A ‘defending of India’ has to start with an understanding of the debilitating consequences of that great disarming of India, post-1857. That disarming was an act of retribution, of revenge against all Indian males in the then British India.
It was not just the physical action of stripping Indian males of arms; it was a psychological wounding, a moral crippling of India and that for the first time in memory. Until a consolidation of British power in India in 1858, all Indian males carried arms, this was de rigueur, for personal arms were both a male adornment and a physical and psychological support.
The Ain-i-Akbari speaks of four-and-a-half million armed men being available for military service in north India in the sixteenth century and doubtless a similar number south of the Vindhyas, considering that the Vijaynagar Empire could field up to one million soldiers at a time.
In a very real sense, Guru Govind Singh’s injunction to all Sikhs to carry a kirpan was very much a part of the prevalent societal norm of his times. He enjoined the faithful to adhere to this norm, as an essential, and decreed the kirpan as a symbol of faith. His aim was to psychologically arm the country, the ordinary tiller of the land to stand strong, to stand armed and to stand up proudly against oppression. His was a fight against Islamic oppression, but the principle remained unalterable.
At a more personal level, to her dying day and long after I had resigned my commission (in the Army, incidentally, I had never carried a personal weapon, not even during operations, but that was an individual eccentricity) and had become an MP - my mother, upon my bidding her farewell to return to Delhi, would unfailingly enquire: ‘Are you carrying your shastra (personal weapon]?’ This query was not born of any worry, it was an assertion of the self-confidence and pride in the carriage of personal arms.
In what is today Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, all rural population was then armed; thus a substantial labour market existed, because of which there was no dearth of employment opportunities for a would-be soldier (umeedvar or ‘hopefuls’ as they were called till recently). These recruits came from all strata of Indian society, caste was totally irrelevant, had always been, for there was no discrimination in recruitment and treatment of soldiers of any kind on the basis of caste. Today’s examples of Maratha Light Infantry (MLI) or Sikh Light Infantry (SLI) are much later manifestations; indeed, this caste factor is so much of a more recent separating, this restricting of mobility. It is a historical fact that from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. the status of ‘Rajput’ was open and accessible to all soldiers; also a ‘Hindu soldier’ had more than one identity, for example, one whilst in service, another in transit, and a third in the village.
That is why it is important to understand that so dramatic a development as the disarming of a whole people, who through centuries (really always), had been used to carrying and wielding weapons, could not but have major consequences. This entire tract of British India, which would include most of today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh, now stood disarmed. But not that part of India which was not British, and did not fall in the category of the colonised. We had all learnt from childhood how to wield weapons, carry them and continued to do so well into the 1960s, when, finally, licensing of arms came to our parts, too.
-“A Call to Honour” by Jaswant Singh