Introduction
Between 27 and 29 April 1918, at the invitation of the Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, a group of prominent Indians gathered in the Council Chamber to support India's greater contribution to the empire's war effort against the Central Powers. The King Emperor's message to the conference declared that the three other great assemblages in Delhi's living memory—the durbars proclaiming Victoria as Empress, celebrating the coronation of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and witnessing the visit of the newly crowned George V and Queen Mary—would be in vain if its purpose was unfulfilled.Footnote 1 Its first concern was manpower; and not a few speakers took the opportunity to call Indians to enlist in the army.Footnote 2 Speaking on the motion of loyalty, the Maharaja of Gwalior held that the empire, standing as it did for liberty and justice, must be perpetuated. Surendra Nath Banerjea added that it was the ‘bulwark of justice and freedom against the aggression of the Huns’. M. K. Gandhi also supported but left his reasons obscure, as did others. Sunder Singh Majithia stated that the Sikh contribution would uphold their ‘past glory’, and G. M. Chitnavis and others echoed this for their own communities and provinces. Speaking specifically on the manpower issue, the Maharaja of Kashmir added that, while it was ‘our dharma to protect our hearths and homes’, it was parmadharma—‘still more sacred’—to serve king and country. A. C. Mozaumdar noted, pointedly, that it was ‘more our misfortune than our fault that we have not been able to do more’. N. G. Chandavarkar, referring to Indians’ political demands, reassured the viceroy that such support in the matter of manpower was not based on barter, but on faith ‘resting on certain cardinal principles in your character as Englishmen’.
These professions of enthusiasm for military enlistment might strike us as, by and large, obeisance from a carefully arranged parade of the state's political allies. But they are in fact indicative of an extraordinarily broad and insistent advocacy of military enlistment by India's political and intellectual elites during the war, from a broad spectrum of political opinion. This article will study that phenomenon. While it does not claim to delineate actual representative motivations for Indians’ enlistment, the responses it describes are not, either, the remote opinions of India's ‘chattering classes’. They were in many cases direct attempts to inspire mass enlistment—none more so than those of Gandhi—and represent an engagement by elites with various levels of Indian society. They are also hugely indicative of their concerns and preoccupations in contesting Indian identity and attempting to reform Indian society at a critical juncture in Indian nationalist politics. Though they indicate other incentives to encourage enlistment, above all, they show a preoccupation with the enlivening effects of military experience—in particular its development of courage and manliness. They thus also reflect anxieties of contemporary Indian weakness and effeminacy—something assumed to be prominent within, though by no means limited to, those elites themselves.
This article focuses on statements in the public space encouraging military enlistment. As well as assessing their explicit rationale, it will tease out what the statements betray about sometimes unspoken assumptions regarding Indian society and its global and imperial context. Occasionally, where possible, it will exploit private letters that throw light upon the author's public statements. The study focuses on Bombay Presidency. Selecting such a region offers the virtue of concentration, though the Presidency still represents a huge area in itself.Footnote 3 The use of an administrative unit, moreover, is not arbitrary: administrative boundaries had salience for the conduct of public debates over recruitment, most notably in the provincial governments’ own war conferences to engage public figures in the aftermath of the Delhi conference described above. The selection of Bombay Presidency is also extremely revealing of all-Indian trends, giving rise to some of the most prominent Indian voices for enlistment, such as Gandhi, B. G. Tilak, and M. A. Jinnah. Its recent experience of relative exclusion from both military recruitment and membership of the martial races was also representative of much of India. It enables us to consider the effects of ‘demartialisation’ (a term in strikingly wide use from the 1880s in western India) in another context than Bengal—a locus classicus whose experience was itself peculiar.Footnote 4
Despite the volume of these calls to enlist (and despite the 1,272,460 Indians who did so), they have received little sustained scholarly attention.Footnote 5 Indeed, India's war experience has only latterly begun to attract the attention it deserves, the ‘emotional world’ of the troops themselves, for instance, having been the subject of valuable recent work.Footnote 6 This article seeks to intervene in current historiography on India and the war that emphasizes instrumentalism in nationalist calls to enlist, holding enlistment to offer a superior bargaining position for political rights leading to full self-rule, or Swaraj.Footnote 7 It argues for their deeper significance in the minds of Indian nationalists to reviving India: while complementary to the aim of self-rule, they also reveal self-strengthening to be a condition of it, and that this strengthening was a foremost consideration. It views the war, indeed, as a site for longer-standing ideas regarding martiality and masculinity to be expressed, with greater urgency and clarity, and where they conjoined with new opportunities to press for political concessions. This article also seeks to intervene in current work on Indian masculinities in the late-colonial period. Current work discusses the popularization of body-building and the aspiration to become one with the ‘stronger’ races on account of a ‘self-image of frailty’ in colonial Bengal, but as yet there is little attention given to this and related phenomena outside Bengal; this article aims to increase this scope.Footnote 8 Mrinalini Sinha's account of the Native Volunteer Movement of 1885–86 touches upon similar themes. The present work suggests limits to the applicability of one important assumption of Sinha's work in particular: that the elite self-perception of effeminacy expressed their hegemonic aspirations within colonial society.Footnote 9 An outstanding feature of the war years was the Bombay elite's concern with the physical frailty of entire non-elite communities. This article also aims to expand on Heather Streets's observation that gendered and racialized constructions of ‘martial races’ not only impacted the identities of martial race communities in India (and Britain) but reached a wide public in India through the relationship of Indian Army officers and the print media.Footnote 10 Specifically, it seeks to demonstrate the impact of the conflation of martiality and manliness—the creation of ‘martial race masculinity’—upon the Indian elites, valorizing martiality and accentuating a self-perception of effeminacy.Footnote 11 This is no simple reproduction; the stolid loyalty inherent to the masculinity imagined by martial race doctrine according to Streets is not a feature of these accounts. But that conflation—exemplified by Kitchener's statement that the Sikhs were ‘manly in their warlike creed’—would certainly have been felt in India; Kitchener's words at Simla, of July 1903—were reported in the Indian Pioneer, and a watchful eye on such ‘Anglo-Indian’ organs is a feature of the nationalist press of the period in India.Footnote 12 The prevalence of gendered language in Indians’ own accounts—the ‘manliness’ of the experienced soldier, the figure of the demartialized man inert and ‘like a widow’—speaks strongly to this.
This article strongly echoes recent work by Maria Misra specifically on Gandhi's espousal of a non-violent but still martial form of nationalism.Footnote 13 It concurs that Gandhi hoped during the war that military action would be a preparation for satyagraha (a term he glossed as ‘soul force’, connoting the power of non-violent resistance), enabling Indians to learn the bravery necessary for it. Misra seems to understate, though, the rupture in Gandhi's thought occasioned by the war: the satyagraha he had developed from 1907, for all its martiality, had rejected violence. It did so, moreover, in her account partly because he considered that the operation of caste (varna) in India rendered the bulk of the Indian population, except its Kshatriyas (warriors), inherently unfit to bear arms, for practical reasons as much as for their dharma.Footnote 14 Yet, as we shall see, Gandhi instructed non-Kshatriyas to also fight, assuming the identity of Kshatriyas, during the war, in order to learn the courage to be satyagrahis. This suggests a greater instability of the role of varna in his conception of satyagraha.
