Indian rebellion of 1857
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1857–1858 was a period of armed uprising and rebellions in mostly northern and central India against British occupation of the subcontinent. The war brought about the end of the British East India Company's regime in India, and led to almost a century of direct rule of the Indian subcontinent by Britain: the British Raj.
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Introduction
The events of this period are known to many Indians as the First War of Independence and the War of Independence of 1857 and to the British, and many western historians, variously as the Indian Mutiny, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Sepoy Rebellion, the Great Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857. The Indian rebellion of 1857 is a modern name for the conflict.
The history of the rebellion is, to this day, an ongoing battle between two competing narratives, the history claimed by the British, who won the war, and the history claimed by the rebellious Indians, who were defeated. The fact that atrocities were perpetrated by both sides during the conflict only adds further to the controversy.
The British East India Company won the power of Diwani in the Bengal after winning the 'Battle' of Plassey in 1757. Their victory in the Battle of Buxar in 1764 won them the Nizamat of Bengal as well. Soon after, the Company began to vigorously expand its area of control in India.
In 1845 the Company managed to extend its control over Sindh province after a gruelling and bloody campaign (of Napier's 'Peccavi' fame). In 1848 the Second Anglo-Sikh War took place and the Company gained control of the Punjab as well. In 1853 the leader of the Marathas, Nana Sahib was denied his titles and his pension was stopped.
In 1854 Berar was annexed into the Company's domains. In 1856 the state of Awadh/Oudh was also annexed by the Company. Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was told that he would be the last Emperor and the Mughal Empire would cease to exist after him.
Causes
This has been a subject of much speculation and divided historical opinion. But quite undoubtedly, the rebellion had diverse religious, social and politico-economic causes. The sepoys (from sipahi, Hindi for soldier, used for native Indian soldiers) had their own list of grievances against the Company Raj, mainly caused by the ethnic gulf between the British officers and their Indian troops. Other than Indian units of the British East India Company's army, much of the resistance came from the old aristocracy, which in turn feared that under British rule they would become increasingly irrelevant and replaced by a new comprador class.
Frictions
Due to missionary activity some Indians came to believe that the British intended to forcibly convert them to Christianity, a view which was perhaps not entirely unfounded, as the British religious fashion of the time was Evangelism, and many British East India Company officers took it upon themselves to try to convert their Sepoys. This was strongly discouraged by the Company, which was aware of the attempts' potential to become a flashpoint, but in spite of official disapproval conversion attempts continued unabated.
The jewels of the royal family of Nagpur were publicly auctioned in Calcutta, a move that was seen as a sign of abject disrespect by the remnants of the Indian aristocracy.
Indians were unhappy with the heavy-handed rule of the Company which had embarked on a project of rather rapid occupation and westernisation. This included the outlawing of many religious customs, both Muslim and Hindu, which were viewed as uncivilized by the British. This caused outrage amongst the Indian population. The British abolished child marriage, Sati (the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands), female infanticide, and hunted down the Thuggees. Many of the Company's modernising efforts were viewed with automatic distrust; for example, it was feared that the railway, the first of which began running out of Bombay in the 1850s, was a demon. However, the common misconception that the British undertook these changes in social system themselves is largely inaccurate, as there were many Indian reformers, notable among them Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who were really the driving force behind these reforms. In fact, one lesson learned by the British after 1857 was to not enact reforms, but to instead further strengthen social divides in order to maintain their supremacy; and also to appease the gentry, who had been major instigators in the 1857 revolt. After 1857, Zamindari (regional feudal officials) became more oppressive, the Caste System became more pronounced, and the communal divide between Hindus and Muslims became marked and visible, all due in great part to British efforts to keep Indian society divided. This tactic is infamously known as Divide and rule.
The justice system was inherently unfair to the Indians as can be expected from any foreign occupation. The official Blue Books — entitled "East India (Torture) 1855–1857" — that were laid before the House of Commons during the sessions of 1856 and 1857, revealed that British officers were allowed an extended series of appeals if convicted or accused of brutality or crimes against Indians. The Company also practised financial extortion through heavy taxation. Failure to pay these taxes almost invariably resulted in appropriation of property.
The British policy of expansionism was also greatly disliked by the Indians. In eight years James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India, had annexed a quarter of a million square miles (650,000 km²) of land to the Company's territory.
