'Best Black Troops in the World': British Perceptions and the Making of the Sepoy, 1746-1805 (review)

The principal prop of the British Indian Empire was the Sepoy Army. Beginning in the 1990s, scholars like Seema Alavi, Douglas Peers and David Omissi have shown interest in the Sepoy Army as a social phenomenon. However, their focus is on the nineteenth century. Channa Wickremesekera, in the book under review, a modified version of his Ph.D. thesis at Monash University in Australia, shifts attention to the eighteenth century.

The British recruited Indian peasants in order to construct what Wickremesekera terms a professional army. The author brings out the contrast between the Western modelled professional Sepoy Army and its Indian opponents. The British introduced elements of the Military Revolution that occurred in early modern Europe. This gave birth to a bureaucratic permanent standing force with a hierarchical officer cadre under centralized state supervision.

But, segmented polities characterized pre-British India. Hence, instead of recruiting directly, the Indian rulers depended on the warlords. The pre-British Indian armies were mainly conglomerations of warriors brought together by the semiautonomous political chiefs. They were known as jobber-commanders and were clan chiefs cum landowners of the villages. This group negotiated with the rulers regarding terms and conditions of service of the men supplied by them. As a consequence, the soldiers were more loyal to their immediate chiefs. And this in turn resulted in frequent desertions and treacheries. However, the Sepoy Army got rid of the jobber-commanders and recruited peasants directly from the villages.

Due to the fragmented structure of the indigenous states, claims Wickremesekera, the Indian princely armies lacked a cohesive command apparatus. An ad hoc grouping of the various chiefs on the battlefield was the general rule. The deployment of the Indian warlords was shaped not so much by their experience of military combat as by the nature of their political alliance with the rulers. Due to the absence of military expertise on the part of the warlords, the soldiers of Indian rulers fought as aggregates of individuals and not as cohesive bodies of soldiers. In contrast, a centralized command and control system was present in the Sepoy Army. The induction of British officers in the Sepoy regiments was a break with Indian military tradition. The white officers constituted a professional body, as they were not allowed to indulge in politics and private trade in return for a hierarchical career pattern.

Thus while the princely armies emphasized individual proficiency at arms, the Sepoy Army under the direction of the white officer corps honed the corporate skill of the warriors. Thus, writes Wickremesekera, the East India Company's army, unlike the pre-British Indian armies, was capable of maneuvering on the battlefield. While the loosely knit indigenous militias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could only be used for conducting raids against the enemy, the tightly knit Sepoy Army was used effectively for permanent annexation of territories after destroying enemy armies in decisive set-piece battles.

Wickremesekera fills a historiographical gap by analyzing the period which witnessed the genesis of the Sepoy Army. Not racial factors but superior organizational techniques transformed the sepoys into "specialists of violence." Wickremesekera's book is a typical example of the growing genre of South Asia's New Military History.