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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: kutayuddha

Indic Diplomacy

14 Sat Jan 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Indic Diplomacy

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Arthashastra, Condoleezza Rice, Deep Datta-Ray, diplomacy, ethics, foreign policy, Great Power, IFS, India, Indian Foreign Service, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Krishna, kutayuddha, Mahabharata, modernity, non-alignment, nuclear, Rajiv Sikri, realism, Shivshankar Menon, Union Public Service Commission, UPSC, vasudhaiva kutumbakam

making-of-indian-diplomacyDatta-Ray, Deep. The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. 380 pp.

Indian diplomacy has long vexed its observers, occidental and oriental alike. Lacking in a culture of periodical declassification and easy access to past and present practitioners, the workings of South Block remain impervious to methodical scholarship. In this environment, a book that promises to reveal not only how Indian diplomacy is conducted but also why it is such an enigma is a welcome arrival. As the title avers, The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism seeks to properly establish the functioning of the members of the Indian Foreign Service in the culture and traditions of their homeland rather than in Christendom’s theories of statecraft.

Several things are of note in this project: first, Deep Datta-Ray, the author, is making a cultural approach to the study of diplomacy and foreign policy. While this may seem perfectly normal to most, it is a method that has had few takers in the historical profession. Though it has become more popular over the last decade, international relations remains firmly in the grip of abstract theories such as realism, constructivism, or Marxism. And yet, diplomats and their political masters do not leave their values and biases at home each day as they come in for work; they are enmeshed in a cultural web which cannot but inform their policies.

Second, Datta-Ray criticises scholars who complain that Indian foreign policy makes little sense for judging it by Western customs of politics, governance, and power. Despite nearly two centuries of British rule – between Crown and Company – over India, cultural transfer from metropole to periphery remained superficial at best. In other words, Thomas Macaulay failed to create brown Englishmen; Indians remain rooted in their traditions and understanding of the world.

Macaulay’s failure would not be a startling revelation in itself but Datta-Ray goes on to argue that the entire modern project in Europe is deeply rooted in its Christian heritage and incompatible to the Indian ethos. The binarism of exclusivist monotheistic cults transcends mere theology and permeates all aspects of culture, resulting in a fundamentally different understanding of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Islam, being an Abrahamic offspring, literally, meshes better with European notions of power relations and the state than dharmic religions do. Again, this is not a new argument: originally put forward in academic circles in the mid-1970s, it has percolated into the awareness of ordinary Indians perhaps a decade ago. However, Datta-Ray’s systematic application of this idea to foreign policy is a first and deserves careful consideration.

Unfortunately, The Making of Indian Diplomacy is filled with turgid prose that could impress only dissertation committees. Such jargon-laden, impenetrable language, the hallmark of cultural studies, is one of the reasons the humanities has lost respect in society. Datta-Ray commits such perversions upon the English language – the Queen was never meant to sound like this – that it would make Guillaume Apollinaire proud! Yet those who brave the presentation are rewarded with some fascinating insights into the workings of India’s Ministry of External Affairs.

Indian history remains, disappointingly, strongly entangled to privileged access and Datta-Ray, son of Sunanda K Datta-Ray, seems to have it. This project needed the personal intervention of then prime minister Manmohan Singh, such was the resistance of the bureaucracy against an interloper. Even then, one MEA mandarin asked the author, “What do you want with our documents? They only reveal process, not intent.” This gives an insight into Indian bureaucratic thinking that marks it different from Western practice. Fortunately, Datta-Ray has used his opportunity well – embedded with the Indian Foreign Service allowed him to observe, talk informally, and interview officially dozens of young aspirants, serving officials, and retired civil servants. The resulting monograph can be understood as discussing the structural and intellectual differences between Western and Indic diplomacy.

