On Tamil Militarism ; an 11 part essay by D.P.Sivaram written in 1992Part 7: The Tamil Soldier and the Dravidian Diaspora
by D.P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, August 15, 1992, pp.12-13 and
28; prepared by Sachi Sri Kantha, for the electronic record]
The idea of the ‘modern Indian army’ is rarely associated with
the Tamils. The nature or its ethnic composition generates the impression that
it is a predominantly north Indian phenomenon. This impression has become so
strongly established that the military history of the British Empire’s rise has
been studied in recent times in connection with the role of the ‘martial
peoples’ of north India in the British Indian army. The tenacity and power of
this ‘impression’ in modern scholarship is best illustrated in the argument of
David Washbrook:
"The role the British Indian army played in international
affairs over the course of the 19th century however, lifts it out of
the context of British Indian relations and places it in a broader global
perspective. It was not an army intended primarily for domestic defence and
police duties in India. Rather, it was the army of British Imperialism, formal
and informal, which operated worldwide, opening up markets to the products of
industrial revolution, subordinating labour forces to the dominating of capital
and bringing to ‘benighted’ civilizations the enlightened values of Christianity
and Rationality. The Indian army was the iron fist in the velvet glove of
Victorian expansionism.Moreover, because the British Empire was the principal
agency through which the world system functioned in this era, the Indian army
was in a real sense the major coercive force behind the internationalization of
industrial capitalism. Paradoxically (or not!), the martialization of north
Indian society and, in many ways the feudalization of its agrarian relations,
were direct corrolaries of the development of capitalism on a world scale during
the 19th century." (Washbrook: 1990)
Washbrook’s view is based on what the Indian army was towards
the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is underpinned by an "impression"
which arose many years after the British had established their strategic hold on
India and had laid the Empire’s foundation with what was known as their ‘Coastal
Army’ which was built up in the latter half of the 18th century,
mainly with Tamil soldiers. The British succeeded in empire-building not by
martialising dominant north Indian military caste communities, but by building
up a cheap but loyal and effective army of predominantly Tamil soldiers. Until
the latter half of the 19th century, it was the Tamil Christian
soldier who was the main coercive force behind the expansion of the Empire in
the subcontinent and elsewhere.
The British recruitment handbook for Madras classes, says
"It can truthfully be said that the Coast Army was mainly instrumental in
conquering India for the British." (p.8) The Tamil soldier was seen as the
bearer of the Sword and the Bible – with few religious and caste prejudices
which madehim suitable for expeditions beyond the sea unlike his more expensive
brethren in north India. Contrary to what Washbrook claims, the early phase of
British overseas expansion in East, West and South Asia was not based on the
martialisation of north Indian society, but on the south Indian alternative to
its military labour market – the loyal classes of Tamils.
"During this whole period, as always throughout its existence,
the Coast Army was specially noteworthy for the cheerful alacrity with which its
regiments have volunteered of service overseas. The Bengal regiments on many
occasions refused to embark for foreign service, on the plea that it was
contrary to their religion. But the Coast Army willingly embarked, and took a
leading part in many successful expeditions, including Manila (1762), Mahe
(1779), Ceylon (1782 and 1795), Amboyna and the Spice Islands (1796), Egypt
(1801-02), Bourbon and Mauritius (1810) and Java (1811-12)".
The Coast Army took part in the final expedition against the
King of Kandy which was followed by the first war in Burma (1824-26). The first
war by the British in China was also fought by them in 1840-42 where the
37th Madras Infantry was made grenadier battalion for its
distinguished conduct. Sir Hugh Gough reported on their service in the China war
that "their perseverance and gallantry before the enemy have secured for them
the confidence of the British European soldiers." (Recruitment Handbook for
Madras Classes, p.6)
Even a brief study of the history of the Coast Army and the
Tamil soldiers who were recruited into it would reveal that the ‘military
agency’ which "conveyed British capitalist power to areas of the world
(including the South Asian hinterland) it could not otherwise have reached" had
a very small proportion of north Indian military groups. Washbrook’s argument
that the World Capitalist system which the British Empire helped so much to
expand rested heavily on the intermediation of the Indian army and that without
it and similar agencies constituted outside the European capitalism core, "the
forces of world capitalism would have been ethnic, much weaker or else of a very
different kind" is plausible but the argument that harnessing the dynamic
potential of the readily available north Indian military groups made it cheaper
for the British to rapidly expand their empire, is untenable in view of the two
most critical phases which determined the hold of the English on the
subcontinent.
