Gandhi in the British Army

Let's say Gandhi fell upon hard times in 1889, and decided to enlist in the British Army.

How does that affect him and India's independence movement?
 
Do you mean the British Army, or the British Indian Army? If the latter, I suspect he would have had difficulty getting in. We could spend weeks talking about the complexities of Indian castes as filtered through British recruitment doctrines, but basically the army had always been more keen on farmers than merchants and lawyers and was moving away from upper-caste Hindus towards Sikhs, Gurkhas and Rajputs. This would tend to rule him out.

The former would have been more interesting. There wasn't a formal colour bar at this point, but I'm not aware of anybody from an ethnic minority ever actually trying to join. The first instance I know about was James Francis Durham, a Sudanese orphan adopted by the Durham Light Infantry who eventually joined the regiment and married the quartermaster sergeant's daughter. That's not to say there weren't previous ethnic minority soldiers, or alternatively that others tried and were rejected. However, I suspect the majority of recruiting sergeants would have turned him down not just on the grounds of his race but also his build, education and vegetarianism.

An even more interesting potential is for him to join a Rifle Volunteer Corps while in England. We know that these units accepted ethnic minority soldiers, because during the 1885 Russian invasion scare there were petitions to set up Indian volunteer corps from Indians who had served as British volunteers while studying in the UK. It's possible he might have joined one for social reasons- the 14th Middlesex (Inns of Court) RVC, for instance- and been persuaded away from a path of strict non-violence.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
He was in the British Army, organizing a ambulance unit during the Boer War.


Gandhi_Boer_War_1899.jpg
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Yep; although it was not the "British Army" or the "Indian Army"

He was in the British Army, organizing a ambulance unit during the Boer War.


Gandhi_Boer_War_1899.jpg


I think it was actually on the establishment of the Natal Colony forces. Interestingly enough, he viewed his experience very positiviely:

There was, shall I say, a spirit of brotherhood irrespective of color or creed . . . (the) uniform was a sufficient badge whether the wearer had a white skin or brown. As a Hindu, I do not believe in war, but if anything can even partially reconcile me to it, it was the rich experience that we gained.

The quote is in Robert Payne's The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (1969)

Best,
 
Do you mean the British Army, or the British Indian Army? If the latter, I suspect he would have had difficulty getting in. We could spend weeks talking about the complexities of Indian castes as filtered through British recruitment doctrines, but basically the army had always been more keen on farmers than merchants and lawyers and was moving away from upper-caste Hindus towards Sikhs, Gurkhas and Rajputs. This would tend to rule him out.

I'm interested to see how much this was the case, though- I always thought that they were pretty strict about the martial races theory of recruitment but I recently found out from the grandmother that one of my great-granduncles served in the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force of the Indian Army and was at the Battle of Basra. Now, we're Syrian Christian Malayalees, who tended to be planters and professionals, definitely not from a category which the British would have classed as Martial Races.

Admittedly, that was during the Great War and one suspects the recruiting guidelines might have been relaxed a bit.
 
I'm interested to see how much this was the case, though- I always thought that they were pretty strict about the martial races theory of recruitment but I recently found out from the grandmother that one of my great-granduncles served in the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force of the Indian Army and was at the Battle of Basra. Now, we're Syrian Christian Malayalees, who tended to be planters and professionals, definitely not from a category which the British would have classed as Martial Races.

Admittedly, that was during the Great War and one suspects the recruiting guidelines might have been relaxed a bit.

It might well be that WWI, just as it led to something of a breakdown in the social hierarchy in Britain, had a corresponding breakdown in those assumptions (though certainly with a perception of the martial races still being the elite corps)
 
'Martial races' theory might have been less intensively applied in recruiting for the support services than in it was the 'combat' (i.e. infantry and cavalry) arms... and I remember having read somewhere that both the Medical branch and the Transport branch actually included significant proportions of Indians amongst their [ "King's"] commissioned officers...
 
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