DC Katoch

I've always wondered why Bihar turned out to be so different from Bengal or Orissa in martial spirit when all three experienced the same history?

DC Katoch

All right, I take that back about Orissa...it should be compared with Bihar and Nepal and not Bengal:

Bihar, Nepal, and Orissa

So now I wonder why Bengal was different from these other regions in martial ability?

lemontree

Then take your revenge and quench your thirst, and be counted amongst the rogues like Dyer, Dawood and Osama. Good luck.
Archer
I did mention 2 Sikh regiments (36th and the 54th), that are mentioned in various records. It is not clear as to troops of which battalion actually took part. These 25 men were basically collected from ad hoc strength that were in transit through Amritsar except the 1/9 Gurkhas' whose 1 coy was present in Amritsar. Units tend to keep such blots in their units buried.
That is debatable as 40 troops from 1/9 GR were catered by Dyer to stand behind the 50 rifleman to ensure that orders were followed.

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Cheers!...on the rocks!!

lemontree

That is a misconception perpetrated by the British after the 1857 Mutiny. For 150 years before 1857, it was the Bengal army that made the British empire in India, and it was the Bengal army that mutinied.

Brig. Ray, sir here is Bengali, with one battle wound and a decoration. So much for this question about "bengali martial ability".

Jay

For the nth time there is no martial race in India. Saying some race/caste/region as martial would do dis-service to rest of the brave men.

Cheras, cholas, Pandyas, vijayanagar, Chalukya's, Pallavas, Hyder, Tippu all of them are martial enought to put the entire south India in to so called martial race.

And the same would hold true for others regions in India.

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A grain of wheat eclipsed the sun of Adam !!

lemontree

The Portugese are famous for their inquisitions that forced many christians to migerate south. Hence, you have a southern christian and hindu community that speaks konkani (same as Goans) in the Karnatak town of Mangalore.

However, St. Francis Xavier did not form part of the Inquisition as he had died in 1552 and the inquisition in Goa started in 1560, almost 8 years after his death in China.

Archer,
That is rubbish, the Syrian and Roman Catholic church have difference for polotico-religious reasons.

gilgamesh

LT, St. Xavier initiated inquisition on Goa by requesting John iii. He did not live long enough to participate in it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa_Inquisition

However the article does not list out in detail many atrocities by the inquisitors.

Eg. Male genitals were hacked off in front of their wives. Breasts cut off and vaginas sliced by swords in front of their husbands. Childrens eyelids sliced off and bodies dismembered in front of their parents.

lemontree

The Portugese did not take all this trouble, they just burnt their victims. A total of 3000-4000 victims suffered they burnings, while the total recorded toll of the inquisition was 16,000.

raj

does that make the sin any less my dear friend?????????

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saw this in some site dont remember the name tough

DC Katoch

Nice try. The "Bengal army" was composed of Purbias from UP and Bihar...anyway I was asking about Bengal in an earlier period.

This answers my question to some extent:

Cause of conversions

The large Muslim populations in Punjab and Bengal, as against the lesser proportions in the UP region, which was the center of Islamic power, have been the basis of heated debates from the 19th Century. Qazi Abdul Wadud, in his book The Mussalmans of Bengal, claimed that large numbers of foreign Muslims came to Bengal as soldiers and administrators and that the Pathans in a later age also colonized large areas in Bengal. In his view then the Bengali Muslims were of foreign origin—but the reason why many local Muslims claim foreign origin has been given in this earlier post.

The leftist view, voiced by Richard Eaton, is that ethnic groups only lightly exposed to “Brahmanical culture” converted to Islam. In the northwest it were the Pathans and the Baloch, in Punjab the Jat clans, and in Bengal it were the Rajbanshi, Koch, Pod, and Chandal communities. But this does not explain why the same Koch or Rajbansis remained true to their ancestral faith in Cooch Behar, Assam, Tripura? And in the case of Punjab why did the same Jat clans east of Lahore not convert to Islam?

In fact the conquest of the Shahi lands (in Punjab) was successfully completed and the conquest of the Sena lands (in Bengal) was also completed by the end of the 13th Century, major resistance ceased and the people were thus forcibly converted to Islam. By contrast the conquest of Ajmer and Kannauj remained unfinished for a long time—these two kingdoms and the adjoining regions formed the heartland of the Rajput resistance. The entire land was an arena of the “back and forth” battles—the Turks would capture a fort, then lose it to the Rajputs, capture it again, and lose it again[6]. Such contests were repeated in a hundred forts spread across the heart of North India. As has been shown in another post all resistance is linked together, and so in this region the resistance of villagers was far stronger than in Punjab or Bengal. For these reasons, even though the sword of Islam was active in this region, there were few conversions to Islam because that sword was not successful.

As has been shown in the case of Punjab, only the regions where Hindus were politically dominant and militarily strong did they remain true to their ancestral faith. Politically, eastern Bengal was completely conquered by the Turks but we need to see the reasons why the local warriors could not continue a military resistance? Or why the plains of Bengal had an entirely different history than the plains of Bihar?

Military developments

The renowned historian Jadunath Sarkar, a Bengali himself, wrote[7], “Bengal has no indigenous race capable of the long continued exertion, the ready submission to discipline, the concerted action in large bodies, and the cool and steady fighting that are required in resisting the hardier races of invaders.”

