Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c51.s4: § 4. Pre-requisites of the successful working of the European military system wanting in India
Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c51.s4
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§ 4. Pre-requisites of the successful working of the European military system wanting in India
v4.c51.s4.1
Military discipline as cultivated in ancient Macedonia and Rome, or in modern Europe, requires certain qualities of character and nerve which the races forming the Maratha light horse or the Rajput tribal levies, utterly lack. Even parity of weapons could not have made these men the equals in fighting efficiency, of the Oudh sepoys of the East India Company’s army, or of the Sikh soldiers who have upheld England’s banner beyond the Indian frontier and across the sea. These Oudh men formed the bulk of Sindhia’s campoo with a small force of Ruhela cavalry for De Boigne’s personal guard.
v4.c51.s4.2
This intellectual and temperamental defect of the pure Indian military classes threw the artillery branch of the native princes from the days of the Mughal empire onwards, into the hands of Goanese and French half-castes with hardly any Indian fit to occupy any position of command or responsibility, such as that of gun-layers. The Indian element in our artillery in the 18th century were golāndāzes, i.e., mere transport coolies and occasionally third class gunners for firing salutes.
v4.c51.s4.3
The true superiority of the European armies lay in the education of the intellect and development of character, and not primarily in their more efficient weapons. These two qualifications were utterly wanting in our indigenous armies; most of our old style officers were illiterate and proud of their ignorance; even the few who could read, never improved themselves by studying new books as the European soldiers and civilians in India very often did. After all, there is no escape from the truth, emphasised in Elizabethan England that *Knowledge is Power*.
v4.c51.s4.4
Hence, neither the best arms of European manufacture nor the most colourful European military costume could convert the purely Indian armies into the equals of European troops or of Indian soldiers long trained and led in action by European officers,—while our national education was so defective and methodical life unknown in our society.
v4.c51.s4.5
The campoo system by putting a foreign head on a purely Indian body, ultimately rendered our armies of the new type helpless and dead when the foreign heads walked off to Europe, abandoning their men as soon as their heap of pagodas had grown sufficiently big to enable them to live at Home as “Nabobs”. This sad truth was learnt by the men of Perron and Avitabile alike.
v4.c51.s4.6
The new system was a valuable military growth no doubt; but it was an exotic and could not take root in the Indian soil, so long as the Indians did not heartily accept and universally spread western knowledge and the western spirit. From this fact follows the further need of modern India adopting western industrial methods and producing on the soil modernised officers and modern munitions, so as to possess within her own bosom an inexhaustible reserve of all that a New Model Army requires.