The Historical Origins of India’s Military Strategic Culture

• In Event: Publics, Institutions, and Cultures: New Research on Indian Foreign Policy

Abstract

This paper is a preliminary step in a larger research program that intends to explore the historical origins of the Indian military’s strategic culture, and its evolution over time. Four generations of research on strategic culture have taken place since the term was first introduced in the international relations literature in the late 1970s. Although the latest (fourth) generation of scholarship has helpfully inaugurated the study of “subcultures” held by different groups within a state, it is yet to study how specific subcultures originate historically and if or how they change over time. We bridge this gap through an exploratory study of the Indian military as a domestic group with its own strategic culture. We focus on two broad questions: whether there exists a strategic culture in the Indian military, and whether and how this strategic culture has changed over time. To answer these questions, we rely on a previously unexamined empirical source in the strategic culture literature: the journal of the United Services Institution of India, which has been published continuously since 1871, i.e. from the period when India was under direct British rule. Given prior evidence of significant institutional continuity between the British Indian Army (established in 1858) and the Indian Army (established in 1947), the USI Journal constitutes a self-contained body of strategic thought that can be examined for evidence of a strategic culture over time. Through a systematic study of articles published in this journal, we develop an understanding of the strategic thought of British officers in India during the colonial period, and offer insight into what this may mean for post-colonial Indian strategic culture.

Authors

• Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Boston University

• Rohan Mukherjee, Yale-NUS College