The war, the army, and the press in India
At the outset of the war, the Indian Army was a professional force, accustomed to recruiting around 15,000 combatants per year.Footnote 15 As is well known, the composition of these recruits bore the marks of severe discrimination in recruitment—a consequence of the so-called ‘martial races theory’. This term might suggest a uniform and systematic conception, and thus mislead. But the notion that only certain of India's peoples were fit to bear arms was pervasive from around the 1880s, both among military recruiters and in ‘popular imperial culture’.Footnote 16 Its most influential patron was perhaps Frederick Roberts, from 1885 to 1893 commander-in-chief of the Indian Army. Roberts expressed its most consistent features: ‘no comparison can be made between the martial value of a regiment recruited amongst the Gurkhas of Nepal or the warlike races of northern India, and of one recruited from the effeminate peoples of the south.’Footnote 17
Roberts thus aimed ‘to substitute men of the more warlike and hardy races’ for the communities of Bengal and Madras, ‘and the so-called Mahrattas of Bombay’.Footnote 18 Roberts's scepticism towards Marathas, notwithstanding their strongly martial self-perception, is indicative of a broad loss of martial status for western India in these formulations. It is important to note that this loss was not complete or even: Roberts went further than the Indian Army recruiters who followed his lead and implemented these new forms racialized discrimination. In particular, as noted by Philip Constable, elite Marathas, insisting on their Kshatriya identity, were able to maintain a degree of martial status by emphasizing a supposedly exclusive martial pedigree, at the expense of regional lower-caste communities from whom they wished to differentiate, such as the Mahars, who in reality had enjoyed a historical ‘warrior’ role. Self-identity—in this case the emergence of a newly socially exclusive warrior status among high-caste Maratha Kshatriyas—in fact had a continual influence on martial races dogma, which was not simply an orientalist imposition upon a passive population.Footnote 19 Thus, while Mahar recruitment to the Bombay Army ceased in 1892, ‘genuine Marathas’, assumed to have a higher degree of Aryan blood, continued to be recruited.Footnote 20 But the note of suspicion, occasionally of disdain, of the military fibre of the region's populace in recruitment handbooks is notable. Marathas may have been acknowledged as fine fighting stock, but the genuine Maratha was a rare breed indeed, and recruiters were to be exacting in weeding out those attempting to enlist through ‘deceit’; not only this, even true Marathas lacked ‘the muscular build of the Pathan’ and were grudgingly admitted to have the ‘courage of the freebooter’.Footnote 21
Army figures for January 1914 indicate the nature of the biases in recruitment, towards the peoples of the northwest, and the Punjab in particular, and towards Muslims in general (as well as Punjabi Sikhs) over Hindus, as ostensibly being of hardier descent and shaped by a warlike religion. Of 24,393 cavalry, for instance, 11,822 were listed as Muslim, including 4,889 Punjabi Muslims and 2,084 Pathans, and 686 from ‘Bombay and the Dehkan’. There were 6,012 Sikhs, 3,094 Jats, mostly from the Punjab. ‘Brahmans’ numbered just 76, and only eight, listed as being from ‘other districts’, could conceivably have come from within Bombay Presidency. ‘Mahrattas’ numbered 164. Figures for the other combat arms did not radically differ; only Mahrattas in the infantry were somewhat better represented, though still making up only around 4 per cent of its total; Sikhs made up almost 19 per cent.Footnote 22 Many communities of Bombay Presidency, of course, were simply not recruited from or worth listing discretely in recruitment figures. Indians would have been conscious not only of these disparities, but of the conceptions that underlay them. The memoranda and handbooks that disseminated ‘martial races’ ideology officially may not have been publicly known, but Roberts's own views, for instance, were expressed in his memoirs, which had gone through 29 editions within 18 months of their publication in 1897.
From the outset of the war, Indian troops were used, as never before, as the ‘imperial fire brigade’. India's first expeditionary force fought on the Western Front from the autumn of 1914, and others were sent to German East Africa, Gallipoli, and Mesopotamia; Indian troops even besieged Qingdao. Despite this, for over two years, recruitment patterns, and the attitudes underpinning them, proved remarkably entrenched. The Indian Army continued to rely largely on regiments undertaking their own recruiting from traditional, favoured recruiting grounds, looking for recruits of a particular ‘class’ or community.Footnote 23 Only after the disastrous surrender of over 13,000 Indian troops to besieging Ottoman forces at Kut-al-Almara in Mesopotamia in April 1916 was the system overhauled. Needing to replenish, the Indian Army shifted from ‘class’ to territorial recruitment, with regional recruiting officers instructed to consider recruits ‘other than those recruited under normal conditions’, in the words of the Adjutant General in India.Footnote 24 Necessity insisted that the barrier between the martial and non-martial be lowered: new ‘classes’ recruited in Bombay included Berads, Bhandaris, Bombay Telegus, Chamars, Bombay Christians, Guzeratis, Jamkhandis, Kathiawar classes, Khandesh Bhils, Kolis, Lingayats, Mahars, Mahratta Brahmans, and Sindis.Footnote 25 In another shift of policy, an ultimately derisory domestic volunteer force—the Indian Defence Force (IDF)—was inaugurated in February 1917.Footnote 26 In early 1918, German advances in the West auguring even greater danger, the prime minister exhorted the Government of India to greater efforts. The Delhi War Conference that followed in April set a 500,000 target for military recruits within a year.Footnote 27 The government of Bombay responded with its own conference in June. It faced an uphill struggle: enlistment in Bombay Presidency was sluggish up to the end of the war, its contribution of 35,721 fighting recruits less than 5 per cent of India's total—a significant under-representation, even given the resilient scepticism of army recruiters. The government, indeed, decided to reduce the quotas for Bombay recruitment after the Delhi Conference and offset them from the United Provinces, so perennially ‘hopeless’ was it to expect them to be met.Footnote 28 Among many explanations for this might be the presence of Bombay city as a site of transit and treatment of Indian bodies—and minds—exposed to the effects of the conflict; though, as a port of embarkation for troops destined for Europe as early as the summer of 1914, it most likely also had a role, conversely, in generating a higher awareness of India's actual and potential role in the conflict, and heightening calls to enlist.Footnote 29
Any study of Indian opinion in wartime must contend with an increased degree of official manipulation of the public space. Some may have spoken in reasonable expectation of reward from the government: a badge in fact was ultimately awarded in recognition of services for recruiting, and honours such as Kaiser-i-Hind were bestowed.Footnote 30 But it is inappropriate to view a desire for personal preferment as a motive in any but a minority of cases; in fact, as we shall see, encouragement for enlistment came even from those the state had long since labelled as nationalist ‘Extremists’ and would continue, with a near inevitability, to persecute during the war. The policing of the press, given that it provides the bulk of the evidence for this article, might though represent a more troublesome factor. Of particular prominence in the government's armoury was the Indian Press Act, 1910; it was this that the government mostly relied upon during the war. It enabled securities to be demanded from printers or publishers that could be forfeit if any writing was found, inter alia, to have attempted to ‘seduce any officer, soldier or sailor’ from his allegiance or to bring the government into ‘hatred or contempt’.Footnote 31 The Defence of India Act, 1915 (analogous to the Defence of the Realm Act in Britain) empowered the viceroy to prevent the spread of ‘reports likely to cause disaffection’ or those likely ‘to dissuade persons from entering the military’.Footnote 32 Articles bearing upon the conviction to fight could thus easily be censured. The government of Bombay's records contain numerous missives—variously ‘warnings’, ‘requests’, and ‘instructions’—to newspaper editors, mostly in response to the appearance of undesirable articles, blacklisting material: examples included reprinted apologias for German war motives, ‘sensational’ descriptions of the sufferings of lascars (Indian merchant seamen), and the suggestion to Indian sepoys that their heroism would be met by empty praise.Footnote 33 Official sanction was common. The government demanded a number of securities before and during the war, and did not shy from demanding the maximum allowable: The Bombay Chronicle, edited by the government's hostile critic Benjamin Horniman, furnished Rs 10,000.Footnote 34
The surveillance of the provincial government provides another record of public speeches, which often went underreported, but it could also silence them. Spoken statements could easily be criminalized, and speakers intimidated. Those considered seditious could be dealt with under the Code of Criminal Procedure, for instance, and securities could again be demanded; specific individuals could be prevented from making public statements under the Defence of India Act; or authorities could simply disperse meetings on the pretext of keeping the streets clear. Tilak, for instance, suffered all three fates during the war.Footnote 35 But altogether such limitations to public expression need not hinder this study, which does not aim to assess the degree of dissent the government encountered. The existence of outright hostility to rendering military assistance to Britain cannot be doubted. As the range of voices in favour of enlistment is itself sufficient to warrant attention, this article will confine itself to such statements and attempt to explain and situate them. A crucial resource for this is the official reports on the Bombay Presidency press. These weekly reports, compiled for the Bombay government by the Oriental Translator, took in the full spectrum of vernacular and English-language newspapers in the presidency, though the reports are unsurprisingly skewed towards newspapers with the greatest circulation and hence putative impact. Though they are naturally limited in the matters they take note of, statements concerning enlistment—a matter of crucial importance to the government—were recorded weekly for much of the war. It must be emphasized that they also provide the only surviving record for many publications, in English and the regional vernaculars, for the period: of all the Marathi newspapers printed during the war, for instance, a reasonably complete print run survives only for Kesari. Newspapers in the original and government records supplement them in this study.
