The East
India Company, or the EICo as it was colloquially known, governed India up to
the time of the 1857 Mutiny, ruling through its three presidencies of Bengal,
Madras and Bombay. Each Presidency had
its own civil service and army, but came under the overall control of the
Governor-General and his Commander-in-Chief who was based in Calcutta during
the winter months and in Simla during the nine summer months.
The three
presidency armies operated as three separate forces but as the EICo began to
extend its clout eastwards from Calcutta beyond the Gangetic plain, the Bengal
Army grew much larger than the other two.
The Bengal army comprised of several infantry regiments known as the
Bengal Native Infantry (BNI), soldiered by Indians but commanded by British
officers. The officers were of British
stock, recruited by the EICo, and had a ‘Company Commission’ rather than a ‘Queen’s
Commission’ which placed them at a lower standing both socially and
militarily. In the Bengal Army the
ratio of troops to officers was one officer to 90 men. This was sustainable only because of the
extensive dependence on ‘Native Officers’ (today’s JCOs/NCOs) in the ranks of
Subedar Majors, Subedars and Jemadars in the infantry and Risaldars and
Duffadras in the cavalry.
By contrast,
there were regiments of the ‘Queen’s Army’ which comprised of European
Infantry, the Bengal Artillery and the Bengal Cavalry, the Corps of Sappers and
Miners and the Corps of Pioneers, comprising of British and Irish troops and
officers alike. Unlike the Bengal Army,
the Queen’s army had a ratio of one officer to thirty men.
In times of
war, which was often in those days, the Bengal Army was reinforced with British
troops drawn from the Queen’s Army as well as with ‘local irregular forces’,
both infantry and cavalry, raised by special order. It was but inevitable that the loyalty of the
‘irregulars’ was to the officer who recruited them and consequently, these raisings
were known mostly by the name of the commander who raised them or by the region
in which they were raised, e.g. Daly’s Horse (1st Punjab Cavalry) or
Coke’s Rifles (1st Punjab Infantry).
These irregular forces came under the direct command of the provincial
governor rather than the C-in-C. The
irregular forces had even fewer officers, generally just one to 200
sipahis/sowars. Most of them were limited to a Commanding Officer, an Adjutant
and a Quartermaster.
On class
composition, the Bengal Army’s soldiers were mostly high-ranking Hindus, Brahmins
and Rajputs, recruited from the Gangetic basin states of Bihar, Oudh and
Rohilkhand. Because of this, caste and
religious loyalties were significant and primary. It was only after the defeat of the Sikh army
in 1849 that Sikhs and Muslims from the NWFP began to join the Bengal
Army. Consequently, new raisings had a mixed
composition of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims at the Unit level while at the
sub-unit level the companies, squadrons, platoons were defined by religion/caste. This resulted in a positive shift of loyalty to
the Unit, rather than to the caste, class or to the recruiting officer.
What is more
surprising is that in those days, none of the regiments were known as ‘Indian’ but
rather as ‘native’ for the term ‘Indian’ was used by the British to describe
themselves!
(By Mrs. Zenobia Panthaki)