The Body of the Beast

Before looking at policies and attitudes, Datta-Ray asks who populates the service. He finds that many of the applicants come from modest backgrounds in the hinterland, some not even aware of the IFS until they had cleared the Union Public Service Commission examination! Many come to government service as a means to mediate between it and their village, or enlist its assistance to protect their region from the state. There is less suspicion of the state compared to Western countries, for one primary reason – it is present in the villages, where private corporations find it unprofitable to venture. Ironically, the failure of the state to adequately provide basic necessities for its citizens is also its greatest strength. Many of the incoming civil service cadre seem to hold an organic view of society in which the state remains a place people can come together and lift themselves up through the opportunities it provides. While the cosmopolitan disenchanted may scoff at such idealism, Datta-Ray has revealed an interesting undercurrent that will last as long as a government job is seen as a guarantor of upward mobility. However, is it necessarily different from the West? One would assume that governments world over attract service-minded people, some more fortunate than others, however cynical it may leave them at the end. A quick comparison to a small sampling of other countries would have helped the argument along much better.

The Making of Indian Diplomacy praises how several IFS officers left lucrative careers in the corporate world to enter into government service. Some officers, ironically, do not want to leave home; others see a civil service job as a badge of status despite working conditions that are less than adequate. For example, at one point during the negotiations over the civil nuclear cooperation with the United States, the Indian delegation consisting of a Joint Secretary from the MEA and two lawyers found itself matched by an American official and his team of 55 lawyers! The Joint Secretary in question, S Jaishankar, when quizzed by his astounded counterpart, simply shrugged and replied that Indians make do. Jugaad, the popular term nowadays for making do, seems romantic only to those who never had to resort to it. MK Narayanan, the national security advisor from 2005 to 2011, glibly dismisses this as Indians not being a litigious society. However, the truth might simply be insufficient resources, poor recruiting power, and a deterring application process. Western foreign service departments are a lot more casual about lateral entry hires from industry, ensuring adequate manpower and expertise available to their ministers and senior bureaucrats at all times. These are certainly factors that make the IFS stand out from Western services but perhaps not in a way to be desired!

Datta-Ray reveals an interesting tidbit about promotions in the civil services: everyone gets positive reviews. As a result, personnel files are useless when it comes time to raise one above his peers. One officer confided in the author that this was because seniors were afraid that they would be accused of casteism if they marked anyone down. Datta-Ray uses this state of affairs to argue for a peculiarly Indian “total evaluation” process that goes beyond words on paper to assess the suitability of an officer for a higher position. It is this system that allowed Shivshankar Menon, former national security advisor to Manmohan Singh and successor to Narayanan, to supercede 16 positions to become the foreign secretary in October 2006. Of course, a less charitable view might be that “total evaluation” is making a virtue out of necessity and that it merely conceals an egregious problem in Indian institutions, namely, using caste victimisation as a weapon to conceal incompetence.

Intellectual Weltanshauung

Datta-Ray recounts when Menon explains the role of a diplomat to the incoming batch of IFS recruits as that played by Krishna in the udyoga parva of the Mahabharata. Rather than launch into a scholarly evolution of diplomacy a la Harold Nicolson, Keith Hamilton, Richard Langhorne, Martin Wight, or Ernest Satow, the former NSA latched onto a text most Indians are intimately familiar with. The great epic remains the backbone of Indian political thinking, Datta-Ray argues, because it avoids the pitfalls of viewing the world in false dichotomies just as Indian foreign policy has shown a tendency to avoid.

This is a limited reading of the Mahabharata, and indeed, Indic thought. There are several incidents in the great epic that run counter to Menon’s portrayal that can be recounted: one, Krishna’s urging Yudhishtira to perform the Rajasuya yaga; two, his advocacy of war within 13 days of the Pandavas’ exile; three, when Krishna intercepted the elephant goad thrown by the king of Pragjyotisha, Bhagadatta, at Arjuna despite a promise not to participate in the war in any way except as charioteer/advisor to the third son of Pandu; or four, the infamous manner in which Drona was made to lay down his weapons. These roles do not, strictly speaking, fit our modern imagination of a diplomat’s task. Yet to restrict foreign policy strictly to conference room machinations and champagne is too narrow an understanding of the profession. A diplomat must also provide wise counsel to his political masters, something Krishna unfailingly did for the Pandavas. If the IFS is indeed inspired by the Mahabharata, one wonders if any of them have ever truly engaged with the text. Similarly, the breathtakingly amoral Arthashastra does not shy away from advocating the use of kutayuddha if the national interest required it.

