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Chandigarh: The Indian Army’s recently introduced uniform regulations, widely understood to have been undertaken at the government’s behest as part of a broader push to reduce the lingering imprint of colonial-era traditions, have been welcomed across sections of the media, serving officers, defence analysts, and assorted custodians of national authenticity.

The centrepiece of this initiative is the newly issued Army Uniforms, 2026, regulations, which remove several residual colonial dress customs. The changes include the indigenous bandi jacket as formal wear – better known in recent years as the “Modi jacket” – the phasing out of ceremonial pouch belts, more commonly known as Sam Browne belts which are named after General Sir Samuel Browne of the British Indian Army, the curtailment of sword-carrying on ceremonial occasions, and the elimination of assorted vestiges of imperial terminology and practice.

Collectively, these measures aim to give Indian military dress a more distinctly atmanirbhar, or indigenous, character. Yet, they also raise an intriguing question: if decolonisation is to be pursued to its logical conclusion, perhaps the time has come to confront the greatest surviving British contribution to military attire: shirts and trousers themselves.

Though neither garment originated in Britain, it was the British who popularised the tailored shirt-and-trouser combination, which by the early 19th century had become standard male attire across much of the Western world and, eventually, the globe. Few items of clothing are more closely associated with the British imprint on modern dress.

An 18th-century depiction of Henry Every, with the Fancy shown engaging its prey in the background. Photo: Public Domain.

After all, before the arrival of the East India Company in the early 17th century and the Raj that followed the 1957 uprising, assorted Indian campaigners did not spend much time worrying about shirt collars, trouser creases, or whether a belt was correctly aligned with its buckle. Rajput cavalrymen, Maratha horsemen, Sikh warriors and even earlier Mughal soldiers had won and lost wars across the subcontinent with remarkable success despite the complete absence of cargo pockets and regulation trouser lengths.

Military history before the advent of the British was surprisingly indifferent to the question of trousers and shirts as standardised elements of uniforms, a concern that, if decolonisation is to be meaningfully undertaken, must itself be re-examined.

Chhatrapati Shivaji, whom contemporary political discourse – particularly within strands of the BJP’s broader civilisational imagination – often invokes with considerable emphasis, built his empire through a combination of mobility, political cunning, and battlefield audacity, without any concern for combat attire or sartorial codes. Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Khalsa Army, likewise, expanded across Punjab and deep into Afghanistan through discipline, organisation, and formidable firepower, rather than any preoccupation with whether shirts were properly tucked or trousers fell at the correct angle above the boot.

An early-20th-century painting by Sawlaram Haldankar of Shivaji fighting the Bijapuri general Afzal Khan. Photo: Public domain.

Countless other Rajput military campaigners too raised and commanded armies  and governed vast territories without ever consulting a dress regulation manual or pausing to debate uniform etiquette of trousers and shirt as a condition of martial effectiveness. In that medieval world, operational effectiveness was measured in campaigns won, forts taken, and alliances forged – not in the precise alignment of collars, cuffs, or creases.

Hence, the logic of the BJP-led government’s decolonisation drive, if pursued to its natural conclusion, would seem to........

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