During the seventeenth century, the East India Company (EIC) was a minor power in South Asia, controlling a few small coastal enclaves. In 1612, the British settlement at Surat was established; in 1639, Fort St George was constructed at Madras; and Bombay was acquired in 1661. Thus, the principal settlements of the EIC in South Asia at the beginning of the eighteenth century were Fort St George, Fort St David near Madras, Calcutta (Fort William), Surat, and Bombay.Footnote ¹ Early in the century, the EIC’s small forces were repeatedly defeated by indigenous powers, but this started changing rapidly from the 1750s. The EIC began projecting power into the interior from its coastal enclaves; one after other, the indigenous powers were defeated and destroyed. By 1849, the EIC had gained political paramountcy in the subcontinent.

Rise of British military power in South Asia: a historiographical analysis

The expansion of British power in South Asia was part of a larger process of imperial expansion in Afro-Asia. Jeremy Black asserts that between 1688 and 1815 Britain became the strongest military power in the world,Footnote ² and between 1815 and 1865 the British empire grew at the rate of 100,000 square miles per year.Footnote ³ In fact, the construction of an overseas empire by Britain was itself a component of the overseas expansion of the European maritime powers during the early modern era. William R. Thompson claims that, along with military power, the availability of local allies who functioned as military auxiliaries of the Western powers and the fragile state systems of the non-Europeans aided the rise of the West over the rest of the world between 1500 and 1800.Footnote ⁴

Historians of British expansion in South Asia can be divided into two groups: the collaboration school and the confrontation school. Historians belonging to the collaboration school explain the rise of British power in South Asia as the product of global capitalism, aggressive British nationalism, and the collaboration of certain indigenous social groups.Footnote ⁵ A variant of this argument is that the failure of the Mughal successor states to establish political stability, indigenous warlords’ (successful sirdars, i.e. chieftains) attempts to utilize British power for their own benefit, and the greed of the local EIC’s officials resulted in the British acquiring an empire in South Asia.Footnote ⁶

Use of force in order to get trading privileges was an essential feature of the European maritime trading companies.Footnote ⁷ Most of the scholars focusing on this military dimension of the rise of British colonialism in South Asia can be categorized as belonging to the confrontation school. This school, influenced by Geoffrey Parker’s ‘military revolution’ thesis,Footnote ⁸ argues that the British acquired military supremacy in the subcontinent by initiating the early modern European military revolution in South Asia between 1750 and 1850. This revolution consisted of the rise of handgun-equipped infantry supported by mobile field artillery and the emergence of a professional officer corps.Footnote ⁹ Influenced by the concept of a series of military revolutions occurring in western Europe,Footnote ¹⁰ Jos Gommans claims that a military revolution resulting in the rise of mounted warriors occurred in medieval China and India. However, the gunpowder-centric early modern military revolution did not occur among the indigenous powers.Footnote ¹¹ The votaries of the confrontation school assert that it was on account of their political culture that the Indian powers failed to initiate a paradigm shift in their traditional method of warfare.Footnote ¹²

The unique culture of the Britons, inherent in the above argument, is somewhat similar to the pre-1947 British officers’ emphasis on the supremacy of their race. This racial superiority, they argued, enabled them to construct a drilled and disciplined army that could inflict higher casualties in decisive battles.Footnote ¹³ This assumption about the superior culture of the western Europeans can also be found in Victor Davis Hanson, who asserts that close-quarter combat by drilled and disciplined infantry capable of waging decisive battles and sieges emerged in classical Greece. From Greece through Rome, this legacy passed on to the eighteenth-century Western powers. This form of combat (known as the ‘Western way of warfare’) by the Western powers was able to overwhelm the ‘East’.Footnote ¹⁴

The votaries of both the collaboration school and the confrontation school accept that pre-colonial Indian polities were nebulous and lacked permanent standing armies. Warfare in pre-British South Asia consisted of desultory raids by feudal cavalry levies. In contrast, the EIC constructed a military–fiscal state that maintained disciplined standing armies capable of sustained operations.Footnote ¹⁵ The British also introduced the techniques of decisive battles and sieges conducted by bureaucratic, capital-intensive, firepower-heavy armies.Footnote ¹⁶

This article argues that the EIC’s military success was not merely the result of importing the military institutions that emerged in western Europe.Footnote ¹⁷ Rather, the EIC succeeded by blending imported British military institutions and techniques with South Asian indigenous military traditions. The result was a hybrid military establishment. Acquisition and proper management of the animal, human, mineral, and financial resources of South Asia, rather than mere technology, proved crucial in the encounters between the British and the indigenous powers. Indigenous collaborators/partners also played a crucial role in the EIC’s army, which was the principal British instrument for confronting the big Indian powers from the middle of the eighteenth onwards. Meanwhile, the indigenous powers failed to blend traditional Indian and early modern Western elements in their armies; this failure was related to their state structure. As we will see, the indigenous rulers’ failure to de-link military service from assignments of land and their inability to transform the sirdars into a professional officer corps were interrelated problems that prevented the transition to state-commissioned hybrid armies.

British military expansion in South Asia: timing and scope

By the mid eighteenth century, Mughal military power had vanished, owing to attacks by the Persians, Afghans, and Marathas, coupled with an agrarian crisis. This article starts from the 1760s, when the EIC gained a significant foothold in coastal India, and ends in 1849, when the EIC was able to wipe out the last powerful independent kingdom in the subcontinent. Until 1755, the EIC and the French Compagnies des Indes fought each other by alliance with the indigenous powers. By 1760, the EIC had succeeded in overwhelming Arcot and Tanjore in the south and Bengal in east India. However, all these polities were minor powers in terms of their political and military clout. Bengal was economically productive but the Bengal nawabs were facing threats from the Marathas, allowing the British to become a threat in Bengal in 1756. Arcot was the feudatory of the Mughal governor (nizam) at Hyderabad. When, in the 1720s, the nizam became independent of Delhi, Arcot became semi-independent of Hyderabad. The nawabs of Arcot were busy fighting the Hindu rajas of Mysore, Tanjore, and Trichinopolly when the British and the French intervened. The Marathas sometimes joined the British and sometimes the French.Footnote ¹⁸

