Sahib is a broad and sweeping military history of the men who served in India and the women who followed them across that vast and dusty continent, bore their children and, all too often, mopped their brows as they died. Although wealth and status meant a great deal in British India, it was a place that slew the colonel or his daughter as easily as it did the sergeant or his. The bloody battles that gave Britain control of the subcontinent left just as much grief in the lines as in officers’ bungalows.
It is a book about British soldiers in the broadest sense — from sahib-log of the most refined sort to gora-log, red of face and coat, intent on mischief in the bazaar.
Richard Holmes, one of Britain’s leading military historians, begins with India’s rise from commercial enclave to great Empire, from Clive’s victory of Plassey, through the imperial wars of the eighteenth century and the Afghan and Sikh Wars of the 1840s, through the bloody turmoil of the Mutiny, and the frontier campaigns at the century’s end.
With its focus on the experience of ordinary soldiers, Sahib explains why soldiers of the Raj joined the army, how they got to India and what they made of it when they arrived.
The book examines Indian soldiering in peace and war, from Kipling’s ‘snoring barrack room’ to storming parties assaulting mighty fortresses, cavalry swirling across open plains, and khaki columns inching their way between louring hills. Making full use of extensive and often neglected archive material in the India Office Library and National Army Museum, Sahib will do for the British soldier in India — whether serving a local ruler, forming part of the Indian army, or soldiering with a British regiment — what Tommy has done for the ordinary soldier in the First World War.
