They made up 20% of soldiers despite being less than 1% of the population of India. These accounts of unwavering loyalty encouraged Sikhs to become the most disproportionately recruited soldiers in British imperial service. Twentieth-century military pamphlets claimed that devotion to the British made “the Sikhs as a Britain’s victory would have been impossible without the contributions of soldiers from Punjab, Nepal, and the northwestern borders-including many Sikhs-who joined the British in putting down the rebellion. Its brutal suppression by British and Company forces resulted in the transfer of Indian territories to the British crown in 1858. This rebellion had started as a mutiny in the East India Company’s Bengal Army and broke out into a wide-scale revolt across northern India. Twentieth-century British soldiers and officers had great confidence in Sikh soldiers because they believed that Sikhs had served in the Indian Army consistently and loyally since the days of the 1857 uprising. In many ways, the imperial exaltation of Sikhs was the keystone of conflict in the twentieth-century Indian Army. Sikh soldiers’ experiences of service, meanwhile, suggest that there were several unintended consequences of exalting a single community as inherently martial. Instead, British efforts to define Sikhs as both a religious community and a naturally loyal band of warriors inspired anti-colonial soldiers and civilians to challenge such paternalistic definitions of Sikh identity. Both Sikhs and non-Sikhs struggled to live up to this effusive praise. Creating the image of the loyal Sikh soldier idealized-and set up unrealistic expectations for-all soldiers. Barstow of the 2nd Battalion, 11th Sikh Regiment wrote in the 1920s that each Sikh was inherently “a fighting man” who could be counted as “the bravest and steadiest of soldiers.” They were, in his view, “more faithful, more trustworthy” than other widely recruited communities known to the British as “martial races.” Another British soldier remembered that “the Sikhs were better than the others” because they were “more loyal.” British perceptions of inherent Sikh loyalty and superiority influenced wider debates about recruitment and martial prowess across religious communities in India. LotsOfWords knows 480,000 words.In the early twentieth century many Britons believed that Sikh men were the living embodiment of perfect soldiers. National Scrabble Association, and the Collins Scrabble Words used in the UK (about 180,000 words each). The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) from Merriam-Webster, the Official Tournament and Club Word List (OTCWL / OWL / TWL) from the Please note: the Wiktionary contains many more words - in particular proper nouns and inflected forms: plurals of nouns and past tense of verbs - than other English language dictionaries such as Words and their definitions are from the free English dictionary Wiktionary published under the free licenceĬreative Commons attribution share-alike. Potential litterature) such as lipograms, pangrams, anagrams, univocalics, uniconsonantics etc. To play Scrabble, Words With Friends, hangman, the longest word, and forĬreative writing: rhymes search for poetry, and words that satisfy constraints from the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo: workshop of You can use it for many word games: to create or to solve crosswords, arrowords (crosswords with arrows), word puzzles, Lots of Words is a word search engine to search words that match constraints (containing or not containing certain letters, starting or ending letters,
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