Ep 29: Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army Guftagu with Dr Kate Imy

<p>Hello and Welcome everyone to India Colonised A Podcast dedicated to Sout Asia’s Colonial history. I am your host Omer Haq and today on our next episode of guftagu we have with us Dr Kate Imy. <br> <br> Kate Imy is a historian of culture and war in British colonial Asia. Her first book, &nbsp;<em>Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army</em>, examines culture and anti-colonialism in the 20th century British Indian army. It won the NACBS Stansky prize and the Pacific Coast Branch Book Award of the American Historical Association. Her next project considers soldier and civilian experiences of war in Singapore and Malaya. She is a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, two CLS awards (Hindi and Urdu), a fellowship from the Institute of Historical Research (London), and a Bernadotte E. Schmitt grant from the American Historical Association. In 2021 she is the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia.<br> <br> <strong>During the first four decades of the twentieth century, the British Indian Army possessed an illusion of racial and religious inclusivity. The army recruited diverse soldiers, known as the "Martial Races," including British Christians, Hindustani Muslims, Punjabi Sikhs, Hindu Rajputs, Pathans from northwestern India, and "Gurkhas" from Nepal. As anti-colonial activism intensified, military officials incorporated some soldiers' religious traditions into the army to keep them disciplined and loyal. They facilitated acts such as the fast of Ramadan for Muslim soldiers and allowed religious swords among Sikhs to recruit men from communities where anti-colonial sentiment grew stronger. Consequently, Indian nationalists and anti-colonial activists charged the army with fomenting racial and religious divisions. In </strong><em><strong>Faithful Fighters</strong></em><strong>, Kate Imy explores how military culture created unintended dialogues between soldiers and civilians, including Hindu nationalists, Sikh revivalists, and pan-Islamic activists. By the 1920s and '30s, the a