08-30-2007, 03:21 AM
The General Causes of Insurrection in 1857
In order to ensure the renewal of its charter, the East India Company worked hard to create the impression that the early nineteenth century was a period of slow but progressive improvement for India, but the truth was far removed from this. It was in reality a time of radical experimentation and desperate contingency in the development of a British system of government, which created widespread resentment. Apart from the administrative reforms described in the previous chapters, a host of other petty interventions by the Company's officials, such as the rounding up and incarceration of prostitutes whenever there was an outbreak of venereal disease among the troops, had promoted disaffection [Ballhatchet 1957, 1980]. One of the most widespread grievances concerned the increase in land tax, imposed in all of the newly ceded and conquered territories. This might have been bearable at a time of agricultural prosperity, but the early nineteenth century was a period of profound economic depression. British methods of collecting these taxes were also unpopular, involving as they did the introduction a European system of courts, whereby defaulters were arraigned before a magistrate and summarily deprived of their lands for failing to meet revenue payments. Such measures were novel, confusing, and illegitimate in the eyes of many Indians. The courts also greatly increased the powers of the sahukar or bania money lenders to whom many were indebted: a further cause of resentment [Hardiman 1996]. Most large land controllers, and many smaller ones, at this time, had acquired their positions because they were aristocrats or ulema (Muslim scholars), the educated elite who ruled the Mughal Empire, and had been appointed by the Emperor or one of his Governors or deshmukhs . But in the territories under Company rule, their authority was superseded by law courts, presided over by men in black frock coats and pants: the British who did not sit in judgement by right of descent, as aristocrats, or as kazis or pundits. They occupied posts in court because they had completed an examination in London and had been appointed to the East India Company's Indian Civil Service. To many Indians this was a strange way to govern a country. Above all, the decisions of the courts were resented because they were final. Tax collection had always been a matter for negotiation under the Mughals: those who could not pay might be threatened, but ultimately a compromise was often possible. Indian governors and zamindars also often made generous gifts of land, so-called inam lands, for the maintenance of temples and pilgrimage centres and as pensions to former public servants. But, imbued with Utilitarian ideals, and particularly David Ricardo's theories concerning agricultural rent, the Company's officials were taught that a rental charge imposed on the land, no matter how high, was not likely to undermine agricultural production and that the government's land tax was a form of rent. They did not see the surplus on agricultural production either as a form of subsistence or a reward for enterprise; they saw it as an unearned surplus, of which they could take as much as they pleased [Stokes 1959]; whilst the grants of inam land were regarded as a drain on the state's resources, to be curtailed. For this reason, the British were extremely inflexible in their revenue assessments, and were inclined to suspend privileged land holdings granted by former rulers [Stokes 1978, ch2]. Zamindars were expected to pay their dues to the government, and if they did not, lost their position. Furthermore, the success of British District Collectors and their promotion, depended on close accounting and their ability to raise yields. This was an entirely different logic from that of the traditional structure of landholding in India which was bound up with aristocratic right, and religious and social status [Cohn 1983].
The general uprising of 1857 has been characterised as anti-colonial because the changes from which people were suffering, in general were those effected by the colonial ruler, the East India Company. The problem was that there were many other causes for rebellion, and not all of those who took up arms were directly fighting against the colonial regime. Many rebels were hoping to restore a pre-colonial social order. They did not know who or what was responsible for the changes going on around them, but what they did want was to revive some form of traditional authority. With the collapse of British military power in North India in that year, others had no alternative but to turn to traditional leaders of one sort or another. Unfortunately, anyone who took to arms, even with the aim of self-defence, or restoring some sort of local order, was often regarded as a rebel by the British and ultimately pilloried, tried and executed [Brodkin 1972].
The Indian army mutineers themselves, who signalled the commencement of the wider insurrection, had mixed motives. Some wanted to revive the authority of the ailing Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, and the units of the British Army which mutinied at Meerut in May 1857 determined their fate at an early stage by deciding to march on Delhi to reinstall the Emperor rather than march, as they might alternatively have done, towards the British seat of power in Calcutta. In doing so, they immediately alienated the large number of Indians who had never recognised the authority of the Mughals, or who, like the Sikhs in the Punjab, had spent many generations struggling against the Mughal Empire. They also alienated Hindu rulers who were prospering under the East India Company's rule. Naturally, they did win the support of Mughal aristocrats in the North of India. A further advantage of marching to Delhi was that it gave the rebels a concrete aim, which was very needed for the obvious reason that India, at this time, lacked a truly powerful nationalist ethos. Those who took up arms were often fighting for their country against the British, but that country might be Gwalior, Bengal, Awadh, Indore &c. â it was not in the name of India itself. They were fighting, very often, for the reinstatement of kingdoms, patrimonies, and chiefdoms that had existed in the pre-British period, or for the revival of an empire which covered part of the subcontinent. They were by no means united in struggling for a single political alternative, and this is one of the reasons why the uprising of 1857 was ultimately successfully suppressed by the British. There was no overall strategy; though to say this is something of a truism, since it is absurd to suggest that there could easily have been one.
Unravelling the events of the Uprising in 1857
Most of the accounts of 1857 that have survived are unreliable as historical sources. To begin with, it is always the victor's version of events that tends to take precedence, and since the British ultimately overwhelmed the insurrectionists, it is the British view that has generally held sway. The uprising was a clear sign that the East India Company had seriously misruled the Indo-gangetic plain but they were reluctant to admit this, which is why in many subsequent British accounts, 1857 is usually referred to as the 'mutiny'. By this it is implied that the insurrection was simply an act of treason by a group of soldiers which was dealt with appropriately. British descriptions of the 'mutiny' were also typically accompanied by accounts of various barbarities and horrors committed by the Indians as if to justify the violent means by which the restoration of colonial rule was accomplished. But this is not, of course, how Indians regarded the matter, then or now. Neither was the insurrection of that year confined to the ranks of the military, nor the atrocities committed as one-sided as the British implied.
Reacting against British misrepresentations many Indian authors, most famously the radical nationalist V.D. Savarkar writing in 1908 [i] , have described the events of 1857 as 'the first national war of Indian Independence'. However, this is clearly a misnomer since, as one historian, R. C. Majumdar [1963], has commented, 'on the whole, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the so-called First National War of Independence of 1857 is neither first, nor national, nor a war of independence'. More detailed assessments published following the centenary commemoration of 1857 have tended to focus less on the activities of the Bengal sepoys, and more on the associated uprisings of the civil population in urban and rural areas. Some authors, such as Eric Stokes [1978], have argued that the rebels of 1857 were fighting for not one, but a variety of causes and nationalisms.
There remains a problem with source materials, which exacerbates the difficulties of interpretation. The Urdu records of the Lucknow and Delhi courts are preserved in the Allahabad and National Archives, but they are written in shekastah, a very difficult form of Persian calligraphy. By contrast, there are extremely voluminous English-language historical records of 1857 that have survived, but they are largely derived from the subsequent attempts made by the British to pacify the country. They are thus part of a project to restore order, rather than a dispassionate, legal investigation into what occurred. Essays by E.I. Brodkin [1972] and Ranajit Guha [1983] have explained why it is so difficult to deduce what really happened from such sources. A great many of these are the accounts of soldiers who were engaged in pacification exercises, and the trial documents of those they believed, often mistakenly, to be responsible for the uprising. The authors and protagonists were keen to convince themselves that they were in control of the situation and that this was not a popular insurrection. They sought to identify and punish alleged agitators and ringleaders who had misled the supposedly naive masses into insurrection: a more realistic exercise than attempting to punish the population as a whole. The documents are thus filled with fabricated conspiracy theories, and attempts to pin the blame for what had happened on somebody, anybody in fact other than the colonial regime itself.
Grievances of the Military
The 19th Native Infantry, stationed at Barrackpore just west of Calcutta, was the first regiment to rebel against its officers, following the now notorious distribution of greased cartridges to be used with newly issued Lee Enfield rifles. These cartridges were greased with fat alleged to be that of cows, revered by Hindus, or of pigs, which was defiling for Muslims, and were believed to be part of an attempt to forcibly convert the Sepoys to Christianity. Those involved in the rebellion were arrested and a Court of Inquiry recommended that the regiment be disbanded. On the day following the initial rebellion - March 29 th 1857 - Mangal Pande of the 34th regiment, which had been barracked alongside the 19th, fired at his commanding officer Sir John Hearsey but was overpowered. He and another sepoy, Iswar Pande, were tried and executed. The name âPande' was thereafter immortalised as the nickname given by the British to the rebel sepoys. [ii] . After the 34th was also disbanded, rumours about the greased cartridges rapidly spread. Six weeks later, a thousand miles away, a native regiment at Meerut was publicly humiliated for refusing to use the cartridges by being marched in shackles to the jail. The next evening, on Sunday 10 th May, the duty officer at Meerut was shot, and the sepoys rallied around the guns of the regiment, forced open the armoury to seize supplies of the supposed polluting cartridges, and attacked and killed their British officers. The next day they marched to Delhi behind their regimental flag.
Given the unanticipated nature of the military mutiny, and keen to avert blame from themselves, officials made much of the sepoys' objections to the distribution of cartridges for use with the Lee Enfield rifle. However, although the cartridges may have provided a rallying point for a few of the mutineers, it was only one of the issues that concerned them. And interestingly, once they had rebelled, the mutinous regiments showed no compunction at all about using these same rifles and cartridges against the British. The cartridge issue nonetheless underscored the weakness of the military's control over the lower ranks of the Bengal army, highlighting the very small number of British officers, and their poor relationship with the troops. Above all, it symbolised the widespread resentment and distrust of the East India Company's policies. This mistrust revolved, among other things, around a perceived threat to Indian religion. Missionary activities had been permitted in India since 1813 lending credence to the fear that the principal reason why the British were in India was to in order to Christianise the population. Such fears had exhibited themselves on previous occasions, as in 1806, when a sepoy regiment at Vellore in the Madras Presidency had mutinied after the issue of a new form of leather headgear, also considered polluting. [iii] There were other fears of course, but British historiographies have tended to stress the cartridge issue because it could be used to demonstrate the irrationality and fanaticism of the natives, and the unreasonableness of their conduct. That they should take up arms over an issue as trivial and superstitious as the greasing of a cartridge, neatly diverted attention from other aspects of the Company's maladministration that provided more contingent and pressing causes for rebellion.