Dis/loyalty to the state and the call to fight
Within all this material, hostility to the aggression of the Central Powers and state loyalty, often expressed together, are certainly visible from the outset of the war. The Germans were ‘always waiting for a suitable opportunity’ to attack their neighbours, stated a speech by one Balubhai Kahandas, a clearly pro-British Gujarati in early 1915, the Kaiser being a ‘serpent in the form of a human being’.Footnote 36 Around the same time, a meeting of the Gujarati Mitra Mandal (literally ‘friends’ association’) at which the guest of honour was the Shankaracharya of Karvar Peeth (a widely accepted figure of authority among Hindus in western India) heard the organizers note the ‘unholy craving of the war at any-price [sic], Military party in Germany’, the ‘innumerable bl[essings] conferred on India by Britain’, and, more remarkably given the nature of the gathering, that Britain was ‘fighting the cause of Christianity . . . of the world-wide peace of human brotherhood’.Footnote 37 The Shankaracharya himself condemned the war's initiators, who had ‘ignored all the noble traditions of Kant and Goethe’; Germany, he stated, referring to the most venerable of Hindu texts, had ‘lost her hold on the brotherly sympathies of all honest and Veda-loving men’. Blessing ‘the banner and sword of England’, he solemnly advised his disciples ‘to be ready and willing to come forward as recruits’.Footnote 38 Anti-German sentiment so coloured attitudes that the noted Parsi judge of Bombay, N. D. Khandalavala, could write in The Theosophist—a journal expounding ‘universal brotherhood’—that ‘the Hun is always barbarous’.Footnote 39 A certain unctuousness is detectable in some of this; Kahandas, most particularly, ensured the government was aware of his loyal speech by writing to the Political Department enclosing a copy. The sentiments, though, were visible generally in the press. The Anglo-Marathi Indu Prakash applauded the ‘noble cause’ of the defence of Serbia; almost three years into the war, in response to a new call to arms, the Islamic Mail even held up ‘the example of the faithful dog to admiration’, noting, in a statement clearly reflecting imperial attitudes, how much of India's ‘moral and material progress’ was down to Britain.Footnote 40
More remarkable than any of this are the open expressions of hostility to European civilization from the outset of the war, and their accompaniment by calls for Indians to fight in it. The change in attitudes within colonized societies towards the supposedly superior, colonizing civilization of Europe on account of the war has been noted, as has the importance within this of the experience of sepoys serving in Europe.Footnote 41 Yet, already in the second week of August 1914, newspapers—admittedly often those whose enthusiasm for the ‘British connection’ was already somewhat muted—were stating in Mahratta’s words that ‘the peace of Europe was a mask, a counterfeit, a sham’ to ‘hide the naked reality’ of ‘relentless competition, brutal selfishness’ and ‘deadly enmity’. Now, it appears, you only have to ‘scratch any European to find the barbarian hidden in him’.Footnote 42 The Gujarati noted ‘it is strange that Europe appears quite the reverse of what the reformers picture it to be’; European states, on account of racial enmity, were ready to ‘cut each other's throats without remorse’.Footnote 43 The Bombay Gujarati, most dramatically, stated that ‘Servia is a mere instrument in this war. The Almighty Destroyer [the god Shiva] has but cast a glance towards the West to mete out adequate punishment to those who are a burden to the earth’.Footnote 44 But all of these newspapers called for Indians to fight. The Gujarati, whose tone had led it to be described by one superintendent of police as ‘nothing short of an enemy publication’, urged its readers to ‘offer whatever help they can’, adding ‘there are brave Indian races who are fit to try their strength against Germany’—something it hoped ‘England would recognise’ by employing their services.Footnote 45 Mahratta, like Gujarati under security since before the war, also insisted Indians wanted the ‘obligations of self-sacrifice’ as well as the ‘rights of self-assertion’, noting India alone could have matched the sum of all forces engaged in the war were they not ‘debarred from the privilege of standing shoulder to shoulder with the British’.Footnote 46 The publisher of another Marathi firebrand, Sandesh, protesting the forfeiture of a 1,500-rupee security under the terms of the Press Act in July 1918, emphasized his support for ‘the patriotic cause’ of the war.Footnote 47 He may have been protesting too much; but he could also point to, specifically, his ‘actual aid in the matter of recruitment’ and the ‘sad irony’ that the government responded with an effective silencing.Footnote 48 The recruitment drive by Indians in fact blurred the distinction between support and sedition; the government saw sedition even in the midst of recruitment efforts, and it was perhaps right in its suspicion of motives.
The Mahratta’s reference to military service as privilege reflects the press's keen consciousness of the demilitarization, over the course of more than a generation, of the bulk of western Indian society. This could, indeed, go as far as pessimism regarding Indians’ residual strength and courage: the Bombay Gujarati lamented that ‘the teeming millions of India’ had been ‘sitting at home like widows’—a phrase also hinting at the gendered insecurities the situation gave rise to; even if they were given back their arms, ‘their valour, which today consists in selling fuel, would scarcely be able to face cannon balls’.Footnote 49 The Akhbar-e-Soudagar (Anglo-Gujarati) echoed it, claiming ‘India cannot be actuated by the same enthusiasm as the colonies, for its helpless hands cannot bear arms’.Footnote 50 But the response, more generally, was to sense the opportunity the war offered.
