The Garrison State: The Military, Government, and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849-1947 (review)

The American political scientist Harold Lasswell first introduced the term Garrison State in order to characterize the predominance of the military within a polity. John Brewer's military-fiscal model which is partly related to the Garrison State hypothesis encouraged historians in the 1990s to apply the above two concepts for understanding colonial India. C. Bayly and Douglas Peers have used the term Garrison State in order to characterize the East India Company State in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. Tan Tai Yong in his Ph.D. dissertation turned monograph under review here categorizes the British-Indian Empire as a Garrison State. He focuses on the most strategically important region of the British Raj, i.e. Punjab, in order to understand the collapse of the Garrison State in the 1940s.

There is good reason to characterize the Raj in India as a Garrison State. About 35 percent of the government's revenue went to feed Mars, even in peacetime. And the Sepoy Army offered the largest number of government jobs for the colonized. About 20,000 Indians joined the colonial war machine for regular pay and wages in cash. Tan rightly argues that Punjab was the most crucial component of the British-Indian Garrison State. Thanks to the Martial Races theory, from the 1880s Sikhs and Punjabi Muslims dominated the Sepoy Army. Tan, building on the works of Clive Dewey, shows that the Raj in an attempt to appease the Punjabis spent most of its available economic resources on Punjab. The net result was overdevelopment of Punjab within the broader framework of colonial underdevelopment. The railroad net and the canals enabled the small and middle peasants of Punjab to grow wheat and sell it on the global market at high prices. The economic boom for the Punjabi peasants, who provided most of the military manpower, continued till the 1930s.

Things started going wrong from the first years of the 1940s. By 1942, colonial India was feeling the pinch of Total War. The loss of Burma rice, the strain on the transportation system and the problems of feeding the million strong Allied armies in South and South East Asia created the Great Famine in Bengal. A desperate Archie Wavell, the Viceroy, had no other option except to squeeze wheat from the Punjabi peasants at controlled prices. The landlords of Punjab felt that the Raj was cheating them. The situation worsened further when from early 1945 the overgrown Sepoy Army started demobilizing soldiers. After the First World War, the Raj satisfied the Punjabi soldiers by granting them plots in the canal colonies. After 1945, the British had no land to offer to the large number of ex-soldiers. The jobless Punjabi soldiers came back home and found out that while income from their family farms was declining, prices of goods were skyrocketing. The honeymoon between the Punjabi landed class and their British overlord was over. Then, disintegration of the Indian Empire was only a question of time.

Tan should have mentioned Razit Mazumder's work on the relationship between the army and Punjab. To sum up, Tan's admirable analysis, based on the Punjab government files and the Oriental and India Office Records, shows the dislocation of the complex interstices of Punjabi society and colonial government. The War and Society approach as followed in this book will go a long way in strengthening the trend of New Military History writing in South Asia.