“the very rarity is argument for retention”Footnote 1
On September 2, 1920, an amendment to the Indian Army Act abolished corporal punishment for the Indian soldier and follower and introduced field punishment as a substitute on active service.Footnote 2 This emancipation from the lash and the rattan came approximately 40 years after flogging had been abolished for the British soldier by the Army Discipline and Regulation Act, 1881.Footnote 3 This article examines two distinct features of Indian military law during the high noon of empire: the Summary Court-Martial (SCM), introduced experimentally in the 1860s and formalized by Act V of 1869, and the prolonged retention of corporal punishment.Footnote 4 The Manual of Indian Military Law described the SCM as a tribunal “peculiar to the Indian Army,” and the one most frequently used in it.Footnote 5 There was no such tribunal under the British Army Act. The commanding officer (CO) of a “native” regiment presided as sole judge over an SCM, and in this capacity he could award a wide range of sentences, including corporal punishment of up to fifty lashes, and these sentences could be implemented forthwith, without confirmation from higher authority.Footnote 6 The Manual of Military Law pronounced that for Indian troops in particular, “a slight punishment promptly inflicted” was more of a deterrent than a heavier one that followed long after the offense.Footnote 7 However, from mid-century onwards, debates about flogging in the “native” army were usually inaugurated with the declaration that it was a punishment rarely used or that it was “practically obsolete.”Footnote 8 The issue offers one of those intriguing situations in which the rarity of a punishment becomes an argument for retaining it, instead of for doing away with it altogether.Footnote 9
The pedagogical effects of the “military form of flogging” were reviewed in a very different frame for the British and Indian soldier. This paralleled the contrast that British officers of the “native” army drew between the British soldier, dragged into military service from the “dregs” of society, and the Indian “sepoy,” pictured as a respectable yeoman who felt that military service was the most honorable form of off-farm work.Footnote 10 This article touches briefly upon that remarkable moment in 1835 when this assumed difference in social standing was considered reason enough to discontinue corporal punishment for the sepoy, at a time when the British soldier could still be sentenced to 300 lashes. In 1845 when Governor-General Sir Henry Hardinge reintroduced corporal punishment to the “native” army, he did so by conceptualizing both British and Indian soldier in a common professional frame. However, with the eruption of the 1857 rebellion in India, and the extension of the franchise in England in 1867, it became more difficult to place the British lower classes on the same plane as colonized people. Reform at home encouraged racial thinking.Footnote 11
In the reconstruction of rule after the 1857 uprising, there was an effort to ensure that, even as civil and military law were rationalized, areas of summary and discretionary authority were worked in for the European officer “on the ground.”Footnote 12 The argument was that the SCM allowed the CO to pronounce judgement with a sovereign-like finality that maintained his prestige before an Asiatic soldiery. This article takes up the story in greater detail from 1881, when the British Army Act was meant to provide the reference point for improving Indian military law, but “local circumstances” were invoked to preserve a harsher and more summary disciplinary regime for the Indian soldier and follower. Lord Roberts, the Commander-in- Chief in India, would choose to forgo the consolidation of six different Indian Articles of War and the Mutiny Act rather than to curtail or drop the flogging clauses.Footnote 13 It was only in 1911, by piggy-backing upon reforms introduced to whipping in the civil sphere, that the Army Department eventually pushed through a consolidated Indian Army Act; one that curtailed but did not abolish corporal punishment.
Along a parallel track, the article examines whether corporal punishment in the Indian Army was indeed such an “infrequent infliction.” Its use on Indian combatants was certainly infrequent; however, there were spikes during some periods of active service.Footnote 14 Second, the perception that corporal punishment was barely there in the Indian Army also owed something to the brief and rather insensate nature of the few descriptions we have of its infliction, and to the determination with which Indian military law was kept out of the sphere of parliamentary discussion.Footnote 15 More importantly, corporal punishment was used with far less inhibition on the noncombatant or follower ranks of the Indian Army than on combatants.Footnote 16 Recruitment propaganda sought to convince the peasant that, when he put on the soldier's uniform and laced his military boots, he had distanced himself from a world of grinding toil, and acquired some immunity against the rough handling of his person by the police, the creditor, and the revenue official who exacted corvée. A recruiting song in World War I contrasted the plight of the man outside army life with his position inside: “Here you get tattered shoes, out there you get full boots…. Here you get shoved around, out there you get a salute.”Footnote 17 Such immunities prioritized the army's claims to the person of the sepoy, but they were cast as status-enhancing privileges acquired by service to state.Footnote 18 At the follower margin, however, this other world of work continued to be visible.
Qualitative evidence suggests that the use of corporal punishment probably increased during the First World War; however, this conflict concluded with the abolition of this punishment in 1920. Among the factors that decided the issue was the need to introduce a more diverse range of “field punishments,” a concern to create loyal constituencies among returning soldiers, and a desire to show that the colonial regime was ready to engage with “loyalist” and politically moderate Indian public figures on military matters.Footnote 19
The Discontinuation of Flogging and its Unconvincing Restoration, 1835–1845
Mere Dismissal
“an insane measure”Footnote 20
On February 24, 1835, Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief in India, Lord Bentinck passed a remarkable general order discontinuing the “the practice of punishing soldiers of the native army by the cat-o'nine tails or rattan,” and directing their dismissal from service in such cases.Footnote 21 Bentinck, described by one biographer as an “an Evangelical Liberal of moderate political convictions” wanted to reform the disciplinary code for British soldiers in India as well, and suggested that flogging could be restricted to penal companies to which the “worst characters” could be consigned.Footnote 22 One year later, however, underlining the importance of strengthening the sepoy's attachment to empire, Bentinck declared in Parliament that “he saw no reason why 150,000 men should, without necessity, continue to be subjected to corporal punishment in order that 20,000 other men, who might properly be subjected to the punishment, should not be displeased.”Footnote 23
Linda Colley concludes thereby, that for an expanding empire, numbers mattered more than race; that “empire could disrupt racial notions and identities as much as it fostered them.”Footnote 24 Bentinck was worried about the low proportion of British to Indian troops. However, his intervention to discontinue flogging was also part of a broader project to push away the symbolic trappings of Mughal sovereignty and position the government of India as the paramount power, and the generator of norms for benevolent rule. Liberal reform provided a reference point for these norms and it validated the centralization of authority in the hands of the governor general in council.Footnote 25
