Kaushik Roy

Mars in Indian History

Colonel G.B. Malleson’s The Decisive Battles of India published in 18832 represents the first attempt to explain British victories with the aid of the decisive battles model. Edwards S. Creasy first introduced this framework. After passing out from Eton, Creasy became a barrister, and finally, Chief Justice of Ceylon. His book The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, which came out in 1851,3 influenced Malleson. These works assume that the political fates of the countries were decided in gigantic set-piece encounters, each of which barely lasted for a single afternoon. Since major historical changes flowed from these confrontations, these clashes of arms were categorized as great battles. While Creasy argues that fifteen great clashes saved the West from ’barbarism’, for Malleson, thirteen great battles on the Indian subcontinent enabled the British

The Historiography of the Colonial Indian Army

Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Dr I. Kamtekar for help in preparing the essay. The responsibility for the errors is mine. In 1764 at Buxar, the Nawab of Oudh was defeated by an army of the East India Company that was one-fifth the size of his.’ This battle marked the beginning of Western military superiority over Asia. The recent defeat of Iraq by the US Expeditionary Force shows that the process still continues. Even though imperialist powers were aware of the critical importance of armed force in the process of colonialism, colonial warfare has ceased to be

Book Reviews : DAVID OMISSI, The Sepoy and the Raj, The Indian Army, 1860-1940, Macmillan Press, London, 1994, xx + 313 pp., £45

South Asian military history has not been a popular subject, even though the army was one of the greatest sources of employment and a big chunk of government revenue went to it. After Stephen Cohen’s The Indian Army (1971). here is a book which, in six thematic chapters, deals with the interrelationships between the post mutiny Indian army and indigenous society. Not all the themes in this book are new: for example, Cohen had also dealt with recruitment. But Omissi’s treatment is far more elaborate