Lord Clive was able to defeat the Bengal nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah at the Battle of Plassey (1757) partly owing to the superior firepower superiority and discipline of the EIC’s army. The nawab’s army had only four field guns, supplied by the French, and failed to cover its ammunition during a rain shower, rendering it unusable. Further, there was no hierarchy of command in the nawab’s army. When a stray shot killed Mir Madan (his most loyal officer), there was no other commander designated to take his place, and his cavalry – which was on the point of threatening Clive’s flanks – dissolved. However, Clive’s victory was also the result of political instability in the Bengal nawabi. The merchant-financier Jagat Seth and sirdars such as Mir Jafar shifted their support to the EIC when the nawab confronted Clive.Footnote ¹⁹

Chance was also critical to the EIC’s ability to capitalize on its victory at Plassey. The Marathas could not intervene in Bengal in the battle’s immediate aftermath because Ahmad Shah Abdali, the ruler of Afghanistan, threatened the Maratha hold over Punjab and north India. In the Third Battle of Panipat (14 January 1761), Abdali’s 60,000-strong army, comprising heavy cavalry, infantry equipped with firearms, and shutarnals (light guns mounted on camels), destroyed the Maratha field army of 45,000 (including heavy and light cavalry and 8,000 firearms-equipped infantry trained in French style) in a decisive battle. The Marathas withdrew and did not return to north India until the 1770s.Footnote ²⁰ By that time, the EIC had expanded from Bengal to Awadh and had become a major player in north India.

From the 1760s, the French company had abandoned India (though independent French mercenaries remained), and as the EIC moved inland into the subcontinent it faced the major contenders for empire in South Asia, indigenous powers that had the political will and economic resources to modernize their arsenals and challenge the rising power of the EIC. Simultaneously, however, the EIC expanded its military establishment and adapted itself to South Asia’s requirements. This fits in with the changing character of the British empire: by the 1780s, British imperial ideology and the global monarchy were becoming more aggressive and cohesive.Footnote ²¹ For reasons of space, this article will concentrate on land forces, rather than maritime ones, and focus on three spheres: military technology, manpower management, and logistics.

Military technology and warfare

Between 1760 and 1849, the EIC fought three great indigenous powers: Mysore, the Maratha Confederacy, and the Khalsa (Sikh) kingdom of Punjab. The Company had to fight four wars with Mysore (in 1767–69, 1780–84, 1790–92, and 1799), three wars with the Marathas (1774–83, 1803–05, and 1817–18), and two wars with the Khalsa kingdom (1845–46 and 1848–49). All these wars were characterized by decisive battles and sieges; and both the EIC and its three principal South Asian opponents imitated each other’s military hardware quite successfully.

Until the 1770s, the EIC enjoyed ‘artillery superiority’ over indigenous regimes, which did not yet differentiate between field and siege artillery. The wrought-iron guns that these regimes had inherited from the Mughals were huge; they had a low rate of fire, could not be moved to meet tactical exigencies on the battlefield, and often blew up in the course of firing. Up to that point, the indigenous powers also did not manufacture standardized light cast-iron guns, and their infantry were equipped with matchlocks rather than flintlock muskets.Footnote ²² They had no answer to the eighteen-pounder and twenty-four-pounder cannons that breached the walls of several Indian forts, the Coehorn mortars that were used against personnel, or the six-pounder field artillery (firing grape shot) that defeated indigenous cavalry charges.Footnote ²³

Bengal and Awadh began modernizing their artillery in the 1760s, with the help of foreign advisors. But this was not fast enough, as the EIC’s superior artillery proved crucial in battles at Undha Nala (1763) and Buxar (1764).Footnote ²⁴ However, Mysore, the Marathas, and the Khalsa kingdom were able to copy British advances in artillery. Besides relying on French mercenaries, Tipu Sultan (ruler of Mysore, 1783–99), Mahadji Sindia (head of the Sindia Clan, 1769–94), and Ranjit Singh (ruler of Punjab, 1801–38) utilized captured Indian soldiers (who had learnt Western military techniques while serving in the EIC’s armies) and British deserters from the EIC.Footnote ²⁵ Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Mysore was able to close the technical gap with the EIC as regards handheld firearms. By 1786, the flintlock muskets produced in Mysore were of the same quality as the smoothbore ‘Brown Bess’ flintlock musket, on which British infantry in India relied until 1849.Footnote ²⁶

The Marathas gained access to gunpowder technology from the Persians, the Afghans, and the Western maritime powers. The Afghans, under Ahmad Shah Abdali, while attacking the Mughals and the Marathas between 1748 and 1761, used mortars with elevating screws. The muskets that were used by the Rohillas (Afghans settled in north India’s Rohilkhand) – based on those used by Nadir Shah’s soldiers – fired a heavier ball with a longer range than eighteenth-century French muskets did.Footnote ²⁷ Shivaji (1630–80), the founder of the Maratha kingdom, recruited infantry from the Konkan region of Maharashtra,Footnote ²⁸ some of whom had acquired flintlocks from the Portuguese.Footnote ²⁹ The Marathas matched the EIC in both artillery and handguns during the Second Anglo-Maratha War. The Agra Arsenal of Mahadji, under a Scottish mercenary’s supervision, manufactured muskets equivalent in finish and durability to those used by the EIC’s troops.Footnote ³⁰ After fighting the Battle of Assaye (1803), Arthur Wellesley wrote that ‘Sindia’s French infantry were far better than Tipu’s, his artillery excellent, and his ordnance so good, and so well equipped, that it answers for our service.’Footnote ³¹

In the opinion of one British officer, the shooting of the Sikh infantry – trained by Paoli di Avitabile, an Italian mercenary officer – during the Battle of Aliwal (1846) was better aimed and delivered than that of Napoleon’s infantry in Spain.Footnote ³² In 1759, Frederick the Great of Prussia introduced horse artillery; the British army followed suit in 1793; and the French army adopted it in 1799.Footnote ³³ In 1803, the EIC introduced three-pounder horse artillery, adding six-pounders in the 1840s.Footnote ³⁴ The Dal Khalsa (army of the Khalsa kingdom) also possessed six-pounder horse artillery.Footnote ³⁵ Qualitatively and quantitatively, the Sikh field artillery was better than that of the Company: N. W. Bancroft of the Bengal Horse Artillery noted that, during the Battle of Mudki (18 December 1845), the rate of firing of the Sikh artillery was 150% that of the EIC’s field artillery.Footnote ³⁶