A year earlier, Bentinck had passed a regulation abolishing corporal punishment as a judicial penalty in the Bengal Presidency. The preamble to this had boldly summed up all the reform arguments against a punishment both “degrading” and “injudiciously” inflicted.Footnote 26 However, when he pressed for the discontinuation of corporal punishment in the “native” army Bentinck shifted to a more cautious, status-based plea. Bentinck was in favor of integrating service conditions across the three armies; to make his case, however, he singled out the Bengal army, which had a more high-caste profile than the Madras and Bombay armies, arguing that once corporal punishment had been removed from civil law in Bengal, the high-caste soldier of the Bengal army could not possibly be subjected to this degradation.Footnote 27 Perhaps he hoped that traditionalists in the East India Company and Parliament who rejected the argument that the lash was universally degrading, might agree that Indians of “caste and respectability” ought to be exempt.Footnote 28
Nevertheless, Bentinck's order was pulled into the thick of the battles taking place in Parliament over the use of corporal punishment in the British military service.Footnote 29 Why, asked reformers, was the British soldier still subject to the lash, when the “Negro” slave and the sepoy had been emancipated?Footnote 30 Critics, on the other hand, accused Bentinck of passing the order without consultation with the home government and on the eve of his departure from India to build up steam for the reform campaign in Britain. J.S. Bell, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, wrote that in Britain, the abolition of flogging, a topic for “our demagogies and revolutionists,” had been found impractical, whereas in India, “a political governor-general … to gain a little temporary éclat on leaving his government, and … to aid his mob-ridden friends at home, has not scrupled entirely to abolish flogging in the semi-barbarous Anglo-Indian army.”Footnote 31
The European community in India, smarting under Bentinck's cost-cutting measures, and wary of initiatives to reconstruct colonial law that cast labor regimes on a more contractarian footing, excoriated the measure. Critics alleged that, the substitution of dismissal for a flogging allowed the sepoy to manipulate an exit from service whenever he wanted, without risking the charge of desertion. Thereafter he might re-enlist under a false name or find service with a hostile state.Footnote 32 Major-General William Casement, member of the governor-general's council, felt that the removal of corporal punished had encouraged a better class to enlist, but agreed that “mere dismissal” encouraged a “libertine spirit.”Footnote 33 The sepoy dismissed in disgrace was stripped of medals and honors, and a close description of him was recorded to prevent re-enlistment,Footnote 34 but what was being demanded was a stronger imprint of stigma.Footnote 35
Contractarian ideology, emerging in the 1830s on platforms in favor of free trade, the abolition of slavery, and projects for legal rationalization, was challenging the presumption of European residents in India that they shared in the power of the state to discipline colonial workforces necessary to the vitality of European commerce and to their own health, comfort, and security.Footnote 36 For example, a discussion among the law commissioners about whether they ought to specifically prohibit Indian masters from chastising their slaves, even “in moderation,” segued into an uncomfortable discussion about the chastisement of domestic servants, which brought European employers into the picture.Footnote 37 An article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine declaring that a CO, stripped of the power to award a flogging, could not maintain the efficiency of a native regiment, glided likewise into the discussion of another perfidious measure.Footnote 38 Bentinck had ordered the actual enforcement of an order of October 6, 1816 from the Court of Directors directing the dismissal of any officer guilty of “violently and illegally” beating a native.Footnote 39 Indian servants, the article insisted, were used to this treatment from native masters, and “reform should be left to the local courts.”Footnote 40 The “natural-ness” of domestic servitude was reproduced in institutional settings, with “servant” a label applied to all regimental followers because of their function as caregivers, even though some were paid by the public exchequer, some by regimental contribution, and others by individual employers.Footnote 41
The Restoration of Flogging, 1844
“of a light description … for the prompt suppression of military offences”Footnote 42
The statistics for court-martials in the 3 years following Bentinck's order do not seem to indicate an immediate disciplinary crisis in the “native” armies, despite complaints of increased insubordination on active service.Footnote 43 Thereafter, a spike in figures reflects the strain of frontier wars, with long absences from home, compounded by the curtailment of allowances for foreign service.Footnote 44 As stretcher-bearers deserted from the Army of the Indus in its march through the Bolan Pass, a general order of March 15, 1839 authorized COs to “inflict the summary punishment of flogging on all followers who hesitate to do their duty.”Footnote 45 This was followed by Act XXIII of 1839 authorizing the addition of a sentence of imprisonment with or without hard labor on the roads to precede dismissal from service.Footnote 46
On October 17, 1844, with the agenda of formulating a set of Indian Articles of War that would apply across the three Presidency armies, Governor-General Hardinge composed a long memorandum explaining his decision to restore flogging to the native army.Footnote 47 He declared that flogging as it was now used in the British army was not a disgraceful infliction. It was the best sort of punishment for the prompt suppression of the kinds of offenses that soldiers committed, soldiers of “high temper and courage,” who, nevertheless, had to be checked from disintegrating into “a rabble.”Footnote 48 This was the principle, he suggested, on which corporal punishment should also be used in the native army. The belief that flogging was a disgraceful infliction could be dispelled by unlinking it from offenses involving “moral turpitude,” and reserving it for those involving insubordination. Thereby, the flogged soldier could be retained in service and even look forward to a promotion someday.Footnote 49 The “unfortunate innovation” in the native army, noted Hardinge, was a general order of 1827 that had rendered corporal punishment “infamous” by confining its use to disgraceful crimes and connecting it to dismissal from service.Footnote 50 The result was that “unworthiness to remain a soldier was recorded by the lash.”Footnote 51 On restoration, therefore, to the Indian Articles of War, flogging was “under ordinary circumstances and in cantonments” not to be inflicted for “disgraceful conduct.”Footnote 52 COs were to understand that flogging was to be used with caution.Footnote 53 The punishment now held to brand the sepoy with “irretrievable disgrace” was imprisonment with hard labor in fetters on the public roads. Any such sentence of more than 3 months had to be followed by dismissal.Footnote 54
Hardinge's decision to restore corporal punishment to the Indian Articles of War can be assessed as part of the rear guard action being taken to slow down the pace of reform in the British army as well.Footnote 55 The military authorities in India were anxious about indiscipline in field service, not just in the native army, but also in British regiments.Footnote 56 Once the sepoy was again liable to a flogging, reformers could not dwell on the scandal of retaining this punishment only for the British soldier.Footnote 57
On restoration to the “native” army, the maximum number of lashes was put at 200, which was the limit now for the British soldier, and it was brought down to 50 in 1847, following a similar reduction in the British service. The statistics Hardinge presented on the use of flogging in the year following its restoration showed that in an army made up of 200,000 Indians, only 110 sentences of flogging had been awarded in the period from October 7, 1845 to September 30, 1846.Footnote 58 Significantly, in ninety-nine such cases, the sepoy had been flogged and retained, not dismissed.Footnote 59 Imprisonment with or without labor, and simple dismissal, had been used more frequently than flogging.Footnote 60 Hardinge's biographer concluded that the result of the governor-general's move was so satisfactory that corporal punishment “became practically a dead letter in the Native Army.”Footnote 61
