Martial Voices: Colonial Discourses of the Indian Sepoy on the Move

Over the course of World War I, the British Empire deployed 140,000 Indian soldiers and labourers to the Western Front. These Indian soldiers, or sepoys, were described in contemporary British sources as fighting for Empire out of an unquestioning sense of duty and honour. Narratives of sepoys 'sacrificing' themselves for Britain resurfaced in contemporary British memorialization of the Indian Army during the event of the war's Centenary. The puzzling notion of colonials willingly sacrificing themselves on behalf of their colonizers during World War I reproduces a well-established body of colonial discourse that described the Indian Army as made up of chivalrous, masculine, and loyal 'martial races.' This thesis is a colonial discourse analysis of martial race discourse across three 'contact zones' of colonial and postcolonial migration and encounter: colonial India, the Western Front, and lastly modern 'multicultural' Britain. Martial race discourses of colonial sepoy loyalty in World War I are fantasies through which we can observe complex, ambivalent negotiations of identity and power in imperial contexts. I apply the scholarship on martial race discourse to British representations of the sepoy figure during World War I, an unprecedented moment of colonial military migration. Martial race discourse was as an ambivalent system of knowing Indian populations that allowed British colonizers to by turn embrace similarities to only select admirable Indian 'races', and to disavow similarities between colonizer and colonized through the insistence of insuperable differences. The stereotype of the martial race sepoy provided British authors with the knowledge with which to ventriloquize sepoys in novels that reasserted martial race discourse to address British wartime anxieties of Indian loyalty. Meanwhile, archives of letters written by Indian soldiers during the war showcase a heterogeneous body of sepoy discourse that reveal the limits of martial race stereotypes, particularly as an identity sepoys found themselves struggling to articulate their own relationship to during the war. The complexities and ambivalences of martial race discourse in British and Indian identity are in the present day submerged in a Britain that seeks an unproblematized legacy of colonial war participation. Just as martial race discourse justified and securitized the presence of Indian soldiers in a European war, the sepoy today is a figure that negotiates the belonging of South Asian populations in a British body politic hostile to immigration.