A Matter of Honour: An account of the Indian Army, its Officers and Men by Philip Mason

A matter of honour;: An account of the Indian Army, its officers and men by Philip Mason
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Why did Indians join the British Army when the latter was all out to conquer their land and impose taxes on them?

The princes of the past had ‘hereditary troops’ and hired troops; the former served in recognition of feudal overlordship, the latter were hired for the campaign. Neither had any expectation of a pension. Again, neither the Mughals nor the Marathas paid a man regular monthly pay for the period of his career, nor did they accept any responsibility for him after he left them. The permanence of the Company’s service had been a strong point from the first.

The book may be of some relevance if one is interested in the history of the Indian Army's regimental system, which, in any case, is in danger of slowly disappearing due to the Agniveer style of recruitment.
The narration is more anecdotal, even the sources of factual material are conjecture. However, at times, remarkably prescient

but a sufficiently intelligent observer should have been able to see that Pakistan would find it more difficult than India to keep the army out of politics. Pakistan was from its foundation an islamic state; in islam, there is traditionally no division between Church and State, no distinction of priest form husband and father, of citizen from soldier… But the division of function is an essential part of Hinduism, and though India after partition was supposed to be a secular state, its thought and the structure of its society are still deeply Hindu. It was traditionally the brahmin who was counsellor and the Rajput who was warrior; the new officers became in a modified form a new occupational caste and they perform their proper function outside politics.

Here the latter argument seems to be stretching credulity a bit. This is how the book ends

The soldier seals his devotion to his craft with his life. He may by chance also win hour in the eyes of other men, but not in the highest degree unless his concern is with his own honour, with his own determination to perform his proper function to his own best ability. This is a central virtue of Hinduism and it is close enough to what is best in islam and in Christianity to have made it possible for men of these three faiths to live and work and die together.

Strongly biased views of the author labelling the British as ‘us’ and the native Indians as ‘them,’ and the tone is undoubtedly patronising. There is an occasional nugget. The account of some loyal servants/soldiers - archetypal stuff of Kipling – are shown as representational of all natives, but in truth the feelings were more ambivalent. Better books for Indian military history for he lay person would be: India's War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia, India's Wars: A Military History 1947-1971, Full Spectrum: India's Wars, 1972-2020, Ayo Gorkhali : A History of the Gurkhas.

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