Institutional belief · Military anthropology
Martial races
Some South Asian communities were treated as possessing innate racial or hereditary qualities that made them naturally better soldiers than others.
2 episodes
Current understanding
Current understanding
Military performance is not an inherited racial, ethnic, or caste trait. Training, selection, nutrition, organization, experience, incentives, technology, and social conditions all shape military effectiveness, while broad ancestry groups do not establish an innate capacity for soldiering.
Institutional episode
British India
From the late nineteenth century, British Indian Army recruitment increasingly favored communities classified as “martial,” including Sikhs, Gurkhas, and some Punjabi Muslim and frontier groups. This was not merely a diffuse colonial stereotype: Army recruitment policy and its administrative machinery classified communities by supposed inherited or environmentally fixed soldierly qualities, concentrating recruitment in selected regions and groups.
Institutions
- British Indian Army
- Army Headquarters, India
- Adjutant-General’s Branch, Recruiting Directorate
Documented consequences
- Selective military recruitment
- Unequal access to military employment
- Racialized classification of communities
Institutional machinery
Recruiting policy was centralized through Army Headquarters and the Adjutant-General’s recruiting machinery, then implemented by regimental and regional recruiting organizations. Authority therefore flowed through identifiable headquarters and recruiting bodies into a wider decentralized apparatus.
Sources and what they establish
- Race and Recruitment in the Indian Army — 1880–1918Modern Asian Studies
Finds that martial-race theory shaped Indian Army recruitment policy from the late nineteenth century and remained operational, with modifications, during the early twentieth century; it also describes the Adjutant-General's Department taking centralized control of wartime recruitment.
- Recruiting in India, before and during the war of 1914–18Army Headquarters, India / British Library India Office Records
Catalogue record for the 1919 Army Headquarters report, shelfmark IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2152, documenting the official recruitment machinery and class-based recruitment system.
- Recruiting the “martial races” — identities and military service in colonial IndiaPatterns of Prejudice
Reviews the racialization of colonial military recruitment and the belief that selected communities possessed qualities necessary for military service.
Institutional episode
Pakistan
After independence, Pakistan formally moved away from British racial terminology but inherited an army whose recruitment geography and class composition had been built around the colonial “martial races” system. Senior officers continued to regard Bengalis as poor military material, and recruitment from East Pakistan expanded only slowly. Bengalis remained sharply under-represented through the 1960s, making the inherited doctrine part of a wider institutional imbalance between East and West Pakistan.
Institutions
- Pakistan Army
- General Headquarters (GHQ), Pakistan Army
Documented consequences
- Severe under-representation of Bengalis in the armed forces
- Regional concentration of recruitment in Punjab and the northwest
- Political grievance in East Pakistan
Institutional machinery
After 1947, the Pakistan Army inherited much of the British Indian Army’s regimental and recruiting structure. General Headquarters shaped force composition while regimental recruitment reproduced preferences for Punjabis and Pashtuns associated with the older martial-race framework.
Sources and what they establish
- Bengali Representation in Pakistan Defence Forces (1947–1971) — A RevisitBIISS Journal
Historical and statistical study arguing that Pakistan's military perpetuated colonial martial-race assumptions to justify low Bengali recruitment.
- The Foundations of Pakistan’s Strategic Culture — The British, Martial Race, and Its Influence on Pakistani Strategic CultureMarine Corps University Press
Describes the continuation of class-composition preferences in the early Pakistan Army and the influence of British officers, including Commander-in-Chief Douglas Gracey, on inherited martial-race assumptions.
- Colonial Military Service and Identity Formation — A Case Study of British IndiaOxford University Press
Reviews colonial martial-race recruitment and notes its continuing influence on the postcolonial armies of India and Pakistan.
Last reviewed: 23/08/2026