The first phase begins towards the middle of the
18th century. It was the contest with the French that first compelled
the British to abandon their policy in India till then, that was was bad for
trade, and raise local troops. There was in the subcontinent at that time
paramilitary caste groups whose services could be obtained for a fee. The
British unlike the great Indian princedoms in that era could not afford the
soldiery of the high caste martial groups although they very much desired them.
From the proceedings of the government, dated 7th May 1770, it
appears that the Sepoy battalions then consisted of Mohamedans, Tamils and
Telugus, but no details of caste are given. It may be inferred that the number
of Brahmans, Rajputs and Maharattas in the Madras army was very small. It is
clear that the authorities were desirous of restricting enlistments to men of
good caste, but it is equally clear that this wasnot practicable during the last
(18th) century."
Again in 1795, it is stated that "owing to the small pay of the
sepoy and the high price of rice, considerable difficulty was experienced in
obtaining good recruits, and the battalions were kept up to their proper
strength by accepting undersized men and those of low caste." (Phytian Adams:
1943). Yet Stringer Lawrence and Clive succeeded in making the cheap low caste
Tamil sepoys into an army with which the English were able to establish
themselves as the main European trading group in India, in the contest with the
French. It later won all the crucial battles that subjugated most of India
during the course of the seventy five years since recruitment of the first Tamil
sepoy levies began in the northern parts of Tamilnadu in 1746.
The East India company established its first military
department at Madras in 1752. The main reason behind the rapid rise of the
British in this era was their low cost but hardy army. The major Indian kingdoms
of the time, although possessed of modern and larger forces were falling into
financial difficulties in maintaining their expensive high caste soldiery whose
pay arrears was frequent cause for mutiny. The English fought with the advantage
of an extremely loyal army which did not rebel for pay. The Recruitment Handbook
of the Madras classes records "never were these qualities more fully tried than
in the war with Hyder. The pay of the army was sixteen months in arrears, famine
raged all over the country, the enemy was at the gates offering large bounty and
pay to our Sepoys to desert, but in vain. Under all these circumstances severe
action were fought. Their conduct during the war excited the admiration of all
who knew it, and Frederick the Great of Prussia was known to have said, "after
reading Orme’s account of the war, that had he the command of troops who acted
like the sepoys on that occasion, he could conquer all Europe."(9)
The second crucial phase in which the future of the British as
an Empire building power was determined was the period in which the Indian
Mutiny erupted in North India. Again, it was the loyal Coast Army that helped
the English survive the Mutiny. It was the Mutiny that made the British
reorganize the Indian army into that form which Washbrook considers in his
thesis.
"In 1857-58, came the great Mutiny of the army in Bengal, when
the Coast Army displayed its loyalty and devotion in no uncertain manner. In a
despatch dated the 19th August 1859, the Secretary of State of India
said, ‘The commander-in-chiefs Minute contains only a slight sketch of the
important services rendered by the Madras army during the great contest in the
North of India. The great fact has been the perfect fidelity of that army and
the perfect loyalty of the 23 millions of persons who inhabit this Presidency,
which enabled the resources of the South of India to be freely put forth in
support of our hard-pressed country men in North." Lieut-General Sir Patrick
Grant said,
"The services in the field of the Troops of this Presidency
employed in the suppression or the Rebellion and the Mutiny are now a matter of
history, and the glowing terms in which they have been recognized must endure
for ever, an unperishable record of this noble soldiers. It can never be
forgotten that, to their immortal honour, the native troop of the Madras army
have been, in the words of the Earl of Ellenborough, faithful found among the
faithless."
The Dravidian ideology was underpinned by the idea of the loyal
Tamil soldier of British Coast Army, bringing to "benighted" civilizations the
enlightened values of Christianity and Rationality. Caldwell and his successors
elaborated a theory of a Tamil Diaspora as the bedrock of Protestantism and the
English Empire on this idea.
Bishop N.C.Sargant, who like Caldwell, was the Church of
England’s Bishop of Tinnevely spells it out clearly in his ‘Dispersion of the
Tamil Church’:
"The Tamils are great soldiers; they went with the army along
with their families and lived in its newly established camps and in the newly
captured territories…they were excellent instruments for establishing the Church
among the Telugu and Kannada speaking peoples." "There is much evidence to
show that Tamil soldiers – of the British Indian Army – and those (Tamils) who
followed the army took the gospel with them to the other parts of India."