The other concerns of the military were more specific [Stokes 1986]. Indian troops were at that time organised into armies based in the three Presidencies of Madras, Bombay and Bengal. If these armies fought beyond their frontiers they received an additional allowance. In 1856 the Governor General decided that since the British controlled two thirds of the subcontinent, these additional allowances were no longer legitimate, and they were removed. The troops of the Bengal army based in Awadh at this time thus immediately received a cut in pay. The General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 also committed the sepoys to sign a declaration that they would be willing to fight overseas if necessary in the service of the East India Company, and this was resented by the majority who had no desire to travel so far. Another cause of resentment was the British policy of garnering recruits from a wide cross section of the population. Until 1856 a large proportion of soldiers in the Bengal Army were Brahmins and Rajputs from the north-west of Bengal. Villagers in this region were becoming accustomed to the income derived from sending recruits to the army. The kingdom of Awadh, independent but allied to the British by treaty since the late eighteenth century, had also become an important source of recruits to the army. The Company offended these groups by stating their intention to recruit more widely across the subcontinent. The sense of grievance had therefore spread to the main army recruiting villages, and a further discordant note was added to this when the disbanded Meerut mutineers returned home.
The decision by the British to seize control of the kingdom of Awadh had also fostered resentment. Awadh had been a loyal ally of the British. Under the notorious policy of lapse, announced in 1850 by the Viceroy Dalhousie, the British stated their intention to seize control of any princely state in which there might be a disputed succession. This they did, rapidly taking over the Nagpur kingdom in 1854 (the largest of all), along with Jhansi, Satara, Udaipur, Balaghat, Sambalpur, Jaitpur, Carnatic and Tanjore. They justified their actions by claiming that 'Indian despotism' was thereby ended, frontiers were consolidated, that it was administratively convenient, and that it was expressly desired by the people themselves [Fisher 1993]. In the case of Awadh, they did not trouble to wait for a disputed succession. The British Resident (the Company's representative at court) alleged that the Rajah was misruling his country, and this alone was used as a pretext to seize control of the kingdom in 1856 [Fisher 1987; Mukherjee 1984].
Arguably therefore it was not the peasants and sepoys who were the rebels in 1857, but the British themselves. In the view of many Muslim political commentators, since the British were merely the revenue collectors of Bengal, they were vastly exceeding their authority, and since the Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, was the Vizier, or guardian, of the Mughal Empire, the seizure of his kingdom was an attack on Mughal sovereignty itself. Following annexation, the Nawab was taken to Calcutta along with members of his family, and the British then made matters worse by sending in a highhanded settlement officer, Martin Gubbins, who in the process of fixing the revenue demand dispossessed a great many local aristocrats, known as taluqdars, from their ancestral estates. These taluqdars , led by the Rajah of Mahmudabad, were among the first aristocratic leaders to raise arms against the British and were strongly supported by their rural populations.
Other factors played a part in the Uprising of 1857. The Sikh regiments of Ranjit Singh who had been defeated in 1840, had been incorporated into the British army. There were some 15,000 of these troops and they were the first and largest force available to the British to move into the Northern plains and retake the areas which had risen in revolt. One of the major failings of the British prior to 1857 was that when they had taken over the kingdom of Awadh they did not recruit the army of the king in a similar manner. They disbanded all 50,000 of the king's troops, effectively dispersing large numbers of aggrieved trained soldiers over the entire region. Once similarly large numbers of men serving in the Bengal army had been alienated the basis was laid for what became a widespread civil as well as military insurrection.
NOTES
[i] Vinaya k Damodar (commonly Veer) Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence, 1857 was originally written in Marathi, published in 1908, and immediately banned by the British. The author, having taken part in terrorist conspiracies in London and Nasik was later sentenced to transporation to the Andaman islands (where he wrote about the concept of Hindutva or 'Hinduness'). He returned following a personal amnesty and was president of the Hindu Mahasabha for seven years in the 1930s and 40s. Savarkar's Indian War of Independence was finally published (in English) and distributed for the first time in 1947.
[ii] This name Pandey was in turn inherited by an English children's toy â a stuffed doll wearing pyjama pants â known as âAndy Pandey'.
[iii] Maya Gupta, âThe Vellore Mutiny' in M.&A.K. Gupta (eds.), Defying Death: struggles against imperialism and feudalism (New Delhi: Tulika Press, 2001): 18-38.
The Course of the Insurrection
By its nature, the East India Company's rule was a military occupation. The company was staffed by military men holding military titles. Military bases, or cantonments, were positioned so as to overawe the principal towns and cities, and sepoy units were based in all of the Princely States, as well as in the coastal trading zones. Because the Company's rule was a military regime, the state itself was imperilled as soon as the military mutinied. As Karl Marx had commented: âit is evident that the allegiance of the Indian people rests on the fidelity of the native army, in creating which the British rule simultaneously organised the first general centre of resistance⦠[to colonial rule]'. [i]
The events at Meerut demonstrated that the cartridge issue, emotive as it may have been, was still merely an excuse for revolt. Many have argued that it had indeed been planned for some time, citing evidence that for months before, lotus flowers and chapatis (flat breads) were mysteriously circulating around the villages of north India, it being rumoured that the planned date for insurrection was the 31 st of May. However, Ranajit Guha has put a slightly different twist on these events, arguing that, rather than an orgnaised conspiracy, this was merely evidence of widespread rural unrest. He traces the exchange of chapatis to the traditional technique of disease prevention through transference, a practice in northern India described in detail by William Crooke, which involved 'the symbolic use of a ritually consecrated object or animal to act as the carrier of an epidemic which had broken out in a locality or was about to do so, and push it beyond its boundaries' . Amongst the transmitters that could be used for the transfer of cholera were âimages of the cholera goddess, doles of rice collected from the local residents, filth and sweepings picked up from the affected villages, domestic animals such as goats, buffaloes and fowl, or in the case of an exceptionally cruel custom reported from Punjab, Chamars âbranded on the buttocks and turned out of the villageâ.' The circulating chapati was thus a transference sign of this type which acquired new meaning, becoming the predictive sign or omen of an imminent upheaval [Guha, 1983: 243-5] Whatever the circumstances, it must have been very obvious to the earliest mutineers that Meerut had to be involved as it was one of the strongest cantonments in the north, but by imprisoning soldiers on the 10 th of May, the British seem to have forced the hands of those involved at Meerut into an early commencement of the revolt. According to eye witnesses, the Meerut regiments were clearly expected when they arrived at the gates of Delhi, as they were greeted with lotus flowers and chapatis and urged to clear Delhi of the British, which they did, slaughtering not only British soldiers and officers but all Christians converts wherever the could be found. Immediately afterwards they sought an audience with the Emperor and King of Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, whom they urged to lead them. To this the frail and aged Emperor (he was 82 years of age) reluctantly and hesitatingly agreed. [ii] Thereafter, mutinous sepoy regiments steadily flowed into the capital (the ultimate destination of some 100,000 out of the 139,000 who mutinied), and proclamations were circulated calling for Muslim and Hindu to unite in a struggle for din (Islamic faith) and dharma : a central characteristic of the revolt [Ray 2003; Dalrymple 2006]. Many of these proclamations were written by Mirza Mughal (Zafar's fifth son), who endeavoured to take charge and unite the chaotic rebel force in Delhi. Others were written by outlying mansabdhars and supporters of the revolt who endeavoured to rally supplies and troops by invoking the authority and name of the emperor. The document known as the Azamgarh proclamation (reproduced under 'Texts') calls for support from all classes and lists the very specific and practical grievances of the rebels. It is interesting to read, not least for its clarity of purpose. [See Azamgarh Proclamation]
Whilst the mutinous sepoys and a growing number of self-proclaimed volunteer jihadis who joined them consolidated their hold on Delhi, preparations went ahead for revolt in Awadh. In the capital Lucknow, the commanding British officer, Sir Henry Lawrence, was warned that a shot would be the signal for the commencement of insurrection on the 30 th May. The story has it that whilst dining that evening he commented on the inactivity of the supposed mutineers, saying âyour friends are not punctual!', at which point a shot rang out. The next day, 34 miles west of Agra, Indian troops at Bharatpur in eastern Rajasthan revolted, and at Shahjahanpur, in north-central U.P. the British were attacked whilst attending morning service. At this point the insurrection might still have been contained, but responsibility for its escalation must lie partly in the hands of General James George Neill, commanding the 1 st Madras Fusiliers. Upon hearing of the events in Awadh, Neill marched to Varanasi, on what he thought was a pre-emptive mission. As soon as he arrived, he disbanded the local native regiment, lined up the sepoys, and shot them. Upon seeing this, a regiment of Sikhs stationed at Varanasi, normally considered âloyal', revolted and were also shot. General Neill then embarked upon a general campaign of terrorism, hanging every able-bodied man he could lay his hands on who aroused the least suspicion. News of these atrocities caused two native regiments at Kanpur, hitherto loyal, to revolt, and march to Bithur, where they met up with Nana Saheb, the deposed Maratha Peshwa, whom they persuaded to lead them to Delhi.
