The Revolt of 1857

In 1857 the anger that had built up over a century of Company rule burst into the open. Sepoys and ordinary people across north India rose together in a great revolt that nearly swept the British away. Though it was crushed, the Revolt of 1857 changed everything. It ended the rule of the Company and brought India under the direct rule of the British Crown. Its causes, course and consequences are among the most frequently asked topics in history.

The revolt had deep causes that had been gathering for decades. They can be grouped:

• Political: the annexation of Indian states through the Subsidiary Alliance and the Doctrine of Lapse angered rulers like the Rani of Jhansi. The takeover of Awadh in 1856 caused special resentment.
• Economic: heavy land revenue ruined peasants and zamindars, while the destruction of handicrafts threw artisans out of work.
• Social and religious: many Indians feared the British meant to destroy their religion and convert them. Measures like the abolition of sati, missionary activity, and Western education fed these fears.
• Military: Indian sepoys were poorly paid and denied promotion. They also resented being sent overseas, which they believed broke their caste.

The spark was the new Enfield rifle. Its cartridges had to be bitten open, and a rumour spread that they were greased with the fat of cows and pigs, offensive to both Hindu and Muslim soldiers.

At Meerut, in May 1857, sepoys who refused to use the cartridges were punished and jailed. Their comrades rose in mutiny, freed them, and marched to Delhi. There they proclaimed the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as their leader. A military mutiny had become a wider rebellion.

From Delhi the revolt spread rapidly across north and central India. At each centre a leader emerged:

• Delhi: Bahadur Shah Zafar, the symbolic head of the revolt.
• Kanpur: Nana Saheb, the adopted son of the last Peshwa, denied his pension.
• Lucknow: Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh.
• Jhansi: Rani Lakshmibai, who fought and died in battle.
• Bihar: Kunwar Singh, the aged zamindar of Jagdishpur, who led the rising in western Bihar.

For a few months the rebels held large areas, and the British position looked desperate. Yet the revolt never covered the whole country. Rajputana (including places like Chittor), the south, Bengal and the Punjab stayed largely unaffected. Exam questions often ask which territory the revolt did not reach, so remember Jhansi, Jagdishpur and Lucknow were centres of revolt while Rajputana was not.

The British struck back with overwhelming force, recapturing Delhi in September 1857 and crushing the revolt by the middle of 1858. The repression was brutal. Lord Canning was the Governor-General of India throughout the revolt. When Crown rule began in 1858, he became the first Viceroy of India.

The rebel leaders met grim ends. The most striking case was Tantia Tope, Nana Saheb's general. He fought at Kanpur and later beside Rani Lakshmibai at Gwalior. After her death he kept up a guerrilla campaign until he was betrayed by his friend Man Singh, captured, and executed in 1859.

The consequences were far-reaching:

• The East India Company was abolished, and India came under the direct rule of the British Crown, marking the start of the British Raj. A Secretary of State for India now governed through a Viceroy.
• The British stopped annexing states and promised to respect Indian princes, who were assured their territories would not be seized.
• The army was reorganised to reduce the proportion of Indian sepoys and rely on groups thought loyal.
• The British became more cautious about interfering in Indian religion and society. At the same time they grew more openly racist and distrustful.

Though it failed, 1857 is often called the First War of Independence. It was the first large, united challenge to British rule. It also became a powerful memory for the freedom movement that followed.

Despite its scale, the revolt was crushed within two years. The main reasons:

• No all-India spread: it was largely confined to the north. The south, east and west stayed quiet, as earlier uprisings there had already been suppressed.
• All classes did not join: big zamindars often acted as "break-waters to the storm". Moneylenders and merchants backed the British. Most Indian princes (Scindia, Holkar, the Nizam, the Sikh chiefs) stayed loyal to the Company. The educated middle class, the new modern intelligentsia, stayed neutral: it neither supported the revolt nor opposed it.
• Poor arms and resources: rebels fought with swords and a few muskets against modern Enfield rifles and the electric telegraph.
• Uncoordinated and poorly organised: there was no central leadership and no common plan. The rebel leaders were no match for British generals.
• No unified ideology: the rebels had no forward-looking programme or shared vision. Modern nationalism did not yet exist.

