Military history is neglected in the South Asian academic circuit due to the dominance of Marxism and, more recently, postmodernism. M. K. Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence and the Indian National Congress-led freedom struggle against British imperialism in South Asia also resulted in the marginalization of academic study of war in postcolonial India. And Western readers are mostly interested in the military adventures of the British in India. This book eschews the traditional ‘battles and campaigns’ approach and attempts to understand who joined the armies and why. Instead of the ‘drums and button’ history, rather than glorifying the valour and heroics of the regiments, the objective is to study the dialectics of the recruitment policies of the ruling elite and the objectives of the different communities from various regions who served in the armies and the navies at different times in varying numbers.

Some scholars have turned their attention to the issue of military recruitment and state building in South Asia. One of the longue durée studies we have is Stephen Rosen's monograph, Societies and Military Power: India and its Armies (1996). He argues that due to the divisive caste system, indigenous armies were merely mobs. This volume shows that far from being an armed mob, the pre-British indigenous armies were capable of manoeuvring and were not technologically stagnant. In fact, pre-British warfare was characterized by decisive battles and sieges. Further, by over-emphasizing the influence of the caste system, Rosen is reverting to a mono-causal reductionist argument.