The British garrison at Kanpur was commanded by General Wheeler, who moved his men to the entrenchment surrounding the residency, from where they fired on the 53 rd and 56 th native infantry battalions who had not up until then mutinied, thus immediately prompting them to do so. At this point Nana Saheb's forces turned back to Kanpur and laid siege to the entrenchment. General Neill was ordered by telegraph from Calcutta to move to Allahabad and Kanpur, but he delayed, claiming that he was too busy with operations to âpacify' the country around Benares, which mostly involved burning villages. However, in terror at the prospect of his approach, the 6 th Native infantry at Allahabad mutinied on the 6 th of June, killing their officer and six cadets. Meanwhile, further north, troops under Generals Wilson and Barnard attempted to relieve Delhi. Meeting up on the 7 th of June, after fierce fighting they managed to regain control of the ridge overlooking Delhi. This they then clung on to for the next three and a half months, despite some 22 attacks by rebel forces from Delhi and an outbreak of cholera.
On the 8 th of June, native troops of the formerly independent princely state of Jhansi rebelled and attacked the Europeans in the fort. General Neill reached Allahabad on June 11 th , but this was too late for General Wheeler and the residents at Kanpur who surrendered to the forces of Nana Saheb and Tatya Tope in exchange for an offer of safe passage to Calcutta. In the now infamous massacre, as they were embarking on boats on the Ganges on June 27 th at Satichaura Ghat, they were set upon by sepoys and city residents, angered (according to Mukherjee [1990]) at news of General Neill's outrages and by rumours that the daughter of Nana Saheb had been captured and burnt alive by the British. When he heard what was happening, Nana Saheb gave orders that the women and children be spared. Seventy British officers in all survived, but they were imprisoned at a house called Bibighar, where they were massacred the next day. The bodies were thrown down a well, where a British memorial was subsequently erected. This was replaced after independence by a statue of Tatya Tope, widely regarded today as a great Indian hero.
At Lucknow, the British retreated to the residency. Foolishly, Sir Henry Lawrence then decided to attack the rebels amassing just outside the city at a small village called Chinhut. There they found themselves out manoeuvred and outnumbered, and retreated in a panic, blowing up their ammunition dump at Machchi Bhavan on the way back into the residency. The siege of Lucknow continued for many months thereafter. The strength of support for the rebels was due to the involvement of the mass of the population of Awadh at an early stage, as revealed in the following proclamation, seized by the British, and which reads like a fiery, populist rendition of the Azamgarh proclamation.
It has become the bounden duty of all the people, whether women or men, slave girls or slaves, to come forward and put the English to death. â¦. by firing guns, carbines and pistols, from the terraces, shooting arrows and pelting them with stones, bricksâ¦and all other things which may come into their hands. ⦠The sepoys, the nobles, the shopkeepers, the oil men etc. and all other people of the city, being of one accord, should make a simultaneous attack upon them . [iii]
Such was the popularity of the revolt in Awadh, that whilst the Europeans in the residency died at the rate of ten per day, the rebel forces surrounding them grew in number to more than 10,000. [iv]
General Neill delayed advancing from Allahabad, claiming he was too busy âmopping up', which meant a continuation of his policy of indiscriminate hanging. Soon there was not a single able-bodied man to be found capable of assisting in the transport of military equipment. A force under General Havelock was sent up from Calcutta on July 7 th to aid in the relief of Kanpur, arriving too late to be of assistance, although they were able to defeat Nana Sahib's forces in an engagement on July 27 th . Soon after this Havelock's forces won a decisive victory at Bithur, forcing Nana Saheb to retreat to Gwalior.
At about this time Bakht Khan, a former gunner from Bareili and a devout Muslim, arrived at Delhi with a large force and treasure and was made Commander in Chief of the rebel forces by the Emperor (despite Bakht Khan's disdain for him) displacing Mirza Mughal who was made Adjutant General and therefore effective head of the administration. Bakht Khan did an effective job of rallying the rebel forces and attacking the British on the ridge. On August 14 th , however, John Nicholson finally arrived at Delhi with a large column of troops, consisting of north-west frontier tribesmen and Sikhs from the Punjab. Soon after this, perhaps sensing the danger, renewed proclamations were published in the Emperor's name calling for supplies and support from the Delhi hinterland.
NOTES
[i] Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune, 1857, reprinted in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The First Indian War of Independence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), p. 36. Marx went further, stating his belief that the wars in Persia, India and China were connected events.
[ii] The scenes in Delhi, and particularly the role of the Mughal court during the course of the Mutiny are brilliantly evoked in William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal (Penguin: 2006). Chapter five describes Bhahdur Shah Zafar reluctant acquiescence to the demands of his effective captors â the sepoy mutineers
[iii] Proclamation enclosed with a translation of a pamphlet entitled Fateh Islam: For. Dept. Political Proc., 30 Dec. 1859, Suppl. No. 1135-1139: cited in R. Mukherjee (1984), p. 148.
[iv] This and many other aspects of the siege are effectively parodied in J.G. Farrell's comic historical novel The Siege of Krishnapur (London, 1978). A detailed blow-by-blow account of the Uprising is available in P.J.O. Taylor (1997).
The British Regain Control
On the 14 th of September, Delhi was finally attacked by the reinforcements from the Punjab: the massive Kashmiri gate was partly blown up, and the British rushed in and recaptured the city. On the 20th of September, the last of the Delhi strongholds was taken, and on the 21st William Hodson captured the Emperor, who was hiding in Humayun's tomb and surrendered in exchange for the guarantee of his life The emperor was taken back to the Red Fort, now under British control. The next day Hodson seized from the tomb the princes Mirza Mughal, Khizr Sultan, and Abu Bakr, the three princes who had commanded the Mughal forces in Delhi. Accompanied by an escort of sawars (cavalry troopers) he took them out on the road to Delhi, then stopped, stripped the three princes naked and shot them dead at point blank range with his revolver. For several weeks after its recapture, Delhi resounded to the sounds of gunfire as the British looted and wreaked revenge with a series of horrific executions of mutinous sepoys, hundreds of whom were shot or hanged each day on a gallows especially constructed in Chandni Chowk or occasionally (in imitation of a Muslim style of execution) blown from the mouths of cannons. Thereafter, in a mirror image of the slaughter when the city was first captured by the sepoys, able-bodied male civilians were dragged from their houses and killed upon the word of informers, who then shared in the loot of their property. The Urdu poet Ghalib, one of the few notables to survive the ordeal, described the scene in his inimitable fashion in a poem, the opening lines of which are reproduced at the beginning of this chapter. The destruction within the city, which reduced the buildings of the Red Fort alone to one fifth of their former area, brought to a complete end not only a dynasty but the dominance of Muslim, Urdu culture in north India.
On the 25 th of September Generals Outram and Havelock reached Lucknow, and the British soldiers embarked upon an orgy of looting, vividly described by The Times correspondent W.H. Russell.
It was one of the strangest and most distressing sights that could be seen; but it was also most exciting .... Discipline may hold soldiers together till the fight is won; but it assuredly does not exist for a moment after an assault has been delivered, or a storm has taken place... Through all these hither and thither, with loud cries, dart European and native soldiery firing at the windows, from which come now and then dropping shots or hisses of a musket ball. At every door there is an eager crowd, smashing the panels with the stocks of their firelocks, or breaking the fastenings by discharges of their weapons... you hear the musketry rattling inside; the crash of glass, the shouts and yells of the combatants, and little jets of smoke curl out of closed lattices. Lying amid the orange-groves are dead and dying sepoys; and the white statues are reddened with blood... From the broken portals issue soldiers laden with loot or plunder: shawls, rich tapestry, gold and silver brocade, caskets of jewels, arms and splendid dresses. The men are wild with fury and lust of gold - literally drunk with plunder. [Russell, 1859]
However, the mutineers had only strategically withdrawn and these same British soldiers soon after found themselves trapped within the city walls, forcing the Commander in Chief, Sir Colin Campbell, to set out from Calcutta to relieve them with troops sent from London. He arrived at Lucknow on the 17 th October and on the night of the 23 rd the besieged Britishers sneaked through the lines of the insurgents to safety. Five days later Nana Saheb's army, led by Tatya Tope, took revenge by engaging and defeating the army of Lt. Gen. Windham and retaking Kanpur. This victory was short-lived, however, as the army of Sir Colin Campbell took the city back again on December 6 th , forcing Tatya Tope into retreat. On the 21 st March 1858, the forces of Colin Campbell finally recaptured Lucknow, the capital of Awadh, engaging in an orgy of looting and plunder in the process.
After the defeat at Kanpur, Nana Saheb allegedly fled to Nepal while Tatya Tope marched to Kalpi to aid the Rani Lakshmi of Jhansi against the forces of General Walpole. Walpole was defeated, and Tatya continued south. However on the 23 rd April 1858 General Hugh Rose arrived, and engaged and captured the remainder of the Rani's forces at Kopatti Serai. The Rani led her forces into battle on horseback, was shot and wounded, then rode to Gwalior, where she died. Indefatigable, Tatya Tope marched on through central India, Rajasthan, and Gujarat in an attempt to raise the Marathas in revolt. Only a few Gond chiefs in the highlands of central India agreed to lend support, and he was finally betrayed and captured in Khandesh. Tope was executed in Jaipur in January 1859.
Tatya Tope, whose real name was Ramchandra Pandurang, was one of the more strategically minded, ruthless and efficient of the rebel leaders. Originally just a Maratha gunner, he rose to be the commander in chief of the forces led by Nana Saheb. Others were less clear-sighted. The siege of the British residency in Lucknow was prioritised by the rebels because of its royal associations - as the former capital of the kingdom of Awadh - at the expense of advancing on Calcutta, crossing the Ganges river, and cutting one of the means of communication available to the British. This lapse enabled the British to marshal troops in the East and in the Western part of India and to retake the Northern plains.