(Sargant: 1940, p.32 and p.68)
About the intention of his word, Sargant says, "The Dispersion
of the Jews was a preparation for the spread of Christianity in the ancient
world. Similarly can it be said that the Dispersion of the Tamil church helped
the missionaries? The first Apostles found some God feating Jews, as their first
believers. Did the missionaries find the Tamils perceptive…was this race the
first fruit of Christian work? I tried to find answers to such questions…This
research made me understand that Christ realised many unexpected and
inexplicable things through the Dispersion of the Tamils and the Tamil
Church."
Sargant, like Caldwell and Bishop Whitehead before him,
believed that research into ancient Dravidian forms of expression found in Tamil
would reveal that there were many surprising words and ideas which denoted
Christian concepts such as that of sin. "Like the ancient Hebrews the ancient
Dravidians also tried to lead a righteous spiritual life."(p.3) The close
connection between the British Indian army’s early conquests, the Society for
the Propagation of the Gospel (S.P.G.), the Dispersion of the English Church,
and the Tamils of Bishop Caldwell’s flock in Tinnevely is described by Sargant
in detail (chapters 2, 3, 5). Thus the Tamil soldier, the Tamil Diaspora and the
Dravidian movement came to constitute a basis of the British Imperial
project.
The nationalist reaction to this project in the Tamil country,
articulated by the terrorist movement, proclaimed modern Tamil militarism as the
means of national emancipation from British rule.
On Tamil Militarism ; an 11 part essay by D.P.Sivaram written in 1992Part 8: The Twin Narratives of Tamil Nationalism
by D.P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, September 1, 1992, pp.10-12; prepared by Sachi Sri Kantha, for the electronic record]
At the turn of the Twentieth century Tamil nationalism was articulated in terms of two different interpretations of Tamilian identity, propagated by two distinct movements which were politically opposed to each other. The one was the Dravidian school; the other was the Indian revolutionary movement. The former was closely associated with English missionaries and unequivocally supported British rule; the latter strongly opposed the Raj and preached violence as the chief means of national emancipation from foreign domination.
 Bishop Caldwell
The discourse that may be identified today as Tamil nationalism is constituted at its basis by these two interpretations – or more appropriately ‘founding’ narratives – which contended with each other to offer authentic readings of the Tamilian past and present, of what ‘really’ constituted Tamilian identity. The Dravidian school gave political and academic form to linguistic ethno-nationalism; the revolutionary movement turned traditional Tamil militarism into a liberation ideology, which evolved into militarist ethno-nationalism. The militarist reading has also characterised Tamil ethno-nationalism in the twentieth century not merely because it was "constructed and deployed to advance the interests and claims of the collectivity, banded and mobilized as a pressure group" but also because, as this study intends to show, it appealed to, and arose out of the structures of experience produced and reproduced through folk culture and religion in rural Tamilnadu.
This is how, as we shall see later, MGR became Madurai Veeran, the warrior god of a numerous scheduled caste in Periyar district in Tamilnadu. Jeyalalitha contested from an electorate there in the last election [i.e., 1991 general election]. However, it is essential to understand the politics behind the claims and silences of the early Dravidian school of Tamil revivalism and ‘historiography’ for examining the rise of modern Tamil militarism.
Caldwell and his followers who wrote and spoke about Tamil culture and history endeavoured to show that Tamils were essentially a peaceful people who had achieved a high level of civilization independent of and prior to the arrival of the ‘Aryans’ in the Indian subcontinent. This was the unique Dravidian civilization. The theory of Dravidian linguistic and hence cultural independence also contained in it the idea that the Tamils were originally a class of peaceful farmers. The politics of Caldwell’s teleology compelled him [to] introduce this idea into his writings. (It was seen earlier that it arose from the attitude he shared with the English rulers towards the Maravar.) The views of Bishop Caldwell were found to be extremely useful by the newly arisen Vellala elite which was contending for higher status in the Varna hierarchy of caste. Therefore the ‘histories’ which were written by the Dravidian school of Tamil studies at the turn of the [20th] century were underpinned by,
The interests of both were intertwined. Their express political interest was to show that Tamil culture in essence was pre-Aryan-Brahmin and non-martial. The first non-Brahmin Tamils to take up the Dravidian theory to examine theTamil past belonged to the Vellala elite and were supported and encouraged by Protestant missionaries (and sometimes by English administrators). The writings of Professor Sunderam Pillai of the Trivandrum University on Tamil history and culture inspired many of his castemen who had been seething at being classified as Sudras by the Brahmins, and worse, by the British caste census and courts of law as well.