The Making of Indian Diplomacy gets to the crux of the matter when it asks why India should become a Great Power. Datta-Ray asks this in the context of Menon’s meteoric elevation and an internal memorandum by Rajiv Sikri, one of the bypassed officers. Sikri, he finds, has fallen into the trap of Western modernity and advocates Great Power status for India for its own sake. This does not satisfy Datta-Ray, who declares such a quest as un-Indian. In support, he quotes former external affairs minister, Natwar Singh’s response – that India’s goal is to remove poverty, not become a Great Power – when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that the United States intended to help India become a major power in the 21st century. According to Datta-Ray, Indian diplomacy avoids the anarchic and binary world of power politics by understanding the international community and India’s place within it as a unified cosmos. All states are interlinked and, therefore, foreign relations is not a zero-sum game. This explains why India continues to deal with Pakistan despite the constant terrorist attacks Islamabad supports against India, or why Delhi de-links its territorial dispute with China from other facets of its relationship. In essence, the view that vasudhaiva kutumbakam, or, the world is one family, guides Indian diplomacy.

This, continues, Datta-Ray, is seen even in India’s nuclear weapons policy – Nehru and Indira Gandhi both rejected Western rationality even at the risk of appearing irrational to pursue their own reasoning. In this, they did not even trust their senior-most bureaucrats for fear that they would push India into the same anarchic-binary world Nehru had avoided through his non-alignment. Finally pushed into crossing the nuclear rubicon, India refrained from weaponisation until 1998 when circumstances forced it to take the next step. Even then, Indian diplomacy maintained its traditional roots. K Subrahmanyam, one of the architects of India’s nuclear doctrine, echoed Nehru and his daughter when he reasoned that in the nuclear age, the main purpose of foreign policy should be to prevent wars; humanity must unite and cooperate to survive.

There are a host of problems with this interpretation of Indian foreign policy. The first is to use Nehru as the yardstick of Indianness. The first prime minister, influenced on the one hand by Mohandas Gandhi’s asceticism and on the other by British notions of progress, can hardly be an example of the traditional Indian values Datta-Ray has deployed throughout his argument. Nehru certainly did not view himself the way Datta-Ray seems to. As he himself wrote in The Discovery of India that he came to India as a foreigner; Nehru had also remarked to John Galbraith, the US ambassador to India, that he was the last Englishman to rule in India. In fact, the question arises that if the IFS really is imbued with the Nehruvian spirit, is it relying on the corpus of Indic works and experiences or on a Leftist, perhaps Christian socialist version of Western thinking?

It is unfortunate that public perception of India has been captured by Gandhi’s misinterpretation of dharmic values. Vasudhaiva kutumbakam was not, as Sarvesh Tiwari has ably shown, a recommendation but an admonition. Ashoka, the great renouncer became so only after he had conquered his enemies. Ahimsa, fashionably misappropriated by Gandhi against the British, was described in a very different context by Buddha and Mahavira. In fact, Indic ethics, which are carried more in the works of literature than philosophy, speak very much in a language of realism – about proportion, balance, alliances, caution, and strength.

If anything, the examples Datta-Ray gives shows the Indian diplomatic establishment in its worst light: not trusted even by prime ministers, animated by the values of an ingabanga leader, wracked by  the low quality of its recruits, unable to attract fresh talent, and riven by its own politics and demons, it mirrors much of what is wrong with Indian institutions and its polity. With decision-making centred around the prime minister’s office, foreign policy resembles more a fiefdom and India a flailing state rather than a robust and rising democracy. Did the Mahabharata, the text that informs so many IFS officers, not have counsel on governance, the limits of authority, and power?