The Extent of Popular Support
Although the Uprising was confined to the northern part of India, other parts of the country had similar cause to resent British rule. Nonetheless, despite the fact that many Mughal aristocrats had been supplanted by Hindu traders, who had profited from their relationship with the British, the Company's rule had failed to penetrate much towards the village level in zamindari areas such as Bihar, where it could even be described as superficial [Yang 1988]. There were rulers in other parts of India who had been dispossessed, and local populations with serious grievances. But the fact that the insurrection was confined largely to the Indo-Gangetic plain demonstrates that India was far from being a homogeneous polity at this time. Indians living in Hyderabad thought that yet another war between the Marathas and the British was in progress. Others had little idea of the scale of insurrection, believing it was merely a zamindari uprising of the sort that had occurred frequently under the Mughals. Although there are clearly the seeds here of later patriotic nationalism [Bayly 1998], the insurrection was arguably a purely regional affair. Two areas - Bengal and the Punjab - remained at least superficially loyal despite their proximity to the rebellion's heartland of North India. There was a large British force based in Bengal, and another in the Punjab, which had been recently conquered; British troops were also massed on the borders of Afghanistan.
The desire for a restitution of the old system, and for the conjunction once again of civil and moral law, caused many insurrectionists to turn to traditional leaders to achieve this end. To this extent 1857 was a reactionary movement, intended and tending to revive former privileges. So it was that the revolt centred around aristocrats such as Khan Bahadur Khan, the last independent Muslim ruler of Rohilhkand before it was annexed by the British in 1801; whilst in Awadh, the revolt was led by ex-military leaders and focussed around the capital, Lucknow.
Subaltern historians have very convincingly demonstrated, using available evidence, that there were many opportunists as well as established local leaders, and numerous individuals took up arms on their own initiative without waiting for the Emperor's appeal, or for feudal aristocrats to tell them what to do. Gautam Bhadra [1985] assesses four localities involved in the Uprising and describes the concerns which motivated the insurrectionists. Depicted in detail are characters such as Shah Mal, a Jat resident of the village of Bijraul in the pargana of Barout, which had suffered from over-taxation by the British in the months before the uprising. Shah Mahal put together a combined force of Jat and Gujar peasants, and attacked and plundered the tahsil of Barout and the bazaar at Baghpat.
Devi Singh was perhaps the quitessential subaltern insurgent, acting entirely on his own without any contact with outsiders. He came from a Jat dominated region centred around the small rural town of Raya in Mathura district. When zamindars and villagers in the locality heard of the King of Delhi's proclamation, they rose up against the moneylenders and attacked the town. Devi Singh, otherwise a man of no distinction, was dressed in yellow, the traditional symbol of royalty, and declared by popular acclaim to be the jat âpeasant king' of the 14 villages in the locality. Upon entering the town, he set up a Government upon the English model â thus simultaneously demonstrating the limits of insurgent consciousness at this time, and tried the moneylenders [Bhadra 1985: 254]. Unfortunately, Devi Singh thought that having driven away the police he had destroyed the British raj. When Mark Thornhill, the Collector of Muttra arrived in mid June with a contingent of troops from Kotah, Devi Singh was quickly captured and executed.
Bhadra also details the story of Gonoo, a Kol adivasi and cultivator from the Singhbhum district of Chotanagpur, who led the Larkha Kol insurrection in reaction to attempts by the British to interfere with traditional institutions. The arrow of war was circulated, and the insurrection kicked off with a mutiny by the sepoys at Ramgarh but then escalated into a wholesale Kol insurrection with the Rajah of Porahat forced to assume the customary role as their head. Bhadra's final example is the Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, an itinerant preacher who advocated jehad against the English across north India. In Fyzabad he was imprisoned, but then freed by mutinous sepoys of the irregular cavalry and 22 nd Native Infantry who acclaimed him their leader. These he then led to Lucknow, where he took part in the crucial battle of Chinhat, alongside the sepoys and lumpen elements from the city population who took part. [Bhadra 1985: 267].
What all of these rebels shared was a high level of purpose and a common goal. Much as with the insurrectionists in Awadh, they were organised, usually in defence of a territory, as wells as through networks of kinship, religion, or political adherence. Caste did not necessarily divide them, they received no instructions from higher authorities, and they were united in their opposition to outside, primarily British, interference. This pattern of organisation was both feasible and commonplace [Guha 1983], and was at least as common as the more feudal forms of insurrection in support of local elites, emphasised in the accounts of Stokes [1979] and others.
Counting the Cost of War
In times of warfare, acts of brutality are commonly committed on both sides and the 1857 uprising proved no exception. The British practice of executing rebel soldiers and officers by tying them to the mouths of cannons, so that the crowds of onlookers would be spattered with blood and the corpses dispersed over a wide area, was intended to shock. It was furthermore a deliberate offence, because blasting the body to pieces in this manner prevented either cremation or a proper burial. The British also carried out hundreds of arbitrary hangings in Northern India as the fighting progressed almost hand to hand through the villages, until they were finally retaken.
By his own account, Frederick Cooper, the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, shot to death no less than 237 captured sepoys at the end of July 1857, a further forty-five suffocating in cells - in a grisly re-enactment of Zephaniah Holwell's âBlack Hole' - before he had a chance to execute them. On the Indian side, there was likewise a systematic use of violence, quite apart from incidents such as the massacre in Kanpur at Satichaura Ghat. During his march through central India, Tatya Tope, for his part, ordered that village officials who had collaborated and collected taxes for the British should have their ears and noses cut off as an example to others. In short, this was a time of bloody savagery on both sides because both were desperate to win, and believed violence to be the only language their enemy understood.
The Uprising was finally quashed when the Governor General and later the first Viceroy, George Canning, amidst howls of protest from the civilians of Calcutta (who petitioned for the removal of 'clemency Canning' as he was called) offered an amnesty to all who gave themselves up after the recapture of Lucknow. This proposal was then published in a General Proclamation made in the name of Queen Victoria in Allahabad on November 1 st 1858, which promised to ârespect the rights of Indian Princes as our own'. By promising the non-confiscation of their lands, Canning was able to persuade fourteen taluqdars in Awadh alone to immediately surrender. Despite summary executions continuing thereafter, the amnesty greatly helped in the pacification of the population, all effective opposition coming to an end with the arrest and execution of Tatya Tope early in 1859. The Emperor Bahadur Shah was tried for treason at the age of 83, by his concessionaries for trade and the holders of the Diwani of Bengal (the East India Company), and was sentenced to transportation. Carried through north India in a bullock cart on his way to Calcutta, he was then exiled to Rangoon where he died and was buried in an unmarked grave four years later in November 1862.
Despite all that has been written on the topic, 1857 will probably remain forever clouded by confusion precisely because it has been used as a political tool both by the British, to justify their actions and their continuing rule in India, despite their unpopularity, and also by the rulers of independent India, who sought to construct a nationalist historiography which down-played (amongst other things) the centrality of the Delhi court in the events of the insurrection. India as the nation, we know now, was created in the twentieth century, and it would be folly to attempt to trace its origins to the events of one hundred years before. Likewise it would be a mistake uncritically to accept colonial British explanations for the uprising.
The most serious consequence of the Uprising was the vacating of the throne in Delhi, which paved the way for the creation of a new British Imperium in India. At the same time, however, the Uprising helped create a mythology of resistance which became a powerful ideological weapon in the hands of later Nationalists during the freedom struggle of the 1930's and 1940's. This was perhaps to prove to be one of its more important legacies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF 1857
(Sources referred to in the text are highlighted in blue)
Alavi, Seema
The Company and the Sepoy (New Delhi; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
Anon. (probably William Robson)
Origin of the Pindaris, preceded by historical notices on the rise of the different Mahratta States, (London: 1818)
Arnold, David
Police Power and Colonial Rule; Madras, 1859-1947 (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)
Ballhatchet, K.A.
Social policy and social change in western India, 1817-1830 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957)
Ballhatchet, K.A.
Race, Sex & Class under the Raj : imperial attitudes and policies and their critics, 1793-1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980)
Bayly, C.A.
Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 8
Bayly, C.A.
Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 6
Bayly, C.A.
Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Bayly, C.A.
Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Bhadra, G.
âFour rebels of 1857' in R. Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV (New Delhi: Oxford University Press , 1985)
Brodkin, E.I .
âThe struggle for succession: rebels and loyalists in the Indian mutiny of 1857' in Modern Asian Studies , 6, 3 (1972), pp. 277-290
Broehl, W.G.
Crisis of the Raj: the revolt of 1857 (Hanover, USA; London: University of New England, 1986)
Chatterji, B.
âThe Darogah and the Countryside; The Imposition of Police Control in Bengal and its Impact, 1793-1837', Indian Economic & Social History Review , 18, 1 (1981), pp. 19-42
Chaudhuri, S.B.
Civil disturbances during the British rule in India, 1765-1857 (Calcutta: World Press, 1955)
Cohn, B.
âRepresenting Authority in Victorian India' in T. Ranger and E. Hobsbawm (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) also in B. Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Embree, A.T. (ed.)
India in 1857: the revolt against foreign rule (New Delhi: Chanakya, 1987).
Farooqui, Amar
Smuggling as Subversion, Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the Politics of Opium, 1790-1843 (New Delhi, New Age International Publishers, 1998; USA: Lexington, 2005)
Fisher, Michael H. (ed.)
The Politics of the British Annexation of India, 1757-1857 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993)
Ghosh, B.B.
British policy towards the Pathans and the Pindaris in Central India, 1805-1818 (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1966)
Gordon, S.N.
âScarf and sword: thugs, marauders, and state-formation in 18 th century Malwa', Indian Economic & Social History Review, 6, 4 (1969), pp. 403-429
Gordon, S.N.