 Prof. Sunderam Pillai
Thus, the historical works of the early Dravidian school were produced as "social charters directed toward the census, where the decennial designation of caste status became a major focus for contests over rank between 1870 and 1930. The first Dravidian history of the Tamils, ‘The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago’, was written by V.Kanakasabhai Pillai, a Vellala from Jaffna who was a civil servant in Madras. Edgar Thurston thought it appropriate to quote the following excerpt from that work, in the section dealing with the Vellala caste in his ‘Castes and Tribes of South India’.
"Among the pure Tamils, the class most honoured was the Arivar or Sages. Next in rank to the Arivar were Ulavar or farmers. The Arivar were ascetics, but of men living in society the farmers occupied the highest position. They formed the nobility, or the landed aristocracy, of the country. They were also called Vellalar, the lords of the flood or karalar, lords of the clouds…The Chera, Chola and Pandyan kings and most of the petty chiefs of Tamilakam, belonged to the tribe of Vellalas." (Thurston, 1906: p.367-368)
The efforts of the early Dravidian school of Tamil ‘historiography’ culminated in the work of Maraimalai Atikal – the founder of the Pure Tamil movement which became a powerful force in the anti-Hindi struggles from 1928 onwards. He published a book called, ‘Vellalar Nakareekam’ – The Civilisation of the Vellalas – in 1923. The book was a lecture he had given at the Jaffna town hall on January 1, 1922 on the ‘Civilization of the Tamils’ A contribution of Rs.200 was made in Jaffna towards the publication of the lecture, as a book. The Jaffna Vellala of that time saw his interests as being bound with that of his castemen in South India, who were attempting to rid themselves of the Sudra status assigned to them in the Varna hierarchy of caste by Brahmins.
 Prof. V. Kanagasabai Pillai
However, Maraimalai Atikal had decided to publish it as a book in order to refute a claim in the caste journal of the Nattukottai Chetti community, that the Chetties did not marry among the Vellalas because they (the Vellalas) were Sudras. In the English preface to the work, Maraimalai Atikal says that his book
"is written in scrupulously pure Tamil style, setting forth at the same time views of a revolutionary character in the sphere of social religious and historical ideas of the Tamil people…In the first place attention is directed to Vellalas, the civilized agricultural class of the Tamils, and to their origin, and organization…it is shown that at a time when all the people except those who lived all along the equatorial regions were leading the life of hunters or nomads, these Vellalas attained perfection in the art of agriculture…and by means of navigation occupied the whole of India. When the Aryan hordes came from the north-west of Punjab and poured forth into the interior, it was the ten Vellala kings then ruling in the north that stopped their advance."
Maraimalai Atikal goes on to claim that the eighteen Tamil castes were created by the Vellalas for their service; that they (the Vellalas) were vegetarians fo the highest moral codes;that Saivism and the Saiva Siddhantha philosophy nurtured by the Vellalas for more than 3,500 years were the pre-Aryan religious heritage of the Tamils; that the classification of Vellalas as Sudras was the result of an insidious Aryan-Brahmin conspiracy. Maraimalai Atikal was also defending fellow Vellala Dravidian scholars and their claims against attacks and veiled criticisms of Brahmin Tamil academics, M.Srinivasa Aiyangar, a respected Brahmin Tamil scholar who had worked as an assistant to the superintendent of census for the Madras Presidency.
Mr.Stuart, had made a devastating attacking on the claims of the Dravidian school of Tamil historiography, which derived its authority from the ‘scientific’ philological works of Bishop Caldwell. He debunked the theory of the Caldwell-Vellala school that Tamil culture was constituted by the high moral virtues of an ancient race of peaceful cultivators, on the basis of what he had studied of the religion and culture of the Tamil country-side, as an officer of the census, and on the basis of ‘pure’ Tamil works that had been rediscovered towards the latter part of the 19th century.
