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ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1946, shortly after taking office as minister for external affairs in India’s pre-independence cabinet, Jawaharlal Nehru sent a long letter to the Commander in Chief and Defence Secretary to press for large-scale reforms to the Indian Army. To the colonial officials who read Nehru’s letter this seemed a dangerous and even reckless proposal, given the bloody and almost uncontrollable communal riots in Calcutta the month before, during which six thousand people were slaughtered. The last thing India needed, from their perspective, was to destroy the one force standing between the country and mass disorder. But Nehru argued, on the contrary, that reform of the military was absolutely necessary to safeguard India’s new democracy. The most urgent thing to do, he said, was to “transform the whole background of the Indian Army,” which meant changing the composition of the “martial class …