Regiments and Corps
of the
SOUTH ASIAN ARMIES:

An Introductory Overview

Origins of the Indian Army

The modern armies of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma all evolved out of the huge colonial army of British India. The Honourable East India Company, established in 1600 and soon growing into one of the world's greatest commercial enterprises, expanded inland from the three main port areas of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, setting up English guards at its trading stations. King Charles II granted the Company virtual sovereign powers when he allowed them to raise an army, mint coinage, exercise civil and criminal jurisdiction, and wage war. The first Indian soldiers were inducted into the Company forces in 1668, and eventually grew into the largest mercenary army the world has ever seen. In 1753 the first British Army unit, the 39th Foot, was posted to India, and helped Robert Clive retake Calcutta from the Nawab of Bengal in 1758. As British expansion proceeded haphazardly, local regiments were raised to aid in the conquest and occupation, and the Company divided its civil and military administration into three presidencies, Bengal, Madras and Bombay. The conquest of the Punjab in 1849 brought about the formation of the Punjab Irregular Force, nominally under the control of the Bengal Army (1200 miles away in Calcutta), but not formally part of it. Likewise, the Hyderabad Contingent was loosely attached to the Madras Army. Each of these five armies had its own numerical sequence of cavalry and infantry regiments, as well as a small number of horse and foot artillery batteries. The basic numbering system was established in 1824, and remained in force until 1903, not counting adjustments made in the wake of the Great Mutiny. Each army had its own commander-in-chief, but the Bengal Army general was overall commander-in-chief.

Almost a quarter of the population of the subcontinent lived not in British India, but in over a hundred semi-independent princely states who had entered into treaty relationships first with the East India Company and later with the Crown. These states maintained their own armed forces, usually supplied with British officers. In some cases the states' rulers funded EIC troops for their own protection. In the case of the large state of Hyderabad, the Crown maintained a small army known as the Hyderabad Contingent besides the state's own small forces. Technological progress eventually rendered most the states's forces useless for anything but ceremony. In 1885 about a score of the states participated in the Imperial Service Troops scheme to train some of their forces up to standard and make them available for emergencies. During the First World War, 18,000 such troops served overseas. After the war, these were reorganised into several classes of readiness of Indian States Forces (ISF). During the Second World War, forty-nine states fielded 50,000 men ranging from platoon to divisional strength. During post-war negotiations for independence, it became clear that India would not tolerate the existence of these princely states. Most of the rulers accepted integration into India, and Hyderabad's resistance was crushed in a short war in 1948. Jammu and Kashmir, with a Hindu ruler of a largely Muslim population proved a far more intractable problem, setting the stage for a half-century of conflict between India and Pakistan. For all the other states, the government of India took charge of the states' units and in 1951 fully integrated them into the regular Army. Several ISF horsed cavalry units were merged to become the 61st Cavalry. Others became new battalions of existing infantry regiments.

The Great Mutiny of 1857-59

In 1857, the British were almost pushed out of India by the Great Mutiny in the Bengal Army. Sixty-four Bengal regiments mutinied or were pre-emptively disarmed. Two Bombay units were affected by the mutiny, but the Madras army was untouched. Loyal elements from mutineer regiments and other Europeans and Indians were hastily formed into irregular forces to help combat the mutiny.

When the British regained control in 1859, the Crown assumed direct control of local forces from the East India Company, and merged its European regiments directly into the British Army. The British also learned not to put field artillery in the hands of natives, a policy which was not reversed in India until 1935. The presidential armies remained under the control of their respective commanders and preserved their separate identities. The mutineer regiments were officially disbanded, and the remaining Bengal loyal units and new irregular units were all renumbered. The senior loyal regiment, the 21st , became the 1st Bengal Native Infantry, and so forth. Thus were born some of the most famous units of the Indian Army, such as Skinner's Horse. In the Madras Army no renumbering was necessary, and in the Bombay Army three gaps in the numbering were filled by newer units. In the original Bengal renumbering of May 1861, the Gurkha regiments, first recruited from Nepal in 1815, were left in the Bengal line. But in October 1861 they were removed and given their own numbering sequence (1st through 4th) taking precedence after the other Bengal infantry. Some other regiments in the Bengal and Madras armies were not officially recognised as Gurkha regiments until 1886 or later, and these were not renumbered in the Gurkha line until 1903. The Punjab Irregular Force (PIF, nicknamed the "Piffers") was regularised in 1865 as the Punjab Frontier Force (and renamed in 1903 simply as the Frontier Force).

Reorganisation in the 1860s also attempted to dilute any further chance of a mutiny by mixing the class composition of units. It was particularly the urban upper caste Poorbeahs of eastern Bengal who had mutinied, and they were no longer recruited. In the new structure, units would be homogenous only at the company level thus assuring that any future disaffection would not result in whole organised battalions becoming an enemy force. (Only a few Sikh and Gurkha regiments were homogenous at the battalion level.) There were no such future troubles, but when India and Pakistan became independent ninety year later, partition along communal lines was complicated by the dilution of Muslim battalions with Hindu companies and vice versa. In the event, the transfer of companies to ensure a wholly Muslim Pakistan was conducted in a very orderly and peaceful manner, regimental solidarity prevailing over one of the most bloody civil wars in history.