Despite his questionable choice of examples, Datta-Ray does convince, with just his anecdote about Menon and the Mahabharata, that there is indeed an Indic way of thinking about foreign policy, even if the wrong lessons seem to have been drawn here. However, he must be cautious in making the jump from the IFS knowing about the epic, to actually following its precepts. Indeed, there is much folk wisdom and rhetoric on how Indians view themselves as part of a bigger cosmic whole; Man does not stand above nature but is a part of it. Yet it is unclear how much this thinking dictates everyday function. Despite such concerns about the environment, for example, the Ganga has turned into toxic sludge, tree cover is receding, and the air in urban centres is unbreathable. To know or to have read Aristotle is not to do as he advises.

In places, it seems Datta-Ray has created a straw man out of Western civilisation; the notion of acting with purpose rather than for its own sake that the author sees in Indic ethics sounds similar to the value Niall Ferguson sees in his very Western, Kantian Henry Kissinger. There are, indeed, differences between how Indic and Abrahamic traditions view the world but as most critics of the West are prone to do, Datta-Ray exaggerates the divergences and homogenises the West in a manner he finds problematic for India or the East.

A book must be judged not only on its argument but also the questions it tickles in the readers’ minds; in the latter, Datta-Ray has succeeded spectacularly. He is among the first to try and apply Indic frameworks to modern challenges, ambitiously threatening to subvert the normative understanding of modernity. It is perhaps too much to expect perfect coherence in the first attempt.

 

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The Hindu Art of War

02 Sat Jan 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on The Hindu Art of War

Tags

ahimsa, AIT, artha, Arthashastra, Aryan Invasion Theory, asurayuddha, brahmin, Buddhism, Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, Chanakya, Chandogya Upanishad, dharma, dharmayuddha, Hinduism, Hitopadesha, IAMT, India, Indo-Aryan Migration Theory, Indology, Islamic, Jainism, jati, jauhar, jus ad bellum, jus in bello, Kalidasa, kama, Kamandaka, Kathasaritsagara, Kautilya, kshatriya, kutayuddha, Mahabharata, Manavadharmashastra, Manu, Mortimer Wheeler, Muslim, Nayaka, Nitisara, orientalism, Panchatantra, Rajput, Ramayana, Shukranitisara, Somadeva, South Asia, varna

Hinduism and the Ethics of Warfare in South AsiaRoy, Kaushik. Hinduism and the Ethics of Warfare in South Asia: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 305 pp.

Hinduism, and South Asia more broadly, has been a glaring lacuna in the study of military history and ethics. Kaushik Roy’s Hinduism and the Ethics of Warfare in South Asia: From Antiquity to the Present (henceforth HEWSA) is unfortunately a poor attempt to rectify that oversight. Although HEWSA passes as an introduction to the uninitiated, it leaves most of the important questions that vex military historians of South Asia unanswered. Although the author’s attempt to place warfare and ethics within their cultural moorings rather than posit them as universal axioms is appreciated, the wider ambitions of his work in presenting South Asia to a Western audience takes away from a focussed analysis of military matters. To be fair to Roy, however, the topic and timeframe presents a Herculean project that would require expertise not just in military affairs but also archaeology and several languages to accomplish thoroughly. This explains why a choice was made – wisely – to restrict the study only to ‘elite’ Sanskrit circles that had the greatest influence on policy. It should also be mentioned at the outset that for the purposes of this review – and most of HEWSA, South Asia is synonymous with India and the dharmic systems that abide within.

The question before any study of military ethics is what constitutes just war and how it should be waged. When it comes to South Asia, scholars would first have to dispel the notion that the region has never known the practice of strategic thinking; second, they would also have to break away from the overpowering Europeanising grand narrative of universal history that places the experiences of the western end of the Eurasian landmass as the normative centrestage. HEWSA begins by asking basic questions on the nature of war and politics instead of accepting readily available theories from the Western canon. Roy, however, sets up the strategists of India in a conversation with their Western (and Eastern) counterparts rather than in opposition; clearly, he does not wish to settle for the simplistic binary of East vs. West that still colours comparative studies across specialties. This is certainly a strength of the book though also a weakness as I will explain later.