The Marathas (New Cambridge History of India) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Guha, Ranajit
Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (New Delhi; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)
Guha, Ranajit
âThe prose of counter-insurgency', in R.Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983)
Hardiman, David
Feeding the Baniya; Peasants and Usurers in Western India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996)
Majumdar, R.C.
The Sepoy Mutiny and the revolt of 1857 (Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963)
Marx, K. & Engels, F.
The First Indian War of Independence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959)
Metcalf, Thomas R.
The Aftermath of Revolt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), chs. 4,5,8
Metcalf, Thomas R.
Land, Landlords and the British Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), ch. on Awadh
Metcalfe, C.T. (ed.)
Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny of Delhi (Westminster: A Constable and Co., 1898)
Mohan, Surendra
Awadh under the Nawabs, Politics, Culture and Communal Relations 1722-1856 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997)
Mukherjee, R.
Awadh In Revolt (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984)
Mukherjee, R.
ââSatan Let Loose upon Earthâ: the Kanpur Massacres in the revolt of 1857', Past and Present, 128 (1990), pp. 92-116
Pandey, Gyanendra
âA view of the observable: a positivist understanding of agrarian society and political protest in colonial India' Review of Eric Stokes, Journal of Peasant Studies , 7, 3 (1980), pp. 375-383
Roy, Tapti
The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994
Russell, W.H.
My Indian Mutiny Diary: a diary of the Sepoy rebellion (London: Routledge, 1859. repr. London: Cassell, 1957)
Sleeman, W.
Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language used by the Thugs, with an Introduction and Appendix descriptive of the system pursued by that fraternity, and of the measures adopted for its suppression, (Calcutta: G. H. Hattman, Military Orphanage Press, 1836)
Stokes, Eric
English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).
Stokes, Eric
The Peasant and the Raj: studies in agrarian society and peasant rebellion in colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), chs 1 and 5-8
Stokes, Eric
The Peasant Armed: the Indian revolt of 1857 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986)
Taylor, Meadows Philip
Confessions of a Thug, (1 st ed., in 3 vols., London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1906; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Taylor, P.J.O.
What Really Happened During The Mutiny: a day-by-day account of the major events of 1857-1859 in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Van Woerkens, Martine
The Strangled Traveller: colonial imaginings and the Thugs of India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
Yang, A.
The Limited Raj: agrarian relations in colonial India, Saran District, 1793-1920 (Berkeley: University of California 1988)
In order to ensure the renewal of its charter, the East India Company worked hard to create the impression that the early nineteenth century was a period of slow but progressive improvement for India, but the truth was far removed from this. It was in reality a time of radical experimentation and desperate contingency in the development of a British system of government, which created widespread resentment. Apart from the administrative reforms described in the previous chapters, a host of other petty interventions by the Company's officials, such as the rounding up and incarceration of prostitutes whenever there was an outbreak of venereal disease among the troops, had promoted disaffection [Ballhatchet 1957, 1980]. One of the most widespread grievances concerned the increase in land tax, imposed in all of the newly ceded and conquered territories. This might have been bearable at a time of agricultural prosperity, but the early nineteenth century was a period of profound economic depression. British methods of collecting these taxes were also unpopular, involving as they did the introduction a European system of courts, whereby defaulters were arraigned before a magistrate and summarily deprived of their lands for failing to meet revenue payments. Such measures were novel, confusing, and illegitimate in the eyes of many Indians. The courts also greatly increased the powers of the sahukar or bania money lenders to whom many were indebted: a further cause of resentment [Hardiman 1996]. Most large land controllers, and many smaller ones, at this time, had acquired their positions because they were aristocrats or ulema (Muslim scholars), the educated elite who ruled the Mughal Empire, and had been appointed by the Emperor or one of his Governors or deshmukhs . But in the territories under Company rule, their authority was superseded by law courts, presided over by men in black frock coats and pants: the British who did not sit in judgement by right of descent, as aristocrats, or as kazis or pundits. They occupied posts in court because they had completed an examination in London and had been appointed to the East India Company's Indian Civil Service. To many Indians this was a strange way to govern a country. Above all, the decisions of the courts were resented because they were final. Tax collection had always been a matter for negotiation under the Mughals: those who could not pay might be threatened, but ultimately a compromise was often possible. Indian governors and zamindars also often made generous gifts of land, so-called inam lands, for the maintenance of temples and pilgrimage centres and as pensions to former public servants. But, imbued with Utilitarian ideals, and particularly David Ricardo's theories concerning agricultural rent, the Company's officials were taught that a rental charge imposed on the land, no matter how high, was not likely to undermine agricultural production and that the government's land tax was a form of rent. They did not see the surplus on agricultural production either as a form of subsistence or a reward for enterprise; they saw it as an unearned surplus, of which they could take as much as they pleased [Stokes 1959]; whilst the grants of inam land were regarded as a drain on the state's resources, to be curtailed. For this reason, the British were extremely inflexible in their revenue assessments, and were inclined to suspend privileged land holdings granted by former rulers [Stokes 1978, ch2]. Zamindars were expected to pay their dues to the government, and if they did not, lost their position. Furthermore, the success of British District Collectors and their promotion, depended on close accounting and their ability to raise yields. This was an entirely different logic from that of the traditional structure of landholding in India which was bound up with aristocratic right, and religious and social status [Cohn 1983].
The general uprising of 1857 has been characterised as anti-colonial because the changes from which people were suffering, in general were those effected by the colonial ruler, the East India Company. The problem was that there were many other causes for rebellion, and not all of those who took up arms were directly fighting against the colonial regime. Many rebels were hoping to restore a pre-colonial social order. They did not know who or what was responsible for the changes going on around them, but what they did want was to revive some form of traditional authority. With the collapse of British military power in North India in that year, others had no alternative but to turn to traditional leaders of one sort or another. Unfortunately, anyone who took to arms, even with the aim of self-defence, or restoring some sort of local order, was often regarded as a rebel by the British and ultimately pilloried, tried and executed [Brodkin 1972].
The Indian army mutineers themselves, who signalled the commencement of the wider insurrection, had mixed motives. Some wanted to revive the authority of the ailing Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II, and the units of the British Army which mutinied at Meerut in May 1857 determined their fate at an early stage by deciding to march on Delhi to reinstall the Emperor rather than march, as they might alternatively have done, towards the British seat of power in Calcutta. In doing so, they immediately alienated the large number of Indians who had never recognised the authority of the Mughals, or who, like the Sikhs in the Punjab, had spent many generations struggling against the Mughal Empire. They also alienated Hindu rulers who were prospering under the East India Company's rule. Naturally, they did win the support of Mughal aristocrats in the North of India. A further advantage of marching to Delhi was that it gave the rebels a concrete aim, which was very needed for the obvious reason that India, at this time, lacked a truly powerful nationalist ethos. Those who took up arms were often fighting for their country against the British, but that country might be Gwalior, Bengal, Awadh, Indore &c. â it was not in the name of India itself. They were fighting, very often, for the reinstatement of kingdoms, patrimonies, and chiefdoms that had existed in the pre-British period, or for the revival of an empire which covered part of the subcontinent. They were by no means united in struggling for a single political alternative, and this is one of the reasons why the uprising of 1857 was ultimately successfully suppressed by the British. There was no overall strategy; though to say this is something of a truism, since it is absurd to suggest that there could easily have been one.
Unravelling the events of the Uprising in 1857
Most of the accounts of 1857 that have survived are unreliable as historical sources. To begin with, it is always the victor's version of events that tends to take precedence, and since the British ultimately overwhelmed the insurrectionists, it is the British view that has generally held sway. The uprising was a clear sign that the East India Company had seriously misruled the Indo-gangetic plain but they were reluctant to admit this, which is why in many subsequent British accounts, 1857 is usually referred to as the 'mutiny'. By this it is implied that the insurrection was simply an act of treason by a group of soldiers which was dealt with appropriately. British descriptions of the 'mutiny' were also typically accompanied by accounts of various barbarities and horrors committed by the Indians as if to justify the violent means by which the restoration of colonial rule was accomplished. But this is not, of course, how Indians regarded the matter, then or now. Neither was the insurrection of that year confined to the ranks of the military, nor the atrocities committed as one-sided as the British implied.
Reacting against British misrepresentations many Indian authors, most famously the radical nationalist V.D. Savarkar writing in 1908 [i] , have described the events of 1857 as 'the first national war of Indian Independence'. However, this is clearly a misnomer since, as one historian, R. C. Majumdar [1963], has commented, 'on the whole, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the so-called First National War of Independence of 1857 is neither first, nor national, nor a war of independence'. More detailed assessments published following the centenary commemoration of 1857 have tended to focus less on the activities of the Bengal sepoys, and more on the associated uprisings of the civil population in urban and rural areas. Some authors, such as Eric Stokes [1978], have argued that the rebels of 1857 were fighting for not one, but a variety of causes and nationalisms.
There remains a problem with source materials, which exacerbates the difficulties of interpretation. The Urdu records of the Lucknow and Delhi courts are preserved in the Allahabad and National Archives, but they are written in shekastah, a very difficult form of Persian calligraphy. By contrast, there are extremely voluminous English-language historical records of 1857 that have survived, but they are largely derived from the subsequent attempts made by the British to pacify the country. They are thus part of a project to restore order, rather than a dispassionate, legal investigation into what occurred. Essays by E.I. Brodkin [1972] and Ranajit Guha [1983] have explained why it is so difficult to deduce what really happened from such sources. A great many of these are the accounts of soldiers who were engaged in pacification exercises, and the trial documents of those they believed, often mistakenly, to be responsible for the uprising. The authors and protagonists were keen to convince themselves that they were in control of the situation and that this was not a popular insurrection. They sought to identify and punish alleged agitators and ringleaders who had misled the supposedly naive masses into insurrection: a more realistic exercise than attempting to punish the population as a whole. The documents are thus filled with fabricated conspiracy theories, and attempts to pin the blame for what had happened on somebody, anybody in fact other than the colonial regime itself.
