Home
Resource
Spiritual soldiers and the politics of difference in the British Indian Army, 1900-1940
PDF
PDF format is widely accepted and good for printing.
Plug-in required
PDF-1(1.87 MB)
Citation & Export
View Usage Statistics
Staff View

Citation & Export
Hide

Simple citation

Imy, Kate Alison. Spiritual soldiers and the politics of difference in the British Indian Army, 1900-1940. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3SN0C44

Export

Click here for information about Citation Management Tools at Rutgers.

Statistics
Hide

Description

TitleSpiritual soldiers and the politics of difference in the British Indian Army, 1900-1940
NameImy, Kate Alison (author); Koven, Seth (chair); Smith, Bonnie (co-chair); Chatterjee, Indrani (outside member); Dixon, Joy (outside member); Rutgers University; Graduate School - New Brunswick
Date Created2016
Other Date2016-05 (degree)
SubjectHistory, Great Britain--Colonies, Great Britain. Army. British Indian Army
Extent1 online resource (viii, 324 p.)
DescriptionIn the first decades of the twentieth century, the British Indian Army went from being a force to suppress internal dissent and protect the borders of the subcontinent to a highly mobile army stationed around the globe. British needs for additional overseas forces meant combining three distinct regional armies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay into a nominally united “Indian” Army. This single military force hid the recruiting biases and theories of martial difference that signaled the fracture, rather than the unity, of the army and the imperial project. This dissertation examines how the institutional changes of the British Indian Army enabled the social and cultural preconditions for the transition from colonial rule to a “globalized” post-colonial order. The British Indian Army in the twentieth century prided itself on its central organization as an “Indian” Army, but the men who served as troops hailed from diverse regions of India as well as the modern nation states of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. The centrality of a nation-state ideal underpinning the “Indian” army not only figured into debates about anti-colonial nationalism, but in the increasing global mobility of both British and South Asian men. Britons and South Asians migrated to and worked in diverse imperial locales—from Australia to New Zealand, Singapore to Hong Kong. Yet the differences between men were not only racial and regional. Significant class and caste disparities existed between the upwardly mobile cosmopolitan Indian officers and their low-ranking and uneducated enlisted counterparts. This encouraged further divisions between those able and willing to gain from a post-colonial Indian nation-state and those who would be left behind. Institutional biases also favored certain expressions of faith and devotion, racializing and militarizing the beliefs and practices of British Christians, Nepalese Gurkhas, and Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs. The British Indian Army’s diversity and international fragmentation signaled that nation states struggled to keep pace with or claim a place for themselves in a new international order. “Globalization” served as an alternative but parallel model to empire. This story is about how diversity was managed—or failed to be managed—in a global and colonial army. The experience of imperial service further unspooled the controlled uniformity that imperial and military life demanded.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Kate Alison Imy
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3SN0C44
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
Version 8.5.5
Rutgers University Libraries - Copyright ©2024