Roy establishes his project as trying to answer four questions: 1. What is war?; 2. What constitutes proper justification for going to war?; 3. How should war be waged?; and 4. What are the consequences of waging war? Strategists long before Prussian military theorist h have wrestled with these questions, and the answers each civilisation has proposed to these questions are today obfuscated by a 20th century technological determinism and a Euro-American pragmatism. As historian Jeremy Black has pointed out, not all societies were driven by the motivation to come up with the most combat-effective machines because their worldviews were different; culture is the key to understanding military strategy. The import of this observation should not be diluted to posit a facile dichotomy of Western rationality versus Eastern spiritualism or wars of honour. In fact, as military scholar Michael Handel noted, the basic rationality of strategy as political behaviour is universal. Kamandaka, believed to be a 4th century strategist in the Gupta court, for example, speaks of the importance of the people’s support for a righteous war to ensure stability – a value dear to the heart of several Western strategists as well.

Yet it would be equally unhelpful to overemphasise the similarities between different approaches to war: Indian thinkers like Chanakya and Manu were, for example, as concerned with the potential for insurgency as they were with facing foreign enemies. Indian authors rarely put their names to their treatises either; furthermore, they usually contained the amalgam of strategic thought before their period though again not always with proper citation. As a result, it is a challenge to date Indian theories of state and warfare as it is difficult to put author to treatise. Concerned as they were with dharmayuddha and kutayuddha, Indian strategists were also a product of their times: Chanakya’s Arthashastra proposes a boldly expansionist state as he wrote during the waxing of Maurya power while Kamandaka’s Nitisara is more cautious as the Gupta Empire was on the defensive from nomadic invaders from Central Asia. Perhaps the greatest difference between Indian and Western thinking on the state and warfare, as Roy astutely observes, is that Eastern societies did not view the state as an abstract principle: there was a relation between tao and the people in China just as there was between rashtra and society in India. European thinkers, on the other hand, seem to view the state more contractually and legalistically, although this is more true with modern theorists than ancient Europeans.

The greatest difference between Indian ethical texts and their Western equivalents, however, is that the former are more theoretical and describe the world as it should be, not as it is, while the converse is true for the latter. Although Roy observes this, he fails to realise how important a point he has stumbled on – Indian morality, even on the field of battle, are not as clearly defined as in the West. This is a strong reflection of dharmic thinking on matters of state and it is possible that Western thinking was similarly and equally influenced by Abrahamic certitude of the world. Yet to be fair, expounding on this would lead him away from the main topic of his study. Finally, an interesting observation by Torkel Brekke, historian of religion, about differences between Indian and European military thought is that the latter comprises of equal attention to jus ad bellum (just cause for war) and jus in bello (just conduct in war) while the former only concerns itself with the latter. The author mentions this in the introduction but disappointingly never returns to the matter explicitly later in the book. From the structure of other arguments, the reader is only left to assume that it has something to do with how Indian strategists viewed the nature of politics and conflict but some clarity would have helped.

The greatest weakness of HEWSA is the author’s willingness to indulge in simplifications about Hinduism that muddy the reader’s understanding of Indian society. Given the author’s belief that society and culture are inextricably linked to military strategy, this is an unacceptable lapse. For example, Roy repeatedly harps on the role of kshatriyas as the warrior class in South Asian society. While this may broadly be true, it does not explain how most of India’s major empires were not of kshatriya lineage. Nor does it explain how Indian emperors could sustain large standing armies based on conscription if only kshatriyas could wage war. After the fall of Rome, it was not until the 19th century in Europe that a professional class of soldiers emerged. In the interim, armies were usually composed of farmers who had to return to their fields during harvest season. As a result, war was limited to specific periods of the calendar or the economy would suffer if farmers could not return to their fields on time. If Indian polities did not follow this rule, it is an important social and economic difference that was worth highlighting. Admittedly, Roy merely repeats the formulation of Indian philosophers on the matter but as he has been quick to point out in other aspects, Indian thinkers addressed an idealised world and not the real one. Instead, a brief explanation of varna and jati would have left readers with a clearer understanding of what actually was and what was supposed to be.

