Publication

Military history is a Eurocentric discipline, as Jeremy Black observes. So too is military sociology. The discussion looks at the Indian army during the Second World War from both the societal and organizational perspectives, attending to the very different ways in which they conceive culture and its relation to combat motivation and battlefield conduct. The first two sections provide some background to military service in British India and look at the Indianization of the officer corps and the formation of the Indian National Army (INA). The focus here is on the kind of cultural analysis appropriate to societal approaches, exploring the role of political beliefs and attitudes and their relation to the actions of Indian officers and other ranks. The last two sections turn to the cultural dimensions of the organizational approach, looking at some aspects of training and combat for British imperial forces in the Burma campaign.