However, many British officers in the service of the East India Company complained that the disciplinary regime for the sepoy was still far too centralized and legalistic, and that the powers of the CO to punish or reward were far too circumscribed.Footnote 62 The sepoy of the 1830s and 1840s tended to be cast as a figure much too aware of his formal rights and ready to petition higher authority to defend them, and this legal-mindedness was cast as pathology. In the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion, the SCM, formalized by Act V of 1869, was designed to foster a different kind of subjectivity. The sepoy was to believe that his CO had the final word in most disciplinary matters. “What they (natives) respect is power in their immediate superior, not power a thousand miles off, in some distant constitutional check,” so pronounced a Punjab committee on the subject of post-Mutiny army reorganization.Footnote 63 The sepoy's field of institutional vision was being deliberately blinkered.Footnote 64
The Repertoire of Practices: The Visible and the Invisible
Flogging, “in the Military Way”: The British and Indian soldier
In India, as in Britain, the properties of corporal punishment—pain, summariness, stigma, or its ability to “season” bodies to new disciplines—were matched to different sorts of offenders. The degree of protection from summary discipline was a marker of institutional status in the army. The follower was more vulnerable to formal and informal corporal punishment than the sepoy. The Indian noncommissioned officer (NCO) could be sentenced to a flogging only if he was reduced from rank. The Indian officer could not be flogged, and if he was above the rank of a warrant officer he could not be tried by a SCM.Footnote 65
The position of drummers in the “native” army, those who actually implemented the punishment, was an interesting one, in terms of their own liability to a flogging. Drummers were recruited from domiciled Europeans, Eurasians, and Indian Christians, and those who stood in some line of European descent were supposed to be tried by the European not the Indian Articles of War, that is by the articles designed for British soldiers in the company's service . These were based on the Articles of War meant for the British Army, but with some additions and modifications.Footnote 66 “Whiteness” was a quality sometimes acknowledged in drummers of the “native” army and sometimes denied to them, and they too negotiated their placement.Footnote 67 In the case of John Doming, a drummer of the 60th Bengal Native Infantry, court-martialled in 1837 for desertion, the judge advocate general (JAG), India, ruled that Bentinck's order did not exempt him from a flogging, as Christian drummers were governed by the European Articles of War. Missionaries critiqued this decision as one that made Christianity the grounds for vulnerability to the lash.Footnote 68
The acts that prescribed a judicial whipping or a military flogging were quite minimal in their description of the actual process. The rules for implementation, with the more visceral images of pain, humiliation, and bodily damage they evoked, were buried in a less accessible official archive. For example, the Indian Whipping Act (Act IV of 1864) laid down that the instrument had to be “a light rattan not less than half an inch in diameter,” but left it to the provincial governments to formulate the rules for infliction.Footnote 69 It was with deliberation, therefore, that when the liberal MP, Henry Cotton, critiqued the overuse of judicial whipping in India, he described it indelicately as a punishment “invariably inflicted in public with a rattan or cane over the bare buttocks.”Footnote 70
The Indian sepoy, like the British soldier, was entitled to corporal punishment in a more “honorable” style than that used for the “common criminal”: with “the regulation cat” on the bare back and within view of military personnel alone.Footnote 71 Ironically, corporal punishment “in the military way” probably inflicted more scarring and on a more exposed part of the body than did the civil mode. Nevertheless, sepoys valued the distinction, because in 1827, the mutinous state of a Bombay regiment was ascribed to illegal discharges and two cases in which the lash had been applied, not to the back but “to the bare posterior.”Footnote 72 The description of “the regulation cat” was buried discreetly in the Manual of Indian Military Law, 1911. It is a strikingly more detailed one than that for the rattan, an index perhaps of the greater caution displayed in its use. “The “regulation cat” … shall consist of nine whip-cord lashes secured to a wooden handle. Each lash shall be twenty-four inches in length and as nearly as possible one quarter or an inch in circumference, three knots being tied on each lash at about one and a half, three and a quarter and five inches from its end. The handle shall not exceed eighteen inches in length and its diameters shall in no place exceed seven-eighths of an inch.”Footnote 73
In the debates about military flogging, accounts of actual occasions on which the sepoy was flogged are very scarce, in comparison with the lengthy and emotive descriptions we have of the British soldier under the lash. In the case of the sepoy, the discussion usually focused not on the wounds being inflicted, but on the scars left in the aftermath, and the message that these communicated to native society. The flogged sepoy would not bathe with his fellow soldiers, pronounced one officer.Footnote 74 When the flogged sepoy returned home, wrote Bentinck, the native community viewed the punishment “as an act of great barbarity.”Footnote 75 In contrast, he said, the sepoy dismissed from service, returning home having lost his regular wage, received a reception akin to that of the Indian widow, the sati, who fled her husband's funeral pyre.Footnote 76 The sepoy's body emerges as the bearer of status rather than as the vehicle of individual experience.
In contrast, the campaign to abolish flogging in the British military and naval service was marked by harrowing accounts of the back getting ripped up and gouts of flesh and blood flying from the lash.Footnote 77 Descriptions highlighted the individuated, human suffering of the British soldier, framing the figure as one en route to rights-bearing citizenship.Footnote 78 However, defenders of flogging also produced some of the most voyeuristic descriptions of the rite, to indicate that they, too, writhed in empathy, but knew that the sights and sounds of pain forestalled the more final punishment of death: “No one can have been witness of the hideous spectacle of a military flogging—no one can have seen the white skin and the firm solid flesh of the culprit reduced under the lacerations of the cat to a frightful mass of purple jelly, with-out deploring the existence of a penal code which sanctions the putting of God's creatures to such vile uses. Such a barbarism is only to be tolerated as a substitute for something worse….”Footnote 79
Such accounts of British soldiers, biting down on strips of leather, to hold back their cries of agony, cast them as simultaneously violent and brave, lower class but triumphantly British. Richard Holmes points out that flogging was administered to British soldiers in India to the very end of its existence, 150 of them being flogged by order of the provost marshal in 1879 during the Afghan campaign for gutting a village against orders.Footnote 80 By the time of the Egyptian campaign in 1881, the cat had been abolished. The Times of India noted regretfully that it could not be used to “cure” the excesses of British soldiers brawling in Cairo, whereas it had checked looting by Indian troops: “Six of those picturesque sinners were strung up yesterday and soundly flogged in the presence of their dusky comrades.”Footnote 81The Spectator hinted that the discontinuation of flogging in the British service might have been a mistake if looting in Egypt could not be rapidly suppressed.Footnote 82 However, such regrets gave way very quickly to utter incredulity that such barbarous treatment had ever been tolerated. And, as the smoke of battles over flogging in the British service dispersed, accounts of Indian soldiers being flogged also faded out.