What the revolt of 1857 was has been debated ever since. The main views:

• A mere sepoy mutiny: some British historians (e.g. Sir John Seeley) dismissed it as "a wholly unpatriotic and selfish sepoy mutiny with no native leadership and no popular support."
• The first war of independence: V.D. Savarkar called it the planned first war of Indian independence; S.N. Sen held it began as a fight for religion but ended as a war of independence.
• Neither first, nor national, nor a war of independence: R.C. Majumdar argued large parts of India were unaffected and many took no part.
• A soldier–peasant uprising: Marxist historians saw it as a struggle of the soldier-peasant combine against foreign and feudal bondage.

The balanced view: it was more than a mutiny but less than a national war. It carried the seeds of nationalism and anti-imperialism. But a sense of common nationhood was not yet present.

Before 1857 the British claimed to be modernising India on progressive lines. After the revolt they turned sharply reactionary. They were convinced that an organised mass movement could threaten their rule. So they set out to keep Indians divided, weak and dependent. To prevent a united challenge, they deliberately set Indians against one another, "prince against prince, region against region, caste against caste, and Hindu against Muslim".

• Communal wedge: after an initial spell of repression against Muslims following 1857, the British decided after 1870 to use conflicts over scarce jobs and resources to drive a wedge between educated Hindus and Muslims along religious lines.
• Hostility to the educated: the middle class was analysing the exploitative character of colonial rule and demanding a share in administration. This made them a threat in British eyes. Once the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885, the British opposed all who stood for modern education and reform.
• Alliance with reactionaries: the British allied with the most reactionary groups, princes and zamindars, hailing them as the "natural leaders" of the people and a counterweight to the nationalist intelligentsia. Lands confiscated from Awadh taluqdars before 1857 were restored to them. Landlord interests were protected against the peasants.
• Retreat from reform: having sided with the orthodox, the British withdrew support from social reform. By encouraging caste and communal consciousness, they strengthened the reactionary forces.

The colonial state did the bare minimum for ordinary Indians and reserved privilege for Europeans.

• Labour laws were grudging and inadequate. Working conditions in factories were miserable. Ironically, the first demand to regulate them came from the Lancashire textile lobby, which feared cheap Indian competition. The Indian Factory Act, 1881 dealt mainly with child labour. It banned employment of children under 7 and limited their hours. The Indian Factory Act, 1891 raised the age limits, capped women's hours at 11 a day, and gave a weekly holiday. But these laws did not apply to the British-owned tea and coffee plantations, where labour was treated almost as slaves.
• Social services were neglected. A huge share of spending went on the army and administration. This left little for education, health or sanitation. What little there was served the urban elite. This legacy of underdevelopment haunts the country still.
• White racism was deliberate. Indians were excluded from the higher grades of the services, from railway compartments, parks, hotels and clubs, and faced open displays of racial arrogance. The rulers maintained "the fact that we were the dominant race".

About two-fifths of India was made up of princely states. British policy towards them was guided by a two-point logic: use them as a bulwark of the empire, and subordinate them completely.

• No more annexation: the states had largely stayed loyal during the revolt. The new policy was to "depose or punish but not annex". Territorial integrity was guaranteed and the right to adopt an heir was recognised, reversing Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse, the rule that a state without a natural heir passed to the British.
• Kaiser-i-Hind: the states' fiction of equality with the Crown ended when Queen Victoria took the title Kaiser-i-Hind (Queen Empress of India) in 1876, stressing British sovereignty over the whole country.
• Paramountcy: under this doctrine, made explicit by Curzon, the princes ruled merely as agents of the British Crown. The British interfered freely in the states through their residents, appointing and dismissing ministers. This was made easier by the spread of railways, telegraph and post.