By Clive Dewey
Wherever one looks, cities - Delhi, Vijayanagar - have been devastated by fighting or rejuvenated by demand. Mass enlistment, also, has had crucial social implications. Armies with a hereditary officer corps have reinforced traditional ascendancies; armies holding out careers open to the talents have created meritocratic societies, by making upward mobility possible. In the seventeenth-century Punjab Rajput warrior tribes acting as military subcontractors to the Mughals extracted tribute from the Jat villages they overawed; in the eighteenth-century Punjab, Sikh war-bands recruited from the ranks of the Jats cut down the tall poppies', reducing their erstwhile rules to obscurity and impotence.
Yet no one, in respectable academic circles, has been willing to admit to being a military
historian. In an age in which every self-respecting historian of the Third World was vaguely
left of centre, military history fell on the wrong side of an ideological divide. Armies were
authoritarian organizations; soldiers were the personification of macho values; their entire
raison d'etre was to kill people. Every colonial empire in Asia was conquered
by armies recruited from the subject peoples they were supposed to exploit; so the history
of the military became the history of collaboration. Indigenous armies were no better.
Freedom-fighters rebelling against alien regimes set up predatory empires themselves, as
soon as they got the chance. Maratha rebels against Mughal overrule created military
despotisms holding millions of non-Marathas down.
As a result, military history tended to be abandoned to enthusiastic amateurs. At their best,
they produced racy narratives of campaigns; at their worst, they were antiquarians obsessed
by the minutiae of uniforms, weapons, units, skirmishes. Without systematic analysis of
cause and effect, without interest in the wider political or economic or social ramifications
of their subject, they had nothing to say to historians working in related fields. Their
research existed in a ghetto of its own. Of course there were exceptions. A handful of
brilliant monographs appeared: one thinks of John Pemple's Invasion of Nepal,
Eric Stokes' The Peasant Armed, or Dirk Kolff's Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy - a definitive
account of a British-Indian campaign, the most profound work on the mutiny, a pioneer study
of the North Indian labour market. But they were isolated peaks.
Serious analysis
Now at last, a whole generation of historians is waking up to the fact that military factors
have to be taken into account across the whole spread of South Asian history. One reason
has been the publication, over the past two years, of four exceptional books. Jos Gommans'
Indo-Afghan Empire; Seema Alavi's The Sepoys and the Company,
Douglas Peers' Between Mars and Mammon; and David Omissi's The Sepoy and the Raj have
permanently changed the face of Indian military history. A reputable field for research has
been established, with an agenda of its own. Out goes the interminable description - the 'first
this platoon assaulted this hillock, then that platoon assaulted that hillock' approach. In comes
the serious analysis: major changes in the art of warfare, the relationship between armies and
states, the culture of the soldiers, the multiplier effects of defence expenditure, the impact
of enlistment on the great recruiting-grounds. Equally important, historians who will never
write a book on military history have begun to integrate the military factor into research on
adjacent topics. Studies of kingship, of state formation, of town-building, of identity, of
caste, of technology, of orientalism, are drawing the military in.
The amazing thing is that South Asian historians have never had a chance to get together to discuss the military history of the Subcontinent. There have been lively panels on military history at Heidelberg (the Modern South Asian Studies Conference), at Birmingham (the British Association for South Asian Studies), at Madison (the War and Society in South Asia Group), and at Honolulu (the Association for Asian Studies). But they were small-scale affairs. Only a tiny fraction of all the potential participants took part, and only a tiny fraction of all the potential issues was discussed. There has never been an international conference exclusively devoted to the military history of South Asia - until now. Provided the necessary grants are forthcoming, it is hoped to hold a three-day workshop on The New Military History of South Asia at Wolfson College, Cambridge in July 1997.
The provisional programme includes sessions on Mughal Warfare, on the Armies of the Successor States, on Logistics, on Recruitment, on Indian and European Soldiers, on Military Orientalism, on Military Science and Militarized Societies. It should come as no surprise that, without a public call for papers, the workshop is already over-subscribed. Participants from eleven different countries - from post-doctoral research fellows to the doyens of the profession - have promised papers; and two of the best-known military historians in the world have agreed to act as discussants. With any luck, their deliberations should restore a neglected subject to its rightful place in the constellation of South Asian studies. Just as battles are too important to be left to generals, military history is too important to be left to amateurs.
Dr Clive Dewey was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the IIAS in April 1996. He can be contacted at Wolfson College, Cambridge CB3 9BB, United Kingdom.