In close-quarter combat, the EIC’s troopers did not enjoy any technological superiority. During the First Anglo-Sikh War, the British found out that the swords of the dragoons had difficulty in cutting through the quilted and padded cotton fabrics worn by the Khalsa troopers.Footnote ³⁷ The Mughals maintained heavy cavalry equipped with lances and tulwars (curved swords used for slashing rather than thrusting). The Indian cavalry in the Company’s service was equipped with the tulwars and lances, but some troopers were also given pistols and carbines. The Mughals also maintained mounted men armed with handguns.Footnote ³⁸

Both the Mughals and the Marathas used bans (rockets).Footnote ³⁹ However, Tipu improved the quality of the bans manufactured at Bangalore,Footnote ⁴⁰ and attached a company of rocket men to each of his infantry brigades.Footnote ⁴¹ The weight of a ban was 2 kg with 1 kg propellant and the range was about 900 metres.Footnote ⁴² Tipu’s innovation was the introduction of iron tube that replaced the bamboo container holding the charge. This allowed a higher bursting pressure in the combustion chamber, giving the missile greater thrust and longer range.Footnote ⁴³ Colonel Mark Wilks in his account published in 1810 describes the bans as follows:

The British were so impressed with bans that not only were rocket battalions set up by the EIC in 1816 and used during the Sikh warsFootnote ⁴⁵ but further research was carried out by William Congreve and William Hale; Congreve and Hale rockets were used during the bombardment of Washington in 1814 and in the American Civil War (1861–65).Footnote ⁴⁶

These Indian bans were not the only Asian weapons that were better than their European counterparts: Michael W. Charney writes that the bamboo cartridges used by indigenous armies worked better than the Europeans’ paper cartridges in the wet tropical climate of Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁴⁷ To conclude, rather than assuming that European military hardware was uniformly superior, regional nuances need to be emphasized. A more important British advantage lay in the utilization of indigenous military manpower.

Military manpower mobilization by the EIC

In India, the EIC maintained its own European army and also depended on British Army units stationed in the subcontinent. In addition, the Company kept a large army whose rank and file were Indians officered by Britons; these Indian infantry and cavalry personnel were known as sepoys and sowars. The EIC had to make use of indigenous military manpower because the demographic resources of Britain were inadequate for conquering India. Further, Indian manpower was not only cheaper but also more effective in the terrain and climate of South Asia. In 1832, when John Byng asked: ‘The native troops are in general much more healthy than the King’s troops, are they not?’, Colonel John Munro replied: ‘Infinitely more so.’Footnote ⁴⁸

After 1695, petty criminals in England were sentenced to join the army or offered enlistment in lieu of more severe sentences. Moreover, serving prisoners could gain freedom by volunteering for military service. Because service was unattractive, the British army recruited from the ‘dregs’ of society, most recruits being vagabonds, paupers, drunkards, bigamists, adulterers, or debtors.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, 30% of British army personnel were Irish; one-third of the EIC’s Irish soldiers had been pushed into military service by famine and poverty.Footnote ⁵⁰ British army units stationed overseas suffered from manpower shortages; consequently, commanding officers preferred not to discharge worn-out men, and regiments deployed overseas for a long period tended to age and decline in efficiency.Footnote ⁵¹

In 1748, an artillery company was organized in each Indian presidency. Initially, Roman Catholics or men with Roman Catholic wives were not allowed to join the artillery. Indians were likewise barred from the laboratories and the military magazine to prevent ‘native’ acquisition of artillery knowledge. In 1753, however, owing to a shortage of European gunners, the Court of Directors ordered that Indians could be appointed as lascars (assistants to the gunners). In 1754, the royal artillerymen first arrived in India. Since European recruits were not available in required numbers, golandazs (gunners) were raised from the lascars. Separate companies of Indian lascars and golandazs were formed and attached to the European companies for cleaning and pulling the guns and bringing up ammunition. In 1797, two lascar companies were attached to each European artillery company. To replace casualties and meet the rising demands, Indian prisoners of war (POWs) were sometimes enlisted as golandazs.Footnote ⁵² Thus, by 1848, most of the personnel of the EIC’s artillery branch were Irish Roman Catholics, and Indians performed the laboratory duties.Footnote ⁵³

Before 1847, the soldiers of the British Army were enlisted for life; only in 1847 was the period of enlistment reduced to ten years.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the EIC’s private European army, the term for service had already been reduced from five to three years in 1745 – without reducing the gratuity – in order to encourage reenlistment; nonetheless manpower problems persisted.Footnote ⁵⁵ In contrast, Indian military personnel were long-term volunteers and served willingly for about twenty-five years. Attractions of regular pay, pension, and gratuity pulled the Indians to the Company’s forces. The British were always conscious of the importance of regular payment in cash to the soldiers.Footnote ⁵⁶ Because of South Asia’s huge demographic resources, military service had always been voluntary. By 1800, the population of the subcontinent was about 200 million.Footnote ⁵⁷ Younger sons of the small farmers joined armies temporarily to supplement their family income, especially after the harvest was over. Moreover, unlike eighteenth-century Britain where military service was unpopular,Footnote ⁵⁸ in India there were several communities who considered military service under any leader to be honourable. National consciousness did not exist among the Indians at that time.Footnote ⁵⁹