Grievances of the Military
The 19th Native Infantry, stationed at Barrackpore just west of Calcutta, was the first regiment to rebel against its officers, following the now notorious distribution of greased cartridges to be used with newly issued Lee Enfield rifles. These cartridges were greased with fat alleged to be that of cows, revered by Hindus, or of pigs, which was defiling for Muslims, and were believed to be part of an attempt to forcibly convert the Sepoys to Christianity. Those involved in the rebellion were arrested and a Court of Inquiry recommended that the regiment be disbanded. On the day following the initial rebellion - March 29 th 1857 - Mangal Pande of the 34th regiment, which had been barracked alongside the 19th, fired at his commanding officer Sir John Hearsey but was overpowered. He and another sepoy, Iswar Pande, were tried and executed. The name âPande' was thereafter immortalised as the nickname given by the British to the rebel sepoys. [ii] . After the 34th was also disbanded, rumours about the greased cartridges rapidly spread. Six weeks later, a thousand miles away, a native regiment at Meerut was publicly humiliated for refusing to use the cartridges by being marched in shackles to the jail. The next evening, on Sunday 10 th May, the duty officer at Meerut was shot, and the sepoys rallied around the guns of the regiment, forced open the armoury to seize supplies of the supposed polluting cartridges, and attacked and killed their British officers. The next day they marched to Delhi behind their regimental flag.
Given the unanticipated nature of the military mutiny, and keen to avert blame from themselves, officials made much of the sepoys' objections to the distribution of cartridges for use with the Lee Enfield rifle. However, although the cartridges may have provided a rallying point for a few of the mutineers, it was only one of the issues that concerned them. And interestingly, once they had rebelled, the mutinous regiments showed no compunction at all about using these same rifles and cartridges against the British. The cartridge issue nonetheless underscored the weakness of the military's control over the lower ranks of the Bengal army, highlighting the very small number of British officers, and their poor relationship with the troops. Above all, it symbolised the widespread resentment and distrust of the East India Company's policies. This mistrust revolved, among other things, around a perceived threat to Indian religion. Missionary activities had been permitted in India since 1813 lending credence to the fear that the principal reason why the British were in India was to in order to Christianise the population. Such fears had exhibited themselves on previous occasions, as in 1806, when a sepoy regiment at Vellore in the Madras Presidency had mutinied after the issue of a new form of leather headgear, also considered polluting. [iii] There were other fears of course, but British historiographies have tended to stress the cartridge issue because it could be used to demonstrate the irrationality and fanaticism of the natives, and the unreasonableness of their conduct. That they should take up arms over an issue as trivial and superstitious as the greasing of a cartridge, neatly diverted attention from other aspects of the Company's maladministration that provided more contingent and pressing causes for rebellion.
The other concerns of the military were more specific [Stokes 1986]. Indian troops were at that time organised into armies based in the three Presidencies of Madras, Bombay and Bengal. If these armies fought beyond their frontiers they received an additional allowance. In 1856 the Governor General decided that since the British controlled two thirds of the subcontinent, these additional allowances were no longer legitimate, and they were removed. The troops of the Bengal army based in Awadh at this time thus immediately received a cut in pay. The General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 also committed the sepoys to sign a declaration that they would be willing to fight overseas if necessary in the service of the East India Company, and this was resented by the majority who had no desire to travel so far. Another cause of resentment was the British policy of garnering recruits from a wide cross section of the population. Until 1856 a large proportion of soldiers in the Bengal Army were Brahmins and Rajputs from the north-west of Bengal. Villagers in this region were becoming accustomed to the income derived from sending recruits to the army. The kingdom of Awadh, independent but allied to the British by treaty since the late eighteenth century, had also become an important source of recruits to the army. The Company offended these groups by stating their intention to recruit more widely across the subcontinent. The sense of grievance had therefore spread to the main army recruiting villages, and a further discordant note was added to this when the disbanded Meerut mutineers returned home.
The decision by the British to seize control of the kingdom of Awadh had also fostered resentment. Awadh had been a loyal ally of the British. Under the notorious policy of lapse, announced in 1850 by the Viceroy Dalhousie, the British stated their intention to seize control of any princely state in which there might be a disputed succession. This they did, rapidly taking over the Nagpur kingdom in 1854 (the largest of all), along with Jhansi, Satara, Udaipur, Balaghat, Sambalpur, Jaitpur, Carnatic and Tanjore. They justified their actions by claiming that 'Indian despotism' was thereby ended, frontiers were consolidated, that it was administratively convenient, and that it was expressly desired by the people themselves [Fisher 1993]. In the case of Awadh, they did not trouble to wait for a disputed succession. The British Resident (the Company's representative at court) alleged that the Rajah was misruling his country, and this alone was used as a pretext to seize control of the kingdom in 1856 [Fisher 1987; Mukherjee 1984].
Arguably therefore it was not the peasants and sepoys who were the rebels in 1857, but the British themselves. In the view of many Muslim political commentators, since the British were merely the revenue collectors of Bengal, they were vastly exceeding their authority, and since the Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, was the Vizier, or guardian, of the Mughal Empire, the seizure of his kingdom was an attack on Mughal sovereignty itself. Following annexation, the Nawab was taken to Calcutta along with members of his family, and the British then made matters worse by sending in a highhanded settlement officer, Martin Gubbins, who in the process of fixing the revenue demand dispossessed a great many local aristocrats, known as taluqdars, from their ancestral estates. These taluqdars , led by the Rajah of Mahmudabad, were among the first aristocratic leaders to raise arms against the British and were strongly supported by their rural populations.
Other factors played a part in the Uprising of 1857. The Sikh regiments of Ranjit Singh who had been defeated in 1840, had been incorporated into the British army. There were some 15,000 of these troops and they were the first and largest force available to the British to move into the Northern plains and retake the areas which had risen in revolt. One of the major failings of the British prior to 1857 was that when they had taken over the kingdom of Awadh they did not recruit the army of the king in a similar manner. They disbanded all 50,000 of the king's troops, effectively dispersing large numbers of aggrieved trained soldiers over the entire region. Once similarly large numbers of men serving in the Bengal army had been alienated the basis was laid for what became a widespread civil as well as military insurrection.
NOTES
[i] Vinaya k Damodar (commonly Veer) Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence, 1857 was originally written in Marathi, published in 1908, and immediately banned by the British. The author, having taken part in terrorist conspiracies in London and Nasik was later sentenced to transporation to the Andaman islands (where he wrote about the concept of Hindutva or 'Hinduness'). He returned following a personal amnesty and was president of the Hindu Mahasabha for seven years in the 1930s and 40s. Savarkar's Indian War of Independence was finally published (in English) and distributed for the first time in 1947.
[ii] This name Pandey was in turn inherited by an English children's toy â a stuffed doll wearing pyjama pants â known as âAndy Pandey'.
[iii] Maya Gupta, âThe Vellore Mutiny' in M.&A.K. Gupta (eds.), Defying Death: struggles against imperialism and feudalism (New Delhi: Tulika Press, 2001): 18-38.
The Course of the Insurrection
By its nature, the East India Company's rule was a military occupation. The company was staffed by military men holding military titles. Military bases, or cantonments, were positioned so as to overawe the principal towns and cities, and sepoy units were based in all of the Princely States, as well as in the coastal trading zones. Because the Company's rule was a military regime, the state itself was imperilled as soon as the military mutinied. As Karl Marx had commented: âit is evident that the allegiance of the Indian people rests on the fidelity of the native army, in creating which the British rule simultaneously organised the first general centre of resistance⦠[to colonial rule]'. [i]
The events at Meerut demonstrated that the cartridge issue, emotive as it may have been, was still merely an excuse for revolt. Many have argued that it had indeed been planned for some time, citing evidence that for months before, lotus flowers and chapatis (flat breads) were mysteriously circulating around the villages of north India, it being rumoured that the planned date for insurrection was the 31 st of May. However, Ranajit Guha has put a slightly different twist on these events, arguing that, rather than an orgnaised conspiracy, this was merely evidence of widespread rural unrest. He traces the exchange of chapatis to the traditional technique of disease prevention through transference, a practice in northern India described in detail by William Crooke, which involved 'the symbolic use of a ritually consecrated object or animal to act as the carrier of an epidemic which had broken out in a locality or was about to do so, and push it beyond its boundaries' . Amongst the transmitters that could be used for the transfer of cholera were âimages of the cholera goddess, doles of rice collected from the local residents, filth and sweepings picked up from the affected villages, domestic animals such as goats, buffaloes and fowl, or in the case of an exceptionally cruel custom reported from Punjab, Chamars âbranded on the buttocks and turned out of the villageâ.' The circulating chapati was thus a transference sign of this type which acquired new meaning, becoming the predictive sign or omen of an imminent upheaval [Guha, 1983: 243-5] Whatever the circumstances, it must have been very obvious to the earliest mutineers that Meerut had to be involved as it was one of the strongest cantonments in the north, but by imprisoning soldiers on the 10 th of May, the British seem to have forced the hands of those involved at Meerut into an early commencement of the revolt. According to eye witnesses, the Meerut regiments were clearly expected when they arrived at the gates of Delhi, as they were greeted with lotus flowers and chapatis and urged to clear Delhi of the British, which they did, slaughtering not only British soldiers and officers but all Christians converts wherever the could be found. Immediately afterwards they sought an audience with the Emperor and King of Delhi, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, whom they urged to lead them. To this the frail and aged Emperor (he was 82 years of age) reluctantly and hesitatingly agreed. [ii] Thereafter, mutinous sepoy regiments steadily flowed into the capital (the ultimate destination of some 100,000 out of the 139,000 who mutinied), and proclamations were circulated calling for Muslim and Hindu to unite in a struggle for din (Islamic faith) and dharma : a central characteristic of the revolt [Ray 2003; Dalrymple 2006]. Many of these proclamations were written by Mirza Mughal (Zafar's fifth son), who endeavoured to take charge and unite the chaotic rebel force in Delhi. Others were written by outlying mansabdhars and supporters of the revolt who endeavoured to rally supplies and troops by invoking the authority and name of the emperor. The document known as the Azamgarh proclamation (reproduced under 'Texts') calls for support from all classes and lists the very specific and practical grievances of the rebels. It is interesting to read, not least for its clarity of purpose. [See Azamgarh Proclamation]
Whilst the mutinous sepoys and a growing number of self-proclaimed volunteer jihadis who joined them consolidated their hold on Delhi, preparations went ahead for revolt in Awadh. In the capital Lucknow, the commanding British officer, Sir Henry Lawrence, was warned that a shot would be the signal for the commencement of insurrection on the 30 th May. The story has it that whilst dining that evening he commented on the inactivity of the supposed mutineers, saying âyour friends are not punctual!', at which point a shot rang out. The next day, 34 miles west of Agra, Indian troops at Bharatpur in eastern Rajasthan revolted, and at Shahjahanpur, in north-central U.P. the British were attacked whilst attending morning service. At this point the insurrection might still have been contained, but responsibility for its escalation must lie partly in the hands of General James George Neill, commanding the 1 st Madras Fusiliers. Upon hearing of the events in Awadh, Neill marched to Varanasi, on what he thought was a pre-emptive mission. As soon as he arrived, he disbanded the local native regiment, lined up the sepoys, and shot them. Upon seeing this, a regiment of Sikhs stationed at Varanasi, normally considered âloyal', revolted and were also shot. General Neill then embarked upon a general campaign of terrorism, hanging every able-bodied man he could lay his hands on who aroused the least suspicion. News of these atrocities caused two native regiments at Kanpur, hitherto loyal, to revolt, and march to Bithur, where they met up with Nana Saheb, the deposed Maratha Peshwa, whom they persuaded to lead them to Delhi.
