After 1947, a substantive major commanded Indian ground forces as a lieutenant-general
When British senior officers left India's army almost overnight in 1947, their Indian successors were pushed up the ladder in acting ranks far above their real ones. S. M. Shrinagesh led ground forces as an acting lieutenant-general while formally still a major, and was only confirmed as lieutenant-colonel in 1949.
The force that became today's Indian Army was created on 1 April 1895, when the separate presidency armies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras, inherited from the East India Company, were merged into one. Before independence the name meant a British-commanded force recruited in India with British officers, distinct from British Army units rotating through. It fought far beyond India, from the Boxer Rebellion in China to Abyssinia, and 1.3 million Indian soldiers served in the First World War.
Indian officers were admitted slowly. A college opened at Dehradun in March 1912 to prepare boys from well-off families for Sandhurst, but only 69 Indians were commissioned between 1918 and 1932. Political pressure produced the Indian Military Academy in 1932, yet on the eve of the Second World War there were roughly 500 Indian regular officers against about 3,000 British ones.
The war exposed divided loyalties. The army swelled from around 130,000 men to over 2.5 million volunteers by August 1945, and some 87,000 Indian soldiers died. At the same time, of roughly 40,000 Indian troops captured when Singapore fell in 1942, over 30,000 joined the Japanese-allied Indian National Army, later led by Subhas Chandra Bose; it was defeated, but it had a huge effect on the independence movement. In Europe, captured Indians and students formed a German-backed Free India Legion of over 3,000, most of whom never saw combat and ended up guarding the Atlantic Wall.
Partition split the army between India and Pakistan and sent four of the ten Gurkha regiments to Britain. India marks Army Day every 15 January, the date in 1949 when K. M. Cariappa took over from General Sir Roy Bucher as the first Indian commander-in-chief. Today it is described as the world's largest standing army, with 1,248,000 active troops, all volunteers.
Source: Indian Army