The values of fighting: manly courage, soul force, and nation-building
As we have seen, such opportunity was illusory for most of the war, so resistant was the army to change its recruitment patterns. But a flickering optimism as to the boon India could gain through fighting remained. Above all, the boon hoped for in western India's public space was a rebirth of courage and martial spirit. The achievements of sepoys were richly celebrated: at a meeting under the auspices of the Bombay Association on 18 February 1917, one speaker enthused that Indians had stood ‘shoulder to shoulder with their British and Colonial brethren in arms, and what heroism and dash, what endurance and patriotism they have displayed in struggles the most arduous and desperate’—words met with ‘loud cheers’.Footnote 51 Specific examples of valour were celebrated in the press.Footnote 52 These were taken by many to show that the ‘old martial spirit is not dead as is shown by her present soldiers in the present war’ even ‘outside the so-called martial races’.Footnote 53 Jinnah went so far as to argue in 1917 that a ‘military policy’ that would allow its flourishing was crucial to ‘the renaissance of India’.Footnote 54 These hopes were coupled with a wide, resentful assumption that the government planned to use Japanese military assistance to defend a still largely demilitarized India.Footnote 55 As Hindusthan put it, ‘some people of this country do not like the bare idea that the Japanese or some foreign nation should defend it’.Footnote 56 In fact, though a government memorandum noted in 1917 that ‘rumours crediting us with this intention have already found some currency’, it was determined to do nothing to ‘give them colour’; for this reason, among others, it recommended not employing Japanese help in Mesopotamia—part of ‘India's sphere’.Footnote 57 But the rumour says much about Indians’ resentment of India's apparent military weakness. It is telling that the words used in Indian press to celebrate such exploits—‘dash’ being a prime example—echo classic ‘martial race’ language. As Streets notes, it tended to connote ‘masculine prowess’.Footnote 58 This conflation of manliness and martiality served to valorize martiality in the eyes of these Indians, and accentuate the corresponding and often visible sense of gendered weakness.
For Gandhi, this boon of courage would enable Indians to practise satyagraha more perfectly. But this was not an easy conclusion for him. From the beginning, the war caused him a crisis: he realized through it his own insufficient spiritual strength to live as a ‘perfect satyagrahi’.Footnote 59 It was perhaps the inculcation of this strength in young Indians that Gandhi, above all, hoped that soldiering could achieve. At the outbreak of the war, Gandhi, in London en route to India, was flummoxed as to his proper response, having previously disavowed continuing his South African War stretcher-bearing work, as it contravened his understanding of ahimsa. Noting that the supply of his daily bread in London was dependent on the protection of the Royal Navy at war, he considered the ‘only one right course’ would be ‘to go away to live in some mountain or cave’ and rely upon nature. But he did ‘not yet possess the spiritual strength’ for this. Thus, he was compelled to ask: ‘What is my next duty, then?’Footnote 60 Immediately, the answer was a renewed commitment to stretcher-bearing work at the front, though in fact ill health forced his return to India by early 1915. He hoped in India to summon ‘the necessary courage’ to perform satyagraha more perfectly; and his wholehearted attempts to recruit soldiers in response to the empire's needs in early 1918 may be read in part as an extension of this to Indian society at large.Footnote 61
Explaining his recruitment campaign to his great friend Charles Andrews in July 1918, Gandhi wrote that he had previously laughed at friends who told him that people had taken up passive resistance out of weakness, but ‘they were right and I was wrong’.Footnote 62 At one level, he reflected that ‘India has lost the power of fight—not the inclination’; it was necessary to regain that power in order to make the moral choice to abjure it.Footnote 63 In a speech shortly before, he had stated: ‘he alone can practice ahimsa who knows how to kill, i.e., knows what himsa is.’Footnote 64 And, for Gandhi, renouncing violence, no less than fighting, required the courage to face death. Indians’ lack of this is a strong theme of Gandhi's recruiting statements, and indeed he equated the quality strongly with manliness. Those fit to hold the ‘celestial weapon’ of satyagraha, he had told another audience, must ‘possesses manliness and courage’; now he specified that ‘he cannot be a satyagrahi who is afraid of death’.Footnote 65 The war would inculcate such manly courage in Indians, giving them a ‘power and strength which we do not possess today’.Footnote 66 It would also instil other virtues such as comradeship and duty.Footnote 67 But ultimately, enlisting to fight would, paradoxically, perfect India's non-violent resistance to war itself. ‘India with her moral force could hold back from her shores any combination of armies from the West or the East or the North or the South’ he wrote in July 1918 to Andrews. ‘The question is, how can she cultivate this moral force?’Footnote 68
There was also a preoccupation, for Gandhi and others, that India must have military strength commensurate with the political self-government they wished it to enjoy. In 1917, Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, had announced Indian self-government within the empire to be the ultimate goal of British policy, acknowledging demands that had increased in volume since the establishment of the Indian Home Rule Leagues from 1915. Jinnah declared he could not take this seriously, as ‘no nation can govern through the ballot box only’ without ‘the requisite strength to carry out its will’.Footnote 69 Similarly, for Gandhi, the notion of a free association of autonomous partners was nonsense, because there could be ‘no partnership . . . between the ant and the elephant’.Footnote 70 Indians ‘could not preserve the country so long as they had no military traditions’ Gandhi told an audience of would-be recruits; ‘Home Rule without military power was useless, and this was the best opportunity to get it.’Footnote 71 Gandhi did not state here that military power might ultimately translate into willingly suffering death rather than resisting evil; otherwise, his point was the same as Jinnah's.
For Gandhi, military strength would in fact rejuvenate Indian society from the village level up; for others, its benefit lay more in consolidating all-India bonds. ‘Our villages are no better than dung-hills’ he somewhat provocatively declared to a gathering in rural Gujarat. ‘It is because every Englishman can stand on his legs and can defend his home and his village against any invader that the English village appears so incomparably superior to ours.’Footnote 72 Gandhi's vision of sturdy, self-reliant yeomen might have been archaising. But others expressed the hope that the novel force of Indian nationalism would be burnished by military experience. At a Bombay Association meeting in February 1917, one speaker called for Hindu and Muslims together to fight for ‘the defence of their common hearth and home and the Empire’, adding ‘that is making a nation’. Another speaker echoed the sentiment, with the proviso that ‘heresies’ like the ‘Maratha Company’ and other ‘class’ units and sub-units be done away with, for the ‘greater unification of India’.Footnote 73
These considerations, though, were subsidiary. The boon of martial courage and manliness—considered as one and the same—was central to the press's response, as to Jinnah's, as to Gandhi's, in its different iterations.Footnote 74 It was entirely consistent with the desire to physically strengthen India in advance of its achieving political rights; and indeed the preoccupation with such self-strengthening often took precedence over the Home Rule demand, as we shall see.
Who should fight?
There seems to have been, then, a general call for demilitarized Indians to enlist. But the question of the identity of the would-be recruits—the intended audience for exhortations to enlist and supposed beneficiaries of hoped-for changes to recruitment policy—is in fact more complex. Each of the calls for Indians to fight, or be given the opportunity, referred to a slightly different set of Indians. What emerges strongly, though, is that scepticism towards the theory of the ‘so-called martial races’ expressed above tends towards a general call for martialization and that it is largely a matter of emphasis rather than a matter of exclusion that certain groups were targeted—albeit with some important exceptions.