The British garrison at Kanpur was commanded by General Wheeler, who moved his men to the entrenchment surrounding the residency, from where they fired on the 53 rd and 56 th native infantry battalions who had not up until then mutinied, thus immediately prompting them to do so. At this point Nana Saheb's forces turned back to Kanpur and laid siege to the entrenchment. General Neill was ordered by telegraph from Calcutta to move to Allahabad and Kanpur, but he delayed, claiming that he was too busy with operations to âpacify' the country around Benares, which mostly involved burning villages. However, in terror at the prospect of his approach, the 6 th Native infantry at Allahabad mutinied on the 6 th of June, killing their officer and six cadets. Meanwhile, further north, troops under Generals Wilson and Barnard attempted to relieve Delhi. Meeting up on the 7 th of June, after fierce fighting they managed to regain control of the ridge overlooking Delhi. This they then clung on to for the next three and a half months, despite some 22 attacks by rebel forces from Delhi and an outbreak of cholera.
On the 8 th of June, native troops of the formerly independent princely state of Jhansi rebelled and attacked the Europeans in the fort. General Neill reached Allahabad on June 11 th , but this was too late for General Wheeler and the residents at Kanpur who surrendered to the forces of Nana Saheb and Tatya Tope in exchange for an offer of safe passage to Calcutta. In the now infamous massacre, as they were embarking on boats on the Ganges on June 27 th at Satichaura Ghat, they were set upon by sepoys and city residents, angered (according to Mukherjee [1990]) at news of General Neill's outrages and by rumours that the daughter of Nana Saheb had been captured and burnt alive by the British. When he heard what was happening, Nana Saheb gave orders that the women and children be spared. Seventy British officers in all survived, but they were imprisoned at a house called Bibighar, where they were massacred the next day. The bodies were thrown down a well, where a British memorial was subsequently erected. This was replaced after independence by a statue of Tatya Tope, widely regarded today as a great Indian hero.
At Lucknow, the British retreated to the residency. Foolishly, Sir Henry Lawrence then decided to attack the rebels amassing just outside the city at a small village called Chinhut. There they found themselves out manoeuvred and outnumbered, and retreated in a panic, blowing up their ammunition dump at Machchi Bhavan on the way back into the residency. The siege of Lucknow continued for many months thereafter. The strength of support for the rebels was due to the involvement of the mass of the population of Awadh at an early stage, as revealed in the following proclamation, seized by the British, and which reads like a fiery, populist rendition of the Azamgarh proclamation.
It has become the bounden duty of all the people, whether women or men, slave girls or slaves, to come forward and put the English to death. â¦. by firing guns, carbines and pistols, from the terraces, shooting arrows and pelting them with stones, bricksâ¦and all other things which may come into their hands. ⦠The sepoys, the nobles, the shopkeepers, the oil men etc. and all other people of the city, being of one accord, should make a simultaneous attack upon them . [iii]
Such was the popularity of the revolt in Awadh, that whilst the Europeans in the residency died at the rate of ten per day, the rebel forces surrounding them grew in number to more than 10,000. [iv]
General Neill delayed advancing from Allahabad, claiming he was too busy âmopping up', which meant a continuation of his policy of indiscriminate hanging. Soon there was not a single able-bodied man to be found capable of assisting in the transport of military equipment. A force under General Havelock was sent up from Calcutta on July 7 th to aid in the relief of Kanpur, arriving too late to be of assistance, although they were able to defeat Nana Sahib's forces in an engagement on July 27 th . Soon after this Havelock's forces won a decisive victory at Bithur, forcing Nana Saheb to retreat to Gwalior.
At about this time Bakht Khan, a former gunner from Bareili and a devout Muslim, arrived at Delhi with a large force and treasure and was made Commander in Chief of the rebel forces by the Emperor (despite Bakht Khan's disdain for him) displacing Mirza Mughal who was made Adjutant General and therefore effective head of the administration. Bakht Khan did an effective job of rallying the rebel forces and attacking the British on the ridge. On August 14 th , however, John Nicholson finally arrived at Delhi with a large column of troops, consisting of north-west frontier tribesmen and Sikhs from the Punjab. Soon after this, perhaps sensing the danger, renewed proclamations were published in the Emperor's name calling for supplies and support from the Delhi hinterland.
NOTES
[i] Karl Marx in the New York Daily Tribune, 1857, reprinted in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, The First Indian War of Independence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), p. 36. Marx went further, stating his belief that the wars in Persia, India and China were connected events.
[ii] The scenes in Delhi, and particularly the role of the Mughal court during the course of the Mutiny are brilliantly evoked in William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal (Penguin: 2006). Chapter five describes Bhahdur Shah Zafar reluctant acquiescence to the demands of his effective captors â the sepoy mutineers
[iii] Proclamation enclosed with a translation of a pamphlet entitled Fateh Islam: For. Dept. Political Proc., 30 Dec. 1859, Suppl. No. 1135-1139: cited in R. Mukherjee (1984), p. 148.
[iv] This and many other aspects of the siege are effectively parodied in J.G. Farrell's comic historical novel The Siege of Krishnapur (London, 1978). A detailed blow-by-blow account of the Uprising is available in P.J.O. Taylor (1997).
The British Regain Control
On the 14 th of September, Delhi was finally attacked by the reinforcements from the Punjab: the massive Kashmiri gate was partly blown up, and the British rushed in and recaptured the city. On the 20th of September, the last of the Delhi strongholds was taken, and on the 21st William Hodson captured the Emperor, who was hiding in Humayun's tomb and surrendered in exchange for the guarantee of his life The emperor was taken back to the Red Fort, now under British control. The next day Hodson seized from the tomb the princes Mirza Mughal, Khizr Sultan, and Abu Bakr, the three princes who had commanded the Mughal forces in Delhi. Accompanied by an escort of sawars (cavalry troopers) he took them out on the road to Delhi, then stopped, stripped the three princes naked and shot them dead at point blank range with his revolver. For several weeks after its recapture, Delhi resounded to the sounds of gunfire as the British looted and wreaked revenge with a series of horrific executions of mutinous sepoys, hundreds of whom were shot or hanged each day on a gallows especially constructed in Chandni Chowk or occasionally (in imitation of a Muslim style of execution) blown from the mouths of cannons. Thereafter, in a mirror image of the slaughter when the city was first captured by the sepoys, able-bodied male civilians were dragged from their houses and killed upon the word of informers, who then shared in the loot of their property. The Urdu poet Ghalib, one of the few notables to survive the ordeal, described the scene in his inimitable fashion in a poem, the opening lines of which are reproduced at the beginning of this chapter. The destruction within the city, which reduced the buildings of the Red Fort alone to one fifth of their former area, brought to a complete end not only a dynasty but the dominance of Muslim, Urdu culture in north India.
On the 25 th of September Generals Outram and Havelock reached Lucknow, and the British soldiers embarked upon an orgy of looting, vividly described by The Times correspondent W.H. Russell.