Let us look at military recruitment of the Indians by the EIC from a wider perspective. During 1817, there were 4,000 Hindustanis (Rajputs, Brahmins, and Muslims from north India) in the Bombay army; in 1824, the number rose to 7,465. The number of Hindustanis rose again when the Bombay army’s Indian units were stationed at Mhow in central India as the recruiting parties were sent to north India. Further, demobilization of the forces of the Maratha Confederacy after 1818 enabled the EIC to tap the Hindustanis and the Marathas. In 1830, the Bombay army comprised 12,476 Hindustanis, 10,015 Konkanis (men from the Konkan region who had previously joined Shivaji’s infantry), and 1,910 Deccanis (inhabitants from the Deccan).Footnote ⁶⁰ The Mughal government recruited musketeers from the high castes (Brahmins and Rajputs) of Awadh and Buxar. They were known as Purbiyas (men from Purab, i.e. east India),Footnote ⁶¹ and joined the Maratha campoos (brigades consisting of infantry armed and trained in Western style by the European mercenaries). The Dal Khalsa also recruited Purbiyas and Gurkhas to their infantry and Muslims for their artillery branch. These communities were also tapped by the EIC: in the 1820s, most of the sepoys of the Bengal Army were Purbiyas. This was partly because the British officers believed that tall yeomen peasants – the Purbiyas averaged about 5 feet 8 inchesFootnote ⁶² – made the best infantry recruits and the higher the castes, the more respectable and well-behaved were the men.Footnote ⁶³ In 1823, the commander-in-chief of India extended the recruiting base of the Bengal army’s infantry to Allahabad, Meerut, Bundelkhand, and Rohilkhand.Footnote ⁶⁴ Two years later, Brahmins and Rajputs constituted 80% of the Bengal army and Muslims another 10%. These three communities came from Awadh, Bihar, and Rohilkhand.Footnote ⁶⁵

S. P. Rosen writes that Indian society was divided by caste structure, and argues that a divided society generates an army with low military effectiveness. Unlike the Indian princes, the EIC constructed a colonial army that distanced itself from the caste-ridden Indian society. Hence, according to Rosen, the Company’s colonial army was more professional and effective than indigenous armies.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, the above account shows that the EIC followed traditional recruitment policies, creating an army that was not separated from indigenous society. Seema Alavi’s claim that the EIC’s colonial army was effective because it reached accommodations with certain Indian communities seems more apt. These communities joined the Company’s military machine because doing so was remunerative and prestigious.Footnote ⁶⁷ The military manpower mobilization of the EIC thus supports Bayly’s collaboration argument. The high-caste South Asian, long-service volunteer army raised by the EIC from the peasantry was thus different from both western European conscript armies and the short-service volunteer British army comprising ‘scum of the earth’.Footnote ⁶⁸

For protection of the north-east frontier and policing the countryside, the EIC raised local irregular regiments (equivalent to paramilitary forces). Some examples will suffice. In 1817, Captain Neufville raised the Assam Light Infantry of about 1,000 men. For protection of the Surma valley from the Burmese and raids by the local tribes, the Sylhet Local Battalion was established in 1824 at Sylhet.Footnote ⁶⁹ For policing and especially for collecting land revenue, sebundy corps (irregular foot soldiers) were raised. In 1804, the government of the Bengal Presidency ‘authorized the commander-in-chief to issue immediate orders for making such increase to the sebundy corps on the ceded provinces as appears proper; and also to issue orders for raising any additional local and temporary corps either of infantry or cavalry which His Excellency might deem requisite, and to nominate officers to the command of these corps’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the 1840s, two sebundy regiments were created in Assam. These units were used for what are known today as counter-insurgency operations.Footnote ⁷¹ This was an instance of bureaucratic innovation on the part of the EIC.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, the British found out that, even after defeating an indigenous force, the EIC could not destroy it; because the Company lacked sufficient cavalry, defeated forces could not be successfully pursued.Footnote ⁷² So, from the 1760s, the EIC started expanding its cavalry. Initially, it depended on indigenous mercenary warlords and allied rulers for supplying light cavalry. In 1765, Najaf Khan, a sirdar who had previously fought against the EIC, joined Company forces that went to fight Marathas in eastern Uttar Pradesh. He was paid Rp200,000 annually by the EIC for maintaining a light cavalry contingent thereafter.Footnote ⁷³ Besides hiring Indian cavalrymen who operated under their own commanders, the EIC also placed cavalry contingents of defeated Indian armies under British command.Footnote ⁷⁴ Further, it raised its own cavalry regiments. The farriers were Anglo-Indians and most of the sowars were Muslims. A few Hindu sowars came from Maharashtra, but most were Rajputs and Marathas. The low castes were not recruited because the high castes and the upper-class Muslims already in EIC units opposed them.Footnote ⁷⁵ This is a good example of the ‘collaborationist’ tenor of the Company’s recruiting mechanisms. In the Indian cavalry and infantry raised by the EIC, British officers were appointed to introduce Western-style discipline and training.Footnote ⁷⁶ Indigenous rulers also tried to Westernize their forces by appointing European mercenary officers, but they were not necessarily loyal or dedicated.

Acquiring manpower is one thing; utilizing it properly is another. Through measures that various scholars have analysed, the EIC managed to induce a sense of professionalism among the freebooting mercenaries who constituted the officer corps. The professional European officer corps was not only dedicated to the EIC but through proper personnel management policy was able to lead the sepoys and the sowars during war. The European officers of the Bengal army already had a consciously corporate spirit by the 1790s; the British officers of the Madras army became professionalized over the following half century. Part of this professionalization evolved because the British officers spent their careers in military service, and the EIC initiated a package of promotions, pay, allowances, pensions, and furlough in order to retain them.

As professionals, the officers planned rationally for raising the military effectiveness of all the forces under their command. One part of that project, in a colonial context, was cultivating the loyalty of the indigenous soldiers. The British officers won the trust of the sepoys by showing deference to their religious and cultural sensibilities. Language training for communication with the sepoys and the sowars was part of the British officers’ professional expertise:Footnote ⁷⁷ In 1806, the commander-in-chief of India ordered that British officers be thoroughly acquainted with ‘Hindustani language’Footnote ⁷⁸ in order to command the Purbiyas of the Bengal army effectively.

