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ABSTRACT
Sikh dominance in the Indian military started under the British in the late nineteenth century. The Sikh insurgency which rocked Punjab in the 1980s remains independent India’s most serious internal rebellion. In fact, the warrior ethos and military martyrdom in the Sikh community could be traced back to the precolonial era. This essay traces the history of the evolution of Khalsa’s military culture. I argue that the Sikhs were already a ‘martial race’ like the Marathas, Rajputs and the Gurkhas before the British imperial conquest. By making a case study of Sikh insurgency against the Mughal Empire, this essay shows that insurgency serves as a major educational and military mobilising tool in the creation of martial cultures/races.
Acknowledgments
My special thanks to Professor Peter Lorge and Dr Paul Rich for encouraging me to write this essay. I am especially grateful to Dr Rich for supplying me with crucial ideas about how to frame this piece. I am indebted to Professor Scott Gates for his conceptual insights on insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. The two referees’ comments have also helped me to reformulate this article. Credit is also due to two of my research scholars, Mr. Aryama Ghosh and Ms. Sohini Mitra, for supplying me with some of the documents used in this essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See for instance Grewal & Banga, Khalsa over 300 Years. The foremost historians belonging to this line of interpretation are Ganda Singh and J.S. Grewal.
2. The argument that the Sikhs became a warrior community due to British military recruitment started with the British officers of the colonial era like Bingley, MacMunn, Vansittart, etc. who were in charge of recruitment during the late nineteenth century. These officers advocated the enlistment of the Sikh warrior community in the British led Indian Army as part of their Martial Race ideology. One modern author to push the argument that Sikh martial identity was the product of British recruitment policy is Fox. See his Lions of the Punjab.
3. Two important practitioners of this approach are Hardip Singh Syan and Louis Fenech. For a somewhat critical, though positive assessment of the culturalist trend in Sikh historiography, see Murphy, “A Millenial Sovereignty?” 89–104. For a negative evaluation of the culturalist approach to analyse Sikh identity, see Grewal, Gobind Singh.
4. Mobad, Dabistan-I Mazahib, 61.
5. Banerjee, Khalsa, vol. 2, pp. 1–25.
6. Grewal, Sikhs of the Punjab, 41, 47.
7. Singh, “The Guru Granth Sahib,” 128.
8. Fenech, “Martrydom,” 20–21.
9. Banerjee, Khalsa, vol. 1, pp. 2–5.
10. Fenech, “Martyrdom and the Sikh Tradition,” 628–30.
11. Murphy, “A Millennial Sovereignty?” 90–91.
12. Grewal, “Introduction,” 3–5; Browne, Origin and Progress of the Sikhs, 22.
13. Muhammad Qasim, Ibratnama, 112–13.
14. Akham-i Alamgiri, 97.
15. Rinehart, “The Dasam Granth,” 136–46.
16. Quoted from Khalsa Rahit, 110.
17. Fatehnama, tr. Ahuja. The quotation is from 67.
18. Zafarnama, tr. Navtej Singh. The quotation is from 21.
19. Dhavan, Sparrows became Hawks, 3–4, 48–52.
20. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy.
21. Chattopadhyaya, Early Medieval India, 57–88; Alavi, Sepoys and the Company. See the first three chapters.
22. Grewal, Gobind Singh, 93–115.
23. Fenech, “Bhai Nand Lal Goya,” 159–69.
24. Gill, “Bhai Gurdas,” 147–58.
25. The quotation is from Khafi Khan, Muntakhabul-L Lubab, 413.
26. Tarikh-I Bahadur Shahi, 566–67; Grewal, “Guru Gobind Singh and Bahadur Shah,” 36–7.
27. Dhavan, “Sikhism,” 51–5.
28. Alam, “Sikh Uprising,” 40–7.
29. Richards, Mughal Empire, 205, 207.
30. Alam, Crisis of Empire, 134–41.
31. Mirza Muhammad, 132; Kamwar Khan, 144; Surman and Stephenson, “Massacre of the Sikhs,” 50.
32. “Letter XII,” 52.
33. Gordon, The Marathas, 113.
34. Char Bagh-i-Panjab, 35–6.
35. Steinbach, Country of the Sikhs, 73–7.
36. Griffin, Rajas of Punjab, 12–8.
37. Sinha, Rise of the Sikh Power, 4–5.
38. Ziegler, “Rajput Loyalties,” 171–210.
39. Bingley, Rajputs, 162, 166–71.
40. Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, 186–87.
41. Tarikh-I Ibrahim Khan, 265–66.
42. Grewal, “Early Sikh History,” 22–3.
43. Gupta, History of the Sikhs, vol. 4, pp. 4–49.
44. Quoted from Polier, “Account of the Sikhs,” 59. I have modernised the spellings.
45. Francklin, “The Sikhs and their Country.”
46. Quoted from “Extract of a Letter from Forster,” 81.
47. “Memorandum on the Punjab and Kandahar,” 91.
48. Khushwant Singh, Sikhs, vol. 1, p. 201.
49. Amrik Singh, “Foreword,” in Jangnamah, 15.
50. Roy, “Technology and Transformation of Sikh Warfare,” 383–410.
51. Quoted from Jangnamah, 263.
52. Mandair, “Colonial Formations,” 70–78.
53. Vansittart, Gurkhas, 1–33.
54. Northey and Morris, Gurkhas, 92–3.
55. Vansittart, Notes, i–iv.
56. MacMunn, Armies of India, 135.
57. Roy, ““People’s War” in India,” 1724.
58. Syan, Sikh Militancy, 4–6.
59. Streets, Martial races.
60. Rand, ““Martial Races” and “Imperial Subjects,”” 1–20.
61. Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers.
62. Mazumder, Indian Army and the Making of Punjab.
63. Khushwant Singh, Sikhs, vol. 2, p. 211; Fox, Lions of the Punjab, 79–80.
64. Yong, Garrison State, 281–309.
65. For instance, in 1951, the biggest chunk of the senior officer corps (colonel and above) in the Indian Army comprised the Sikhs. They constituted 26% of the senior officer corps. Wilkinson, Army and Nation, 93.
66. Caplan, “Martial Gurkhas,” 260–81.
67. Jakobsh, “Gender,” 594–605; Kaur Singh, “Feminist Interpretation,” 606–21.
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Kaushik Roy
Kaushik Roy is Guru Nanak Chair Professor in the Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He is also a Global Fellow at Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway. He has been attached with PRIO in different capacities for about a decade. At present, he is engaged in PRIO’s Warring with Machines project. Previously, he has taught at Visva Bharati University at Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, and also at Presidency College, Kolkata, India. He has done his PhD from Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was also a Junior Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. He has received Charles Wallace Fellowship, and research grants from Indian National Science Academy, UGC, etc. He is a member of Indian National Science Academy’s Research Council. Roy specialises on the Eurasian military history. He has worked extensively on both conventional and unconventional wars of pre-modern, early modern and present eras. He has published many books and chapters in edited volumes published from Ashgate, Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, E.J. Brill, Oxford University Press, Pickering & Chatto, Routledge, etc. He has also published articles in various peer reviewed journals like Economic and Political Weekly, First World War Studies, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Journal of Global History, Journal of Military Ethics, Journal of Military History, Modern Asian Studies, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Studies in History, War in History, etc. Roy is also one of the editors of War and Society in South Asia Series and Wars and Battles of the World Series of Routledge. He is the Chief Editor of Oxford online Military History Bibliographies. He is also one of the members of the editorial board of International Area Studies Review