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This project started as an attempt to understand rank-and-file resistance within the colonial Indian army. My reasons for doing so were quite simple. Colonial Indian soldiers were situated in the divide between the colonizers and the colonized. As a result, they rarely entered colonialist narratives written by and of the British officer or nationalist accounts of the colonial military. The writers of contemporary post-colonial histories have been content to maintain this lacuna, partly because colonial soldiers are seen as not sufficiently ‘subaltern’ to be the subjects of their studies. The more I investigated the matter, the more I realized how important it was to move beyond ideas of resistance and collaboration. If sipahis (or sepoys) were between the two poles of colonizer and colonized, so their day-to-day existence fell between notions of resistance or collaboration. The problem I still had was finding a means by which I could recover the voice of the colonial soldier. Locating the testimony of Indian sipahis was not as difficult as I first feared. Thousands of censored 'Indian Mails' from the two World Wars were stored by the India Office at Whitehall and are now within the archived records of the British Library. A similar number of interrogation reports of Indian military personnel who defected to the Indian National Army during the Second World War, and subsequently fought for the independence of India, have recently been declassified by the Indian Ministry of Defence and handed to the National Archives of India. Finally, depositions given by soldiers during courts martial in the early part of the twentieth century have survived in several archives. But none of these sources offered a holistic glimpse of what soldiers thought and felt. The presence of the censor, interrogator and the courtroom was literally written across the page and conditioned the voice of the sipahi contained therein. The solution I have adopted in this thesis is to treat the heteroglot nature of these forms of testimony as reflective of Indian soldiers' own heteroglossia. Even though the spaces in which soldiers could speak were compromised, they could nonetheless provide opportunities for soldiers to push the boundaries of what was permissible and what was not. The form of the letter was used to further illicit activities and pass on news of discontent or trouble at home. The space of the colonial courtroom was reappropriated by sipahis in order to thwart the prosecution of their peers. The interrogation chamber was a forum for many soldiers to demonstrate that they no longer considered themselves subject to the rigours of British military discipline. In each example, however, it was not only the boundaries of sipahis' testimony that were being distended, but the boundaries of their own identities. Thus the nature of my thesis is to demonstrate how soldiers could re-read and re-write their own roles within the colonial Indian Army.

The British Indian Army, formed from the old presidency armies of the East India Company in 1895, was one of the pillars upon which Britain’s world empire rested. While much has been written on the colonial and global campaigns fought by the Indian Army as a tool of imperial power, comparatively little has been written about the transition of the army from British to Indian control after the end of the Second World War. While independence meant the transition of the force from imperial rule to that of civilian oversight by India’s new national leadership, the Dominion of India inherited thousands of former colonial soldiers, including two generations of British and Indian officers indoctrinated in military and cultural practices developed in the United Kingdom, in colonial India and across the British Empire. The goal of this paper is to examine the legacy of the British Empire on the narrative, ethos, culture, tactics and strategies employed by the Indian Army after 1945, when the army began to transition from British to Indian rule, up to 1973 when the government of India reinstituted the imperial rank of Field Marshal. While other former imperial officers would continue to serve in the army up to the end of the 20th century, the first thirty years after independence were a formative period in the history of the Indian Army, that saw it fight four major wars and see the final departure of white British officers from its ranks. While it became during this time a truly national army, the years after independence were one in which its legacy as an arm of imperial power was debated, and eventually transformed into a key component of military identity in the post-colonial era.

This thesis analyses the nation-building work that the Indian Army undertook during the military administration of Malaya, 1945-6. This was a two-part process, taking in military-led relief work and a political reform scheme. Historians have conducted little work on the Indian Army’s role in the British return to empire in Malaya, thus the army’s crucial and nuanced role has been overlooked. This limits the understanding of the army’s institutional development and role in Malayan nation-building between 1945-6. This thesis redresses this. It argues that the military administration of Malaya encapsulated the culmination of wartime changes to the role of the Indian Army fighting soldier. Whereas before the war the Indian Army found it expedient to keep its soldiers isolated from current affairs, British experience during the Second World War instead suggested that soldiers educated in current affairs could be very effective. Concurrently, British military leaders began to think on the role of the Indian Army and its men after the war. They concluded that the Indian Army’s soldiers could become catalysts of national political and social development, and initially identified this as a role for the army in post-war India. Furthermore, it was felt that the Indian Army could contribute both to the Commonwealth and United Nations ideals. The return to Malaya encapsulated these changes to the conception of the Indian Army soldier and was a practical expression and measure of these. The soldiers became agents of political change, imperial re-entrenchment and administration – which this thesis terms ‘soldier-administrators’. The Indian Army, it is argued, was deployed consciously as a nation-building force, using the new thinking on the role of Indian Army soldiers. In so doing, the Indian Army partook in targeted schemes for military relief, political reform and nation-building to try to build the new Malayan nation.