The 1903 Kitchener Reforms and the First World War

Some reductions were made after the Second Afghan war of 1878-1880, but new regiments were raised in the wake of the Anglo-Russian crisis of 1885. These new units filled some gaps in the numbering system. Also in 1885, the word "Native" was omitted from regimental titles since it had developed some negative connotations.

Gradual steps were taken to unify the several armies. In 1891 and Indian Staff Corps was created, replacing the three Presidential Staff Corps. The officers were considered to belong to the Indian Army, a term which had not previously been general usage. Two years later the commanders of the Bombay and Madras were eliminated, and in 1895 the Army was formally united as the Indian Army. At the same time, it was divided into four commands (Bengal; Punjab, including the Frontier Force; Madras, including Burma and Hyderabad; and Bombay, including the Sind and Baluchistan) whose regiments preserved their old numbering schemes. In 1902 Kitchener became Commander-in-Chief India and enacted far-reaching reforms. The following year all the cavalry and infantry were renumbered into a single sequence, and all reference to the old presidential armies was omitted from their titles. Although some titles changed, the numbering remained in force until the next major reorganisation in 1922. The Bengal units were given precedence, a galling affront to the Madras and Bombay units which were older and had not mutinied. The new line of infantry consisted of battalions numbered 1 through 130 and nine vacant numbers. The 1903 numbering was achieved simply by preserving the Bengal numbers, adding 50 to the old Punjab Frontier Force numbers, 60 to the Madras numbers, and 100 to the Bombay numbers. This left some gaps in the numbering, but allowed the regiments to preserve a semblance of their old numbers. In the following decade, a few disbandments created more gaps in the numbering. During the First World War new regiments were created, filling the vacant numbers according to their location. Thus the 70th Burma Rifles logically filled a vacant number in the "Madras block".

During this same period, the class composition of the Army was shifting. The South had long been at peace, and the British considered that the southern races made poor soldiers. Thus old Madras army units were gradually infiltrated by the "martial races" of the north - Punjabis, Sikhs, Rajputs, and Dogras. The transformation of the 2nd Madras Infantry into 62nd Punjabis was symptomatic of this trend. After the Third Burma War in 1885-87, six battalions were withdrawn from the Madras Army to form a permanent Burma occupation force, and numbered as the 1st-6th Burma Battalions. In 1891 their Madras regimental numbers were restored.

At the outbreak of the First World War, the Indian infantry and pioneers consisted of 107 single-battalion regiments and eleven two battalion regiments (the ten Gurkha regiments and the 39th Garhwal Rifles). Expansion for the war was largely achieved by raising 2nd (and sometimes 3rd) battalions within the regiments.

The 1922 Reorganisation and the Second World War

The First World War exposed problems of reinforcement and supply, and inevitably led to reorganisation in 1922.

The cavalry was far more numerous than needed in modern war, and their number was halved by amalgamating pairs of almost all the regiments. Three regiments, the 27th and 28th (the oldest in the Army), and the Guides Cavalry remained intact. The new cavalry regiments were grouped around seven permanent regimental centres with regiments taking turns as the recruiting and training unit for the group. This system gave way in 1936 to three groups for the remaining eighteen regiments, with one regiment in each group (12th Sam Browne's Cavalry, 15th Lancers, and 20th Lancers) removed from active service and permanently assigned to the training role. Mechanisation began in 1938 with the 13th DCO Lancers and Scinde Horse trading their horses for armoured cars. The last unit to complete the conversion were the 19th KGO Lancers in 1940. The number of the regiment was given prominence in 1922, but during the 1930s many of these were flipped into subtitles, giving prominence instead to better-known regimental names.

There were two generations of Pioneers in the Indian Army. The first in the eighteenth century evolved into Sappers and Miners with more and more specialised engineering tasks. The second generation began life as infantry of the line, "preparing the road" for the main body of infantry. This included road and railway building, irrigation projects, dam construction, and barrack building. From 1864 to 1904 the number of pioneer infantry battalions grew from two to twelve. By the outbreak of the First World War, every infantry division had one pioneer battalion trained as infantry but also carrying light engineering equipment such as pick axes. In the post-war reforms, the Pioneers were taken out of the infantry of the line and grouped into four Pioneer regiments taking precedence immediately ahead of the infantry (1st Madras Pioneers, 2nd Bombay Pioneers, 3rd Sikh Pioneers, and 4th Hazara Pioneers). Within ten years their work became so specialised and their effectiveness as infantry so compromised, that they had in fact become engineers duplicating the work of the Sappers and Miners. The Pioneers were therefore disbanded in 1933.

