recognizing that the loyalty of the expanding numbers of Punjabi soldiers would be ‘won or lost in [their] homes and villages, not in the regiments’,11 the Raj sought to unify its military and rural policies: It was no coincidence that the ‘martial classes’ coincided with the dominant landholding elements of rural Punjab. The grafting of the army’s regiments onto the social base of Punjab’s rural order demonstrated a masterful appreciation by the military and the state in rural Punjab that the essence of a reliable and stable military lay in a contented peasantry.