Economics
The British East India Company was a massive export company that was the force behind much of the colonization of India. The power of the Company took nearly 150 years to build. As early as 1693, the annual expenditure in political "gifts" to men in power reached nearly 90,000 pounds. In bribing the Government, the Company was allowed to operate in overseas markets despite the fact that the cheap imports of South Asian silk, cotton, and other products hurt domestic business. By 1767, the Company was forced into an agreement to pay 400,000 pounds into the National Exchequer annually.
By 1848, however, the Company's financial difficulties had reached a point where expanding revenue required expanding British territories in South Asia massively. The Company began to set aside adoption rights of native princes and began the process of annexation of more than a dozen independent Rajas between 1848 and 1854. In an article published in The New York Daily Tribune on July 28, 1857, Karl Marx notes that "... in 1854 the Raj of Berar, which comprise 80,000 square miles of land, a population from four to five million, and enormous treasures, was forcibly seized".
In order to consolidate and control these new holdings, a well-established army of 200,000 South Asians officered by 40,000 British soldiers dominated India by 1857. The last vestiges of independent Indian states had disappeared and the Company exported tons of gold, silk, cotton, and a host of other precious materials back to England every year.
The land was reorganised under the comparatively harsh Zamindari system to facilitate the collection of taxes. In certain areas farmers were forced to switch from subsistence farming to commercial crops such as indigo, jute, coffee and tea. This resulted in hardship to the farmers and increases in food prices.
Local industry, specifically the famous weavers of Bengal and elsewhere, also suffered under British rule. Tariffs were kept low, according to traditional British free-market sentiments, and thus the Indian market was flooded with cheap clothing from Britain. Indigenous industry simply could not compete, and where once India had produced much of England's luxury cloth, the country was now reduced to growing cotton which was shipped to Britain to be manufactured into clothing, which was subsequently shipped back to India to be purchased by Indians.
The Indians felt that the British were levying very heavy taxation on the locals. This included an increase in the taxation on land.
Political Interference
If a landowner did not leave a male heir, the land became the property of the British East India Company via the doctrine of lapse carried out by Lord Dalhousie and his successor, Charles John Canning, 1st Earl Canning. Lord Dalhousie used this doctrine to possess a number of Indian kingdoms, most notably those of Pune, Nagpur and Jhansi, causing the disenfranchised rulers of these kingdoms to join sides with the rebellious Indian troops. This applied to feudal lands as well as to the states.
Sepoys
Sepoys were native Indian soldiers serving in the army of the British East India Company under British officers trained in the East India Company College, the company's own military school in England. The presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal maintained their own army each with its own commander-in-chief. They fielded more troops than the official army of the British Empire. In 1857 there were 257,000 sepoys.
The Company also recruited Indians of other castes than the Brahmin and Rajputs; the latter is a traditional warrior caste in the Western part of North India, now Rajasthan. In 1856 sepoys were required to serve overseas during a war in Burma. Hindu tradition states that those who 'travel the black waters' will lose their caste and be outside the Hindu community. Sepoys were thus very displeased with their deployment to Burma.
The sepoys were dissatisfied with various aspects of army life. Their pay was relatively low and after the British troops conquered Awadh and the Punjab, the soldiers no longer received extra pay for service there, because they were no longer considered "foreign missions". However, they were not subject to the penalty of flogging as were the British soldiers. Sepoy soldiers found themselves constantly pitted against their countrymen in an army which the common soldiers increasingly began to feel was governed by wholly foreign influences. In a colonial setting, this is the prime breeding ground for a conflagration.
Into this conflagration, the Pattern 1853 Lee-Enfield (P/53) rifle was introduced into India. Its cartridge was covered by a greased membrane which was supposed to be cut by the teeth before the cartridges were loaded into the rifles. There was a rumour that the membrane was greased by cow or pig fat. This was offensive to Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike, who considered tasting beef or pork to be against their respective religious tenets. The British claimed that they had replaced the cartridges with new ones not made from cow and pig fat and tried to get sepoys to make their own grease from beeswax and vegetable oils but the rumour persisted. A new drill was also introduced in which the cartridge was not bitten with the teeth but torn with the hand: the sepoys argued that they might very well forget and bite. The Commander in Chief in India, General George Anson reacted to this crisis by saying, "I'll never give in to their beastly prejudices", and despite the pleas of his junior officers he did not compromise.
Some began to spread the rumour of a prophecy that the Company's rule would end after a hundred years. Their rule in India had begun with the Battle of Plassey in 1757.
Start of the war
The preceding months held tensions and several serious events but they failed to cause as big a conflagration as those at Meerut.
