62 AWARDED FOR VALOUR
be conferred on Duffadar Gunkut Ras Deokur of the Southern Mahratha
Irregular Horse.^64
Despite this definitive pronouncement that native troops would not be
eligible, a less arbitrary reason was apparently felt necessary to justify this
position. This was provided by the Duke of Cambridge. His staff sifted
through the regulations until they came up with a more concrete reason to
deny the award to Deokur. The Duffadar wasineligiblefor the Cross because
hewaseligible for the Indian Order of Merit.^65 The decoration was a valour
award instituted by John Company in 1837. Issued in three classes, it
carried with it both a cash award and the potential for a grant of land upon
mustering out of company service.^66 Since the IOM was open only to native
troops, the staff officers explained, it was unfair to British troops to allow
native eligibility for a Victoria Cross as well. Deokur’s recommendation
was promptly rejected and the precedent had been set. No further native
nominations would be entertained.^67
The exclusion of native troops appears to a large extent to have stemmed
from moral indignation rather than pure racism. Able Seaman William
Hall won the VC during the relief of Lucknow on 16 November 1857 as
part of the naval gun detachment detailed to breach the walls of the Shah
Nujeff mosque. He and Lieutenant Thomas James Young (who also got
the Cross) continued to serve the last gun after the rest of the detail had
been killed or wounded by the mutineers. Born in Nova Scotia, Hall was
black.^68 Nor were there any objections to the bestowal of a Cross on Private
Samuel Hodge of the 4th West India Regiment. In 1866 he won the VC
at Tubabecelong in West Africa for opening a breach in a village stockade
and then accompanying the assault armed only with the axe he had used to
chop through the wall.^69
While the number of men of color who earned the official recognition
of a Victoria Cross is statistically insignificant, that these recommendations
went through the process proves that the War Office and Horse Guards did
not dismiss claims merely on the basis of the melanin content of the man’s
skin. Given the number of non-white troops and auxiliaries maintained by
the Empire during the nineteenth century, the paucity of non-white Victoria
Crosses does indicate a degree of latent racism in the administration of the
award. In this, the military was simply reflecting the culture that created it,
the same imperialist attitude summed up in ‘The White-Man’s Burden.’
The exclusion of Indian soldiers from eligibility was, by contrast, almost
certainly based far more on the fact that some of them had broken their
oaths than on their skin tone. The public fed on a steady diet of lurid tales
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