The author’s implicit acceptance of the Indo-Aryan Migration Theory (IAMT) is another factor that mars this study. Basically, IAMT was proposed by British and German Orientalists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries after the discovery of the Indo-European language family and postulates that the Indian subcontinent was subject to large population migrations from the Caucasus and Central Asia in three waves, the first around 2,200 BCE, the second around 1,700 BCE, and the final one around 1,000 BCE. In the mid-1940s, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler suggested that these waves had perhaps been invasions rather than migrations but this variation of the IAMT, referred to as the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), did not hold for long though it has been the strawman subject of innumerable critiques of the IAMT. Regardless, given the controversies around the subject, any scholar touching upon the topic peripherally ought to warn the reader of the assumptions made.

Roy suggests that the rules governing the war towards the end of the Ramayana were more lax than in the great fratricidal war of the Mahabharata…or at least, there seemed to be more anguish and hand-wringing at the violation of rules in the latter epic than the former. This he supposes is due to the different rules governing warfare within and without groups. The assumption here, stemming from his thoughts on the IAMT, is that Rama was an Aryan king fighting a non-Aryan king, Ravana, while the Pandavas and Kauravas were both Aryan families. In the former situation, there were few rules of just war whereas the latter had strict codes. Of course, this fails to explain how Ravana, a non-Aryan chieftain, was a great devotee of Shiva and a brahmin – outsiders would never be accorded a varna (improperly translated into English as caste). More importantly, there is no textual evidence for this supposition in the primary sources – the author cites secondary sources to back his claim, a source whose racial categories are strongly influenced by the orientalism of British Indology.

With the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, Roy correctly points out that these systems are not as pacifist or as ascetic as are commonly believed: the founders of both were themselves kshatriyas and both had several royal friends throughout their lives; Buddha was not even a vegetarian! Buddhist and Jain ahimsa was closer to the Hindu concept as expounded in the Chandogya Upanishad, related to austerity, generosity, sacrifice, truthfulness, and integrity, and not the passive non-violence of Mohandas Gandhi. Roy’s exposition is a much-needed correction to the common narrative on Buddhism and Jainism. However, he insists on seeing both these belief systems as schisms from Hinduism – a view that is not shared by many scholars of the latter.

A whole chapter is dedicated to the most famous treatise on war and politics to come out of India, the Arthashastra. The treatise is briefly summarised before its author is compared to European political philosophers and military theorists from Plato to the authors of Fourth Generation Warfare. Roy relies heavily on secondary sources, preferring the words of his contemporary scholars than of the masters themselves. In the evaluation, the Arthashastra emerges as an amoral text that was quite comfortable with kutayuddha as well as dharmayuddha and considered internal as well as external threats to the kingdom. Chanakya advocates diplomacy, assassinations, poisoning, temporary alliances, espionage, biological warfare, and any other means that can deliver victory. The focus is on strategic knowledge of the enemy than on tactical advice and Chankaya does not stop with victory: the Indian strategist considers the best ways of controlling a defeated foe as part of his analytical package. Contrary to Western armies, Indian victors allowed the conquered to maintain their language, dress, customs, and gods; only the unrighteous rulers were removed. Unlike Western theorists, Roy observes, Chanakya’s theories make human agency instead of inter-state structure the primary variable in politics. Furthermore, there is no mention of seapower, nor is there any consideration of technology as a force multiplier in battle.

Instead of the long comparative section, the topic would have been better served if a closer analysis of the Arthashastra, its author, and their milieu were attempted. How did the political, social, and economic realities of the early Maurya Empire influence Chanakya’s thoughts? How much is he a product of his time? What were the challenges to Mauryan rule at the time? Why did the Mauryans dedicate their efforts to conquering India and not send their armies westwards? The answers to these questions would have situated the Arthashastra in its own context and revealed more about warfare and ethics in South Asia than do the quick comparisons to Western and Eastern strategists. After all, it is not the Western theorists who are understudied but the South Asian context.