In his memoirs published in 1891, Lord Roberts described his one encounter with a British flogging parade in India. Two “fine, handsome young Horse Artillerymen,” lashed on an earlier occasion for having sold their kit, repeated their offense. Roberts’ description of the preparatory rituals builds up our sense of dread, and we share his relief about a last minute reprieve.Footnote 83 However, Roberts makes no reference to flogging in the Indian Army, even though, in 1889, as commander-in-chief, India, he had insisted on its retention in the new Indian Army Bill.Footnote 84
The “Raw” Recruit: Training, Not Punishment
One of the complaints in the 1840s and 1850s was that though “the cat” had been reinstated in the Indian Articles of War, the use of the rattan at drill was still prohibited. Some British COs corrected mistakes at military exercises very violently;Footnote 85 however, this was an arena of power in which Indian officers also had a stake.Footnote 86 Falling back on the idiom of “native custom,” William Sleeman, an old -style East India Company official, declared that Indian officers opposed the reintroduction of corporal punishment, but felt that there was no shame in using the rattan on the “raw” recruit, because he stood in the relation of shagird (disciple) to ustaad (teacher).Footnote 87 The notion that the rattan speeded the training process persisted, because in 1855, another Bengal army regulation had to make the point that: “The punishment of soldiers with a rattan at the pleasure of individuals entrusted with the instruction of recruits, or on any other occasion whatever, is strictly prohibited.”Footnote 88 However, British officers tended to turn a blind eye to rough treatment by drill havildars because of their extensive reliance on Indian officers to maintain discipline, a reliance that contributed to the low figures for court-martials in the Indian service. Yeats-Brown saw an Indian “sergeant” strike a cavalryman in the face for turning left instead of right during the dismissal of the guard, without a word being said. A Risaldar major told him that if he found a horse dirty, he beat the owner, the second time he gave him a tongue-lashing, and the third time he had him dismissed. “Years later … I learned what should be visible and what invisible in India sillidar cavalry.”Footnote 89 However, sepoys deployed the ethnic norms of colonial regimental organization to put some limits on this and other forms of punishment, signaling that they might submit to rough training at the hands of Indian officers of their own community, but would resist it from those of another.Footnote 90
Bodies not Subjectivities: “Bazaar Riff-Raff” and “Semicivilized Labor”
It is the greater vulnerability of the figure of the follower to corporal duress that brings into view the full range of laboring strata and combinations of military law, local statutes, and police regulations that sustained the colonial military infrastructure. In the first half of the nineteeth century, the military authorities exercised an almost unchallenged sway over all those whose labor and services it relied upon in cantonments.Footnote 91 It was only with the Indian Articles of War (Act V of 1869) that a distinction was made between enrolled followers who came under military law at all times and unenrolled followers and private servants, who came under military law only “on active service, in camp, on the march or at any frontier post.”Footnote 92 However, weeks at a time could be spent in such seemingly transitional or liminal spaces, given that well into the 1890s, a lot of troop movement was still by marches.Footnote 93
Among the dizzyingly diverse ranks of the follower element were the departmental followers, those who made up the transport, ordnance, and stretcher-bearer establishments. Their institutional position began to improve from the early twentieth century on. Then, there were the followers attached to regiments and to other corps as sweepers, cooks, grass cutters, and grooms, laundrymen, valets, messwaiters, and barrack “boys.” Some of these were paid from the public exchequer, others by subscription or by individual officers. There was a prescribed core, beyond which the number of attached followers fluctuated according to the season, the station, and whether it was peacetime or they were in active service.
Sepoys were discouraged from bringing their families to the military station; however, followers’ wives and children lived with them, providing a crucial labor reserve for the army. Cast as “bazaar scum,” whose work resembled the dependency of domestic service, the attached followers were particularly vulnerable, both to the more summary provisions of military law, and to “informal” chastisement by European officers and soldiers.Footnote 94 If British privates could not always pay for the care they felt was their due, they enforced it by boot and fist. Their memoirs give a frank account of this expectation.Footnote 95
There was one context in which the work of the Indian sepoy could take on a dangerous resemblance to that of the attached follower, involving as it did the role of rendering bodily care to an institutional superior. European officers were reminded repeatedly that the Indian soldier assigned to them as batman or orderly was not a “servant”; his status as a combatant had to be preserved.Footnote 96 Sepoys attached as nursing orderlies to the army hospital corps could also suffer a drop in status because of a similar association with the follower's role.Footnote 97
Finally, there were porters, and sometimes grass cutters; tent pitchers; and camel, mule, or cart drivers, picked up along the way to supplement followers who moved with the army. Magistrates were expected to draw upon the Police Act and upon certain local statutes for the impressment of labor, carriage, or supplies, to assist military mobility.Footnote 98 The tributary and tax regime of “wild” border tracts in particular, was marked by this imperative. These were also the zones in which executive authority operated with greater freedom. For example, Section 6 of the Indian Whipping Act (Act IV of 1864) allowed the substitution of corporal punishment for imprisonment in “wild” or frontier tracts.Footnote 99 Given that the follower train tended to be cast as bazaar riff-raff or as semicivilized labor, it is not surprising that summary caning was considered the most effective way of preventing porters on some frontier expedition from fouling encampments, deserting, or looting along the way.Footnote 100
Act XII of 1894: Keeping under the Parliamentary Radar
(T)he re-arrangement of articles has enabled the Committee to reduce the number of times that punishment (flogging) is specifically mentioned … to three as against twelve … . At the same time, the power of inflicting this punishment has in no way decreased.Footnote 101
The reintroduction in 1881 of an “invidious distinction” in the matter of flogging, but this time in the reverse direction, went largely unnoticed. For Indians in public life, the big military issues were the economic strains created by expansionist wars, and the exclusion of educated Indians from commissioned rank. Attention in press and Parliament was also concentrated at this time on a scandalous spike in the use of whipping as a judicial penalty and as an instrument of jail discipline in India. This was happening against the background of a famine stalking parts of India in 1878–79. Critics asked if half-starved beings really ought to be whipped for petty offences, or for not being able to work hard enough in jails.Footnote 102
However, if the retention of the lash in the Indian army went virtually unnoticed, it was also because the military establishment in India tried to keep the issue away from parliamentary discussion. In the 1890s, and again in 1906–10, the sprinkle of questions about flogging in the Indian service owed something to allegations in Parliament that the executive in India was far too resistant to policy directives from London.Footnote 103 Usually this criticism came from the liberal end of the political spectrum. However, we also encounter Robert Hanbury, Conservative MP for Preston in Lancashire, who seemed to pose uncomfortable questions on Indian military policy to maneuver against the raising of customs duties on British cotton goods.Footnote 104