Fire near Calcutta
Calcutta on 24 January 1859.
Bengal Native Infantry
On February 26, 1857 the 19th Bengal Native Infantry (BNI) regiment came to know about new cartridges and refused to use them. Their Colonel confronted them angrily with artillery and cavalry on the parade ground, but then accepted their demand to withdraw the artillery, and cancel the next morning's parade [1].
Mangal Pandey
At Barrackpore (now Barrackpur), near Calcutta, on March 29, 1857, Mangal Pandey of the 34th BNI attacked and injured his British sergeant on the parade ground, and wounded an adjutant with a sword after shooting at him, but instead hitting the adjutant's horse.
It is alleged by the British that Pandey was heavily intoxicated with Bhang at the time of this incident. General John Hearsey came out to meet him on the parade ground, and said later that Mangal Pandey was in some kind of "religious frenzy". He ordered a jemadar to arrest Pandey, but the jemadar refused. Pandey then tried to kill himself by pulling the trigger of his musket with his toe. He only managed to wound himself in the chest, and was court-martialled on April 6. He was hanged along with the jemadar on April 8. The whole regiment was dismissed as a collective punishment, and because it was felt that they would harbour vengeful feelings towards their superiors after this incident. The other sepoys thought this a very harsh punishment.
April saw fires at Agra, Allahabad and Ambala.
3rd Light Cavalry at Meerut
On 9 May, 85 troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry at Meerut refused to use their cartridges. They were imprisoned, sentenced to ten years of hard labour, and stripped of their uniforms in public. It has been said that the town prostitutes made fun of the manhood of the sepoys during the night and this is what goaded them.
When the 11th and 20th native cavalry of the Bengal Army assembled in Meerut on 10 May, they broke rank and turned on their commanding officers. They then liberated the 3rd Regiment and attacked the European cantonment where they killed all the Europeans they could find, including women and children, and burned the houses. The rebelling forces were then engaged by the remaining British forces in Meerut. Meerut had the largest percentage of British troops of any station in India: 2,038 European troops with twelve field guns versus 2,357 sepoys lacking artillery. Some commentators believe that the British forces could have stopped the sepoys from marching on Delhi, but the British commanders of the Meerut garrison were extraordinarily slow in reacting to the crisis. They did not even send immediate word to other British cantonments that a rebellion was in process. It seems likely that they believed they would be able to contain the Indians by themselves.
On 11 May the rebels reached Delhi, where they were joined by other Indians from the local bazaar, and attacked and captured the Red Fort (Lal Qila), killing five British, including a British officer and two women. Lal Qila was the residence of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II and the sepoys demanded that he reclaim his throne. At first he was reluctant, but eventually he agreed to the demands and became the leader of the rebellion.
Support and Opposition
The rebellion now spread beyond the armed forces, but it did not result in a complete popular uprising as its leaders hoped. The Indian side was not completely unified. While Bahadur Shah Zafar was restored to the imperial throne there was a faction that wanted the Maratha rulers to be enthroned as well, and the Awadhis wanted to retain the powers that their Nawab used to have.
The war was mainly centred in northern and central areas of India. Delhi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Jhansi, Bareilly, Arrah and Jagdishpur were the main centres of conflict. The Bhojpurias of Arrah and Jagdishpur supported the Marathas. The Marathas, Rohillas and the Awadhis supported Bahadur Shah Zafar and were against the British.
There were calls for jihad by some leaders including the millenarian Ahmedullah Shah, taken up by the Muslims, particularly Muslim artisans, which caused the British to think that the Muslims were the main force behind this event. In Awadh, Sunni Muslims did not want to see a return to Shiite rule, so they often refused to join what they perceived to be a Shia rebellion.
In Thana Bhawan, the Sunnis declared Haji Imdadullah their Ameer. In May 1857 the famous Battle of Shamli took place between the forces of Haji Imdadullah and the British.
Many Indians supported the British, partly due to their dislike at the idea of return of Mughal rule and partly because of the lack of a notion of Indianness, These very forces were crucial to the British re-conquest of the independent areas. The Sikhs and Pathans of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province supported the British and helped in the capture of Delhi. The Gurkhas of Nepal continued to support the British as well.
Most of southern India remained passive with only sporadic and haphazard outbreaks of violence. Most of the states did not take part in the war as many parts of the region were ruled by the Nizams or the Mysore royalty and were thus not directly under British rule.