There was indeed a special anxiety on the part of the spokesmen of militarily marginalized groups to urge enlistment. This is true of Gandhi's recruitment campaign, carried out almost exclusively in Gujarat and Bihar, among communities he recognized as ‘unmartial’.Footnote 75 Identifying himself with his Guajarati audience in Nadiad in June 1918, Gandhi claimed ‘any stout fellow can successfully intimidate us. If a Pathan were to come here and start hitting out with the lathi, we would all run away’.Footnote 76 If Gujarat wanted ‘to save herself from the reproach of effeminacy’, he added in an Enlistment Leaflet ‘she should be prepared to contribute thousands of sepoys’.Footnote 77 Whereas the Shankaracharya of Karvar in his 1914 exhortation particularly had Hindu society's warrior Kshatriya castes in mind, Gandhi also specifically addressed lower-caste groups within Hindu society such as Vaghris, assuring them they shared the qualities of Kshatriyas, and even identifying them as such.Footnote 78 Both, though, referred to Hindu society alone. Gandhi was explicit that it was the Hindus of western India who needed shaking. ‘This unnatural fear of death,’ he wrote to Andrews, ‘is ruining the nation. For the moment, I am simply thinking of the Hindus. Total disregard of death in a Mahomedan [sic] lad is a wonderful possession’.Footnote 79 In this, a continuity between the Hindu self-strengthening of figures such as Madan Mohan Malaviya, with his insistence on extensive physical training and wrestling at the proposed Hindu University at Banares, is visible.Footnote 80 Indeed, many of these figures, like Gandhi, in fact had as their main object the revivifying of the Hindu population specifically. It is worth recalling that India's army in 1914 was disproportionately non-Hindu; calls to enlist aimed to remedy this. Demartialization of Hindus added another layer to a specifically Hindu self-perception of weakness and passivity, heavily influenced by colonial critiques, and emphasized by the frequent complaint, from both Gandhi and Tilak, for instance, that Kshatriya dharma in general had been lost and needed to be revived: Tilak's treatise on the Bhagavad Gita, published in 1915 but composed in his prison cell five years earlier, with its call to restore Kshatriya virtues and its strong notes of physical violence, is consistent with these wartime pronouncements.Footnote 81 Kaiser-i-Hind, meanwhile, promised that India's Parsees would show themselves the sons of the ‘valiant Rustom and Sohrab’, belligerents in the Persian epic the Shahnameh.Footnote 82 Another newspaper under Parsee editorship expressed the common demand that ‘the bar sinister between the warlike and the unwarlike sections of the people must be done away with once and for all’; Kesari, among others, echoed that it would be ‘futile’ to continue to distinguish between races in the matter of recruitment.Footnote 83
Newspapers identifying themselves with Muslims of the presidency were not slow to express their enthusiasm, either. This is notable, given the official nervousness over the attitude of Indian Muslims and the hopes of Ottoman (and German) propagandists to emphasize the oppressiveness of non-Muslim rule and the European threat through the war to the position of the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph, the leader of the Islamic umma.Footnote 84 The Gujarati Akhbar-e-Islam noted in August 1914 that European states for several years ‘have had in view the partition of the Turkish Empire’; but the same newspaper the following week added that a volunteer corps would ‘uphold the prestige and honour of Islam’.Footnote 85 When the IDF was mooted in 1917, the English-Urdu Islamic Mail claimed that ‘Mohammedans, who have been promised entry to Paradise if they wield the sword, will only enlist in much larger numbers’.Footnote 86 Such statements went beyond a perfunctory acceptance of the duty to encourage enlistment and show the seriousness with which it was urged by newspapers produced for the Muslim population in the presidency.
The group perhaps most frequently invoked as recruits were the ‘educated classes’; and here especially many spoke for themselves and their own communities. Even the Gujarati’s call in 1914 for the ‘brave’ Indian races to be given the opportunity of enlisting was accompanied by a pledge that ‘if this is offered, the educated too will offer their lives’; it was echoed by Kesari four years later, calling for ‘citizen soldiers from the middle classes’ distinguished by their knowledge of ‘what the country means’.Footnote 87 It was mostly these classes Jinnah seems to have had in mind; in a speech in the Imperial Legislative Council in February 1917, he even lamented that ‘we, the educated classes of India, have not had the opportunity given to us of losing a son or a husband or a brother’.Footnote 88 Interestingly, as late as May and June 1918, the press complained that such men were still not being recruited, Sandesh, for example, holding that the government seemed to be recruiting their 500,000 from the ‘backward classes’, as they ‘studiously want to avoid recruiting from the educated classes’; such an approach was blamed on the state's suspicion of the educated, who would not die ‘to secure a new lease of life for the bureaucracy’.Footnote 89 Tilak's speaking ban came in response to his remarks at a public lecture that the ‘recruits who are enlisted in the Bombay Presidency’ are of the kind that has ‘his eye of the rupees’, in particular the Mahar and Berad communities, who were ill-suited to military discipline and would return their occupation of ‘thieving’ after the war.Footnote 90 Tilak's particular concern here was that Brahmin communities be given an opportunity to militarize, reflecting his recurring preoccupation with reshaping Brahmin identities. But he also complained that the government did ‘not want intelligent [janati] people in the army’—a broader category, much as he might have employed them synonymously.Footnote 91
The consistency of this complaint, notwithstanding changes in recruitment policy that would nullify it, may indicate the anxiety with which it was made, as well as the slowness of the military authorities to implement change. There may have been a fear that the invigorating effects of military service would not be felt by educated elites—a destabilizing prospect. Specifically, these elites were anxious to experience leadership in war, which they viewed as the preserve of educated Indians; there was, as we shall see, adamance that King's Commissions be granted to Indians. Conversely, educated Indians’ inability to assume authority over rank-and-file recruits in war would, of course, imperil their claim to social authority in peace. Such anxieties may, though, have gone even further. The well-known stereotype of the effeminate educated Indian (the most common example of which was the Bengali babu) may have struck at these men of letters. And the notion that there was something specifically physically enervating about university education, which many of them had experienced, was one with a remarkable recent history in western India. Gandhi played a variation on a well-known theme in claiming in 1917 that instruction through a foreign medium produced ‘graduates . . . mostly without stamina, weak, devoid of energy’.Footnote 92 It was perhaps for this reason that Praj Mitra and Parsi described the refusal to enlist, given the opportunity, as a ‘paralysing and permanent reproach’ to the educated.Footnote 93
Thus, in general, those calling for enlistment spoke foremost for their own communities—whether conceived as Hindu-Gujarati, Muslim, Parsi, or simply ‘educated’—especially if they considered their communities militarily marginalized. But a feature that should be emphasized is that, while elite anxieties are richly in evidence, these elite figures also demonstrated a concern over the demilitarization of the non-elite, or even the general population of India. Gandhi's call for all of the Hindus of Gujarat to militarize, for instance, suggests his perception of a shared predicament. And, in turn, the perspective of such communities only inspired a desire for the revivification, in the words of the Bombay Gujarati, of India's ‘teeming millions’.
Conditionality and its limits
For all that, many—among them several of these same figures—adopted a conditional support for enlistment once the colonial state had extended its search for recruits and begun to make near-desperate calls for recruitment in early 1918. The evidence suggests that, simply put, fighting was more important than bargaining, however. Ultimately, even the most hard-boiled political negotiators, such as B. G. Tilak, betrayed an anxiousness for Indians to enlist that undermined the consistency of their positions. At the very least, the grant of Home Rule—the supreme political goal—was complementary, rather than superior, to the opportunity of experiencing warfare.
