Joe Shearer
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Sikh are a mystery, even the non-martial Dalit Sikhs have their regiment (SLI) but Muslims don't, is it simply the legacy of Sikh empire or something more?
@Joe Shearer @xeuss
Whoa. So many questions all together.
The so-called non-martial Dalit Sikhs were quite cut up at not being given a chance to fight, because even in Ranjit Singh's army, they had been attached to regular Jat regiments in company strength. The British recruited them as Pioneers first, and this phase of their existence continued until 1933, when they (two regiments separately) were disbanded.Nobody needs Sappers in peacetime. They were raised again during the war, in 1941, and a very bland name, the Mazhabi and Ramdasia Sikhs, was changed to the Sikh Light Infantry.
Muslims don't have their regiment? That's because the main Muslim recruiting regiments went off to the Pakistan Army. The Punjab Regiment, the premier regiment, was largely PMs, and they went to the Pakistan Army. So both the PA and the IA have a Punjab Regiment, both regiments tough as nails. The Pakistan Army was constituted of precisely the Muslim components of British Indian Army regiments, whether of Rajput Muslims, Ranghars (UP Muslims settled in Haryana and the Punjab) or Punjabi Muslims. The three regiments in that Army that have a background in the British Indian Army are the Punjab Regiment, the Baloch Regiment and the Frontier Force Regiment. I don't know much about the other regiments; it appears that they have been raising a regiment for every region, so, one for their section of Kashmir, Azad Kashmir, one for the Gilgit-Baltistan region, the Northern Light Infantry, and one general Territorial Army kind of regiment. Also one for the Sindh.
The point is that the Muslim regiments, the Punjab, the Baloch and the FF, went off to Pakistan. But contrary to your impression, recruitment of Muslims was always done into the Indian Army, into mixed regiments that were not designated for a single ethnic group. For instance, the Grenadiers (that are the oldest Grenadier regiment in the Commonwealth, and older than the Grenadier Guards by designation as Grenadiers by more than 50 years); or the Guards regiment itself. There are several more.
Sikh are a mystery, even the non-martial Dalit Sikhs have their regiment (SLI) but Muslims don't, is it simply the legacy of Sikh empire or something more?
@Joe Shearer @xeuss
I was just expecting that according the Martial race theory, only caste would matter in recruitment but religion also did.
No, it didn't. Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims were all recruited; there are three exclusively Sikh regiments, six exclusively Hindu (of different ethnicities) regiments (Dogra, Jat, Kumaon, Garhwal, Mahar, Maratha Light Infantry, Assam), one tribal (Naga), seven Gorkha (1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 8th, 9th from the old British Indian regiments and the new 11th). Grenadiers, Guards, Paras were all open to anybody and everybody.
I haven't really done any major research into this, and I may be wrong in one or two details, but this is the broad structure.
That structure related only to enlisted men, not to officers. Anyone who goes through the SSB and the NDA is an officer, besides those that join one step later through OTAs.
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