In Faithful Fighters, Kate Imy undertakes a refreshing investigation into the Indian Army between the 1910s and 1930s to trace the roots and development of religious militarism and racial masculinity in the colonial military institution of British India. In doing so, she also provides a snapshot of the civilian communities from which the Indian Army recruited and that it protected. As Imy makes clear, the decision to examine the three-decade span covering World War I and the interwar period allows us to observe the Indian Army in war and peace, the ever-changing contexts of political demands from within, the collapse of a global economy, and the British Empire on the international stage.
Imy strategically positions this topic at the intersection of key scholarship as varied as World War I colonial soldiers (Das), the discourse of “martial race” (Streets), and colonial masculinity (Sinha), to name just a few. She also...
