Recent years have seen an expansion of studies on the social and cultural aspects of military activities in South Asian history. Especially with regard to the colonial period, the role of the army not only as a major instrument in the apparatus of empire, but as the largest employer in British India and as an arena of contact between Indians and Britons has received the attention of a growing number of historians. As one of the latest results of this trend, Nile Green's study on Islam and the Army in Colonial India seeks to explore “the interface between the Army and religion as it found expression among the Indian soldiers of the Hyderabad Contingent between around 1850 and 1930” (p. 3). Despite its title, the author is explicit about the fact that the book is essentially a micro-study, centered on vernacular narratives about the relationship between soldiers of the Hyderabad Contingent and four Muslim faqīrs (three men and one woman). At the same time, Green endeavors to suggest parallels and connections which link the specific case of the Hyderabad Contingent to wider questions surrounding the religious world of the Indian soldiery in Colonial India.

The book is divided into three chapters. In the first, Green discusses “traditions of supernatural warfare” (p. 17) and the role of holy men among the armies of precolonial South Asia, drawing upon his own studies in Deccan history as well as recent scholarship on the military history of India. Chapter 2 deals mainly with the life of Afzal Shāh Biyābānī of Qazipeth and his interactions with the sepoys stationed in the Hanamkonda cantonment in the mid-nineteenth century. Similarly, the third and last chapter turns around the attachment of the soldiery of the Aurangabad cantonment to the antinomian faqīr Banē Miyān, and shortly discusses two further instances of military personnel's involvement in the networks of antinomian faqīrs beyond the borders of Hyderabad State through the cases of Tāj al-dīn Bābā of Nagpur and Bābā Jān of Pune.

What emerges from Green's account of these holy men and women and their military followers is an in depth account of the interface between the life-world of the soldiers, their needs, concerns and experiences, and their attachment to individuals who were credited with the power to intercede and act on behalf of their followers in times of need. Based on early-twentieth century Urdu biographies of the faqīrs that draw on the accounts of individual sepoys about the faqīr's miraculous power, Green demonstrates the importance of faqīrs in the religious life of the Empire's Indian soldiery. By paying close attention to the concerns of the Urdu biographies, the interpretive framework through which Muslim sepoys made sense of their lives and contemporary events is partly recovered and put in relation to the often quite different interpretive lens of Briton evangelical officers, military historians and army physicians regarding matters as diverse as the role of army chaplains, perceptions of the festive and carnivalesque, the use of narcotics, or the interpretation of “madness.” Furthermore, the role of the army in spreading the fame and following of faqīrs through its networks of cantonment settlements is also given attention.

Through his sensitive reading of the relevant sources, Green is able to identify certain characteristics of “barracks Islam,” as he calls it, namely “the soldiers' demands for protection from danger, promotion in their careers and the festive provision of pleasure” (p. 137). The book succeeds in capturing something of the colonial soldiery's “Islam in the flesh” (p. 2) beyond the intellectual concerns with an abstract “Sufism” and the activities of Muslim reformers which form the staple fare of accounts of Islam in colonial South Asia. One might perhaps take issue with some of Green's conclusions. While he amply demonstrates the extent to which his occupation influenced the character of the sepoy's Islam, one wonders whether positing a “barracks Islam” might not unnecessarily divorce the religious life of the sepoy from that of the society around him. After all, the desire for protection from adversity, success in one's occupation, and the carnivalesque characterize the religious practice of many Muslims in the colonial Deccan peninsular, whether they soldiers, traders or peasants. Similarly, Green's short account of the fairly sudden demise of this “barracks Islam” in the face of reformist pressures from the 1910s onwards does not fully convince. The simple fact of greater exposure to reformist ideas can hardly explain why soldiers would be convinced by these ideas. After all, the Indian soldier in the Age of World Wars was in a sense even more in need of supernatural assistance than his comrade a generation earlier, and Green himself points out how accounts of the miraculous proliferated among the British soldiery in the First World War despite the rejection of such accounts by theologians and historians (pp. 29–30). Yet these issues also show the range of questions that Green's book opens up for debate. Islam and the Army in Colonial India deserves to be widely read among scholars of religion as well as historians of the army and the administration of health under colonial rule.