This was of course written for a later age because the Palas and the Senas had comparable military power with their contemporaries in other parts of India—what is interesting is the varying composition of this military power. In the Gwalior inscription describing their victory over the Palas, the Pratihars have recorded the Pala army as having dense masses of elephants, horses, and chariots. Chariots! The vehicle of war that had disappeared from most parts of the world was still being used by the rulers of eastern India.

The Arab merchant Sulaiman (850 CE) has recorded that the Pala kings were at continuous war with their neighbors and that they took 50,000 elephants in each campaign. By contrast the Pratihars are described by the same author as having the best cavalry in India augmented by elephants, camels, and infantry. The Arab writers describe the Rashtrakuta troops as mostly infantry but with units of elephants and cavalry—the latter being imported through the Arab merchants.

Horses have been bred in the relatively dry parts of western and northern India, which was the home of the Pratihars, but were never found in the humid regions of the east, the land of the Palas. That area has been the breeding ground of the best elephants found in India and quite naturally has been home to empires that fielded large squadrons of elephants, beginning with Magadha and the Mauryas. Before the elephants became important, the kingdoms in northern India had relied on chariots, and the eastern empires continued this reliance even though they had to import horses to pull these chariots.

So it isn’t surprising that the Palas a thousand years later had large elephant forces but it is puzzling why they continued using chariots when those horses could have been used to boost their limited cavalry. But this tradition of using chariots continued in the east—the later Palas in the 11th Century defeated the Varman kings of eastern Bengal and took from them chariots and elephants as booty. For this same reason the cavalry of the Sena kings was very deficient and proved to be their doom against the heavy cavalry and mobile archery of the Turk invaders.

By contrast the kingdoms of Ajmer and Kannauj had adequate cavalry, but they also had large contingents of elephants and infantry—these varying arms proved difficult to coordinate when faced by mobile archery and cavalry maneuvers. But their proficiency in cavalry allowed the Rajputs to continue the resistance from the innumerable forts and strongholds. This did not happen in the east.

The broken remnants of the Sena power continued to resist the Turks who had established their capital in Lakhnawati—in one such battle the Turks are said to have captured a few elephants from the Senas. Concurrent with foreign invasions the Sena Kingdom was also breaking from within, and the Deva dynasty that usurped power from them is said to have cooperated with Sultan Balban against the Turks of Lakhnawati. But they were ultimately defeated, their kingdom was annexed, and their people were converted to Islam.

Some Hindu principalities remained in the western portion of Bengal bordering Orissa and Jharkhand—this region had outcrops of hills covered with jungles. Their military power was inadequate because of the lack of cavalry—they did not even have the resources to maintain elephant forces and consequently their troops were mostly infantry. These principalities were of no consequence to the Bengal Sultans who fought mostly against outside independent powers like Orissa, Assam, Myanmar, and their own overlords of Delhi. But they were useful in guiding armies through the jungle roads, providing supplies to those armies, and in defending their own homes from invaders. Late in the 17th Century Shova Singh, the Zamindar of Chatwa-Barda in the Medinipur district plundered the lands of his neighbors and the Mughal territories before he was killed and his army defeated by the Mughal prince Azim-ush-shan.

So even when politically inconsequential, these principalities at least had minimal military strength to keep their own people free. For this reason people in the western areas of Bengal remained with their ancestral faith and traditions.

Under the Sultans the forts of the region, though built of mud or clay, were effective in design in repelling invaders. The Rajputs in upper India adapted to the improved construction of forts that had taken place in Muslim and Christian lands and built some magnificent forts of their own in this period, but the indigenous Bengalis in the east could not do the same. The Bengal Sultans also adapted to the use of naval flotillas in the numerous rivers, and in defensive wars against armies from upper India or in the invasions of Assam—these naval wars will be described later. The Turks in Bengal also adapted the use of elephants in their own armies as they had done earlier in Punjab and Delhi.

It remains to study the use of infantry. Jadunath Sarkar again wrote “the army of the Nawabs of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa…was filled entirely with Afghans and Hindu foot-musketeers of Buxar, with a sprinkling of Sayyids of Barha…and Bahelia musketeers from Awadh.” In other words the indigenous Bengalis did not form any part of the army of the Nawabs or of the British who succeeded them. On the other hand Hindus from Bihar and UP dominated both the Nawab’s and the British infantry—which again brings up the question of why the plains of Bihar were different from the plains of Bengal when both were under the same rulers?

lemontree

Do you see me justifying the act??

raj

well u said it

lemontree

You are imagining things.

Vaman

IMO, everything that was gained from the British was completely incidental. None of the gains even begin to compensate for the wealth sucked out of this nation. On the other hand it would be pretty accurate to say that Britain would not have become as prosperous a state it is now had it not been for the wealth appropriated from India's occupation.
Even under occupation India's textile industry was producing textile far better in quality than those in British mills, causing them to literally ban Indian textiles exports and giving British textiles preferential access to the Indian markets.
Another example - the railways : The railways in India was never created to provide transportation for Indians. It was created simply to quickly move the military to quell rebelliion and control the local populace. It was also the most efficient way to transport resources from India to the ports to feed the British industries.
I dont think theres a reason to think that Railways wouldnt have been built in India had it not been for the British. Just like we have developed other industries, we would have found a way to build the railways too. Same goes for the civil services and the rest of the bureaucracy too. Anything could have been bought, borrowed, stolen, copied or developed.
Whats the big deal?

lemontree

IMO everyone agrees on the above by-products of the British Raj.
The big deal is that when you have politicians screwing our country upside down your last sentence seems hypothetical.