Each night, the young corporal returned to his room inside the abandoned church, which had once served as a military hospital: The night streamed in through the skylights, making its giant arched hall look like a catacomb. The church was inhabited, some said, by the souls of the soldiers who had died there, their bodies destroyed by Yellow Fever or gunshot. “Everybody is frightened to enter there,” the corporal wrote to his uncle. “I am not frightened at all, because I am the last to believe that departed souls will ever condescend to molest us.”
Fifteen thousand kilometres away, Kaylash Chunder Biswas received the letter in mid-1889, at his home in the small village of Koreya in West Bengal. Travelling across three continents and two oceans, his nephew had joined Brazil’s army as a soldier of fortune, after working as an ocean liner steward and circus lion-trainer.
The letters from Lieutenant Suresh Chunder Biswas began to be published in Kolkata’s Amrit Bazar Patrika later that year, his incredible journey would fire the imagination of generations of Bengalis, to whom it served as proof they could fight to free their nation from England’s rule.
Few in modern India have heard of Lieutenant Biswas’ name—but continue to follow him into foreign battlefields. Late last month, Gujarat resident Hemil Mangukiya was reported killed in Ukraine, serving with Russia’s military as a logistical contract-worker. Kashmir’s Azad Yusuf is still there, together with perhaps dozens of other Indians recruited through a labour contractor in Dubai.
Earlier, Indians were reported to have served with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. They have died working in war-zones like Iraqas well as Israel. Many gave their lives in the course of the long, hopeless war to liberate Afghanistan from Taliban jihadists.
Three years from now, thousands of Agniveers recruited by the armed forces for four years under the Agnipath scheme will begin seeking hard-to-find jobs. Likely, many will be hired by multinational private military contractors who recruit trained soldiers from across the world. Though contract soldiers do not enjoy the legal protections international laws give to militaries, law scholar Lindsey Cameron estimates the industry generates over $100 billion each year.
For decades now, successive governments have been squeamish at the prospect of Indian citizens serving foreign wars. The time might be coming, though, to stop pretending the problem doesn’t exist, and provide a legal framework to protect contract soldiers recruited from the country.
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Brazil’s Bengali hero
Excavating the historical Lieutenant Biswas has proved no small task. Leaving aside a photograph the officer mailed home—“this uniform cost me one thousand dollars, because it is made of fine cloth, feather, silk and gold lace”, he proudly wrote—little archival material has survived. The bulk of knowledge about his life derives from just two books written decades after his death—a Bengali-language biography by Upendra Krishna Bandhopadhyay, and an English account by Hur Chander Dutt. There is no book that has examined the Brazilian archive.
There is no surviving documentation to bear out whether the racier elements of Dutt’s narrative are true or not: His Biswas drops a rabid dog with a double-kick, slays a cobra with a pocket knife, rescues a wasp-waisted Burmese woman from a fire, engages in a drunken threesome with two women in London, and resists seduction by a carpenter’s wife.
For the most part, though, the core of Biswas’s story seems plausible. Following his less-than-enthusiastic embrace of school education—Dutt calls Biswas a “great and bitter opponent of Saraswati, the goddess of learning”—the young man eventually found work at Spence’s Hotel in Calcutta, as a tout and tour guide. Later, though, Biswas was overcome by an urge to seek his fortune abroad. He travelled to Rangoon, without luck, and then to London.
There, he found work in a circus troupe, as a gymnast and weight-lifter. In 1881, London’s New Era reported on a performance by The Great Continental Menagerie, where Biswas appeared as a lion-tamer. “This daring young Hindoo master of the king of beasts is loudly applauded for his display of temerity,” the newspaper recorded.
According to Dutt’s account, Biswas fled with the circus to Mexico, because of threats from the family of a lover. From there, he went to Brazil, joining the army at the suggestion of his to-be wife. The letters show he was promoted from ordinary soldier to Cabo Esquadra,or corporal, in 1887, and stationed at an outpost in Santa Cruz.
Later, in 1894, Biswas was promoted to Lieutenant, after capturing a gun-position held by naval mutineers during the Battle of Niteroi. The leading English-language contemporary military history of the battle, though, does not mention Biswas’s role.
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Indian soldiers of fortune
Even though Biswas’s letters made him a cult figure in Bengal, the mercenary was a familiar figure in the region and beyond. Large numbers of Bengali mercenaries, historian GJ Bryant has written, served in the East India Company. French, Portuguese and Indian rulers in the 18th and 19th centuries were, similarly, heavily dependent on mercenaries to fill the ranks of their infantry and provide specialist services to the cavalry and artillery.=
Even today, Indian nationals serve in the famous French Foreign Legion, as well as the United States military—though unlike recruits into private corporations, they have the legal status of soldiers.
Large-scale recruitment into the British Indian Army during the First World War, historian Arvind Ganachari notes, was motivated by the promise of payoffs, not loyalty to the Empire. George Morton-Jack has noted that coercion was liberally deployed when families resisted sacrificing their sons in return for land and money.
The use of mercenaries remained widespread through the Cold War, scholar Akbarali Thobani records, to stage coups against hostile regimes. “A private British firm, Security Advisory Services, did most of the recruiting there,” Thobani wrote, “and a spokesman admitted that recruitment was financed with United States money and that the group was dealing through a liaison officer in the United States Embassy in London.”
Allison Stanger and Mark Eric Williams note that large multinational mercenary organisations—among them, Wagner, Sandline, Xe Services, Military Professional Resources, DeWe, Dyck Advisory and Paramount—allow Governments to engage in military operations without directly committing troops.
Executive Outcomes, operating mainly in Africa, protected oil facilities and mines from rebels, and trained conventional militaries, earning an estimated $40 million a year at its peak. In 1994, as world powers dithered during the genocide in Rwanda, Executive Outcomes offered to end the killing for a mere $120 million. Firms providing mercenaries often had high-powered connections: Former United Kingdom prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark Thatcher, pleaded guilty in a South African court to planning and organising a coup in Equatorial Guinea.
The experience of being colonised with the aid of locally recruited mercenaries has made Indians deeply hostile to private military contractors—but across the world, the corporations’ influence continues to grow.
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A necessary evil?
As John Hawkswood—adventurer and mercenary in the service of the great states of Florence, Milan, and Pope Innocent VI—walked in his estates in Montecchio, he encountered two Franciscan monks. “My Lord, may God grant you peace,” the monks intoned politely. The answer wasn’t what they expected: “May God take away all the alms ye have received.”
“The monks were affrighted and cried: ‘Lord, wherefore say ye that?’” the 14th century poet Franco Sacchetti recorded.
“Do ye not know that I live by war,” Hawkwood replied, “and that peace would ruin me?”
Even though the idea of mercenaries remains morally abhorrent to many, the reality is tens of thousands of Indians have sought military service overseas, in pursuit of fortune. For Agniveers not fortunate enough to find employment in police forces or the organised private sector, the rewards of employment with private military contractors will outweigh the risks. To create an appropriate legal framework will allow Indian companies to profit from this global business, and protect their employees.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)