Over the period 1886–89, a new Indian army bill was drafted; however, it stalled for 3 years because Lord Cross, the Secretary of State for India, pointed out that there would be strong resistance in Parliament to the retention of flogging clauses in a new enactment.Footnote 105 The Commander in Chief, India, Lord Roberts, preferred to drop the bill rather than agree to any curtailment of corporal punishment in the “native” army, arguing that this would erode the power of the COs.Footnote 106 Discussion picked up again in 1892–93, but, as Viceroy Lansdowne pointed out, Gladstone's government was going to be even more unlikely to approve a bill that retained the flogging provisions.Footnote 107 The warning shot was fired in Parliament on April 16, 1894 by Hanbury, who wanted to know what steps were being taken to remove the “invidious distinction” between native and white troops in India in terms of liability to flogging.Footnote 108 The year had opened on a very stressful note for Henry Fowler, the Secretary of State for India, because of Lancashire's vigorous resistance to any rise in the customs duties on textile exports to India. Another clash would follow over allegations that the army in India was bypassing the parliamentary mandate to end the compulsory medical inspection of military prostitutes.Footnote 109 Against this background of conflict, a way had to be found to push through changes in Indian military law, because of the impending reorganization of the Indian army, from one based on three Presidency armies to one organized by commands.Footnote 110 The strategy eventually worked out between the government of India and the secretary of state was to cast the bill not as a new enactment, but as one that only amended the defects of the Indian Articles of War (Act V of 1869).Footnote 111 This meant that it could be put through the Indian Legislative Council without referring to Parliament.Footnote 112 As an informal committee reviewing this bill pointed out triumphantly, references to corporal punishment had been studiously curtailed in it; however, the power to inflict this punishment had in no way decreased.Footnote 113
Act XII of 1894 introduced another form of extraordinary court–martial to Indian military law, namely the Summary General Court Martial (SGCM) designed to facilitate trials on detached duty during active service when stiffer sentences were required than were possible by the SCM.Footnote 114 In other respects, Act XII of 1894 reveals a trend that would be carried further by Act VIII of 1911: that of doing away with intermediary court-martials and distributing the authority to convene a SCM more widely.Footnote 115 The three-man committee reviewing the bill had declared that the SCM ought to deal with most offenses relating to native soldiers, except those of unusual gravity.Footnote 116 Earlier, the CO of an Indian army detachment had to be in command of at least three companies to convene an SCM. Now he could convene this tribunal irrespective of the strength of his detachmentFootnote 117 Under Act V of 1869, the Army Hospital Native Corps, a departmental follower unit, could be tried only by the district court martial. Officers complained that this higher tribunal was inappropriate for “mere menials”; therefore, the new Act ensured that they too could be tried by SCM.Footnote 118
However, the wider distribution of the authority to convene the SCM meant its proceedings had to be subject to closer scrutiny.Footnote 119 Captain Beauchamp Duff, on the reviewing committee, regretted this break from tradition: “Commanders of Native regiments consider that that personal prestige which enables them to maintain discipline among their men is in great measure due to the fact that no authority lower than the Commander-in Chief can modify the sentences they pass at summary court.”Footnote 120
The following year, Hanbury resurrected his threat to bring Indian military law into the domain of parliamentary discussion by asking once again what steps had been taken to remove the distinction in the matter of flogging “between the Natives of India and all other of Her Majesty's soldiers, including the West India Regiments”Footnote 121 The very next day, on February 15, 1895, Fowler dashed off a communication to the viceroy stressing that Parliament would “not allow the continuance of flogging in the Indian Army after it has been abolished everywhere else throughout the Empire. It is idle to embark on this controversy. The Indian Army will be included in the Mutiny Act … if flogging is not abolished in your Army, and surely your military advisers do not wish this.”Footnote 122 Hanbury did indeed propose, although unsuccessfully, that section 180 of the British Mutiny Act be amended or removed, to enable the abolition of flogging in the Indian army.Footnote 123 Section 180 stated that nothing in the British Army Act would “prejudice or affect the Indian Military Law respecting officers, soldiers, or followers in Her Majesty's Indian forces being natives of India.”Footnote 124 Its removal would have permitted a much closer assimilation of Indian to British military law and the adjutant-general in India warned of the alarming consequences: the SCM would disappear, military law that applied to enrolled followers in peacetime and on active service would apply to them only in wartime (as was the case with British civilians attached to the British army).Footnote 125 Provisions relating to enlistment and discharge would change as, for example, the provision for “consequent dismissal” by which any sepoy or follower sentenced to imprisonment with hard labor for more than 3 months was automatically dismissed.Footnote 126
The Indian Army Act (Act VIII of 1911): Liberal Reform and its Limits
In December 1905, after a decade of Conservative rule in alliance with the Liberal Unionists, the Liberal party won a landslide victory. Among the new MPs were figures such as Henry Cotton and Thomas Hart-Davies who had served in the Indian Civil Service and were members of the Indian Parliamentary Committee that lobbied for a liberalization of rule in the colony, as, for example, by removing race distinctions in the law and curbing executive arbitrariness. Drawing upon an announcement in 1906 that flogging in military jails, the last vestige of corporal punishment for the British soldier, was to be abolished, Hart- Davies asked John Morley, Secretary of State for India, if total abolition would also be extended to the Indian army. Morley began with the usual statement about the infrequency of this infliction, but brought it around to a different conclusion: “This is all the more reason why flogging should go….”Footnote 127
Morley set out therefore to abolish corporal punishment in the Indian army by placing the Indian soldier in the same professional frame as the British and West Indian soldier. However, as the discussion played out between the government of India and a military committee constituted in 1907 at the India Office, Morley had to accept that reform would take place in a colonial frame. Corporal punishment could be reduced but not abolished. And, some new factors were reinforcing the government of India's investment in corporal punishment. The drawing of the Durand line along the North-West Frontier in 1893–95 had placed Pushtun tribes forcibly under British jurisdiction, and there was an effort both to subdue and co-opt them by encouraging recruitment to the army and frontier militias. The “native” army “was not homogenous in its composition” wrote Viceroy, Lord Minto; it included “many turbulent races,” also as a follower element, “drawn, as a rule, from a lower class, and … more difficult to control.”Footnote 128 In 1895, Viceroy Lord Elgin had used much the same reasoning to argue that differences in human material required differences in discipline. The offenses of the British soldier, Elgin observed, arose largely from drunkenness, whereas the danger in the Indian army arose from the “presence of turbulent races on whom the yoke of discipline bears heavily, while all are liable to be touched by outbursts of temper of fanaticism, when … only exemplary punishment on the spot can be of any avail.”Footnote 129 Elizabeth Kolsky has given an excellent account of the way in which the creation of “the fanatic” as a legal category justified exemplary forms of punishment in the “barbarous” space of the frontier.Footnote 130 The Frontier Crimes Regulation of 1901 outlined harsher criminal penalties for border tracts or for specific ethnicities such as Pathan or Baluch, as, for example, by authorizing a magistrate to add a sentence of whipping to any other punishment for certain crimes.Footnote 131