The one hundred and thirty infantry battalions were grouped into twenty new large regiments, with one battalion (the 10th) serving as permanent regimental depot and training centre. This organisation was actually pre-figured in 1886 when the single-battalion regiments were linked in groups of three or four sharing a regimental centre with battalions taking turns as the recruiting and training unit. For example, the 2nd, 4th, 13th and 16th Rajputs shared a centre at Agra. This system had broken down in the First World War with about one third of the battalions tied down in an administrative role. Under the new system, the 16th Rajputs became the 10th training Battalion of the new 7th Rajput Regiment and consisted of five companies to service the five active battalions of the regiment (the former 2nd , 4th , 7th, 8th and 11th Rajputs). During the Second World War, the term 10th Battalion was omitted in favour of "Regimental Centre". In the 1922 reorganisation nine battalions in the old infantry line were disbanded (3rd, 5th, 17th, 42nd, 43rd, 44th, 63rd, 80th, 88th). The 1922 reorganisation also created a part-time Territorial Force similar to the British (numbered beginning with the 11th Battalion of each regiment).

In 1937 Burma was separated from India, and the 20th Burma Rifles became the nucleus for a new Burma army. European officers were henceforth to come from the British rather than Indian service, but events overtook those plans, and the Second World War broke out with most of the Burmese units commanded by Indian Army officers.

Expansion for the Second World War was accomplished by mobilising the Territorial Force, raising new battalions of old regiments, and raising new regiments. New infantry regiments, unlike those of the 1922 reorganisation, were unnumbered, and the old regiments dropped their numbers in 1945 (except for the Punjab regiments since there were several whose titles would be identical without the numbers). Of the new regiments, the Sikh Light Infantry was considered to be a revival of the Sikh Pioneers disbanded in 1933, and it took precedence within the infantry accordingly.

Partition and Independence, 1947

Independence for India brought with it Muslim insistence on a separate Muslim state of Pakistan. Plans were quickly made to divide the British Indian Army and all its assets between independent India and Pakistan on a 2:1 ratio. Some geographical inequities, such as the industrial base (arms and equipment manufacturing) in India and the traditional training areas and cantonments in Pakistan could only be rectified by time. Of 21 cavalry regiments India received 14 and Pakistan 7. Of 19 pre-war infantry regiments, India received 11 and Pakistan 8. India also retained four war-raised regiments. Of the ten Gurkha regiments, six remained in the Indian Army and four entered directly into British service . The latter regiments moved their home base from India first to Malaya, then to Hong Kong, and finally to Britain itself. Individual Gurkha soldiers in the British regiments were given the option of remaining in Indian service, and a new regiment (11th Gurkha Rifles) was formed from those who opted out of British service.

The Post-Independence Indian Army

India became a Republic in 1950, and its Army regiments erased royal connections from their names. In time the Indian Army grew to be the fourth largest in the world. Expansion was achieved largely by creating new numbered armour regiments and adding battalions to the existing infantry regiments. The cavalry regimental numbers representing the units which went to Pakistan were left vacant until the 1980s, and new regiments were initially created starting at 42nd in order to avoid any confusion with the pre-1922 regiments. Three new infantry regiments were formed in time, all taking precedence over the old 2nd Punjab Regiment by plundering the latter of its historic battalions. These were the Brigade of Guards (modelled after the British in 1949), the Parachute Regiment (replacing the war-time unit which had disbanded), and the Mechanised Infantry Regiment. The largely Hindu/Sikh State Forces of Jammu & Kashmir were regularised in 1957 as the Jammu & Kashmir Rifles. Likewise, volunteers of the 1947-48 war were regularised in 1976 as the Jammu & Kashmir Light Infantry.

The Post-Independence Pakistan Army

Pakistan became a Republic in 1956 and also consequently omitted royal connections from its Army titles. Expansion followed the same model as the Indian Army, initially leaving vacant the cavalry numbers which had gone to India, and beginning the new regimental numbers at the 22nd. New battalions were added to the existing infantry regiments, but four new regiments were also raised shortly after independence: Bahawalpur (formed from the Indian State Forces), Pathan, East Bengal, and Azad Kashmir. In a very unpopular move in 1956 the eight old and four new infantry regiments were consolidated into three large regiments: the 1st, 14th, 15th and 16th Punjab were amalgamated into one Punjab Regiment; the old Baluch, 8th Punjab and new Bahawalpur were merged into a new Baluch Regiment; and Frontier Force Regt, Frontier Force Rifles and new Pathan Regt formed a new Frontier Force Regiment. Subsequent new regiments included the Sind Regiment formed from eleven battalions of the Punjab and ten battalions of the Baluch regiments. The Azad Kashmir Regiment was formed by regularising "freedom-fighters" and other paramilitaries of the 1947-48 war. The East Bengal Regiment, which was somewhat optimistically forming its 10th Battalion in 1971, was lost to Bangladesh when East Pakistan broke away in that year's war of independence. The Special Service Group was formed from the 19th Bn (raised during the Second World War) of The Baluch Regiment as Pakistan's elite red berets, a combination parachute and commando force.