The calculation involved in calling for enlistment was often explicit. ‘History bears witness that whenever subjects have obtained rights from irresponsible rulers in any country, they have done so by insisting upon them in times of difficulty’ stated Kesari, citing Magna Carta.Footnote 94 Tilak was the foremost spokesman for this position. He editorialized in the same paper at around the same time: ‘give us self-rule [swarajya] and we will be obliged to protect our land; we will not be too enthusiastic to go to war if we do not have self-rule.’Footnote 95 Young India hoped the war was not being fought for the ‘weaker nationalities in Europe alone’, pointedly adding that ‘we want a more tangible incentive’ to fight.Footnote 96 This demand was encapsulated by a manifesto of 19 Home Rule leaders, including Horniman, Tilak, and Jinnah, to the governments of India and the United Kingdom, stating that, ‘if India is to make great sacrifices’, it must be ‘as a partner in the Empire and not a dependency’.Footnote 97 The language used could suggest a bargain with the government, rather than a mere instruction on how to inspire India's efforts. After Lloyd George telegrammed the viceroy calling on India to redouble its efforts in April 1918, the Servant of India commented: ‘The response of the peoples of this country’ would ‘greatly depend on upon the attitude which the people in England and the British officials in this country adopt towards the legitimate political aspirations which at present sway the hearts of the thinking section of the Indian community’.Footnote 98 Kesari, stopping short of opposing the recruitment campaign, suggested that Home Rulers should prioritize getting rid of the bureaucracy, there being ‘more important work to do than getting recruits at present’, meanwhile insisting it wished to see a ‘national citizens’ army’.Footnote 99 Tilak castigated the Delhi War Conference for offering ‘hot air’ (bhapaka) rather than substantive change on political issues.Footnote 100 His close associate, G. S. Khaparde, indeed attempted there to move a resolution that, in order to invoke enthusiasm, a bill in parliament should be introduced granting ‘responsible government’ for India—a motion deemed out of order by the viceroy.Footnote 101 And Tilak himself was ruled out of order by the governor of Bombay at the Bombay War Conference for attempting to proffer some views on how ‘Home Defence and Home Rule must go together’ while speaking on the motion of loyalty to the King Emperor; frustrated, Tilak left, followed by others, including the editors of Young India and Kesari, and the Parsi industrialist, S. R. Bomanji.Footnote 102
Other statements of support for enlistment, ostensibly unconditional, rested on a clear logic of quid pro quo. Gandhi explicitly disagreed with Tilak for his attaching conditions to his support, saying he would ‘not whisper “Home Rule”’ as long as the war lasted; and he promised to government that he would ‘rain men on you’, as an expression of ‘ungrudging and unequivocal support to the Empire’.Footnote 103 ‘But,’ he stated, ‘it is the simple truth that our response is due to the expectation that our goal will be reached all the more speedily on that account—even as the performance of a duty automatically confers a corresponding right.’Footnote 104 This Gandhian logic split Indian opinion. The New Times stated ‘we doubt if we will get Swaraj after the war; we doubt if self-government ever came as a “reward” of one living nation to another’; Gandhi's optimism conflicted with ‘rugged commonsense’.Footnote 105 The Jam-e-Jamshed on the other hand believed ‘thousands will enlist if only Mr. Tilak and others co-operate with the government’ and Sanj Vartiman supported Gandhi's campaign as ‘quite proper’.Footnote 106 Ramabai Ranade, whose selection to speak at the Bombay War Conference provides a rare surviving female statement on recruitment from the presidency, cited the Bhagavad Gita to assert that ‘the reward for one who dies in action is the attainment of heaven’, yet, as the Emperor is like a father and the children his subjects, it is necessary for the father to give ‘kindnesses and occasional privileges also to enthuse the children’. A ‘statesmanlike effort’, she trusted, would be made.Footnote 107
Neither the conditional support for enlistment nor the expectation of reward negates the broader importance of military enlistment for all of these figures. Gandhi's unconditional support, after all, was just that; combined with his expressed belief in the value of fighting, this is telling. Gandhi's position certainly suggests an unwillingness to risk Indians’ non-participation in the war through imposing a condition that may not have immediately been met. Indeed, Gandhi elsewhere demonstrates not so much a confidence in the consequent concession of Home Rule, but rather that Indians’ military experience would enable them ‘to wrest freedom in a moment’ if the crushing bureaucracy were to ‘play foul’.Footnote 108 The colonial government's reciprocity was rather more doubtful to him than the efficacy of fighting. Neither for Tilak and others was enlistment entirely instrumental in gaining Home Rule, even if it was couched as a condition; they were complementary aims, the end of which was a strengthened and self-governing India. This complementarity can be seen in Kesari’s approval of the ‘dual policy’ of Home Rule and military conscription for Ireland, proposed in April 1918; this, it implied, also answered to India's needs.Footnote 109 It might be objected that the condition of Home Rule did minimize the chance of Indians enlisting in numbers. But there may have been a genuine doubt that such enlistment would not be forthcoming otherwise. Sandesh claimed in April 1918 that for ‘educated and self-respecting Indians to enlist it is first necessary to arrive at a satisfactory answer to the Home Rule question’ and this genuine concern over the enlistment of the educated elite, a priority for Sandesh, as for Tilak and Jinnah, helps to situate their demand.Footnote 110 Gandhi also fleetingly suggested that these figures feared that, without political concessions, recruitment would in general fail: in a speech at Nadiad in June 1918, he claimed to have discussed with Tilak and others his position on unconditional enlistment, and its goal of achieving Home Rule ‘in due course’ while in the meantime gaining ‘military power’, but that his fellow politicians ‘doubted whether the ryots [cultivators] would accept these views’.Footnote 111 If this fear was genuine, it would suggest very clearly that nationalist politicians in 1918 could see their own preoccupations with martiality as divergent from the views of the population at large.
A fear for India's security likely underlined the importance of the complementary goals of Home Rule and militarization. The physical threat apparently posed to India by the spring of 1918 constituted another reason not only to encourage enlistment, but to more urgently demand Home Rule, the concession of which would stimulate it. Indian newspapers, in language reminiscent of Congress's call for a ‘People's War’ against the Japanese almost 25 years later, asserted that ‘if India is to be safe it must be by her own sword willed by her own hand’.Footnote 112 There was a strong emphasis, in contrast to 1942, on the safety of the empire, and India as an integral part of it. It must also be acknowledged that the sense of immediate danger expressed was also less; but it was not negligible. German militarism pervaded Indian imaginations to a perhaps surprising degree, auguring a fate worse than its current political subjugation. This sense of threat was even visible in August 1914; but, by the spring of 1918, it was heightened, the risk of German invasion referred to in the press as ‘very great’.Footnote 113 Lloyd George's telegram had warned of German tyranny ‘not only over Europe but over Asia as well’, and Indian fears of German-inspired invasion carry strong echoes of British paranoid fantasies of the period.Footnote 114 Shri Venkateshwar worried that ‘Germans might induce the half-civilised Muhammedans of central Asia’ to believe Indian Muslims would help them, ‘the impending invasion’ therefore being ‘like the Muhammedan invasions of old, carrying fire and sword destroying the sacred places of the Hindus’.Footnote 115 Such fears represented the extreme end of the spectrum; the press more broadly expressed rather a foreseeable future vulnerability of British India vis-à-vis external enemies, likely inspired by Germany. Tilak in the Kesari, for instance, named Persia and Turkistan as Germany's props for an assault on Asia ‘in future’.Footnote 116 As he elsewhere put it:
If Home Rule is not granted, the Empire is in danger of being one day crippled . . . India cannot hereafter be defended by the naval and military forces of Great Britain simply because there are none. . . . India must be trained to defend herself.Footnote 117
Rast Goftar agreed that if the ‘peril of a German descent is to be averted for ever India must have a national army’.Footnote 118
There was, in any case, a good deal of slippage regarding the supposed ‘condition’ of the grant of Home Rule. Within his censured speech, Tilak gave a classic expression of the demand: why ‘should we come forward to protect that India in which we have no rights’ and in which ‘we are treated like slaves?’Footnote 119 But, rather than insisting upon full political rights, he concluded that, if full commissions as officers were offered, giving Indians ‘the same rights as Europeans, two or ten lakhs [200,000 or 1,000,000] of people would this day be ready to die’.Footnote 120 As a measure of his personal investment in this issue, a few days earlier, he had stated that, were they granted, he could guarantee 25,000 recruits from Maharashtra and offered to personally give Rs 100 for every recruit short of 5,000 enlisted within six months.Footnote 121 It was not the only time during these weeks he would adopt such a dual stance.Footnote 122 At the same juncture, Indu Prakash seemed to agree that opening ‘higher military appointments’ would help overcome ‘difficulties in the way of recruitment’; and Servant of India argued similarly, adding related demands including the removal of the British ‘innate sense of racial hauteur’.Footnote 123 The demand for commissions can be viewed as an important part of the militarization agenda, offering schooling in military leadership. This was especially true given the preoccupation with the enlistment of the educated. Tilak argued that the middle class (‘madhyam varga’), for him synonymous with the ‘learned class’, were not to be expected to enlist just ‘like day labourers on tea plantations’ and Jinnah was most explicit that the educated would not enlist without commissions; their withholding, beyond the most tokenistic concessions, during the war might explain the frequent complaint that the educated classes were effectively barred from recruitment.Footnote 124 This demand may therefore have also reflected the lax response to enlistment among ‘the educated classes’, deflecting embarrassment at it, and attempting to improve it. The grant of commissions, rather than Home Rule, was perhaps considered the minimum requirement to inspire their enlistment, and was also intrinsically useful. It thus took precedence over any other professed conditions.
