Trace the evolution of Indianisation of the officer corps in the British Indian Army from the Sandhurst reservation (1918) to the founding of the Indian Military Academy (1932).

Indianisation meant replacing British officers with Indians holding King's Commissions. Between 1918 and 1932 it advanced not as a single reform but as a chain of calibrated colonial concessions, each conceding form while retaining British control of command.

1918: the token reservation

• Nearly 1.3 million Indians served in the First World War [1], making continued exclusion from the officer cadre politically indefensible.
• Ten annual vacancies at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst were reserved for Indians — the first breach in an all-British commissioned cadre.
• Its limits were structural: training stayed in England, restricting entry to a wealthy, narrow social base, and the annual intake was too small to alter the cadre's composition.

1925-26: the Skeen Committee's push

• The Indian Sandhurst Committee under Lt-Gen Sir Andrew Skeen, with Indian members including M.A. Jinnah, Phiroze Sethna and Ziauddin Ahmad, examined officer entry and training [2].
• A sub-committee toured Indian universities — Bombay, Poona, Madras, Calcutta, Benares, Allahabad — to judge whether Indian graduates furnished officer material, shifting the debate to indigenous recruitment [3].
• Its report of 14 November 1926 urged doubling Sandhurst vacancies from 10 to 20, opening King's Commissions in Artillery, Signals and Engineers, and founding a military college in India [2].

The colonial ceiling

• Government accepted only the vacancy increase; the India-based academy was deferred — reform was permitted in numbers, not in institutional autonomy.

1931-32: from recommendation to institution

• The Chetwode Committee (1931), under Commander-in-Chief Sir Philip Chetwode, worked out the modalities, recommending an academy admitting 40 Gentlemen Cadets per term [4].
• The Indian Military Academy, Dehradun, began training on 1 October 1932, ending Sandhurst's monopoly [4].

Thus Indianisation evolved from a token reservation abroad to an indigenous academy at home, driven by nationalist pressure and conceded incrementally. Its enduring gain was institutional: the IMA became the nursery of independent India's professional, apolitical officer corps, embedding a tradition of merit-based service under civilian constitutional authority.