The all-too-familiar argument that corporal punishment was required to control a “low-caste,” unsanitary, and unruly follower element had also assumed a new dimension. During 1902–5, the crucial importance of the “auxiliary services” to military logistics was acknowledged, and transport followers and stretcher-bearers were organized into permanent standing departments, the Supply and Transport Corps and the Army Bearer Corps. Ironically, the greater institutional visibility of these departmental followers and the greater formality prescribed for their disciplinary regime added to the arguments in favor of retaining corporal punishment.Footnote 132 The JAG, India, pointed out in 1906 that approximately 22,000 men had been brought under the Indian Articles of War as transport attendants in the Supply and Transport Corps, and that flogging was used more frequently to discipline them than in combatant units.Footnote 133 The Assistant Adjutant-General, Richard Wapshare, declared that desertion would become rife among these transport attendants if flogging were abolished.Footnote 134
Morley's dispatch of August 30, 1907 signaled his shift to a more limited agenda, one in which reform for the Indian soldier would not be measured by the standard established for the British soldier. He accepted that on active service, flogging would be retained for the Indian soldier, and that in peacetime, reform for him would be linked to the pace of reform in corporal punishment for the Indian in civil life.Footnote 135 With reference to the civil sphere, Morley had asked the government of India to restrict the class of criminal offenses for which magistrates could order a whipping.Footnote 136 In 1908, a bill to amend the Indian Whipping Act was introduced to the Imperial Legislative Council to meet a chorus of complaints about the extensive and often arbitrary use of whipping as a judicial penalty and in jails, complaints sharpened by the whipping of Bengali schoolboys for political offenses.Footnote 137 The JAG, India, decided it was time to break through the deadlock created by the earlier refusal to consider any change in the flogging clauses. By linking reform in military flogging to the new Indian Whipping Bill, a comprehensive Indian Army Act could finally be pushed through.Footnote 138 Taking his cue, the viceroy assured Morley that the new Indian Army Bill would give effect to his dispatch of August 30, 1907. Its provisions on corporal punishment for peacetime would “follow those of the new Civil Whipping Act,” while keeping the earlier provisions intact for active service.Footnote 139
Under the new Indian Army Act (Act VIII of 1911) enrolled Indian soldiers and followers were liable in peace time to corporal punishment only for those offenses for which Indians in civil life were also liable. However, there was one specifically military offense outlined by Section 31(d) for which they could still be sentenced to a flogging in peacetime.Footnote 140 The phrase “theft from a comrade” was often used to sum up this section and analogous provisions in the previous Indian Articles of War.Footnote 141 The crime was thereby cast as one that eroded trust in the barracks, with soldiers described as only too ready themselves to hand out a thrashing.Footnote 142 Section 31(d) and Section 35 were oriented, in fact, to the much broader objective of protecting the property of government, army officers, military messes, and bands, property often entrusted to sepoy and follower. As one transport officer commented, “A jemadar in the draught mule establishment on Rs 10 per mensem has in his charge animals, carts, and equipment to the value of about Rs 40,000….”Footnote 143
Theft of military material had political implications as well, with the transfrontier sepoy surfacing as a figure who connived to desert with his rifle and ammunition to the unpacified side of the border.Footnote 144 In an army that had to be run “on the cheap,” these sections gave legal expression also to the imperative of drilling and disciplining the sepoy into careful use of military animals and equipment.Footnote 145 General Egreton wrote that of the two cases of corporal punishment he had witnessed in his Indian regiment, one was of a man given fifty lashes to set an example for a crime that had become very prevalent. Cavalrymen would overmarch their horses to rejoin the regiment in time after their furlough, bringing them back in emaciated condition.Footnote 146 The concern to protect military property also resulted in the formalization by Section 21 of another of those “local” practices that had to be defended against too much assimilation to the British military code; namely, the levying of collective fines on a company for the loss of arms.Footnote 147 The “Statement of Objects and Reasons” introducing the 1911 Indian Army Act referred specifically to this provision: “Experience has shown that such responsibility is the best safe-guard for the security of the arms of a company and this is especially true in class company regiments”—that is, in the majority of the regiments of the Indian Army.Footnote 148
One result of this tagging of military to civil law was that the maximum number of lashes that could be inflicted under the new Indian Army Act came down to thirty, to conform with the thirty stripes of the rattan permitted by the new Indian Whipping Act (Act IV of 1909). However, some Indian commentators disputed the degree to which Act IV of 1909 had actually fulfilled the reform agenda, pointing out that magistrates retained their much-critiqued power to award a whipping without giving the accused any opportunity, in certain cases, to appeal the sentence.Footnote 149 New political impulses and fears registered in the debate about corporal punishment both in the civil and military sphere. One complaint about the older Indian Articles of War (Act XII of 1894) was that sedition was not defined.Footnote 150 The 1905–7 canal colonies agitation in Punjab had made it clear that soldiers were not entirely sealed off from “urban agitators.” Now, the new Indian Army Act took Chapter Six of the Indian Penal Code as its reference point for defining offences against the state, and stated that these were also offenses against military law, which could be tried by court-martial within and outside British India.Footnote 151
The Indian Army Act (Act VIII of 1911): Now One Imperial Force?
A native Imperial Amy serving in all parts of the world, under all the different conditions which now are taken as a matter of course, but which were not dreamt of when the Articles of War were originally passéd.Footnote 152
The Indian Army Bill was introduced to the Indian Legislative Council on January 21, 1911 in phrases very celebratory of change and modernization. The “Statement of Objects and Reasons” declared that the old Indian Articles of War were out of date and unsuited to an Indian army that was “now one Imperial Force serving not only in India but also in other parts of the Empire.”Footnote 153 Explaining why this enactment was necessary, the JAG highlighted the new legal issues created by the posting of Indian army detachments overseas.Footnote 154 Since 1899, they had been sent to the South African war, as garrison troops to crown colonies such as Ceylon, Hong Kong, and Mauritius, to Uganda and Nyassaland, “under conditions which … could hardly be distinguished from active service” and “in armed though peaceful occupation of territory belonging to a friendly power, as is the case in Tientsin… .” Scarcely a month passed by, he noted, without some difficulty created by the fact that the general officer at one of these foreign stations was not the general officer of a command as defined in the Indian Articles of War, or because he was serving under the Army Council in Britain and not under the commander-in-chief in India.Footnote 155
Changes were required in administrative procedure rather than in the sections on crime and punishment, and the model, the JAG said, was the British Army Act, “the result of generations of experience in the administration of any army which has had to serve under all conditions in all parts of the world.”Footnote 156 However, it was the SCM, that tribunal peculiar to the Indian army, which had provided a key disciplinary format for the flexible use of Indian army detachments, combatant and noncombatant, under different combinations of command.