It was one of the strangest and most distressing sights that could be seen; but it was also most exciting .... Discipline may hold soldiers together till the fight is won; but it assuredly does not exist for a moment after an assault has been delivered, or a storm has taken place... Through all these hither and thither, with loud cries, dart European and native soldiery firing at the windows, from which come now and then dropping shots or hisses of a musket ball. At every door there is an eager crowd, smashing the panels with the stocks of their firelocks, or breaking the fastenings by discharges of their weapons... you hear the musketry rattling inside; the crash of glass, the shouts and yells of the combatants, and little jets of smoke curl out of closed lattices. Lying amid the orange-groves are dead and dying sepoys; and the white statues are reddened with blood... From the broken portals issue soldiers laden with loot or plunder: shawls, rich tapestry, gold and silver brocade, caskets of jewels, arms and splendid dresses. The men are wild with fury and lust of gold - literally drunk with plunder. [Russell, 1859]
However, the mutineers had only strategically withdrawn and these same British soldiers soon after found themselves trapped within the city walls, forcing the Commander in Chief, Sir Colin Campbell, to set out from Calcutta to relieve them with troops sent from London. He arrived at Lucknow on the 17 th October and on the night of the 23 rd the besieged Britishers sneaked through the lines of the insurgents to safety. Five days later Nana Saheb's army, led by Tatya Tope, took revenge by engaging and defeating the army of Lt. Gen. Windham and retaking Kanpur. This victory was short-lived, however, as the army of Sir Colin Campbell took the city back again on December 6 th , forcing Tatya Tope into retreat. On the 21 st March 1858, the forces of Colin Campbell finally recaptured Lucknow, the capital of Awadh, engaging in an orgy of looting and plunder in the process.
After the defeat at Kanpur, Nana Saheb allegedly fled to Nepal while Tatya Tope marched to Kalpi to aid the Rani Lakshmi of Jhansi against the forces of General Walpole. Walpole was defeated, and Tatya continued south. However on the 23 rd April 1858 General Hugh Rose arrived, and engaged and captured the remainder of the Rani's forces at Kopatti Serai. The Rani led her forces into battle on horseback, was shot and wounded, then rode to Gwalior, where she died. Indefatigable, Tatya Tope marched on through central India, Rajasthan, and Gujarat in an attempt to raise the Marathas in revolt. Only a few Gond chiefs in the highlands of central India agreed to lend support, and he was finally betrayed and captured in Khandesh. Tope was executed in Jaipur in January 1859.
Tatya Tope, whose real name was Ramchandra Pandurang, was one of the more strategically minded, ruthless and efficient of the rebel leaders. Originally just a Maratha gunner, he rose to be the commander in chief of the forces led by Nana Saheb. Others were less clear-sighted. The siege of the British residency in Lucknow was prioritised by the rebels because of its royal associations - as the former capital of the kingdom of Awadh - at the expense of advancing on Calcutta, crossing the Ganges river, and cutting one of the means of communication available to the British. This lapse enabled the British to marshal troops in the East and in the Western part of India and to retake the Northern plains.
The Extent of Popular Support
Although the Uprising was confined to the northern part of India, other parts of the country had similar cause to resent British rule. Nonetheless, despite the fact that many Mughal aristocrats had been supplanted by Hindu traders, who had profited from their relationship with the British, the Company's rule had failed to penetrate much towards the village level in zamindari areas such as Bihar, where it could even be described as superficial [Yang 1988]. There were rulers in other parts of India who had been dispossessed, and local populations with serious grievances. But the fact that the insurrection was confined largely to the Indo-Gangetic plain demonstrates that India was far from being a homogeneous polity at this time. Indians living in Hyderabad thought that yet another war between the Marathas and the British was in progress. Others had little idea of the scale of insurrection, believing it was merely a zamindari uprising of the sort that had occurred frequently under the Mughals. Although there are clearly the seeds here of later patriotic nationalism [Bayly 1998], the insurrection was arguably a purely regional affair. Two areas - Bengal and the Punjab - remained at least superficially loyal despite their proximity to the rebellion's heartland of North India. There was a large British force based in Bengal, and another in the Punjab, which had been recently conquered; British troops were also massed on the borders of Afghanistan.
The desire for a restitution of the old system, and for the conjunction once again of civil and moral law, caused many insurrectionists to turn to traditional leaders to achieve this end. To this extent 1857 was a reactionary movement, intended and tending to revive former privileges. So it was that the revolt centred around aristocrats such as Khan Bahadur Khan, the last independent Muslim ruler of Rohilhkand before it was annexed by the British in 1801; whilst in Awadh, the revolt was led by ex-military leaders and focussed around the capital, Lucknow.
Subaltern historians have very convincingly demonstrated, using available evidence, that there were many opportunists as well as established local leaders, and numerous individuals took up arms on their own initiative without waiting for the Emperor's appeal, or for feudal aristocrats to tell them what to do. Gautam Bhadra [1985] assesses four localities involved in the Uprising and describes the concerns which motivated the insurrectionists. Depicted in detail are characters such as Shah Mal, a Jat resident of the village of Bijraul in the pargana of Barout, which had suffered from over-taxation by the British in the months before the uprising. Shah Mahal put together a combined force of Jat and Gujar peasants, and attacked and plundered the tahsil of Barout and the bazaar at Baghpat.
Devi Singh was perhaps the quitessential subaltern insurgent, acting entirely on his own without any contact with outsiders. He came from a Jat dominated region centred around the small rural town of Raya in Mathura district. When zamindars and villagers in the locality heard of the King of Delhi's proclamation, they rose up against the moneylenders and attacked the town. Devi Singh, otherwise a man of no distinction, was dressed in yellow, the traditional symbol of royalty, and declared by popular acclaim to be the jat âpeasant king' of the 14 villages in the locality. Upon entering the town, he set up a Government upon the English model â thus simultaneously demonstrating the limits of insurgent consciousness at this time, and tried the moneylenders [Bhadra 1985: 254]. Unfortunately, Devi Singh thought that having driven away the police he had destroyed the British raj. When Mark Thornhill, the Collector of Muttra arrived in mid June with a contingent of troops from Kotah, Devi Singh was quickly captured and executed.
Bhadra also details the story of Gonoo, a Kol adivasi and cultivator from the Singhbhum district of Chotanagpur, who led the Larkha Kol insurrection in reaction to attempts by the British to interfere with traditional institutions. The arrow of war was circulated, and the insurrection kicked off with a mutiny by the sepoys at Ramgarh but then escalated into a wholesale Kol insurrection with the Rajah of Porahat forced to assume the customary role as their head. Bhadra's final example is the Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, an itinerant preacher who advocated jehad against the English across north India. In Fyzabad he was imprisoned, but then freed by mutinous sepoys of the irregular cavalry and 22 nd Native Infantry who acclaimed him their leader. These he then led to Lucknow, where he took part in the crucial battle of Chinhat, alongside the sepoys and lumpen elements from the city population who took part. [Bhadra 1985: 267].
What all of these rebels shared was a high level of purpose and a common goal. Much as with the insurrectionists in Awadh, they were organised, usually in defence of a territory, as wells as through networks of kinship, religion, or political adherence. Caste did not necessarily divide them, they received no instructions from higher authorities, and they were united in their opposition to outside, primarily British, interference. This pattern of organisation was both feasible and commonplace [Guha 1983], and was at least as common as the more feudal forms of insurrection in support of local elites, emphasised in the accounts of Stokes [1979] and others.
Counting the Cost of War
In times of warfare, acts of brutality are commonly committed on both sides and the 1857 uprising proved no exception. The British practice of executing rebel soldiers and officers by tying them to the mouths of cannons, so that the crowds of onlookers would be spattered with blood and the corpses dispersed over a wide area, was intended to shock. It was furthermore a deliberate offence, because blasting the body to pieces in this manner prevented either cremation or a proper burial. The British also carried out hundreds of arbitrary hangings in Northern India as the fighting progressed almost hand to hand through the villages, until they were finally retaken.
By his own account, Frederick Cooper, the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, shot to death no less than 237 captured sepoys at the end of July 1857, a further forty-five suffocating in cells - in a grisly re-enactment of Zephaniah Holwell's âBlack Hole' - before he had a chance to execute them. On the Indian side, there was likewise a systematic use of violence, quite apart from incidents such as the massacre in Kanpur at Satichaura Ghat. During his march through central India, Tatya Tope, for his part, ordered that village officials who had collaborated and collected taxes for the British should have their ears and noses cut off as an example to others. In short, this was a time of bloody savagery on both sides because both were desperate to win, and believed violence to be the only language their enemy understood.
The Uprising was finally quashed when the Governor General and later the first Viceroy, George Canning, amidst howls of protest from the civilians of Calcutta (who petitioned for the removal of 'clemency Canning' as he was called) offered an amnesty to all who gave themselves up after the recapture of Lucknow. This proposal was then published in a General Proclamation made in the name of Queen Victoria in Allahabad on November 1 st 1858, which promised to ârespect the rights of Indian Princes as our own'. By promising the non-confiscation of their lands, Canning was able to persuade fourteen taluqdars in Awadh alone to immediately surrender. Despite summary executions continuing thereafter, the amnesty greatly helped in the pacification of the population, all effective opposition coming to an end with the arrest and execution of Tatya Tope early in 1859. The Emperor Bahadur Shah was tried for treason at the age of 83, by his concessionaries for trade and the holders of the Diwani of Bengal (the East India Company), and was sentenced to transportation. Carried through north India in a bullock cart on his way to Calcutta, he was then exiled to Rangoon where he died and was buried in an unmarked grave four years later in November 1862.
Despite all that has been written on the topic, 1857 will probably remain forever clouded by confusion precisely because it has been used as a political tool both by the British, to justify their actions and their continuing rule in India, despite their unpopularity, and also by the rulers of independent India, who sought to construct a nationalist historiography which down-played (amongst other things) the centrality of the Delhi court in the events of the insurrection. India as the nation, we know now, was created in the twentieth century, and it would be folly to attempt to trace its origins to the events of one hundred years before. Likewise it would be a mistake uncritically to accept colonial British explanations for the uprising.
The most serious consequence of the Uprising was the vacating of the throne in Delhi, which paved the way for the creation of a new British Imperium in India. At the same time, however, the Uprising helped create a mythology of resistance which became a powerful ideological weapon in the hands of later Nationalists during the freedom struggle of the 1930's and 1940's. This was perhaps to prove to be one of its more important legacies.
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