 Maraimalai Atikal
Srinivasa Aiyangar noted in his ‘Tamil Studies’, "Within the last fifteen years a new school of Tamil scholars has come into being, consisting mainly of admirers and castemen of the late lamented professorand antiquary, Mr.Sunderam Pillai of Trivandrum." Aiyangar argued that contrary to the claims of the new school, the Tamils were a fierce race of martial predators. He wrote,
"Again some of the Tamil districts abound with peculiar tomb stones called ‘Virakkals’ (hero stones). They were usually set upon graves of warriors that were slain in battle…The names of the deceased soldiers and their exploits are found inscribed on the stones which were decorated with garlands of peacock feathers or some kind of red flowers. Usually small canopies were put up over them. We give below a specimen of such an epitaph. A careful study of thePurapporul Venba Malai will doubtless convince the reader that the ancient Tamils were, like the Assyrians and the Babylonians, a ferocious race of hunters and soldiers armed with bows and lances making war for the mere pleasure of slaying, ravaging and pillaging. Like them the Tamils believed in evil spirits, astrology, omens and sorcery. They cared little for death. The following quotations from the above work will bear testimony to the characteristics of that virile race. (1) Garlanded with the entrails of the enemies they danced with lances held in their hands topside down. (2) They set fire to the fertile villages of their enemies, and (3) plundered their country and demolished their houses. (4) The devil’s cook distributed the food boiled with the flesh of the slain, on the hearth of the crowned heads of fallen kings. With these compare same passages from the Assyrian stories of campaigns: ‘I had some of them flapped in my presence and had the walls hung with their skins. I arranged their heads like crown…All his villages I destroyed, desolated, burnt; I made the country desert.’ And yet the early Dravidian are considered by Dr.Caldwell as the farmers of the best moral codes, and by the new school of non-Aryan Tamil scholars…"
Aiyangar even claims, "We have said that the Vellalas were pure Dravidians and that they were a military and dominant tribe. If so one could naturally ask, ‘How could the ancestors of peaceful cultivators be a war-like race?" He argues that the etymology of the root Vel is connected to war and weapons, that it was not uncommon for cultivating castes to have been martial tribes in former days as in the case of the Nayar, the Pillai, the Bants, etc. He also cites an official census of the Tamil population in the Madras Presidency, which shows that Tamil castes with a claim to traditional marital status constituted twenty six percent of the total number of Tamils in the Presidency. (Srinivasa Aiyangar; 1915, pp.40-58)
 Kasi Anandan, 1970s
Aiyangar’s attack on the Dravidian theory of Caldwell and the Vellala propagandists had political undertones. Learned Brahmins of the day were acutely aware of the political interests that lay behind the claims of the early Dravidian school. Vellala Tamil revivalism and its idea of Dravidian uniqueness were closely related to the pro-British and collaborationist poltical organization that was formed in 1916, by the non-Brahmin elites of the Madras Presidency – the South Indian Liberal Federation. Its proponents were, therefore careful not to emphasise the narratives of the martial reputation of the Tamils that were embodied in the ancient ‘high’ Tamil texts or in the folk culture of rural Tamilnadu. (Tamil revivalism had been promoted by Protestant missionaries and British officials in the latter half of the 19th century, only in as much as it was seen to facilitate the social, economic and religious aims of demilitarizing Tamil society and diminishing the influence of Brahmins in it.)
This was done not only out of a desire to promote Vellala caste culture, as Tamil national culture, but also in conscious deference to the concerns of the Raj about the ‘seditious’ views of Tamil cultural revival that were being propagated by the ‘terrorists’ and their sympathisers which were aimed at stirring the "ancient martial passions" of the Tamils in general and the military castes in particular, by appealing to martial values inscribed in the caste traditions of the Maravar and linking them to a glorious past that had been sustained by, what according to them, was the unique and powerful Tamil martial tradition. The political life of Purananooru, the foundation text of Tamil militarism had been initiated by two Brahmins who were sympathisers of the Indian revolutionary movement at this juncture. (The one was the great Tamil poet Subramanya Bharathi; the other was the great Tamil scholar M.Raghava Aiyangar, the court pundit of the Marava kings of Ramnad.)
These concerns, had compelled the Raj to take lines of action aimed at the terrorists and the military castes. One, it carefully sifted through the Tamil revivalist propaganda of the suspected sympathisers of the terrorist movement, to charge them with sedition. Two, it introduced the Criminal Tribes Act of 1911, with the express objective of throughly obtaining knowledge of, supervising and disciplining the Kallar and Maravar who were classified as dacoits and thugs under this act. The political mobilization of the Tamil military castes began as reaction against this act. The political leadership of this mobilization was inspired by the militarism of the terrorists. Modern Tamil militarism as a political force emerged from this conjuncture.