It seems likely, indeed, that the fluctuations in the conditions applied to recruitment efforts reflected primarily simply the confidence that those conditions would be met. Thus, the desire for enlistment was voiced from the outset of the war, when recruitment was still relatively restricted; the Home Rule demands expressed increasingly concertedly from 1915 were set in this context. By early 1917, with the first extension of military opportunities, no stringent conditions were attached. The response to the announcement in February 1917 of the IDF is telling. Kesari’s initial reaction was of calculating scepticism. ‘Our leaders have advised us to enter military service unconditionally’, it stated, but ‘we shall indulge in a little plain speaking’.Footnote 125 The move ‘simply means that that today Government cannot do without our aid’, there being no other reason why they would ‘withhold the boon’ so long. Kesari, like other papers, wished distinctions between ‘black and white subjects’ to be removed and for higher military posts to be opened; Indians would ‘shoulder the rifle so long as we can do it with self-respect’. Enlistment would depend ‘upon the Government's reply’.Footnote 126 When the disappointing reply came, Tilak editorialized for Kesari mildly that the government ‘could have been more open and welcoming’, but abjured boycotting the force: ‘Many believe and argue that until there is no distinction between black and white in the military, no thinking and patriotic (“deshabhimani”) black soldier will feel like joining the army’, but ‘it is not correct to hold this bias and stay away’; Indians should ‘join the army without reservations’.Footnote 127 His own son joined the following month.Footnote 128 Tilak's line was echoed by, among others, Message, Sandesh, and Gujarati, the latter expressing itself ‘thankful for small mercies’.Footnote 129 Newspapers were explicit that the force, which was widely if somewhat erroneously written of as an extension of the regular army, represented a ‘tide . . . in the flood of Indian progress’; Gujarati was simply ‘afraid the war will come to an end before the valour’ of the IDF ‘can be put to the test’ and Dnyan Prakash felt it a ‘fine opportunity’ for military training.Footnote 130 Tilak himself agreed, worried that ‘this time will not come again and again’.Footnote 131 The retreat from the initial conditions underlines these incentives, while also probably reflecting an acknowledgement that the force, limited and inessential as it was, could scarcely be bargained over. By 1918, the sluggish army enlistment in Bombay Presidency, along with the state's desperate need for recruits, actually strengthened the bargaining position, just as fears over sluggish enlistment encouraged more demands to be made. After the Montagu Declaration of August 1917, immediate demands for Home Rule were also more plausible, even if some newspapers in 1918 listed lesser political demands as a quid pro quo, such as the release of political prisoners, the repeal of the Press Act, or the amelioration of agricultural conditions.Footnote 132 That Mahratta, mouthpiece of the Home Rule movement, in fact still insisted in May 1918 on unconditional enlistment shows not its lesser concern with achieving self-government, but its (correct) scepticism that such a grant would be made; it was better to encourage enlistment for, as it had pointed out the previous year, ‘the soldier's qualities are a necessary factor against the crushing bureaucracy’.Footnote 133
The grant of Home Rule, then, as condition or reward, only explains to a limited extent the call to enlist in India. Those fervently espousing conditionality tended, indeed, to slip towards unconditional advocacy of enlistment. This tendency is best explained by the inherent value fighting had in the minds of Indian elites. The preoccupation with the physical and martial weakness of Indians was at the heart of this—a heavily gendered insecurity that these elites felt on behalf of India at large and which fighting offered to assuage.
Conclusion
The self-reproach of weakness and effeminacy was tied to complaints over the effects of colonialism, specifically the demilitarization of the population. This reflected not merely restricted recruitment to the army, but other, long-standing colonial policies, particularly the Arms Act of 1878—a measure held to have effectively disarmed all India. For Jinnah, among the most ‘burning questions’ addressed at Bombay Provincial Conference in 1916 were not only the admission of Indians to the commissioned ranks, but ‘the most irritating and humiliating’ bar from Indians forming military volunteer corps and the ‘unjust application of the Arms Act’.Footnote 134 The 1918 manifesto he and others signed echoed this, noting the act ‘completed India's abject helplessness’.Footnote 135 In a phrase that echoed one of Tilak's speeches, Gandhi chided his would-be recruits: ‘Today we are unable to protect our women and children even against wild animals.’Footnote 136 But, whereas Tilak had bemoaned that Indians, because of the Arms Act, had to request police help against ‘the depravations of a tiger in the jungle’, for Gandhi, Indians were ‘People afraid of even a squirrel’, who ‘had much better think of improving their own condition than of getting Swaraj’.Footnote 137 Martial strength itself was conflated with manliness—a relationship likely influenced by statements of martial races ideology that seeped from the Indian Army into the press and popular consciousness in India. Both demilitarization itself and the open expression of the rationale for restricting military recruitment—the effeminacy of the bulk of the population—incentivized military experience. The reaction went deeper than simply desiring to strengthen so as to better agitate for political rights, though of course that sense was important; it was a generalized self-perception of Indians’ physical feebleness every bit as marked as that which John Rosselli in his seminal study held to be unique to the self-perception of the late nineteenth-century Bengali elite.Footnote 138 As Rosselli himself notes, the Bengali militant nationalist Sarala Debi's emphasis on physical culture was in fact influenced by western Indian culture and Tilak's writings in particular, which were likely driven by some of the same insecurities.Footnote 139 It seems likely that these held good for swathes of India, the cardinal distinction being between those areas most extensively recruited from up to 1916, and those overlooked—although it may also be that the relatively low enlistment thereafter gave rise to more insistent calls and underlined the fear of a generalized enervation in the region. An aggravating factor to these was the belief in India that the world in general was increasingly militarized and competitive. This was most obviously reflected in 1918, with the fear of ‘combinations inspired by Germany’ invading Indian soil. Global politics, auguring a perhaps greater threat than the humiliations of colonialism, rendered more anxious the cry of ‘weak and emasculated India’.Footnote 140
In this context, the war appealed as an opportunity for Indians not only to militarize, but also to develop their mettle fighting Europeans. And the false assumption that Japan had been approached by Britain to defend India by 1917 was a telling self-indictment. The foremost Asian military power appealed to, and haunted, the imagination of Indians at this moment; its triumph against a European power was both instructive and acidulating, emphasizing India's weakness. Lok Sevak pointedly noted in August 1914 that ‘if the Viceroy desired he could raise in three months 30 million soldiers in India’ ‘just as Japan trained lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of soldiers in the Russo-Japanese war’.Footnote 141
