In his memoirs, Maurice Willoughby, a British junior officer who served in India in the 1930s, recalled a notable frontier incident: “When the Royal Welch Fusiliers, whose Regimental Mascot is a large white goat, arrived at Landi Kotal in the heart of Pathan Afridi country, the locals were puzzled. ‘What! Only one goat among so many?’ Later the Goat Corporal was the subject of one of the most celebrated court martials in the British Army; that of being charged ‘Contrary to Good order and Military Discipline, he did upon certain dates, Prostitute the King's Goat.’ Apparently he had found himself a nice little earner hiring the animal out to local tribesmen” (Singh, at 28). In using this incident to illustrate increasingly negative interwar British attitudes toward Pathans, Gajendra Singh shows that he has the historian's eye for the resonant anecdote and revealing detail. Furthermore, he reminds us that warfare is not simply a continuation of politics by other means—it is also a cultural activity.
The aim of Singh's book is to analyze Indian soldiers' testimonies—particularly through letters, reports of prisoner interrogations, and court martial records. Singh argues that “soldiers were able to manipulate their partial presence in the final texts of their testimonies in order to make their voices more pronounced,” but also that “soldiers could be manipulated by the testimonies they produced” (8). He stresses the importance of viewing testimony “as a process, praxis or act and not simply as a word referring to a static text” (8).
In the first two chapters Singh considers how Indian soldiers were seen by the British. Singh reviews the idea of the “martial races” that informed Indian Army recruiting policy from the later nineteenth century. Although his analysis covers much familiar ground, it serves as a useful context for the more original contribution that follows, in which he considers the relationship between colonial paternalism, army discipline, and Indian military law. He identifies a gradual “orientalization” of Indian military law and notes some significant differences in the legal treatment of Indian and British soldiers—Indians could be convicted of “intoxication” (implying the possible use of drugs), while incapable British soldiers were charged with mere “drunkenness.” He also suggests that the Indian Army treated “shell shock” more sympathetically than did the British Army in the Second World War.
Singh then uses British military censorship reports to analyze Indian soldiers' letters in the two world wars. Here he provides a useful overview, emphasizing, for example, wounded Indian soldiers' frustration at the strict regime practiced at one hospital in Brighton in 1915. A weakness of the book is its lack of footnote citations to the existing scholarship. On the treatment of the Indians wounded and the question of the extent of self-inflicted wounds, for example, Singh does not cite important work by Jeffrey Greenhut, Rozina Visram, Alan Lester, and George Morton-Jack.
The next two chapters deal with the engagement of “transnational” Indian Muslim soldiers with Islamic issues during the Great War, analyzing the “conversation” in which they were engaged about their religion and the war. Ahmadiyya propaganda was generally pro-British, but an implicitly anti-imperial “snowball” letter was also circulating among the sepoys. Singh notes the storm of protest that followed the marriage of one Muslim soldier in France to a French woman. In his account of the 1915 Singapore mutiny, he analyzes the testimonies of four Muslim soldiers, coming to the unsurprising conclusion that soldiers on trial for their lives fabricated testimony to avoid incriminating themselves. He argues that the accused “manipulated the contours of the punitive, disciplinary space of the colonial courtroom” (153) and were therefore not “quiescent victims of colonial justice.” Yet the facts are startling: of approximately 400 mutineers, 47 were executed, 137 were sentenced to transportation, and 28 were imprisoned. If they were indeed trying to achieve “manipulation” in the courtroom, then they were not very successful at it.
The final chapter is based on the interrogations of Indian soldiers who joined the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army (INA). Among other things, Singh uses these interrogation reports to reconstruct life in the INA, including the use of theatre as anti-British propaganda. In this chapter Singh does not cite the important 12-volume collection of documents The Transfer of Power, edited by Nicholas Mansergh; doing so could have provided additional context and clarified a key point. He ends the chapter with a quotation from Claude Auchinleck—the last commander-in-chief in undivided India—anchoring his argument that the INA trials showed that “the elements of fantasy that underpinned the colonial Indian Army had been dispelled” (178–79). The quotation reads, “It is quite wrong to adopt the attitude that because these men had been in service in a British controlled Indian Army that therefore their loyalty must be the same as British soldiers. As I have tried to explain, they had no real loyalty towards Britain, not as we understand loyalty” (179). However, the accompanying footnote gives no date or archival source. A version of this document, dated 12 February 1946, appears in volume 6 of The Transfer of Power, and as presented there, Auchinleck's memorandum is a thoughtful reflection on the INA that he sent to army commanders. There the relevant passage reads, “these men had taken service in a British controlled Indian Army” (my emphasis), wording that implies a significantly higher level of commitment to the British-Indian Army than Singh's quoted phrase, “had been in service” (179). (There may, of course, be different versions of the same document, but the crucial discrepancy deserves attention.) Furthermore, Singh does not quote an earlier passage from the document, in which “the Auk” argued that “loyalty [in the British-Indian Army] was focussed on the regiment, and particularly on the regimental officers” (John Connell, Auchinleck [1959], 947), most of whom were then British.
Singh's good conclusion lifts the volume, and there are some useful statistical tables at the end. The use of theory in the book is sometimes a little strained, particularly in the introduction. Several passages in the book consist mainly of long quotations from primary sources; these might have been better integrated into the text. Singh perhaps takes the “hidden transcripts” argument a little too far. Of course, even illiterate soldiers could subvert military censorship or attempt to manipulate courtroom proceedings, but we need to remember that the Singapore mutineers and the INA men were being interrogated or tried (or both) because they were accused of mutiny or treason. They were not typical of Indian Army soldiers. Singh is nevertheless to be congratulated on a nuanced reading of testimonies created under conditions of censorship, interrogation, or even threats of execution.