Initial stages
Bahadur Shah Zafar proclaimed himself the Emperor of the whole of India. The civilians, nobility and other dignitaries took the oath of allegiance to the Emperor. The Emperor issued coins in his name (One of the oldest ways of asserting Imperial status) and his name was added to the Khutbah (The acceptance by Muslims that he is their King).
Initially, the Indian soldiers were able to significantly push back Company forces. The sepoys captured several important towns in Haryana, Bihar, Central Provinces and the United Provinces. The British forces at Meerut and Ambala held out resolutely and withstood the sepoy attacks for several months.
The British proved to be formidable foes, largely due to their superior weapons, training, and strategy. The sepoys who mutinied were especially handicapped by their lack of a centralised command and control system.
Rao Tularam of Haryana went to collect arms from Russia which had just been in a war with the British in the Crimea, but he died on the way.
Delhi
The British were slow to strike back at first but eventually two columns left Meerut and Simla. They proceeded slowly towards Delhi and fought, killed, and hanged numerous Indians along the way. At the same time, the British moved regiments from the Crimean War, and diverted European regiments headed for China to India.
After a march lasting two months, the British fought the main army of the rebels near Delhi in Badl-ke-Serai and drove them back to Delhi. The British established a base on the Delhi ridge to the north of the city and the siege began. The siege of Delhi lasted roughly from the 1st of July to the 31st of August. However the encirclement was hardly complete—the rebels could easily receive resources and reinforcements. Later the British were joined by the Punjab Movable Column of Sikh soldiers and elements of the Gurkha Brigade.
Eagerly-awaited heavy siege guns did not guarantee an easy victory against the numerical superiority of the sepoy. Eventually the British broke through the Kashmiri gate and began a week of street fighting. When the British reached the Red Fort, Bahadur Shah had already fled to Humayun's tomb. The British had retaken the city.
The British proceeded to loot and pillage the city. A large number of the citizens were slaughtered in retaliation for the Europeans killed by rebel Indians. Artillery was set up in the main mosque in the city and the neighbourhoods within the range of artillery were bombarded. These included the homes of the Muslim nobility from all over India, and contained innumerable cultural, artistic, literary and monetary riches. An example would be the loss of most of the works of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, thought of as the greatest south Asian poet of that era.
The British soon arrested Bahadur Shah, and the next day British officer William Hodson shot his sons Mirza Mughal, Mirza Khizr Sultan, and Mirza Abu Bakr under his own authority. Their heads were presented to their father the next day.
Cawnpore
In June, sepoys under General Wheeler in Kanpur, (known as Cawnpore by the British) rebelled — apparently with tacit approval of the Nana Sahib — and besieged the European entrenchment. The British lasted three weeks of the Siege of Cawnpore with little water, suffering constant casualties. On the 25th of June the Nana Sahib requested surrender and Wheeler had little choice but to accept. The Nana Sahib promised them safe passage to a secure location but when the British boarded riverboats, their pilots fled, setting fire to the boats, and the rebellious sepoys opened fire on the British, soldiers and civilians. One boat with 4 men escaped.
The surviving women and children were led to Bibi-Ghar (the House of the Ladies) in Cawnpore. On the 15th of July, worried by the approach of the British forces and believing that they would not advance if there were no hostages to save, the Nana Sahib ordered their murders. Three men entered it and killed everyone with knives and hatchets and hacked them to pieces. Their bodies were thrown down a well.
The butchering of the women and children proved to be a mistake. The British were aghast and the pro-Indian proponents lost all their support. Cawnpore became a war cry for the British soldiers for the rest of the conflict. The Nana Sahib disappeared and was probably killed trying to escape India.
When the British retook Cawnpore later, the soldiers took their sepoy prisoners to the Bibi-Ghar and forced them to lick the bloodstains from the walls and floor. Then they hanged all of the sepoy prisoners.
Lucknow
Rebellion erupted in the state of Awadh (also known as Oudh, in modern-day Uttar Pradesh) very soon after the events in Meerut. The British commander of Lucknow, Henry Lawrence, had enough time to fortify his position inside the Residency compound. British forces numbered some 1700 men, including loyal sepoys. The rebels initial assaults were unsuccessful, and so they began a barrage of artillery and musket fire into the compound. Lawrence was one of the first casualties. The rebels tried to breach the walls with explosives and bypass them via underground tunnels that led to underground close combat. After 90 days of siege, numbers of British were reduced to 300 loyal sepoys, 350 British soldiers and 550 non-combatants. This action quickly became known as the Siege of Lucknow.
