Overview

On a pleasant October morning in 1746, a small army of one thousand men put together by the French East India Company, consisting of 300 hundred Europeans and 700 hundred Sepoys, French-trained Indian soldiers, faced a massive Mughal Army of 10,000 across the Adyar estuary on the Southeastern seaboard of India. In a feat of arms that has few parallels in history, the limited French force forded across the river braving gunfire and artillery barrages, and trounced their opponents in a classical show of European musketry salvo; drawn up in three ranks and advancing while firing successive volleys of shot, before they pounced on the enemy with bayonets. The French had made a vital military point; numbers didn’t matter, training and discipline did. This landmark event in Indian history was to conceptualize the greatest military enterprise the subcontinent has ever known– the creation of the Indian Army. The British, who were mere bystanders to the event, were to pick up the trend and raise the first of their Presidency Armies - the Madras Army, and closely thereafter, the Bengal and Bombay armies; all of which were later, towards the end of the 19th Century, to be amalgamated to form the grand edifice that is the Indian Army today. Empire’s First Soldiers provides a vivid recreation of the glorious battles that the old Madras Army fought, including the Carnatic, Mysore and Maratha Wars in India, and the Burma and China Wars overseas; as well as those their descendants, the soldiers in the Indian Army fought during the two World Wars.

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