The forgotten plan to station Canadian soldiers in British India

At the turn of the 20th century, few parts of the vast British Empire were more disconnected than Canada and India. Canada attained Dominion status in 1867, while India remained firmly under the grip of the Raj. Loyal to the Empire, Canadians grew up hearing stories about the 1857 Indian War of Independence and the violent attacks by “mutineers” on British women and children. The Canadian press of the time often portrayed Indians as “seditious”.

Yet media reports also suggest there was some sympathy for Indians suffering under British rule. In 1897, authorities in Ottawa established the Canadian National India Famine Fund to raise money for victims of famine in India.

“There has been consultation between the Governor-General and the Dominion Cabinet with regard to the best mode of evoking and transmitting further practical sympathetic help on the part of all Canada for the relief of the present dire distress in India,” Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier said in January 1897.

Relief funds were also collected in Canada during the Indian famine of 1899-1900, which claimed more than four million lives.

In 1904, the Canadian government considered using India as a training ground for volunteer army units known as the Canadian Militia. A concrete proposal came from Minister of Militia and Defence Frederick Borden, who suggested sending Canadian personnel to India for training under British officers. Known as “Sir Frederick Borden’s Scheme”, the idea even won the support of King Edward VII, whom the Ottawa Citizen quoted as calling it “imperialism of the best sort”. The newspaper also cited the monarch asking “whether Canadian officers would care to risk the smell of powder for ten or twelve years, as British battalions do”.

Local resistance

Britain’s secretary of state for war, Arnold Foster, advanced the proposal by formally requesting Canada to send 40 officers and 1,000 soldiers to India. Once news of the proposal reached the press, however, many Canadian newspapers strongly criticised it.

“In fine abstract, the idea, were it confined to selected officers, or had we a regular army from which units could be sent, would be excellent, but in the present condition of our military establishment in Canada, it is difficult to see how anyone really acquainted with our militia could seriously advance such a proposition,” the Ottawa Journal wrote in an editorial.

The newspaper argued that, in “piping times of peace”, it would be difficult to persuade young Canadians “to compensate for spending the most important years of their lives in garrison in India,” adding that even with “big inducement” no regiment could be raised for such a mission.

The Ottawa Journal dismissed the proposal as little more than “playing at soldiery” while insisting that Canadian troops would demonstrate their patriotism in wartime if necessary. “Once previously the youth of Canada flocked to the recruiting stations to swell the ranks of a Canadian regiment for India, but it was amid the stress and danger of the great mutiny of 1857, when everything appealed to Canadians to rally for the defence of the flag, the prestige of the race, the avenging of untold indignities upon British women and children, and the old ‘100th’ regiment, though too late to participate in the re-establishment of British rule in India, carried from our shores, as fine and stalwart a lot of young warriors as ever buckled on a belt or fired a gun,” the editorial added.

Another newspaper, the Hamilton Times, was equally dismissive. “The Indian project is ridiculous any way you look at it,” it declared. “We have factories to man and plenty of vacant land to till.”

Prime Minister Laurier also opposed the proposal, describing it as “militarism”. The Globe and Mail reported in January 1904 that Laurier believed his first duty was to develop and populate Canada. “If a Canadian regiment went to India, it would be treated precisely as an English regular regiment, and would take part in any military operation that might be conducted on the frontiers of India,” the newspaper wrote. It warned that Canada would thereby become obligated to participate in Britain’s foreign wars.

In the end, the Canadian cabinet refused even to discuss the proposal, which had emerged from talks in London between Foster and Borden.

Russian factor

Although Laurier rejected the 1904 proposal, officials within the British bureaucracy continued exploring ways to integrate the Empire’s distant territories. William Brodrick, better known as Viscount Midleton, who served as secretary of state for India from 1903 to 1905, attempted to reshape Canadian perceptions of India.

Addressing an audience in Ottawa in 1908, he described India as the “main prop” of the Empire. “Instead of India pulling upon us, we were always pulling upon India,” Brodrick said. “Indian troops saved Natal, helped to relieve the British legation at Peking and averted disaster in Suakin.”

Appealing directly to Canadians, Brodrick added: “Those who realised that nearly one-third of the world’s population was attracted to the British Empire would deal gently with statesmen in their difficulties about Indian races.”

By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, as the Indian National Congress gained popularity, fears spread across the Empire of another mutiny. A year before Brodrick’s Ottawa speech, Reverend JG Brown, a Canadian Baptist missionary who had spent eight years in India, told the Toronto Star that many Indians, especially Telugu-speaking communities and people in southern India, remained loyal to British rule. At the same time, he warned of growing dissatisfaction with colonial administrators.

“Unless the Government of India does the people serious injury, I think they will remain loyal,” Brown told the newspaper. “But while this is the case, the problem is a big one, and if they go on blundering and alienate the moderate section, then India will be aflame.”

Brown noted that Europeans were isolated throughout India and warned that any major uprising could produce violence on a scale larger than that seen during the Boxer Rebellion in China between 1899 and 1901, when up to 250 foreigners, most of them missionaries and their families, were killed.

At the end of the 1900s, fresh concerns emerged that the Russian Empire might cross Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor and invade India. Some officials in the Raj believed such an invasion could coincide with a second mutiny, prompting renewed discussion about deploying Canadian troops to India.

In June 1910, the Vancouver Sun reported that an unnamed war correspondent, speaking in the Pacific Ocean city, claimed that if relations between Britain and Russia deteriorated, Canada would be asked to send 30,000 troops to India.

“How do Canadian farmers and artisans like the prospect thus presented,” the newspaper asked. “What do they think of the proposal to take the 30th Wellington, the 34th Ontario, 35th Simcoe, 36th Peel and other volunteer regiments, and to stretch these along the northern frontier of India with a Russian army in front and an India seething with sedition in rear?”

The editorial questioned whether Canadians were prepared to shed “their blood and their treasure” in “the burning sands” of India. “Why should they spend themselves either to keep Russia out of India or to keep Hindus in unwilling subjection to British rule,” the Vancouver Sun wrote, adding that Canada did not possess “one atom of material interest” in India.

Fortunately for Canada, Anglo-Russian relations never deteriorated to the point where the Tsar seriously contemplated invading India, and no such deployment proposal materialised.

The militia that Borden cultivated, and unsuccessfully tried to send to India, later formed the core of the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War, when Canadian and Indian troops fought alongside one another on the Western Front. A few decades later, Canadian troops also served in the India-Burma theatre as British forces battled Japan during the Second World War.

After India attained independence, the two countries established a defence relationship that remained strong for more than two and a half decades.

Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His latest book, Colombo: Port of Call, has been published by Penguin Random House.