In Chapter 4, the third case study investigates how martyrdom discourse was deployed by Sikhs during World War I. It begins with an analysis of the social and cultural situation at the turn of the twentieth century in Punjab, from where the majority of Sikh sepoys hailed, and the resulting relationships with the imperialist British Raj. After examining the socioeconomic conditions that led Sikhs to enlist in the British Indian Army, I discuss how a military mindset constructed a particular idea of Sikh character. The chapter proceeds with an analysis of Sikh traditions of martyrdom and the way the British Empire was colored as a prophesized entity, and therefore actions in its service construed as a sacred duty. Simultaneously, I describe the antagonism felt for the British Empire by emigrant Sikh communities especially in North America, creating a bifurcation of perspectives reflected in approval or dismissal of the self-sacrifice of Sikh soldiers and the creation of anticolonial martyr forms. The chapter concludes with an examination of how the failed promises of the British government following the war marginalized those Sikh martyrs who fell in their ranks during World War I.

White officers’ claim that they alone could wield that blade that “ruled” India became a dominant ideology within the colonial state in the early nineteenth century. This chapter argues that this “stratocracy” was the product of two entangled phenomena, rooted in the Company’s growing paramountcy over India’s military landscape. At the turn of the nineteenth century, sepoys, European soldiers, and officers faced a diminished military labor market with few opportunities for employment outside of the Company’s aegis. In 1806, frustrated at these limits and changes in the Company’s service, sepoys launched a violent, but brief mutiny at the garrison of Vellore, galvanizing a wave of colonial panic about further unrest. When in 1809 white officers launched their own mutiny in Madras, they warned that refusing their demands would shatter their control over their sepoys – leading to another Vellore. The gambit worked: The civilian governor of Madras was recalled in disgrace and the mutinying officers escaped without punishment. For decades to come, the rhetoric first articulated in 1809 remained a powerful tool through which military officials overruled civilians in Company affairs.

The East India Company’s empire rested on its sepoys – its sprawling army of Indian recruits. The emergence of the sepoy army has usually been understood as a tactical innovation, in which European-style discipline was introduced to an Indian setting. This chapter argues instead that the growth of the sepoy army should be seen as an ideological development. The use of indigenous recruits and other non-Europeans for military labor had a long history across the British Empire as a whole. In much of the empire, including the Company’s earliest trading factories, this practice had been coded as anomalous by colonial elites eager to maintain a monopoly on the prestige of formal military service. Efforts by colonists to preserve that exclusive control made armies and militias across the empire some of the first institutions to be formally segregated along racialized lines. In much of the Atlantic empire, nonwhite military labor was marginalized and rendered invisible. In the Company’s settlements, in contrast, the sepoy became a highly visible symbol of empire – rendered valuable only because of an allegedly transformative system of European command, leadership, and discipline.

In the last half of the eighteenth century, the East India Company’s formal armies expanded from a few undermanned garrisons to a sprawling field force of more than one hundred thousand sepoys. How was the Company able to build such a force so quickly, and what drew recruits to the service? This chapter places the Company’s sepoy armies within the wider military landscape of India, focusing on the south where the Company’s earliest military expansion took place. Some of the Company’s first Indian officers, including Muhammad Yusuf Khan, saw its armies as unique professional opportunities through which to circumvent established political and social hierarchies in India. Company officials, though, were uncomfortable with such ambitions and quickly took steps to stymie them. As opportunities for advancement within the Company shrank, though, sepoys looked for more creative ways to realize their aspirations, including deserting the Company to seek further promotions in another army. The interplay between the Company’s ever-growing need for military labor and sepoys’ own desires to capitalize on their value as soldiers radically reshaped the military economy in South India and beyond.

The end of the East India Company came suddenly. In 1857, sepoys and colonial subjects across North India rose in a wave of rebellions that brought the Company near to collapse. Bloodily suppressing the revolt, the British state dissolved the Company, beginning the period of Crown rule in India. The Company’s armies were incorporated into the broader British military infrastructure, a development that has often been seen a natural extension of this transfer. This chapter inverts that assumption, suggesting instead that the end of Company rule was in fact a result of white officers’ failure to preserve their autonomy. For decades, officers had resisted reform and had extended their influence by arguing that they alone could maintain sepoys’ loyalty. The 1857 rebellions, originating in military garrisons, disproved those claims. The Company’s white soldiers and officers protested the Company’s dissolution – launching their own mutiny in 1859 – but their version of stratocracy proved unpersuasive in the wake of 1857. The Crown’s imperial Raj was no less militaristic than its Company predecessor, but no longer would local officers wield disproportionate influence over its policies.

In 1857, a string of military mutinies soon followed by a series of popular uprisings tore apart the core heartland of colonial India and threatened to unravel the British Raj. Units of the Bengal Army rose up against their British officers and in conjunction with other discontented groups quickly seized key cities and towns. The British were ejected from major centres, and there were genuine fears that the conflagration would spread to other regions of colonial India. The scale of the revolt, and the violence with which it was accompanied, was unprecedented. Moreover, the intense racialization of the conflict and the anxieties it spawned, would shape British military, strategic, and political policy throughout the empire for generations to come. Ultimately, the British were able to restore order, but not without a huge amount of bloodshed, in large part because of a lack of common purpose and organization amongst the rebels. The British benefitted from the fact that the revolts did not spread much beyond the north, leaving much of India tense but quiet. Resources could therefore be more easily pooled and concentrated on the rebels who operated bravely but without direction. Militarily, the revolt was a watershed moment for the British Army and for the British Empire.

I look at India’s role as a hub of circulation of military personnel. During the second half of the eighteenth century, India was a battlefield between the British, the French and Indian powers, in which soldiers of various provenance were mobilised, but most important was the rise of the sepoy armies of the East India Company. Apart from contributing to the establishment of British preponderance in India, the sepoys were also used in expeditions abroad, starting with their participation in an assault against Spanish Manila in 1762. Eschewing an exclusive focus on the military aspect, I scrutinise the archive of sepoy deployments outside India for information about how ‘ordinary’ Indians dealt with foreign lands and foreign people. I pay particular attention to the role of Indian soldiers in the two world wars. I present a case study based on the censored mail of the Indian expeditionary force soldiers sent to France in 1914–15, a rich trove of observations sometimes bordering on ethnographic reportage. After independence, India’s armies continued to play a global role as the largest manpower contributor to UN peacekeeping. I also look at India’s contribution to world peace.