NEW DELHI, Dec. 14 —Cpl. Sidh Ram, a short, lean, dark‐skinned man with a thick mustache, volunteered for the Indian Army 11 years ago to escape the poverty of his native village.

Like most of the other jawans, or ordinary soldiers, in the 838,000‐man army, Corporal Ram had only a few years of school and little prospect of finding a good job.

Now he considers himself fortunate to be earning 185 rupees a month — about $25 — as a gunner in an artillery regiment. The average Indian earns $15 to $20 a month.

He Is in Hospital

Recuperating In the Delhi Army Hospital from a shrapnel fragment that pierced his neck during the heavy battle for Chhamb, in Kashmir, last week, Corporal Ram said the army had been good to him.

“The army taught me how to read and write and gave me a respectable job,” he explained. “I have been able to get married and take care of my wife and daughter.”
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Corporal Ram sends half his salary home each month by postal money order to his wife, who lives with his father in their small village in the state of Maharashtra, south of Bombay. He gets two months' leave a year to spend with his family.

In his family background and in his reasons for joining the army, the corporal appears typical of the jawans, who are all volunteers.

He enjoys the free cigarettes and pegs of rum that the army distributes at the front. But, unlike many an American G.I., he is a serious, religious man, a Hindu, who likes to listen to Indian mythic tales and would not think of putting pinups over his bed or visiting prostitutes.

Oddly for socialist India, the old British Indian Army tradition of strict separation between officers and enlisted men is maintained. The officers in Corporal Ram's regiment often speak English among themselves, they carry swagger sticks, and they refer to each other as gentlemen and to the jawans as “our boys.” When Corporal Ram addresses an officer he calls him Sahib, or master.

A Broad Social Gap

There is little of the easy informality and close comradeship between officers and men that often exists in the United States Army, especially in Vietnam. The Indian officer is a well‐educated man from a good family; the jawan is usually a poor, uneducated man from the countryside.

The Indian Army has also preserved the old British system of ethnic and regional regiments. Corporal Ram's artillery outfit, for example, is made up exclusively of men from his state.

The Gurkha Rifles, fierce tribesmen from Nepal, is probably the most famous of the ethnic regiments. There is also the Punjab Regiment, the Sikh Light Infantry, the Rajputana Rifles, the Madras Regiment and the Dogra Regiment, named for a Kashmiri clan.

Corporal Ram, lying under a heavy red blanket in a ward filled with wounded men just brought in from the western front, expressed a desire to get back to the fighting.

“It is my duty, what I have been trained for all these years,” he said, “As soon as I am fit, I will go back.”