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Empire’s First Soldiers
Whether we read of the accounts of our first war of Independence of 1857 (Tantia Tope, Nana Fadnavis, Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi) or of the various Maratha, Sikh and Burma wars or the 1962 war with China or the decisive three wars with Pakistan in 1947, 1965 and 1971, and her treacherous intrusion into the Siachen Glacier in 1984. We admiringly hear the inspiring saga of the heroic deeds of our soldiers who, unmindful of the consequences, pushed forward to face and overpower the enemy to secure the honour of their motherland. The author is as unflinching in his praise of the British soldiers and their leaders who established their empire in India as in his admiration of the patriotic Indian soldiers who fought for their motherland. He writes: "From the perspective of my story, Robert Clive, who with barely 200 sepoys and 100 Europeans under him, successfully defended the fort at Arcot against a 15,000-strong Mughal army, was as much a hero as Haider Ali who, riding at the head of his swashbuckling cavalry, outwitted the British and terrorised them into submission at Madras." Even the freedom that we got in 1947, the author is of opinion, is the gift of our patriotic soldiers (on February 18, 1946, the ratings of the Royal Indian Navy rose in an open mutiny, which for a few days assumed serious proportions), the sudden volatility the nationalist movement had gained with the trial of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army officers and the threat of impending Civil War due to communal tensions which the Indian Army would have been called upon to tackle. Thus, in a strange way, the author argues, the Indian soldier, without whom Britain could not have created her empire, had himself proven inherently instrumental in dismantling it. Therefore, the impact of the armed forces in propelling the country towards her freedom has been profound. Thus, this book is about the nation’s soldiers who made the empire and broke it as well. Though it is the story of the entire Indian soldiery, it is basically and essentially of the southern Indian soldier or the ‘Madras soldier’, as he is popularly identified. The author stresses again and again that the Indian Army is one of the best things that could have happened in this country. It is Great Britain’s invaluable gift to this nation. Writing about the border war with China in 1962, the author is filled with anguish and indignation, and rails against the political leadership of the time that was responsible for the humiliation of this great and glorious Army that the British had painstakingly raised and built during two centuries of their rule. See, how he describes the unholy debacle: "It was an uncalled for war forced on an unprepared Army by a national leadership which couldn’t have been more naive. Having provoked a powerful neighbour into open aggression by its unrealistic foreign policy, the Government of India perpetrated the unpardonable sin of committing the troops for an operation, for which they were least prepared and wholly ill-equipped, blatantly ignoring the counsel of its field commanders. The result was a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude. The Indian Army, always exalted for its glorious victories in the field, was to be meted out a drubbing it would find hard to live down ... a sad and shameful commentary on a proud nation and its Army that for that moment in history, we found ourselves at the enemy’s mercy."
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THE theme of this book is
to explain how India has stood to benefit from professional soldiering
during the last 250 years. This extremely engaging narrative is about
battles, about men who fought them and about those who led them. The
heroes, whether in the battle of Adyar in 1746 or that of Plassey in
1756 or in various theatres of combat during the First and Second World
Wars in 1914-18 and 1939-45 across Asia, Africa and Europe, or as late
as in 1999 during the Kargil conflict, were soldiers who fought
heroically with the motto "Theirs is not to reason why"
engraved on their breasts. This is true of all soldiers irrespective of
the fact where they came from or which side they fought on.