This sense of self-reproach is underlined by a consideration of Indian calls to militarize from around 1880, when the characteristic features of India's ‘demartialization’ were becoming clear. Bombay newspapers during the war in fact showed themselves very conscious of this history. The Gujarati caustically noted in response to the IDF announcement that ‘Congress has been trying to get military training for Indians for thirty years’. Now it had been offered, ‘who should be thanked’?Footnote 142 Some who supported conditional enlistment by 1918 had in fact been arguing for military volunteering and training for over 30 years. Most notable, perhaps, was Tilak. At the height of the ‘native volunteering movement’ occasioned by the apparent Russian threat in 1885, he stated: ‘What we want is the free use if arms and a little training in the handling of warlike weapons.’ The ‘present slenderness of frame and want of hardihood’ may have discouraged the authorities, but there were ‘the result of a neglect of physical training’.Footnote 143 In the heat of this controversy, the Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885; at only its second meeting, it passed a resolution on volunteering, decrying the crushing of martial spirit to be a ‘terrible and irreparable injury’, the Arms Act leaving ‘people and livestock at the mercy of wild beasts’; what was needed was ‘self-reliance which enables a man to dare, which makes men brave, which makes them worthy of the name of men’.Footnote 144 After seconding, there was no discussion, the president noting that it is one of the ‘few questions’ on which ‘no difference of opinion exists, throughout the whole of India’.Footnote 145 The following saw the first of many resolutions on the granting of army commissions and the foundation of military colleges for training Indians; in 1888, all of these were combined in a further resolution, supported by the Bombay representative Pherozeshah Mehta with the words ‘you cannot, and ought not, to emasculate a whole nation’.Footnote 146 A concern over the perilously militarized world even accompanied these calls. As early as 1886, the motion against the Arms Act was justified by such ‘gigantic armies and armaments’. There was ‘trouble in store for the whole civilised world’; it was predicted: ‘sooner or later a tremendous military struggle will commence’, with India ‘the scene of any serious attack’ by European powers upon Great Britain.Footnote 147 As has been noted, the South African War of 1899–1902 led to calls from India's press and politicians for Indians to be sent to fight to show their ‘gallantry’, as well as to win political rights in return.Footnote 148 Gandhi, too, as Misra points out, urged an orthodox self-strengthening, including the creation of a military volunteer force as late as the Bambata war of 1906; his subsequent satyagraha can be seen as a martial method—even in its bodily discipline, a drastic reformulation of his previous advocacy of ‘soldierly’ meat-eating.Footnote 149
Such long-run calls to militarize were not simply undifferentiated, of course. General war in Europe presented new opportunities for Indians. At one level, the state's need for recruits, even its potential need in 1914, made more realistic the prospect of achieving greater political rights. Military experience might strengthen Indians to agitate for them—a view occasionally explicit and likely more broadly persuasive. Such a view is also entirely consistent with the felt need to self-strengthen that is so highly visible. Likewise, the apparent bargaining for Home Rule in exchange for enlistment would achieve both of these complementary aims—a notion neatly encapsulated by Kesari’s endorsement of the Irish ‘dual policy’ of Home Rule and conscription for India. The Bombay Home Rule League itself was, it should be noted, quasi-militaristic in its style, its flags and uniforms, as attested by contemporary images by the Bombay photographer, N. V. Virkar.Footnote 150 The appetite for militarization, indeed, went even further than conscription: Jinnah, for instance, called for boys aged 16–18 to have ‘local military service’, to form the reserve and militia of a national army, while Praj Mitra and Parsi urged ‘the necessity’ of ‘immediately making suitable arrangements in every school and college for giving military training to our young men’.Footnote 151
The desire to militarize and even to engage in war, particularly under circumstances of heightened international competition, appears consistent with social Darwinist thought in Britain and throughout Europe in the same period, and its direct influence on some of these figures, occasionally apparent, is likely. Indeed, the hypercompetitiveness and militarism of the contemporary international order, and the prevalence of Social Darwinist thought, both contributed to global valorization of martiality in this period. The example of Japan, as we have seen, provided direct inspiration for Indian self-strengtheners: many would have ascribed its own success, moreover, to its muscular patriotism and inculcation of a warrior ethos, through which, recent writing notes, martial arts classes were sanctioned in schools as part of a ‘Spencerian struggle’, and a deliberate effort was made to make military values dominant in society.Footnote 152 Such calls for self-strengthening were also a particular part of the experience of other societies that considered themselves dominated by European imperialism, such as China, or in the case of the Ottoman empire, a state that conceived itself to be facing an existential threat from predatory powers: the ‘Young Turks’, it has been noted, not only put faith in ‘militaristic attitudes’ inspired by social Darwinism, but many also even served in the Japanese army.Footnote 153
Indians, too, seem to have been directly influenced by Social Darwinist thought. In August 1914, Mahratta mused that wars ‘purge the nations of their “unfit”’ as well as bringing ‘out the higher elements in human nature’.Footnote 154 This statement recalls the work of Friedich von Bernhardi, or perhaps Karl Pearson; both might conceivably have influenced it.Footnote 155 Suggestions in the press that men found begging in Bombay should be recruited hinted at a similar concern for social hygiene.Footnote 156 This gives further evidence of the purchase that forms of social Darwinist thought emphasizing collective efficiency could have in colonial Indian conditions.Footnote 157 The viceroy's statement to the Delhi War Conference of 1918 certainly seemed to assume it: ‘the nations are being tried by fire’, Chelmsford said, ‘and the dross is being purged away.’Footnote 158 Extending military service was certainly consistent with a concern for ‘national efficiency’. Thus, somewhat ironically, Indians’ response to the colonial notion of ‘martial races’—in part expressing quasi-Darwinian conceptions of inherited racial capabilities—was notably sceptical. The voices encountered in this article urged the recapture of martial virtues by those outside the ‘so-called martial races’, expressing a hostility to the notion per se as well as to its restricted membership. If the loss of martial traditions meant that most Indians did not have the ‘strong physique’ to stand ‘the stress of modern warfare’, modern war, conversely, would be a school to create the modern Indian male body.Footnote 159 This argument must not be pushed too far: for some, recruitment was still to be limited to the ‘better’ communities, as Tilak's hostility to Mahar recruitment shows. An echo of former colonial recruitment dogma, this is also a reminder that Indian social hierarchies and perceptions had a marked effect on its formation, as we have seen. Many of the figures discussed in this article argued for their own communities, or to the community of ‘the educated’ to which they almost uniformly considered themselves to belong. But it is demonstrable that many such figures, though they may have vociferously demanded leadership roles within a combatant force as their natural due, were not only interested in their own development. Their diagnosis of Indians’ weakness in general may well have been sharpened by a self-perception of physical underdevelopment, and their position in society gave them a confidence in understanding its needs, as it also gave them a sense of responsibility to encourage India's general renewal through its experience of war.