The organizational format of an EIC regiment was to a great extent derived from western European armies’ regimental structure. Each Indian infantry regiment included 46 British commissioned and non-commissioned officers, 280 Indian commissioned officers (who ranked below British non-commissioned officers) and non-commissioned officers, and 1,800 sepoys.Footnote ⁷⁹ A sepoy joined the army at sixteen and finally became a subedar at sixty.Footnote ⁸⁰ Promotion was given if a sepoy demonstrated good conduct and was not invalided out of the army. In 1819 and 1825, the grades of subedar-major and resaldar-major were introduced as rewards for long-serving meritorious soldiers.Footnote ⁸¹ Such opportunities for promotion were supposed to encourage Indian soldiers to fight well.Footnote ⁸² A cavalry regiment had ten troops, each commanded by a jemadar (a man who had risen from the ranks owing to his own skill).Footnote ⁸³

The Company’s military organization combined indigenous and imported elements. In irregular cavalry regiments (organized along pre-British Indian lines), troopers joined with their own horses. Consequently these regiments cost half as much as a regular Indian cavalry regiment – whose troopers were armed, equipped, and mounted in Western style by the government – and the EIC retained many of them. Further, the irregular cavalry regiments were better than the regular British cavalry regiments at foraging, reconnaissance, skirmishing, and outpost duties. However, for a trooper in an irregular unit, loss of a horse in combat meant a large loss of capital; thus, they sometimes shied away from combat. In 1803, the EIC began to pay the cost of the mount when a trooper lost his horse in battle; this made the Company’s irregular cavalry more combat effective than those of the indigenous powers. Retaining the traditional irregular cavalry organization and its advantages, while offsetting its weakness through this measure, was an instance of successful military hybridization.Footnote ⁸⁴

In 1727, Louis XIV introduced uniform in the French army.Footnote ⁸⁵ Western uniform was later issued to the Indian troops in order to strengthen their regimental ethos. In 1804, jackets and pantaloons were issued to the 7th Bombay Infantry Regiment.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, the EIC was cautious in introducing Western dress for the sepoys, perhaps rightly so, since the institution of leather cockades, along with declining service conditions, sparked off a mutiny among Madras army sepoys in 1806.Footnote ⁸⁷

In 1789, many Indian soldiers who were invalided were given wasteland in lieu of pension. A resaldar received 600 bighas,Footnote ⁸⁸ while a subedar got 400 bighas. The land was taken from the zamindars (large landholders) of Benaras. The British resident at Benaras and the collectors (civilian bureaucrat) of Shahbad and Rohtas districts were in charge of granting land. By granting land to the discharged soldiers, the EIC attempted partial satisfaction of the traditional aspirations of Indian soldiers, who used to join the armies of princes in order to become landlords. The grantees were also given money to buy implements and animals for cultivating the land. The collectors and the resident maintained registers of such land grants, sending copies to the board of revenue. When the original grantees died, the land passed to their heirs. If the heirs failed to pay the rent, the land was forfeited and sold to the highest bidder.Footnote ⁸⁹

During the late seventeenth century, the EIC’s land forces had been in a sorry state. In 1664, its garrison at Bombay numbered 400 men;Footnote ⁹⁰ in 1699, the Company’s military force in Bengal numbered 130 men plus some artillerymen.Footnote ⁹¹ That the colonial military establishment grew massively thereafter was due to effective utilization of South Asian manpower. In 1756, the EIC maintained only 300 European soldiers in Bengal.Footnote ⁹² Eight years later, the Bengal army comprised 1,500 Europeans and 10,000 sepoys.Footnote ⁹³ In 1773, the Company possessed 9,000 European and 45,000 Indian soldiers;Footnote ⁹⁴ in 1788, there were 8,045 European troops in India. The number of British troops had risen to 13,125 by 1797, but the increase was far greater in case of the Indian soldiery of the EIC. In 1813, there were 21,940 British troops and 179,632 EIC troops in South Asia; in 1830, the numbers were 21,940 and 204,152.Footnote ⁹⁵ This expanding army was maintained by the EIC’s logistical infrastructure, to which we now turn.

Logistics of the EIC’s hybrid army

Martin Van Creveld defines logistics as the art of moving armies and keeping them supplied.Footnote ⁹⁶ The term ‘logistics’ in our context covers food, munitions, and other supplies, as well as the animals and non-combat manpower required for maintaining and moving an army. The subcontinent is bigger than Europe, and very ecologically diverse: while north-west India is an extension of the Central Asian arid zone, eastern India is full of marshy swamps and tropical monsoon forests, with an ecology similar to Southeast Asia’s. Even if Van Creveld’s assertion that logistics make up nine-tenths of the business of war is exaggerated,Footnote ⁹⁷ it played an important role in colonial wars. Campaigning armies had to feed animals and personnel. The EIC’s personnel were of two types: combatants (British and Indians) and a larger number of non-combatants (mostly Indians). For instance, in 1781, Eyre Coote’s force, campaigning against Mysore, included 6,000 combatants and 15,000 non-combatants.Footnote ⁹⁸

Non-combatants included carpenters, farriers, grass cutters, water carriers, doolie (stretcher) bearers, beldars (those who dig latrines), dhobis (washer-men), pioneers (road-builders), maulvis (for providing spiritual comfort to the Muslim soldiers), and so forth, all of whom were traditional features of the pre-British South Asian armies.Footnote ⁹⁹ Feeding a multi-ethnic army complicated the logistical tasks. The EIC had to accommodate their indigenous soldiers’ varied dietary preferences, shaped by regional cultures: the Europeans consumed bully beef and bread; the Gurkhas and Muslims ate beef; most of the high-caste Hindu soldiers were vegetarians; and the Madras army’s sepoys ate rice.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In addition, firewood was required for cooking the food. In Bengal Army infantry regiments, dominated by Brahmins, messing was impossible: caste rules forbade a Brahmin from touching food not prepared by himself or his relatives, or by members of his own gotra.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thus each Brahmin soldier prepared his own food (rice, ghee [clarified butter], and vegetables) and ate alone. During campaigns, they depended on puris (fried bread made of wheat) and laddus (sweetmeats), which they prepared and carried in haversacks. Many Brahmins were also addicted to bhang and opium, and took army-supplied rum during active campaigns.Footnote ¹⁰² At times, the EIC also had to feed the forces of their indigenous alliesFootnote ¹⁰³ – a further example of the Company’s collaborationist policies.

