian Army by the end of the War was thus rated as among the best in the world whose Officers and men displayed the highest levels of motivation and gallantry on the field of battle.