The JAG pronounced, for example, that the three judge regimental court-martial was being abolished, as it had been replaced by the SCM and rendered obsolete.Footnote 157 Offenses triable by SCM without reference to superior authority were enlarged, on the grounds that this would expedite the trial of cases of petty assault or desertion.Footnote 158 The power to convene an SCM was distributed more widely.Footnote 159 A noncombatant holding the post of CO, for example a British medical officer, could now hold an SCM himself instead of having to send for a combatant officer.Footnote 160 As a counter-check, the officer to whom the proceedings of the SCM were forwarded could now “set aside the proceedings or reduce the sentence.”Footnote 161 His only option earlier was to set aside the sentence. Act VIII of 1911 also facilitated the use, under detached conditions, of the other extraordinary court under Indian military law, the SGCM, a three member tribunal that could award the death penalty or any lesser penalty under the Indian Army Act. With some exceptions, a sentence awarded by the SGCM could also be implemented without confirmation.Footnote 162 This tribunal was pressed into service during the First World War to try incidents of serious insubordination in active service.Footnote 163
Hitherto the literature on the reconstruction of the Indian army in the early twentieth century has focused largely on Kitchener's determination to ensure that military resources were properly “de-provincialised” so that all units could be massed in strength against any substantial Russo-Afghan threat.Footnote 164 A linked proposition is that the Indian army was not really considered for use outside India until 1912, and then only to a very limited extent. An official compilation titled India's Contribution to the Great War (1923) declared with some caveats that “The Army in India was in no sense maintained for meeting external obligations of an Imperial character.”Footnote 165 Discussions about the Indian Army Act (Act VIII of 1911) give us a remarkably different picture, one in which the speedy deployment of Indian army units around the Indian Ocean emerges as a crucial imperative.Footnote 166
The Great War: Punish and Retain
One of the best kept secrets about the Great War was the increased use of corporal punishment, not simply by informal use, but even by formal award of SCMs and SGCMs. One reason was that to find manpower, particularly follower manpower, labor nodes were tapped where corporal duress was quite acceptable, as from jails, settlements for “criminal tribes,” and zones where corvée was a regular feature of the tax regime. But there are hints that corporal punishment also increased for the “rarely flogged” sepoy.
Indian soldiers sent in the Indian Expeditionary Force to Europe in 1914 would experience race segregation in forms that they had not been familiar with before. The European theater was also one in which the various metropolitan powers, friendly and warring, compared their treatment of colonized subjects, and “coloured” military personnel made their own assessments.Footnote 167 At the same time, the manpower crunch overseas, heightened by the shortage of shipping, meant that flogging and fines were preferred to imprisonment with hard labor or other punishments that removed the offender from work sites or from active service. Forefronting in particular the figure of the young soldier, not yet attuned to the rigor of military discipline, such measures were also cast as acts of clemency, which saved the offender from long periods of rigorous imprisonment or a death sentence, and allowed rehabilitation through further military service.Footnote 168
COs of the Indian Labour and Porter Corps had begun by assuming that, as in India, summary use of the rattan would deal with “coolie” indiscipline. However, they were reminded that the men had been formally enrolled under the Indian Army Act; therefore, irksome as it was, they would have to hold an SCM to order a flogging.Footnote 169 In France, Lord Ampthill, advisor for the Indian Labour Corps said that its officers recommended on-the-spot flogging as the punishment best understood by the men: “The Indian, like the child or a dog, does not understand deferred punishment.”Footnote 170 His suggestion that a special ordinance be passed to permit a summary flogging was not accepted. However, labor officers were carefully informed about the wide range of powers vested in the CO of an Indian Army detachment when he convened an SCM.Footnote 171 East of the Mediterranean, in Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, the flogging of various “coloured” labour units was far more visible and was justified as a continuation of “traditional” disciplinary practices.Footnote 172 The sound rather than the sight of “natives” being flogged was something that the irrigation engineer George Buchanan recalled of his service in Mesopotamia. Hearing some “extraordinary noises” at lunch in the officers mess in Basra, Buchanan was told that the room where corporal punishment was administered was next door. His informant added “that they had grown so knowledgeable … that they could tell from the nature of the cries whether the sufferer was an Arab, Persian, or Indian. The man who flogged was an extraordinarily robust sergeant, and at the end … marched off whistling a hymn tune, ‘The voice that breathed o'er Eden’ being a favourite.”Footnote 173
In this theater too, Lt. Col. William B. Lane, advisor for the seven Indian Jail Porter and Labour Corps chafed at having to hold an SCM before awarding a flogging.Footnote 174 Lane had served as inspector–general of prisons in India where the jail code allowed a whipping even for entirely work-related offenses. I could not locate any court-martial records for the Indian Labour Corps in France. However sentences of flogging by award of SCM and Special General Court Martial were handed out frequently in some units of the Indian Jail Labour and Porter Corps in Mespotamia, and to a lesser extent in the “free” Indian Labour and Porter Corps.Footnote 175
However, the “rarely flogged” sepoy also became more vulnerable to corporal punishment because of the preference in wartime for “on the spot” punishments that kept personnel in the field.Footnote 176 The War Office reported in 1916 that the procedure in France for cases of self-mutilation in the Indian Army was to hold the court-martial at the hospital itself and to “award field punishment.”Footnote 177 At this point, “field–punishment” in the Indian army still meant corporal punishment.Footnote 178 However, the repertoire of punishments that could be used on field service had to be enlarged; therefore, other options were also explored. On November 23, 1917, admitting that sentences of corporal punishment had been passed during the war “for want of some other form of punishment which would not necessitate the withdrawal from active duty of the offender,” the adjutant-general, India recommended that forfeiture of pay and allowances be added to the punishments that could be awarded on field service.Footnote 179
The other factor playing upon the disciplinary regime for Indian military personnel was race segregation in the European theater.Footnote 180 Nikolas Gardner describes the situation in Marseilles in late 1914 when James Willcocks, the Commander of the Indian Corps in France, authorized the award of corporal punishment to Indian troops found absent without leave, “when there is reason to believe that the offence was due to immoral relations, actual or intended with a European woman.”Footnote 181 On December 1, 1914, Lieutenant Robert Dyne Jeune noted the award of twenty lashes to cavalryman Hazura Singh, for “making indecent overtures to a French girl,” adding that although the sentence was mild, it had been “well administered by a sturdy corporal … a former sailor and well versed in the art of flogging.”Footnote 182
However, in his memoir, Willcocks claimed that he had done his best to restrict the use of flogging for sepoys, lest it “give a false impression to our allies that there was a difference in our methods of treating different classes of our soldiers.”Footnote 183 He had ordered that flogging be reserved only for “disgraceful conduct” and that all such sentences be brought to him for confirmation.Footnote 184 Willcocks was also concerned that Field Punishment No.1 prescribed for the British soldier which involved tying him, hand and foot to a post, might arouse unfavorable comments from the French and make him “a mark of contempt to the Indians.”Footnote 185 The singularities of British and colonial military punishment were proving an embarassment in the European theater.
