Direction for [ Question No: 164 To 166 ] :
The recruitment of the company's army in the eighteenth century was not just building on the existing traditions of the North Indian military labour market; those traditions were being adopted to British imperial preferences. The recruitment system for example, endorsed the traditional British preference for peasants as best potential recruits and followed the colonial stereotypes that wheat-eating Indians rather than the rice-eating groups were physically more suitable for the job, although such ethnic stereotyping became a much more important factor in army recruitment in the late nineteenth century rather than in the eighteenth. During the initial formative phase, Hastings did not want to disturb the existing caste rules in the affairs of the army. So the Company's army consisted mainly of upper caste Brahman and Rajput landed peasants from Awadh and the Rajput and Bhumihar Brahman peasants from north and south Bihar-both wheat-eating regions. These people joined the Company's army because the pay, allowances, pension and resettlement provisions offered by the Company were much better than those offered by the regional States, and what was most important, salaries were paid regularly. The deliberate policy of respecting caste, dietary, travel and others religious practices of the Sepoys fostered a high caste identity of the Company's army. By joining it many of the upcoming socially ambitious castes like the Bhumihar-Brahmans could fulfill their aspirations for social mobility. Cornwallis, despite his preference for Anglicisation, did not disturb this specific organization of the army, and as a result, the Company came to possess a high caste army, which was prone to revolt when their social privileges and pecuniary benefits were cut from the 1820s. As the Company's territories expanded to the west beyond the Bengal frontiers into the mountainous Jungle Terai, in the 1770s and then into the Ceded and Conquered Districts in 1802 there was another attempt to recruit from among the hill tribes. While in the plains the Company ran permanent recruitment centres, in the hills recruitment was made through local notables and payment was offered through the Mughal system of ghatwali service tenures. The defeat of the Indian States, particularly of Mysore in the late eighteenth and of the Marathas in the early nineteenth centuries created another vast reservoir of surplus armed manpower to recruit from; but the Company's army could not absorb all the disbanded soldiers of the Indian princes. Then from 1815 there was another experiment to recruit Gurkha soldiers from among the Nepalis, Garwahlis, and Sirmouri hill men. A skilful blending of the Nepali martial tradition and European training and discipline made the Gurkhas the most trusted soldiers in the British army.
