This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. BETWEEN SELF AND SOLDIER: INDIAN SIPAHIS AND THEIR TESTIMONY DURING THE TWO WORLD WARS By Gajendra Singh Thesis submitted to the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History 2009 ! ! "! ! Abstract 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. ! ! """! ! Declaration I affirm that this thesis is entirely my own composition, represents my own original research and has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification except as specified. Signed: Gajendra Singh ! ! "#! ! To my parents, who raised me and In memory of the late Colonel Pritam Singh (INA) Jai Hind! ! ! #! ! Contents Abstract page i Declaration iii Acknowledgements vi Abbreviations vii Glossary viii Introduction 1 1 In Search of Colonial Negatives: Martial Race Theories, Recruiting 11 Handbooks, and the Indian Army 2 The Perils of ‘Oriental Correspondence’: Writing at the Margins of the 39 Soldier’s Letter 3 Throwing Snowballs in France: (Re-) Writing a Letter and (Re-) 71 Appraising Islam, 1915-1918 4 Mutiny, Fabricating Court Testimony and Hiding in the Latrine: The 98 5th Light Infantry in Singapore 5 ‘Breaking the Chains with Which We Were Bound’: The Interrogation 126 Chamber, The Indian National Army and the Negation of Military Identities, 1941-1947 Towards a Conclusion 151 Appendix I 158 Appendix II 166 Appendix III 171 Bibliography 174 ! ! #"! ! Acknowledgements I would not have got far with this thesis without funding or the help of my Supervisors. I am indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for funding my doctoral research, and for additional travel grants. I am equally appreciative to Crispin Bates for his rigorous and good-humoured supervision, and for the intellectually stimulating advice of Markus Daechsel. There have been numerous people whose advice I have sought and who have helped this thesis a great deal. If I haven’t mentioned you below, I apologize, and feel free to pat yourself on the back. Thanks firstly to Ben Schiller, who has been a good friend, office-mate, and was kind enough to read the thesis from cover to cover before submission. I am sure I could have submitted the thesis six months earlier if we had not constantly distracted each other but it would only have been half as fun. Thanks are also due to Ashok Malhotra, Syed Hussain Shaheed Soherwordi, Tom Lloyd, Tim Siddons, Moritz Baumstark, Christian Hogsbjerg and Jose Anthony for their friendship, advice, reading parts of my thesis, and for offering me cups of coffee which I am yet to repay. There is an array of people who have pointed me to useful readings, or offered titbits of advice. They include (in no particular order): Owen Dudley Edwards, Paul Nugent, Tom Webster, Ian Duffield, Bob Morris, (the late) Victor Kiernan, Sumit Sarkar, Santanu Das, Ravi Ahuja, Willem van Schendel, Kaushik Roy and Franziska Roy. Numerous archivists have offered me help, the names of most of whom I sadly (and somewhat guiltily) cannot remember. I do remember Annamaria Motrescu who helped me sift through the Film Archive at (what was formerly) the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol; and the staff at the Private Archives section of the National Archives of India. Thanks also to the late Sardar Pritam Singh (Colonel, INA) who was not an archivist but a warm and entertaining host and interviewee. Finally, thanks are due to my family. To my parents, Sardar Satinder Singh and Sardarni Jagdish Kaur, who (weirdly) did not mind me embarking on the crazy path of a PhD. And to my brother, Sukhmeet Singh, who listened patiently as I read parts of my thesis to him. ! ! #""! ! Abbreviations CIH Central India Horse CIM Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France CSDIC(I) Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (India) DMI Directorate of Military Intelligence HKSRA Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery INA Indian National Army PM Punjabi Musalman/Muslim MEMC Middle East Military Censorship: Fortnightly Summaries Covering Indian Troops NWFP North West Frontier Province RIASC Royal Indian Army Service Corp SMR Report in Connection with the Mutiny of the 5th Light Infantry at Singapore (1915) UP United Provinces of Agra and Awadh (now Uttar Pradesh) ! ! #"""!! Glossary al-Dhajjal/al-Dajjal The Muslim False Messiah/Antichrist, whose appearance is to precede the Day of Judgement. anna One sixteenth of a rupee or 4 paise. ata Flour. Azad Hind Fauj Lit. ‘The Army of Free India’. The official name of the INA after its reformation under Subhas Chandra Bose. battalion A body of soldiers, composed of 8 companies, and numbering 750 Indian officers and men. bhailawa (Reputedly) a plant, the seeds of which were used by washermen to mark clothes. Bharat Mata Ki Jai! Long Live Mother India! bidi/beedi Thin, often flavoured, Indian cigarette. bigha Unit used to measure an area of land. It varied in size throughout colonial India, but was generally less than an acre. brigade A body of soldiers, composed of regiments/battalions, and forming part of a division. bulbul A type of South Asian songbird. charas Hashish. chatak A small unit of weight measurement roughly equivalent to an ounce. There are 16 chataks in 1 seer. company A unit of infantry, composed of platoons, and forming one eighth of a battalion or regiment. crore Ten million. dafadar An Indian cavalry NCO, corresponding to a sergeant. dal Split pulses. Doaba Lit. ‘Two Rivers’ or ‘Land of the Two Rivers’. Refers to the area of Punjab between the Ravi and Sutlej rivers. dhikr Islamic devotional recitation of the name of God. dhobi Washerman. dhoti Rectangular piece of unstitched cloth, usually around 7 yards long, wrapped around the waist and legs and knotted at the waist. Traditionally worn by Hindus in northern India. division A body of soldiers, composed of brigades, and forming part of a corps. durbar A state reception given by Indian princes for a British sovereign or by an Indian prince for his subjects; the court of an Indian prince. F Kikan Japanese military intelligence operation established during the Second World War.