The memoir gives no hint at all of the restiveness building up in sepoys about their restriction to camp, particularly when they noted that French colonial troops moved about more freely. YMCA sources give us a better sense of this tension, because they claimed the credit for defusing it.Footnote 186 A biography of Surender Kumar Datta, an Indian YMCA worker, describes an incident in which a sepoy who stayed away for a night with a French woman was sentenced to a flogging and confinement to barracks. The man declared that he would accept any punishment but not this degradation. The news spread, and the Risaldar major put his belt on the table before the CO, declaring the camp would blow up if the flogging was performed.Footnote 187 The order was withdrawn, but on another occasion, the body of a Gurkha soldier who had shot himself after a flogging was found behind the YMCA hut. S.K. Datta, contacted Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India who took up the matter with the War Office. The biography claims that an order was issued that corporal punishment was not to be used for Indian troops, although it was retained for camp followers.Footnote 188
The infrequency of a particular punishment owed something, therefore, to the boundaries that Indian military personnel put on it; however, the narrative also reveals the small interfaces that war mobilization had opened up between the sepoy and educated Indians. In another context, some educated Indian boys would discover that when they stepped into the shoes of the ordinary sepoy, they could be flogged.
In 1917 an Indian Defence Force (IDF) was set up, modeled after the Territorial Force in Britain. It was meant to encourage educated Indians to aspire to a military career; however, there were complaints that service conditions were far inferior to those in the European Defence Force, the standard of rations, housing and uniform being that for the sepoy.Footnote 189 Enthused by the decision to send Indian troops to Europe, educated Indians were ready to hail the sepoy as a figure of sacrifice and suffering.Footnote 190 However, his milieu remained for them very firmly that of the laboring orders. Writing to P. Sivaswami Aiyar, a Liberal politician and one of the patrons of the scheme, a student asked if by signing up he would find himself vulnerable to a flogging: “If it is a fact … it is a barbarous punishment … . so my request is to take care of us from being flogged.”Footnote 191 Pointing out that flogging had been abolished in the British army, but also underlining the social gulf between educated boys and the sepoy, Aiyar requested the removal of corporal punishment for the Indian Defence Force, by executive intervention if not by legal amendment.Footnote 192 On October 4, 1917, another Liberal politician, Sir Sankaran Nair, member of the Viceroy's Executive Council, was informed that the commander–in-chief would issue an executive order prohibiting the use of corporal punishment for IDF recruits.Footnote 193 In the case of the 49th Bengal Infantry Battalion, another experiment in recruitment from the educated classes, corporal punishment was permitted only with the sanction of the commander-in-chief in India.Footnote 194
The Indian National Congress took a more egalitarian, if somewhat hazily worded, position on the issue. One of the clauses of its December 1918 “Declaration of Rights of Citizenship” demanded that “corporal punishment … not be inflicted on any Indian subjects of His Majesty serving in the Army or Navy save under conditions applying equally to all British subjects.”Footnote 195 The two Indians appointed to the Esher Committee on postwar army reorganization, the powerful Punjab landowner, Sir Sikander Hayat Khan, and the retired Bengali civil servant, Sir Krishna Gupta, disagreed on many points, but both demanded the abolition of corporal punishment.Footnote 196 The liberal politician Srinivas Sastri, and moderate Congressmen Bayya Narasimheswara Sarma and Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, raised the issue in the Imperial Legislative Council.Footnote 197 When government finally decided to abolish corporal punishment by Act XXXIII of 1920, it was also an acknowledgement of the increased sense of self-worth demonstrated by the Indian sepoy returning from the Great War, and the regime's concern to secure him as a force for loyalty.Footnote 198 Hence the new constitutional scheme inaugurated in 1919 gave the vote to retired, pensioned, and discharged soldiers, who would have been excluded otherwise by the high property qualification laid down for the franchise.Footnote 199
Conclusion
An insuperable terror appears to reign over the imagination of all … . like the native superstition which sees in some charm or amulet, the only protection against all evils.Footnote 200
Across the nineteenth century, both in the metropolis and in the colony, the distinctiveness of military service had been invoked to insulate the realm of army discipline from currents of liberal reform. The argument that it was flogging that best met the imperatives of the army owed a lot to the aura of lower class danger that hung about the British soldier. In 1844–45, one justification for reintroducing corporal punishment to the “native” army was that an “invidious distinction” could not be permitted in the same profession. The other position, which acquired more force after the 1857 rebellion, was that the British soldier, however violent and unruly, was, after all, British, whereas the Indian sepoy was, ultimately, a mercenary. Nevertheless, it is striking how slowly this acknowledgement of the British soldier as citizen secured his emancipation from the lash. On the other hand, the flogging clauses in the Indian Articles of War (Act V of 1869) were considered symbolically so important to the disciplinary protocols and economies of the Indian army that the consolidation of Indian military law was delayed till 1911. This article argues that some of these protocols began to lend themselves quite well to the surcharged imperial dynamic that marked the turn of the century. The SCM began to be valued not only for the charismatic aura t hat it lent to the CO's office, but also for the operational ease that it brought to the flexible deployment of Indian army detachments under various combinations of command all around the Indian Ocean. The provisions for corporal punishment seemed to facilitate the incorporation of turbulent frontier populations into empire, and they lent a porosity to the line between military and civil jurisdiction that allowed follower labor to be obtained on the cheap, and with a considerable amount of coercion when necessary. On the one hand, the government of India prided itself on recasting the Indian Army as a “truly imperial force.” On the other hand, it invoked “local circumstances” to retain certain differences in the military code, shifting, for example, the goal post in the matter of flogging from the British Army Act to the reformed Indian Whipping Act of 1909. This meant that in peacetime, the Indian soldier's liability to corporal punishment was calibrated to the criminal law for civilians. During war, he would be subjected to a military code, which, however new in its form, had reincorporated the “invidious distinction” between him and the British soldier in the matter of flogging. However, at the conclusion of the First World War, it became necessary to sacrifice this one “local” distinction in military law to retain much of the rest. Flogging, that talismanic symbol of the CO's summary authority, was abolished in 1920, but the SCM itself was preserved, as were the much harsher punishments that distinguished Indian from British military law, such as longer sentences of transportation and imprisonment, and the imposition of collective fines for the loss of arms.Footnote 201 One exception to the abolition of corporal punishment trailed on into World War II: in active service, the CO could still summarily sentence a follower who was a “menial servant” to twelve strokes of a rattan.Footnote 202 Who exactly was a “menial servant”? In 1925, quizzed on this point in the Indian Legislative Assembly and in Parliament, official spokesmen could give no clear answer, but they insisted that this clause had to be retained.Footnote 203 Corporal duress, formal and informal persisted at the labor penumbra around the Indian Army right up to World War II.Footnote 204
