Colin Campbell (1792-1863), 1st Baron Clyde.
Part 1 of 3
Apparently a date was fixed for the revolt to begin simultaneously in many places.* But some Indian regiments at Meerut went ahead too fast and mutinied on May 10, 1857. This premature outburst upset the programme of the leaders of the revolt, as it put the government on their guard. The revolt, however, spread all over the United Provinces and Delhi and partly in Central India and Bihar. It was not merely a military revolt; it was a general popular rebellion in these areas against the British.
Bahadur Shah, the last of the line of the Great Moghals, a feeble old man and a poet, was proclaimed by some as Emperor.* The Revolt developed into a war of Indian independence against the hated foreigner, but it was an independence of the old feudal type, with autocratic emperors at the head. There was no freedom for the common people in it, but large numbers of them joined it because they connected their miserable condition and poverty with the coming of the British, and also in some places because of the hold of the big landlords. Religious animosity also urged them on. Both Hindus and Mohammedans took full part in this war.
* For the background, see The Causes of the Indian Mutiny.
* Bahadur Shah II (1775-1862), who ruled as the 20th Mughal Emperor from 1837 to September 1857, when a month shy of his eighty-second birthday he was deposed by the British and exiled to Rangoon in Burma. A Muslim, he was sympathetic to Hinduism and regarded as something of a mystic. He was also an Urdu poet, and a patron of poets. At his trial when the Mutiny was over, he protested that he had been contemptuously manipulated by the rebels, but the British authorities were not in an understanding mood.
Précis
In 1857, the British East India Company’s high-handed management of India provoked a rebellion. It began in the army, and widened out to become a more general protest against foreign rule. It was not a democratic revolution but an attempt to protect and restore traditional Indian values, supported by Muslims and Hindus alike. (52 / 60 words)
Part Two
The ‘massacre ghat’ at Cawnpore.
For many months British rule in North and Central India hung almost by a thread. But the fate of the Revolt was settled by the Indians themselves. The Sikhs and the Gurkhas supported the British. The Nizam in the south, and Scindia in the north, and many other Indian States, also lined up with the British. Even apart from these defections, the Revolt had the seeds of failure in it. It was fighting for a lost cause, the feudal order; it had no good leadership; it was badly organized, and there were mutual squabbles all the time.
Some of the rebels also sullied their cause by cruel massacres of the British. This barbarous behaviour naturally set up the backs of the British people in India, and they paid it back in the same coin, but a hundred and a thousand times multiplied. The English were especially incensed by a massacre of English men and women and children in Cawnpore, treacherously ordered, it is stated, after promise of safety had been given, by Nana Sahab, a descendant of the Peshwa. A memorial well in Cawnpore commemorates this horrible tragedy.
In the midst of the horrors of the Revolt and its suppression, one name stands out, a bright spot against a dark background.
* At the time, John Bright MP, a steadfast critic of British policy in India, somewhat reluctantly agreed that the Mutiny had to be pacified; we could not “allow every Englishman in India to be murdered”, he wrote in a letter that September. “But he subsequently expressed his deep indignation” recalled his biographer G. Barnett Smith “at the severities and cruelties practised by the British troops and their commanders on the natives of India”. Dead rebels went unburied, living rebels were shot, hanged or blown from the cannon’s mouth. “An English general, Neill,” Nehru tells us, “who marched from Allahabad to Cawnpore, is said to have hanged people all along the way, till hardly a tree remained by the roadside which had not been converted into a gibbet.” It was brutality from an age long past: see Charles Dickens on The Harrying of the North.
Précis
The rebellion was doomed from the start, because the Indian rebels had no common cause save a nostalgia for a past without substance. Many Indians supported the British and others fell to in-fighting. War crimes were committed on both sides; the historian looking for noble deeds must look to individuals, for few will be found among the commanders. (58 / 60 words)
Part Three
An equestrian statue of Maharani Laxmibai atop her burial place in Gwalior, India.
This is the name of Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi, a girl-widow, twenty years of age, who donned a man’s dress and came out to lead her people against the British.* Many a story is told of her spirit and ability and undaunted courage. Even the English general who opposed her has called her the “best and bravest” of the rebel leaders.* She died while fighting.
The Revolt of 1857-58 was the last flicker of feudal India. It ended many things. It ended the line of the Great Moghal, for Bahadur Shah’s two sons and a grandson were shot down in cold blood, without any reason or provocation, by an English officer, Hodson, as he was carrying them away to Delhi. Thus, ignominiously, ended the line of Timur* and Babar and Akbar.
The Revolt also put an end to the rule of the East India Company in India. The British Government now took direct charge, and the British Governor-General blossomed out into a Viceroy. Nineteen years later, in 1877, the Queen of England took the title of “Kaiser-i-Hind”, the old title of the Caesars and of the Byzantine Empire, adapted to India. The Moghal dynasty was no more. But the spirit and even symbols of autocracy remained, and another Great Moghal sat in England.
* Lakshmi Bai was Queen of Jhansi from 1843 to 1853, as wife of Maharaja Gangadhar Rao. Jhansi was a small city-state located in what is now the southwest corner of Uttar Pradesh in northern India.
* This was Field Marshal Hugh Henry Rose (1801-1885), 1st Baron Strathnairn. “Rani Laxmibai is personable, clever and beautiful” he is recorded as saying. “Above it, she is the most dangerous of all Indian leaders.” That being the case, it might have been wiser to leave Jhansi in her capable hands.
* This should read ‘two of Bahadur Shah’s sons’, since he had many sons by many women though he had only one wife, Zeenat Mahal (1823-1886). When he went into exile after the Mutiny, two of his surviving sons and his wife went with him. The rebels had themselves treated him very badly, enacting their own policies in his name; but the British took a high-minded line with him which their own actions did not come close to justifying.
* Timur (1336-1405) is the Tamerlane of English literature, a ferocious fourteenth-century warlord from Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan, who ravaged India and whose descendants sat on the throne of Delhi. See posts tagged Timur (Tamerlane).
Précis
One heroic exception was Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi, a young widow who fell, wearing a warrior’s dress, while leading from the front. However, the rebellion was suppressed and the British moved swiftly to prevent any repeat. Control of India was transferred from the Company to the Crown, and Queen Victoria sat upon the throne of the Mughal Emperors. (59 / 60 words)