When I was on a visit to India in the mid-1970s, I flew one morning from Delhi to Jaipur. After we had all settled back into our seats a short, dapper, moustached man in an ordinary western suit, climbed into one of the front seats. At Jaipur he was the first off the plane, and was met at the foot of the steps by several army officers, with much saluting and clicking of heels. It happened that when I flew back the next day he was on the same plane once again; and at Delhi airport I eventually realised who he was. He was met there by several members of his well-dressed family, and was shown to his huge car by his seemingly even larger, magnificently turbaned, driver. He was, I realised, Sam Maneckshaw, the Indian Army's only Field Marshal since Independence, the hero of its spectacular victory in the Bangladesh war, now, very evidently, living in enviable, luxurious, much honoured retirement.

What a contrast to those political generals, the house-bound expresidents of the day, Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan, in Pakistan next door! What a contrast too to Generals Ne Win, Suharto, Zia and others of their ilk still wrestling with the intractable problems of their countries.

That day, what I saw of Sam Maneckshaw neatly symbolised the remarkable abstention of the Indian Army from any direct control over India's politics in all the thirty years and more since Independence.

For some time now various scholars have been making a range of new enquiries into India's political history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.