Rice for the sepoys of the Madras army was acquired from client kingdoms. In November 1791, the nawab of Arcot provided 350 vessels full of rice for Madras army sepoys fighting Tipu Sultan, a useful source since Tipu lacked ships to interdict the EIC’s coastal convoys.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For feeding an army in pre-modern India, bazaars (markets) and banjaras (nomadic traders who carried grain on bullocks and supplied the field armies) were required. For grain and fodder, the Mughals depended on the banjaras.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In addition to the bazaars and the banjaras, the British also depended on the beparis (grain traders) who bought grain from the countryside and sold it to the bazaars. However, the British introduced certain administrative mechanisms for systematizing supply from these traditional institutions. For example, the superintendent of supplies was in overall charge of supervising the bazaars,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ the introduction of this institutional mechanism for strengthening the traditional bazaar system having been overlooked by the Indian rulers. This is a typical example of hybridization (synthesizing traditional and innovative Western elements) initiated by the EIC in logistics. During emergencies, the British officials took care to buy all the available grain from the countryside and stored it in fortified enclaves such as Fort St George.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The EIC’s civil administration functioned as a link with rural society and mobilized resources for use by the army. The indigenous regimes lacked such civilian bureaucratic infrastructures. During the Second Maratha War, two civilian officials, Mr Seton and Mr Thornhill, were directed to procure bullocks and rice from Pilbhit. When this rice had to go by boat, the boats were provided by Mr Grant, Magistrate of Faruckabad. The collectors of Benaras, Shahbad, Allahabad, and Bihar were ordered to send grain, ghee, salt, and wheat to the depot at Allahabad.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ British commanders took care to provide a strong escort to the grain convoys, to protect them from enemy light cavalry. An account of an EIC force during the Third Anglo-Maratha War describes them as ‘having no less than 200 carts and 16,000 banjaras’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Elephants were widely used by the indigenous armies of Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹¹⁰ During the Battle of Third Panipat, the Maratha force had 300 elephants for carrying the baggage;Footnote ¹¹¹ the British imitated the Marathas’ use of elephants for transportation, with elephants pulling the EIC’s siege trains.Footnote ¹¹² In Burma, during the First Burma War (1824–26), one elephant was able to carry the baggage of a platoon of the Bengal army,Footnote ¹¹³ but each elephant consumed about 600 pounds of green fodder per day,Footnote ¹¹⁴ plus ghee, rice, and bananas. In 1790, during the Third Mysore War, and in 1803, during the Second Maratha War, the nawab of Awadh supplied elephants to the Company.Footnote ¹¹⁵ From 1830 onwards, however, the British officials coerced the chieftains of the Khasi hills in north-east India to provide elephants.Footnote ¹¹⁶ While elephants were used in the swampy and jungle-covered tracts of eastern India, camels proved more useful in arid north-west India and Punjab, and were extensively used during the First Afghan War (1838–42). After this success, the EIC increased the camels it maintained from 7,500 in 1843 to 15,000 in 1845.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The EIC’s field artillery was drawn by bullocks raised in Tipu’s stud department. The British dragoons depended on imported horses from the Persian Gulf, while horses were brought from the Caper region for light cavalry and horse artillery; walers were imported from Australia in small quantities during the early nineteenth century. Thanks to British naval supremacy, the indigenous powers could neither match nor challenge the British import of overseas equines.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The Marathas and the Sikhs obtained big horses from Central Asia, imported through Kabul. These Central Asian horses may have had greater strength and stamina than those from Iraq and Arabia, but imports declined during the late eighteenth century; thereafter, the Marathas and the Sikhs mostly had to make use of small, country-bred ‘ponies’. The Dal Khalsa partly depended on horses raised in the Salt Range of west Punjab, while the sowars of the Bengal army’s irregular cavalry regiments had to buy horses. Lahore and Multan produced good horses for light cavalry, able to cover 50 miles per day for several days.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The EIC became largely self-sufficient in the production of gunpowder and gunpowder weapons for its own use, by using manpower and natural resources from the subcontinent, where all the ingredients of gunpowder could be obtained. Sulphur was found in north-west India and Sind; saltpetre, available in abundance in the Gangetic Valley, was acquired by the EIC not only for its own use but also for British needs elsewhere.Footnote ¹²⁰ In 1790, the EIC ordered the nawab of Awadh not to interfere in British attempts to acquire saltpetre from his domain. The Company utilized the services of Indians for supplying saltpetre: during November 1791, one Jaganath Prashad was ordered by the EIC to send 6,300 maunds of saltpetre through his gomastahs (agents) in twenty country boats from Benaras to Calcutta.Footnote ¹²¹ From 1750 onwards, the Company was obliged to supply the board of ordnance in Britain with 500 tons of saltpetre annually at a stipulated price (£4 per hundredweight), during both war and peace. In 1755, extra amounts were required because of the prospect of war with France. During the wars of 1775–83, the EIC undertook to supply extra saltpetre to Britain at less than half the stipulated price. In 1791, when the country was buying saltpetre from Holland at £31 per ton, the EIC offered it at £4 per ton. Between March 1796 and September 1805, the Company provided Britain, then at war with Napoleon, with about 33,500 tons of saltpetre.Footnote ¹²²

To ensure regular supply of war materials to the EIC’s various forces, the British set up the board of ordnance in India, and magazines were established at the principal stations where units were posted. All contracts for the supply of stores, proofs of ordnance, powder, plans for construction of ordnance, and reports of powder works, laboratories, and arsenals were submitted to the board.Footnote ¹²³ In 1750, the council of Fort St David employed carpenters and bought timbers, planks, and iron from the countryside in order to construct gun carriages.Footnote ¹²⁴ Carriages for ordnance were constructed in Fort William by the military storekeeper, and guns were manufactured at the Gun Carriage Factory in Cossipore from 1803 onwards.Footnote ¹²⁵ Combining the mineral and human resources of the subcontinent with this administrative innovation was another example of military hybridization.

