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In terms of size, the Indian Army was much larger than its two sister services: the Royal Indian Navy and the Royal Indian Air Force. Besides ideological (martial race theory), several non-ideological factors such as the capacity of the military organization to house, feed, clothe, train, and equip large numbers of men at a time affected the volume of recruitment. Inadequate number of viceroy’s commissioned officers and non-commissioned officers also decelerated enlistment. The absence of homogeneity in India as regards race, religion, and language militated against mixing of classes indiscriminately in the training formations. Chapter 1 shows how the Raj could construct a multi-ethnic volunteer army without resorting to conscription. The British utilized the mercenary tradition inherent in the Indian society to raise 2.5 million men in wartime. The vast demographic resources of India and relatively underdeveloped agrarian economy also aided the Raj to acquire military manpower from the so-called martial as well as non-martial races.

This chapter concerns the outbreak of anti-imperial global mutinies in the demobilization era, with a particular focus on the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946. It draws upon trial proceedings for the perpetrators of this outbreak, and analyzes its negative reception in the national and world media. The central claim is that the inconsequentiality with which the naval mutineers were frequently charged was in fact a motivated ethics of non-generativity or symbolic celibacy, protesting considerations of causality in moral and political procedure. Read sympathetically, the oddly self-trivializing practices (and testimonies) of the mutineers can be shown to obtain from the buried history of anticolonial mutinies in general, beginning with the revolt of 1857. Much like their predecessors, the rebels of 1946 refuted the perpetuation of empire within themselves (and thereto, the protracted conversion of colonial worlds into garrison states) performatively, by falling short of military regimen and the contingent culture of perpetual war.

The 1942 Burma Campaign was an extension of the Malaya–Singapore Campaign. During the conquest of Burma in the first half of 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) displayed the same tactical skill which it had displayed in the Malayan jungles and in Singapore. And also during the ‘long retreat’ from Burma, the BURCORPS displayed the same weaknesses which A.E. Percival’s composite army exhibited during their retreat from north Malaya to Singapore. The demands of Japanese grand strategy prevented the IJA from launching a full-scale invasion of India in either late 1942 or during 1943. Japanese inactivity allowed India Command the respite which the latter desperately needed to build up the air assets and for training British and Indian infantry. This chapter shows how India Command and general headquarters from 1943 onwards, through creative rigorous training and propaganda, were able to instil combat professionalism among the Indian soldiery. And they along with the nascent Royal Indian Navy and miniscule Royal Indian Air Force led Field-Marshal Bill Slim’s 14th Army to victory in Mandalay–Meiktila and Rangoon during 1944–5.