Roy’s discussion of early medieval India leaves much to be desired. Again, led astray by his sources, Roy argues that brahmin intellectuals of the period saw the Bactrians and Parthians as mlechchas because of their patronage of Buddhism. This would not have solved the problem of local Indian chieftains who patronised Buddhism or those who followed it and it seems bizarre that the brahmins would follow this half-measure that achieved nothing. Roy also claims that the Sunga and Kanva dynasties were established by brahmins to fight off the sudra ascendancy seen in the rise of the Nandas and Mauryas! It is in this context, the author claims, that the Manavadharmashastra was written and as a result, the primary aim of its author was to preserve the status of brahmins. While Chanakya had concentrated on artha and kama, Manu focused on dharma.

Manu is the first Indian strategist that we know of to mention seapower. Kalidasa is another but in both cases, the authors limit themselves to riverine navies and not bluewater vessels. Manu is also the first Indian strategist to show a liking for cavalry, even suggesting that the king not wage war in the absence of good cavalry. Chanakya had advocated a balanced composition of forces between infantry, cavalry, chariots, and elephants while Kamandaka had emphasised the shock value of elephants. However, Manu is more cautious than the author of the Arthashastra and voices a preference for coalitions of likeminded rulers against a common threat than a quest for power by one emperor. Oddly, though, unlike most commanders, he preferred fortress warfare to open battle despite the hardships of disease, logistics, and discipline. The army would live off the enemy’s land, laying siege to the enemy’s fort while pillaging the countryside.

In general, Indian strategists preferred to solve things through diplomacy and wealth over arms; this is the same advice one gets from Chanakya, Manu, Kalidasa, Kamandaka, Somadeva, and others though they also strongly advised against shunning violence. Later thinkers, however, accepted the use of kutayuddha more readily, especially if it could prevent war altogether. According to Roy, Kalidasa advised that dharmayuddha be followed only against Indian monarchs and not against the Yavanas; similarly, it was permissible for a victorious king to annex the kingdoms of his defeated foes outside India but not within. The development of a geographic sense of India in this period is an interesting facet that Roy does not dwell on.

The author suggests that Somadeva warned against sending armies to the northwest – this would correspond to the region whence most invasions of India occurred and usually by a foe with superior technology. Unfortunately, Roy has little more to say about this either. Something else Roy mentions is Thiruvalluvar’s advice that an army look grand and imposing. Clearly, the Tamil thinker understood the psychological dimension of warfare well and tried to bring it into play in service of his patron. The lessons of these books on strategy did not remain restricted to the elite but trickled into the Hitopadesha, Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagara, and other stories in simplified form. What the reception was is a difficult question to answer. One wonders if the wisdom of Indian military thinking was noticed by foreigners when these works were translated, first into Persian and then later into Arabic and Latin.

The descriptions of Indian treatises on strategy raise many questions that Roy does not answer. For example, Indian monarchs seemed to always lack cavalry of sufficient quality and quantity. Yet no king ever tried to address this shortcoming by importing and breeding horses in India.  Kalhana, the author of Rajatarangini, mentions that the Palas and Senas of Bengal attempted to import cavalry from Afghanistan and South China, and the Hoysalas tried to crossbreed Arab mares with local breeds to no avail. When the Romans, Greeks, Persians, and Carthaginians could take elephants from India, why could Indian traders not acquire war horses? Although the problem of a weak cavalry was temporarily solved under some kings such as Vikramaditya of the Gupta dynasty or Harshavardhana of Thaneshwar and Kanauj, it remained an issue until the very end. In relation to the equine lacuna, India did not develop metal stirrups or horseshoes until much later either and this gave the Hunnic mounted archers a tremendous advantage in battle; the invaders’ composite bows also gave them greater range than their Indian opponents. Why did Indian rulers fail so spectacularly in developing or acquiring military technology despite their use of spies or their fame in trade? This would have been an important question in a military history of South Asia.

