Bobby thought so, too.
At Guindy, both boys were enrolled in the University Training Corps, the voluntary training unit for potential army officers. Early every Saturday, before the sun poured its jellied heat over Madras, they lined up at the Allen Grounds, occasionally for some riflery but mainly for endless parade. Kurien was hopeless. Ordered to shoulder arms, he’d get his rifle stuck in the next man’s shirt-cuff, and drop it onto the ground. ‘Pick up your damned rifle, you butter-fingered idiot!’ a sergeant shouted down the line, in some terrifying English Midlands accent. Bobby, with callous lack of effort, made the top student rank. He could out-shoot some of the NCOs at the rifle butts. Though the discipline never pleased him, every week his officers clapped him on his shoulder, and told him to put some stripes on it.
The Indian Army was the world’s largest mercenary organisation; though it did not regard itself as such, its critics did not hesitate to. It was a force of paid soldiers who upheld the foreign occupation of their own land, and other people’s lands as well. The Army was older than the Raj itself, and it had filled with the silt of centuries, out of which grew all its pomp and folly.
But the period between the wars had stirred that sediment. The first principle of the Indian Army had always been European command. The officer’s commission, a King’s Commission, was the privilege of White men. It brought moral order to the quarrelling castes and creeds in the other ranks, the natives whom Kipling had depicted in ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’ as a conference of mules, bullocks, horse and elephant, united only by the animal grunt of ‘Hukm hai!’ – It is an order! – ‘Hukm hai!’
After the Great War, so many British men lay in the ground that the government began to wonder how in the future it could staff its armies in Britain as well as in the colonies. The Congress, too, was insisting on a plan of ‘Indianisation’ of state personnel, including military brass. The year Bobby was born, native officers were cautiously commissioned into seven Indianised battalions. By 1932, an Indian Military Academy was opened at Dehra Dun, and established the right of Indians to join the army command. The numbers admitted were small, and the men selected were practically, and often literally, princelings.
Facing a new world war, with its allies under German occupation, Britain needed the strength of its colonies and dominions. It needed to expand their armies and – an unnerving thought for leaders like Churchill – their corps of native officers. A gate that had creaked open an inch in two decades suddenly flew wide. In came the newest martial caste of the British Raj: the Indian middle class. With an Emergency Commission, an Indian would be trained and paid on a par with White officers, and would receive his pips in just six months, instead of thirty. On college grounds across India, young men traded one uniform for the other, khadi for khaki.
This new war would not be like the Great War. In 1914, it was said the mud in Ypres was only brown because so many Indian jawans lay in it. While they had filed into the trenches of an alien continent, to die of gangrene, disease or the cold, the Army had sententiously debated whether it was alright for black Indians to kill White Germans, or even to have their wounds treated by White nurses. But Indians were not for crawling any more. They would not rank with dumb animals, only good for taking orders. They would be the sahibs now, saluted by subordinates of every race.
As for the mud, by the end of 1940, no war front remained on the continent. They would sail out to the far fields of the Empire, into the jang-e-azam, the war of the world, to perform deeds that would never be forgotten.
3
Miranshah, November 1941
It was all very well for Manek, up there. But did he know what they did to a Tommy on the ground, if they caught him alive? Tortured to death, and that’s just the start of it. If he was carrying his kit, they knew to look for the mess tin with its folding handle, and they used that pretty handle to gouge his eyes out. Then he’s scalped, and they have his brains out, and fill the cavity with dust and stones and straw. They cut his privates off and stitch ’em into his mouth, and put burning cigarette ends up his nose.
Mind you, that’s just his head …
The sergeant trailed Manek through the circuit of the aircraft, making final checks. He was on his second tour in the North-West Frontier, he said; the last time had been with the Army, so close to the ground he could smell the fakir’s sulphur smoking off the hills. He thought it only right, and some small pleasure, as a man who had felt flint-chips dance down his shirt when bullets struck his sangar walls, that he should inform the young Indian pilot-officer of the true nature of the foe. Air force men never saw much of them. But no one’s initiation to Miranshah was complete without him getting a picture of how he would look after a Pashtun beauty treatment.
An hour later, Manek was cocooned in the cockpit of his Hawker Audax, 2,500 feet above the mineral sea of Waziristan. The slopes below him graded from the rule of brown to disobedient shades of purple, ferrous orange and powder blue, and the outcrops cast flat black sails of shadow, pointing east, east and east in the afternoon light. Here and there, notched into the hills, was a small white ‘Y’: the Frontier pickets signalling ‘We have nothing for you. All is well.’ Manek was now at the outermost point of British-Indian power, beyond the last garrison, wheeling through the furthest, coldest orbit of what was called India. The hills beyond them had been ceded to the control of the Afghan king. As if they were anyone’s to cede, or to control. Manek thought of the recruitment ad in the newspaper: Monarch of all you survey. Kings ruled the air here, but not the land.
From this elevation, the Tochi river was a twist of green silk scarf, tied to conceal the beige blisters rising from the ground beside it. Those were the villages of Waziri Pashtuns, who grew rice and apricot trees on the riverbanks. Higher up the hills, they grazed sheep in the shade of the juniper and pine. In between, they lay among the stones, invisible, nibbling at sugary balls of channa-gud from their pockets, and waiting for the Empire’s men to enter rifle range.
Once a week, on road-opening day, supply trains of armoured trucks ventured out to the Scouts’ post at Datta Khel, the camp nearest the Afghan border. Up in the folded hills, the Army manned pickets to watch the valley road, while down at the river, stockades secured the larger villages at Boya and Kharmakar. At the base of the valley was Miranshah, knuckle of the Empire, home to several battalions of the Indian Army and the headquarters of the Tochi Scouts, tribesmen paid to control tribesmen in the most hostile sector of the Frontier. Yet control, bought at whatever price, never lasted long. When they grew restive, the Pashtuns were stone-sprung terrors. At the end of road-opening day, when the pickets were called in to join the rearguard, seasoned soldiers came running like children from the dark. This was why the Army shared its base in Miranshah with the Indian Air Force and the RAF.
Other forts in the Frontier were crowded by hilltops, from which the Pashtuns sometimes took potshots into the kitchen lines and hockey fields. Miranshah, however, sat some distance from the nearest hills, a clay battleship in a flat, stony bay. At night, all life retreated into its thirty-foot hull. With its crenels and watchtowers silhouetted by the stars, the fort could belong in any century. But at dawn the gates opened and a modern air force was wheeled out onto the plain. Bomb racks and fuel tankers scrawled on the dust, and the Audaxes of No. 2 Squadron rolled into the haze, ready for the fight.
It was sixty years almost since the Forward Policy had advanced British control, not just to the base of the mountains beyond Punjab, but into their heights. Those passes had been the gates for the invasion of India since Alexander, and for as long as Britain had ruled the Punjab it had maintained a grizzled guard against threats from the west. Mud forts were built and garrisoned in monastic isolation, exposed to the elements and to trigger-happy tribesmen, and service in ‘the Grim’ became a rite of passage for young officers and regiments. By the turn of the century, once the wounds of the Mutiny had closed, the imperial imagination filled instead with exploits on the Frontier.1