Introduction

A review of the historiography of the Indian Army from the early nineteenth-century histories of the Bengal, Bombay and Madras Armies to that of the Indian National Army in the Second World War. This chapter covers such varied approaches as the narrative approach of Victorian histories of the Indian Mutiny with their particular imperial ideology and the more recent subaltern and cultural approaches, and to the examination of issues such as the fiscal-military state and the concept of martial races. The whole is set in the wider context of the movement from Eurocentric to global perspectives of military development.