Indian reflections on warfare declined with the Islamic invasions of the subcontinent. Warriors for a jealous desert god, Muslims rulers removed Hindu advisors of the conquered Indian kings from imperial service and closed the avenue for contribution to political life. Most Hindus who continued in royal service were forced to convert if they wished to retain their positions. The Hindu kingdoms that resisted the invaders, however, did not fare better than their ancestors did in terms of learning newer and more effective military strategies and technologies. The Rajputs, for example, held to their code of personal glory on the battlefield and failed to see the evolution of mass tactics; similarly, the Nayakas in the south were disdainful of gunpowder and thought it to be weapons for the cowardly – a regressive attitude that only shattered their armies when they went up against more modern opponents. The Rajput and Nayaka views were prevalent among European knights too when they first came across the Ottoman janissaries. The social and economic structure of feudal Europe had created the European knight, a fearsome force in one-on-one combat but no match for hurtling pellets of lead. Where the Europeans adapted quickly, Indian polities failed to do so. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Shukranitisara, a work by an unknown author written around the late 17th century.

The Shukranitisara, like any work on military matters, emphasises the training of soldiers to fight with or without arms. However, it shuns the use of warfare with mechanical devices – gunpowder, siege engines, etc. – as asurayuddha, a particularly barbaric form of kutayuddha. The concept existed even in earlier treatises such as the Arthashastra but where Chanakya used the term ‘asurayuddha‘ to define heinous practices to be avoided by a victor, such as the massacre of the males of the royal household, the violation of their women, and the appropriation of their wealth, the author of Shukranitisara reserved the term for battlefield practices that had become routine. One might pontificate over the degeneration of chivalry but such matters concerned only romantic bards while the strategists were not beyond recommending kutayuddha in the pursuit of a quicker and cheaper victory. Not only were foreign invaders less delicate about such concerns, but Muslim armies frequently desecrated Hindu places of worship, forced conversions, massacred the citizenry, raped and sold the royal women into slavery, and killed their menfolk. It was in response to this barbarism that Rajput women took to jauhar.

Although Roy accepts the atrocities of the Muslim conquests, he nonetheless enters into the record Romila Thapar’s claim that there was no sense of Hinduism in this period. He also cites Richard Eaton on how limited the damage from the Islamic invasions were. This is deeply unconvincing given the tales of conversion and massacre contained in his own study.

Roy takes the reader through the Indian freedom struggle and ends his study with a few short comments on India’s nuclear posture. However, these periods hardly reflect any thought on the ethics of warfare understood in the conventional sense. Even accepting Chanakya’s paradigm of inter- and intra-state warfare, passive non-violence seems a tool that may have, at best, suited a particular situation rather than be an entire ethical theory of warfare in itself.

Perhaps the biggest question Roy does not attempt to answer is why Indian polities remained thoroughly inept at war. Barring a brief period in the Chola Empire, no Indian kingdom ever extended beyond the boundaries of Akhand Bharat; furthermore, there was a total failure to develop or even adopt superior technologies in a timely manner. Why were Indian monarchs not able to do what rulers in most other parts of the world did routinely? A second ‘big question’ Roy could have shed light on is to what extent these theories were discussed and debated. Was there even a limited and elite public sphere in which ideas of warfare were discussed and improved upon? How well did these ideas survive transmission as one dynasty replaced another? Roy indicates that Indian treatises dealt with the ideal world more than they dealt with reality. However, what effect did the results of real battles have on them?

It is possible that these questions can never be answered for lack of sources. Nonetheless, they deserve a vigorous discussion that HEWSA did not provide. The author’s excessive reliance on secondary sources and translations also deserves comment. Although South Asia is a difficult region that demands its scholars to have a command over several languages and kills, any analysis as important as Roy’s project ought not be done without expertise in at least some of the skills and languages; perhaps a collaborative work would have achieved the desired result better. It is said that reviewers often discuss the book they would have written rather than the book at hand – this may be the case here too but any study that claims to discuss the ethics of warfare in South Asia cannot afford these lapses, particularly in a field where much of the groundwork is yet to be laid.

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