Retaking the Frontier: Ethnicity, Military, and Space in the North East and North West, 1850–1900

This paper analyzes the contradiction between the theory of martial races and ideals of frontier warfare in the context of “hill” groups brought into the Army in the late 19th century. Martial race theory decontextualized and reified difference between ethnic and caste groups targeted for recruitment, while the Indian Army’s ideals of frontier warfare emphasized the sameness of hill and jungle warfare throughout the British empire. According to the latter theory, “savages” fought alike and must be met with civilized tactics. Together, the two ideologies depoliticized and redefined ethnic identities that had been shaped in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries through control over particular landscapes during the break-up of the Mughal empire and entrenchment of regional successor states. Similarly, frontier landscapes were remade to inscribe new notions of order against which the “ethnic” soldier would appear anachronistic and powerless, as for example in late 19^th-century photographs of a hill regiment I discuss in the presentation.

I explore these dynamics through comparing the recruitment of Chambiali men into the Dogra Regiment and Limbu men from eastern Nepal into Gurkha regiments as part of a colonial project of de-historicizing and managing borderland ethnicities. Men from both regions had to present themselves to the outside world via the army as part of political entities that were not hegemonic or popular at home. I examine hill warfare in Sikkim in 1850 and 1861, and the raising of the Dogra Regiment in Himachal Pradesh in the 1880s and its later deployment in the northwest frontier and Afghanistan in 1897 to illuminate these processes. In doing so, I look at how “discipline” in the new infantry regiments and remaking of policeable frontier spaces were exaggerated in colonial presentations (for example, in photographs and British officers’ written accounts), to delegitimize entrenched corporate claims to frontier spaces.