One factor that increased the effectiveness of the EIC’s armies and prevented desertion and mutiny was regular payment in cash. Black rightly says that the enormous army of the EIC was self-supporting and not a burden on British taxpayers.Footnote ¹²⁶ Plunder from defeated and satellite Indian princes, as well as land revenue from the territories it annexed from the conquered kingdoms, enabled the EIC in India to finance its costly military machine. Between 1793 and 1803, the Company had to pay £1,553,600 for the British troops stationed in India.Footnote ¹²⁷ During the last decade of the eighteenth century, the Awadh nawabi had to pay Rs5 million annually as protection money under the terms of subsidiary alliance to the EIC.Footnote ¹²⁸ In 1793, the EIC derived £6,963,625 from the territories annexed by it in India; this had risen to £14,535,739 by 1807.Footnote ¹²⁹ After the First Sikh War, the Company extracted £500,000 as indemnity from the defeated Khalsa kingdom.Footnote ¹³⁰ As a point of comparison, in 1775, the annual income of the Maratha Confederacy was Rs160 million (or £16 million). However, owing to the absence of a centralized fiscal apparatus, much of the revenue was absorbed by the sirdars who occupied the intervening layers between the peasants and the central government at Pune.Footnote ¹³¹

The indigenous political system and hybrid armies

Mysore, the Maratha Confederacy, and the Khalsa kingdom all understood the importance of Western military hardware and acquired it; they also copied Western military organization. The Westernized armies of the Marathas and the Sikhs depended on the technical skills of mercenary European officers. But, in 1803, these European officers deserted the Marathas,Footnote ¹³² while, before the First Sikh War, Sikh sirdars, who were angry at the privileges enjoyed by the foreign mercenaries in the Khalsa kingdom, forced those mercenaries to leave.Footnote ¹³³ Hence, immediately before their confrontations with the British, the technologically advanced Maratha and Sikh units were left without their directing heads. The Indian rulers, unlike the Czars, Austrian emperors, and Ottoman sultans, did not attempt to inculcate a Western military professional ethos among the nobility by opening up Western-style military academies and forcing the sirdars to attend.Footnote ¹³⁴ Even ‘modernizing’ Indian rulers such as Tipu, Mahadji, and Ranjit Singh lacked the power and institutions to discipline the sirdars, and the sirdars were too strongly steeped in the traditional cultural ethos. However, the real culprit was the multilayered indigenous state system and the subcontinent’s ecology.

Several kinds of problem – conceptual/cultural, material, and structural – prevented indigenous polities from raising hybrid armies that could confront the EIC. The post-Mughal polities that functioned in the subcontinent between 1750 and 1850 were not centralized bureaucratic organizations but fluid nebulous structures. The warlords’ activities of retinue- and alliance-building were crucial features of state formation. Thus they incorporated potential opponent sirdars by assigning them jagirs (land grants) and rights over local administration (collection of revenue and maintenance of law and order). Meanwhile they used clan, caste, and familial connections to mobilize large number of armed retainers. The sirdars had to compromise with hereditary zamindars, who controlled revenue and forts, and who also had armed retainers at their disposal. In addition to indigenous competition, these warlords had to tackle French and British power. They lacked time and resources to establish a stable bureaucratic infrastructure that would enable them to generate the financial resources required for establishing cohesive, well-balanced, loyal armies. For all these reasons, even the regimes of the most successful sirdars/warlords were not deeply rooted. Their principalities were mostly agglomerations of smaller kingdoms.Footnote ¹³⁵

Consider Mysore, for example. During the 1720s, the Wodeyar maharaja of Mysore tried to establish a centralized bureaucracy that would enable him to extract greater resources from the countryside in a more systematic manner, a move that was necessary for maintaining a more costly firearms-equipped infantry and field-artillery-centred force. However, continuous raids by the Marathas gave the maharaja no opportunity to introduce such a bureaucratic infrastructure on a long-term basis.Footnote ¹³⁶ Worse, in the 1750s, a sirdar of Mysore named Haidar Ali deposed the maharaja and captured power. Besides lacking legitimacy, he also lacked time and resources for a thorough overhaul of the state administration and the army. From the 1760s, he had to fight the Marathas and the EIC for survival.Footnote ¹³⁷

At times, cultural and material conditions coalesced to produce obstacles to the construction of hybrid armies by the indigenous rulers. For example, Mahadji Sindia and Ranjit Singh realized the importance of possessing an infantry–artillery oriented force. However, their sirdars demanded that numerous light cavalry should be maintained, under their own control. There were several reasons for this. First, the Marathas and the Sikhs established themselves against the Mughal empire from the 1650s by conducting long-range mobile guerrilla warfare with the aid of light cavalry. So the sirdars felt that light cavalry might succeed against the EIC, too. The culture of warfare also functioned as a brake on South Asian central governments’ attempts to replace light cavalry with firearms-equipped infantry. From the fifteenth century, such infantry played central roles in the Ottoman order of battle, but this was not so in South Asian warfare. Though the indigenous polities used matchlock-equipped infantry in siege warfare, the cavalry, and not the infantry (who were poorly disciplined and paid), remained the lynchpin of the battlefield. And, unlike Ottoman janissaries, the undisciplined infantry of pre-British South Asian armies were incapable of volley fire.Footnote ¹³⁸

Third, the sirdars realized that disbanding their light cavalry contingents would result in expropriation of the jagirs that they held from Mahadji and Ranjit – and getting jagirs for fighting was very important.Footnote ¹³⁹ When a particular sirdar controlled the central government, the subordinate sirdars paid him tribute. If the sirdar at the helm of the central government became weak, or if there were succession disputes, revenue flow from periphery to centre ceased. After Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839, a factional fight among the Sikh sirdars resulted in the court losing control over the Dal Khalsa; Sirdar Gulab Singh in Kashmir became independent and made a separate deal with the EIC.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Thus modernization of force structure, a central government monopoly over the coercive apparatus, and construction of a fiscal apparatus by the central government would have resulted in the sirdars losing power and influence. Hence, the sirdars opposed construction of such an apparatus.

Overall, the British logistical system functioned better than those of the indigenous powers. Owing to financial problems, the Maratha forces’ ‘umbilical cord’ occasionally disintegrated; the Maratha soldiers then survived by loot and plunder, reducing their combat effectiveness. For instance, in 1777 the Maratha sirdar Haripant’s soldiers resorted to looting the suburbs of Pune for fodder and grain. While their pay remained in arrears, they refused to take the field.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Moreover, plundering the banjaras turned them towards the EIC, which paid regularly in cash. The defeat at Third Panipat accelerated the disintegration of the Maratha Confederacy’s central government. The peshwa (prime minister)’s military weakness encouraged many vassal sirdars to withhold payment of tribute. The peshwa consequently failed to pay the French-trained infantry regularly, resulting in desertion and disbandment of the corps.Footnote ¹⁴²

The sirdars were not bureaucrats whom the central government could transfer at will. They were military entrepreneurs who held hereditary land tenures with the right to maintain armed followers. They lacked clear-cut territorial jurisdiction and their rights to collect revenue from different areas overlapped with those of other sirdars. This was linked with the segmentary structure of Indian polities. Thus, the public monopoly of violence was absent in the post-Mughal polities.