On the 25th of September a thousand soldiers of the Highlanders under General Sir Henry Havelock joined them, in what was known as 'The First Relief of Lucknow'. In October another Highlander unit under Sir Colin Campbell came to relieve them and on the 18th of November they evacuated the compound women and children first. They fled to now-retaken Cawnpore.
Jhansi
Jhansi was a Maratha-ruled princely state in Bundelkhand. When the Raja of Jhansi died without an male heir in 1853, Jhansi was annexed to the British Raj by the Governor-General of India under the Doctrine of Lapse. His widow, Rani Lakshmi Bai, protested the annexation on the grounds that she had not been allowed to adopt a successor, as per Indian custom.
When the Rebellion broke out, Jhansi quickly became a centre of the rebellion. A small group of British officials took refuge in Jhansi's fort, and the Rani negotiated their evacuation. When the British left the fort, they were massacred by the rebels. Although the massacre might have occurred without the Rani's consent, the British suspected her of complicity in the slaughter, despite her protestations of innocence.
In September and October 1857, the Rani led the successful defence of Jhansi from the invading armies of the neighbouring rajas of Datia and Orchha. In March 1858, the British Army, led by Colonel Rose advanced on Jhansi, and laid siege to the city. The British captured the city, but the Rani fled in disguise. She was later killed in a skirmish with the British forces.
Other areas
On 1 June 1858, Rani Lakshmi Bai and a group of Maratha rebels captured the fortress city of Gwalher (Gwalior) from the Shinde (Sindhia) rulers, who were British allies. The Rani was killed three weeks later at the start of the British assault, when she was hit by a spray of bullets after fleeing Gwalior. The British captured Gwalior three days later.
The Rohillas centred in Bareilly were also very active in the war and this area was amongst the last to be captured by the rebels.
Retaliation
From the end of 1857, the British had begun to gain ground again. Lucknow was retaken in March 1858. On 8 July 1858, a peace treaty was signed and the war ended. The last rebels were defeated in Gwalior on 20 June 1858. By 1859, rebel leaders Bakht Khan and Nana Sahib had either been slain or had fled. The British adopted the old Mughal punishment for mutiny and sentenced rebels were lashed to the mouth of cannons and blown to pieces. It was a crude and brutal war, with both sides resorting to what would now be described as war crimes. In the end, however, in terms of sheer numbers, the casualties were significantly higher on the Indian side.
Due to the bloody start of the rebellion, and the violence perpetrated upon the Europeans by the Indian forces especially after the apparent treachery of Nana Sahib and butchery in Cawnpore, the British believed that they were justified in using similar tactics. As a result, the end of the war was followed by the execution of a vast majority of combatants from the Indian side as well as large numbers of civilians perceived to be sympathetic to the rebel cause. The British press and British government did not advocate clemency of any kind, though Governor General Canning tried to be sympathetic to native sensibilities, earning the scornful sobriquet "Clemency Canning". Soldiers took very few prisoners and often executed them later. Whole villages were wiped out for apparent pro-rebel sympathies. The retaliation was termed by the Indians: Devil's Wind.
Reorganisation
The rebellion also saw the end of the British East India Company's rule in India. In August, by the Queen's Proclamation of 1858, power was transferred to the British Crown. A secretary of state was entrusted with the authority of Indian affairs and the Crown's viceroy in India was to be the chief executive. The British embarked on a program of reform, trying to integrate Indian higher castes and rulers into the government and abolishing the East India Company.
The viceroy stopped land grabs, decreed religious tolerance and admitted Indians into civil service, albeit mainly as subordinates. The British also increased the number of British soldiers in relation to native ones; henceforth 'Indian' regiments would be made-up of at least one-third British soldiers and only these would be allowed to handle artillery. In 1877 Queen Victoria took the title of Empress of India on the advice of her Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Bahadur Shah was tried for treason by a military commission assembled at Delhi, and exiled to Rangoon where he died in 1862, finally bringing the Mughal dynasty to an end.
References
- ^ Memorandum from Lieutenant-Colonel W. St. L. Mitchell (CO of the 19th BNI) to Major A. H. Ross about his troop's refusal to accept the Enfield cartridges, 27 February 1857, Archives of Project South Asia, Missiouri State University
See Also
- 1857 by Surendra Nath Sen
- Vellore Mutiny
- Azimullah Khan
- History of South Asia
- British Raj
- Titumir
- The Bollywood film The Rising depicts events around the life of Mangal Pandey
