Every man who dons the uniform and joins the ranks of the armed forces looks forward to earning his stripes. Arguably it was a little known artilleryman Napoleon Bonaparte who is the best example of the heights a soldier can scale  by dint of his martial  abilities and of course luck. And it was Bonny, (as Bonaparte was referred by his English opponents) who remarked “Every soldier carries a marshal&’s baton in his knapsack.” But “From Sepoy to Subedar” by  Sitaram a soldier in the Bengal Army of the East India Company  makes no such claims. He makes no pretence of concealing his mind set by signing  the foreword to the account of his life in the company&’s army as “ Your slave Sitaram, Subedar, Pensioner”. If the reign of the “Company Bahadur” rested on his bayonets of the thousands of   “Jack  Sepoys” like Sitaram, these men seem to be unaware of their importance to their foreign masters. Treated worse than mercenaries, nevertheless the sepoys held aloft their employers banners as they defeated opponents who had been their neighbours for generations and basked in the reflected glory of their overseas masters.  Little wonder, Sitaram&’s accounts of the various campaigns in which he participated are sans any trace of nationalism. Be it the Gurkha and Pindari wars and the culmination of his career in crushing what the present generation  proudly acknowledges as nation&’s First War of Independence though the masters of the faithful sepoys have tried to pass it off  as Sepoy Mutiny, it continues to be diary of a soldier who worships the ground trodden by his masters. Translated and first published by lieutenant-colonel Norgate, Bengal Staff Corps at Lahore in 1873, the 221-page hardback is not a tome to be despised. It is the faithful account of a man who bares his soul and does not even flinch to mention the death of his own son who has joined the rebels in the Great Uprising of 1857. Edited by Ananda Bhattacharya, this Kunal Books publication gives an accurate outline of the loyalty and skill of the Indian soldiers serving the cause of a foreign ruler. It is a quirk of history that of late the British have acknowledged that it had to fight its toughest battle not on the beaches of Normandy or the desert of North Africa, but among the hills of Imphal and Kohima where they had to pit their strength against the soldiers of  Subhas Chandra Bose -led Indian National Army who neither gave nor asked for any quarters from their erstwhile commanders and comrades of the British Indian Army. These freedom fighters  who have been relegated to the footnotes of the history of  the struggle for independence are yet to be given their due.