The Ottoman empire used janissaries and salaried cavalrymen, who represented the permanent standing army of the Porte. By the 1750s, however, the janissaries had become dysfunctional. Then the Ottomans created a standing army of infantry musketeers from the levend, vagrant landless peasants, who were organized in companies, paid directly by the state, and kept in separate barracks. Both the janissaries and the levend companies were equipped by firearms produced in the state arsenal; in India, by contrast, peasants made their own arms in the villages and joined the banners of the sirdars. In 1831, the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud, with a new centrally organized force named as ‘the victorious soldiers of Muhammad’, was able to revoke the timars (roughly equivalent to jagirs) and disband the militarily useless traditional light cavalry. It was much easier for Ottoman sultans to revoke the land grants (or assignments of land revenue) issued to the soldiers in lieu of payment than it was for indigenous South Asian rulers. This was because the Ottoman sipahi paid through timar was a private soldier. In contrast, the sirdars, like the Mughal mansabdars (sirdars who held mansabs, i.e. ranks in the imperial hierarchy, and maintained cavalry in return for assignment of jagirs) had hundreds or thousands of military retainers under their direct control. This made the central governments of South Asia’s indigenous rulers’ weaker than those of their Ottoman counterparts.Footnote ¹⁴³

Instead of being unified polities, the Maratha and the Khalsa states were loose collections of various sirdars, their armed contingents continually jockeying for power. Occasionally, sirdars fought each other in order to move from the lower to the higher rungs of the loose, ever-fluctuating, political system. The political culture of pre-British India encouraged such jockeying.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Gaining pre-eminence within a political federation characterized by plasticity through subjugating lesser sirdars did not encourage complete destruction of opposing forces. Rather the aim of warfare was to defeat an opponent and negotiate with him from a position of strength, making him a subordinate. A sirdar defeated today became an ally tomorrow. Negotiations, changing sides during and after conflict, and renegotiations characterized ‘armed politics’ in pre-British India; unlike the situation in western Europe, desertion was not regarded as a crime in the pre-British military culture. These characteristics of pre-British warfare are ably portrayed in Jos Gommans’ monograph on Mughal warfare. Overall, Clausewitz’s compartmentalization of war and peace was absent in traditional India’s military culture; campaigns and negotiations occurred simultaneously. Personal armies, composed mostly of light cavalry geared for marauding, were well suited to this kind of warfare.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

However, Gommans takes the argument too far when he says that Mughal warfare boiled down to armed theatre. Gunpowder weapons were used and bloodshed occurred. However, since the objective was not to completely destroy the enemy but to incorporate the defeated enemy sirdar as a vassal chieftain, gunpowder weaponry remained marginal to light cavalry. In contrast, EIC forces aimed at destruction of the enemy force and establishment of a new political order. Further, the sirdars hated the European mercenaries who led Europeanized indigenous contingents, resenting the pay and perquisites that the latter derived from Mahadji and Ranjit. As a result, when Mahadji and Ranjit started modernizing parts of their armies, they and their successors faced several rebellions from their sirdars. Hostility between the sirdars and the mercenary European officers also prevented joint planning and combined operations in 1803 and the 1840s.

Both Mahadji and Ranjit realized that the light cavalry and irregular infantry maintained by the sirdars were useless for decisive battles and sieges. However, they failed to reduce their numbers because of the operation of South Asia’s military labour market, which in turn accelerated the genesis of segmented states. The military labour market was the product of India’s huge population and unpredictable monsoon. The subcontinent featured large numbers of armed peasants and horsemen who offered themselves to the highest bidder. These armed peasants and sowars were sharecroppers and marginal peasants who could not be reliably absorbed within the agrarian sector; any failure of the monsoon forced them to go into military service. They elected either their clan leader or the jemadar to negotiate the terms of service with the powerbrokers. Unless these impoverished men were taken on by a prince, they joined the high-status warlords. During the late sixteenth century, the sirdars’ private forces, swollen by these armed marginal elements, included about 10% of the subcontinent’s adult male population. Political chaos, continuous warfare resulting in agricultural decline, and population growth pushed even larger numbers of armed peasants into the military labour market during the eighteenth century. They not only conducted marauding raids in princes’ domains but at times challenged central governments, carving out separate principalities.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Conclusion

Long before the intervention of the western European powers, the roles of gunpowder, sieges, and decisive battles were increasing in South Asian warfare. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the British and the French played a crucial role in further transforming the military culture. Indian powers adopted new technologies fairly rapidly, and therefore the EIC did not enjoy any significant technological superiority from 1770 onwards. The British learned a number of useful techniques from Indian forces (bans, lances, tulwars, use of light cavalry, and so forth). And, in the spheres of manpower mobilization and commissariat, the EIC absorbed many indigenous military traditions.

Thus, instead of a military revolution between 1770 and 1849, the EIC’s military establishment witnessed a blending of western European military techniques with traditional Indian military practices. The result was an amalgamation of traditional elements of South Asian warfare with new elements of war-making borrowed from western Europe.

Rather than a technological revolution, it is more appropriate to say that the British initiated a managerial revolution between the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. Cooperation between the civil administration and the military establishment characterized British techniques in the acquisition and utilization of India’s manpower, animal, and economic resources. The outcome was that the EIC’s military organization between 1750 and 1849 represented both tradition and transition, creating a hybrid entity.

The indigenous powers failed to construct such cohesive hybrid armies owing to their segmented state structure. The fluid indigenous political system, in conjunction with environmental and cultural factors, prevented the transition from contract armies to state-commissioned hybrid armies. Any indigenous rulers who persisted in trying to build a centralized bureaucratic state with a state-commissioned hybrid army on the model of the EIC would have faced stiff resistance from zamindars and sirdars; most probably, such a ruler’s principality would have imploded long before it came head to head with the EIC’s state-commissioned hybrid military machine.