As we shall see later, Karunanidhi, Thondaman, Kasi Anandan and Prabhakaran are all, in varying degrees, products of the notions of Tamilian identity which arose from this conjuncture. Students of Tamil ethno-nationalism’s current phase will find that the martial narratives of Tamilian past and present are at work in two extremes of the Tamil political spectrum. Last month, an audio cassette was released in Jaffna by the LTTE and a commemoration volume was released in Singapore in Thondaman’s honour. Both are politically conscious efforts to root two personalities and their nationalist projects, to what has been portrayed as the most powerful manifestation of the Tamil martial tradition – the Chola Empire.
The LTTE cassette evokes a glorious past associated with Prabhakaran’s only nom de guerre, Karikalan – the founder of the Chola Empire. The commemoration volume, on the other hand seeks to emphasise the ‘continuity’ of a martial caste tradition between the leader of the CWC and the great general of the Chola Empire, Karunakara Thondaman. Thus the examination of Tamil militarism in this study is an exploration of the answer to the question – why does Tamil ethno-nationalism express itself thus and how does it sustain power to appeal to pan-Tamilian sentiments?
*****
Letter of Correspondent R.B.Diulweva [Dehiwela] and Sivaram’s response:
Martial Tamils
[Lanka Guardian, September 1, 1992, p.24]
I read with wry amusement, and increasing bewilderment, Sivaram’s curious assemblage of ‘facts’ about Tamil ‘military’ castes. The recluse in the Vanni, and his acolytes in the diaspora, should be grateful to the L[anka] G[uardian] for providing a platform for this skewed rewriting of history.
Some random reflections on Sivaram’s thesis. Does he seriously believe that the buccaneering Portuguese had the time to indulge in sociological analysis of Tamil militarism (a la CIA) and strategically decide to erase/Vellalise the ‘military’ castes? This also applies to the Dutch and the Brits. Sivaram’s overall picture is of a truly fantastic war sodden people imbibing blood thirstiness with their mothers’ milk. Weren’t the vast mass of Tamils peaceable farmers, fishermen, craftmen? Or was their sole function to service these magnificent bravos? And whom did these ‘military’ castes fight during the eras of peace when Tamil civilization, in its truest sense, flourished?
Another fact for Sivaram. One of his ‘military’ castes the Maravar has made a contribution to the Sinhala language. To this day, a ‘marava-raya’ is synonymous with ‘thug’. This is, probably, all that these ‘warriors’ were!.
D.P.Sivaram states:
I suggest that Mr.Diulweva go on reading before he finally decides whether it is skewed history or not. He should also study Prof.K.Kailasapathy’s Tamil Heroic Poetry, which describes an earlier phase of the culture that I have tried to analyse. He might find the overall picture there even more gruesome.
I understand Mr.Diulweva’s concerns given the current situation of the country, and hence his wish to think that the vast mass of Tamils were peaceable farmers. His wish and concern have had precedents in the British era. As for the sociological analysis of the buccaneering Portuguese, it was based on Prof.Tikiri Abeyasinghe’s ‘Jaffna under the Portuguese’ (discussed there in detail). I deal with the Maravar in as much as they were a political fact in the rise of Tamil nationalism. A write up in the Sunday Times of 23.8[Aug].[19]92 by its Madras correspondent refers to the political influence of one Mr.Natarajan who he says "belongs to the powerful Thevar (the caste title of the Maravar) community in southern Tamilnadu." Mr.Diulweva will find, if he takes a closer look at the politics of Tamilnadu, still an important political fact.
*****
References
(1) Recruitment handbooks of the Indian Army series. Madras
Classes, by Lieut-Col.G.E.D.Mouat, revised by Capt.G.Kennedy Cassels, New
Delhi: Govt.of India Press, 1938.
(2) I have used a Tamil translation of Sargant’s book. The
Dispersion of the Tamil Church, N.C.Sargant, 1940; translated into Tamil by
Rev.C.L.Vethakkan, 1964.
(3) Madras Infantry 1748-1943, Lt.Col.Edward Gwynee Phythiam
Adams, Govt. Press, Madras, 1943.
(4) An interesting study of the military labour market in north
India has been done recently by Ditk.H.Kloff-Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The
Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan 1450-1850, Cambridge
University Press, New York, 1990.
(5) History of the Madras Army, Lt.Col.W.J.Wilson,
Madras Govt. Press, 5 vols., 1882-89.
###Posted May 24, 2005 | |
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
தமிழக இராணுவயியல்'-7-DPSivaram
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.