Free Sample essay on the Revolt of 1857 (India)

The Revolt of 1857 was much more than a mere product of sepoy discontent. It was in reality a product of the character and policies of colonial rule, of the accumulated grievances of the people against the Company’s administration and of their dislike for the foreign regime.

For over a century, as the British had been conquering the country bit by bit, popular discontent and hatred against foreign rule was gaining strength among the different sections of Indian society. It was this discontent that burst forth into a mighty popular revolt.

Perhaps the most important cause of the popular discontent was the economic exploitation of the country by the British and the complete destruction of its traditional economic fabric; this both impoverished the vast mass of peasants, artisans and handicraftsmen as also a large number of traditional zamindars and chiefs.

We have traced the disastrous economic impact of early British rule in another chapter. Other general causes were the British land and land revenue policies and the systems of law and administration.

In particular, a large number of peasant proprietors, subjected to exorbitant land revenue demand, lost their lands to traders and moneylenders and found them hopelessly involved in debt.

The new landlords, lacking ties of tradition that had linked the old zamindars to peasants, pushed rents up to ruinous heights and evicted them in case of nonpayment’s.

The economic decline of the peasantry found expression in twelve major and numerous minor famines from 1770 to 1857.

Similarly, many zamindars were harassed by demands for higher land revenue and threatened with forfeiture of their zamindari lands and rights and loss of their status in the villages.

They resented their loss even more when they were replaced by rank outsiders officials, merchants and moneylenders. In addition, common people were hard hit by the prevalence of corruption at the lower levels of administration. The police, petty officials and lower law courts were notoriously corrupt.

William Edwards, a British official, wrote in 1859 while discussing the causes of the Revolt that the police were “a scourge to the people” and that “their oppressions and exactions form one of the chief grounds of dissatisfaction with our government”.

The petty officials lost no opportunity to enrich themselves at the cost of the riots and the zamindars. The complex judicial system enabled the rich to oppress the poor.

Flogging, torture and jailing of the cultivators for arrears of rent or land revenue or interest on debt were quite common. Thus the growing poverty of the people made them desperate and led them to join a general revolt in the hope of improving their lot.

The middle and upper classes of Indian society, particularly in the north, were hard hit by their exclusion from well-paid higher posts in the administration.

The gradual disappearance of Indian states deprived those Indians, who were employed in them in high administrative and judicial posts, of means of livelihood. British supremacy also led to the ruin of persons who made a living by following cultural pursuits.

The Indian rulers had been patrons of arts and literature and had supported scholars, religious preachers and divines. The displacement of these rulers by the East India Company meant the sudden withdrawal of this patronage and the impoverishment of those who had depended upon it.

Religious preachers, pandits and maulavis, who felt that their entire future was threatened, were to play an important role in spreading hatred against the foreign rule.

Another basic cause of the unpopularity of British rule was its very foreignness. The British remained perpetual foreigners in the country.

For one, there was no social link or communication between them and the Indians. Unlike foreign conquerors before them, they did not mix socially even with the upper classes of Indians; instead, they had a feeling of racial superiority and treated Indians with contempt and arrogance.

As Sayyid Ahmad Khan wrote later: “Even natives of the highest rank never came into the presence of officials but with an inward fear and trembling.”

Most of all, the British did not come to settle in India and to make it their home. Their main aim was to enrich themselves and then go back to Britain along with their wealth. The people of India were aware of this basically foreign character of the new rulers.

They refused to recognise the British as their benefactors and looked upon every act of theirs with suspicion. They had thus a vague sort of anti-British feeling which found expression even earlier than the Revolt in numerous popular uprisings against the British.

The period of the growth of discontent among the people coincided with certain events which shattered the general belief in the invincibility of British arms and encouraged the people to believe that the days of the British regime were numbered.

The British army suffered major reverses in the First Afghan War (1838-42), in the Punjab Wars (1845-9), and in the Crimean War (1854-56).

In 1855-56 the Santhal tribesmen of Bihar and Bengal rose up armed with axes and bows and arrows and revealed the potentialities of a popular uprising by temporarily sweeping away British rule from their area.

Though the British ultimately won these wars and suppressed the Santhal uprising, the disasters they suffered in major battles revealed that the British army could be defeated by determined fighting even by an Asian army.

In fact, the Indians made here a serious error of political judgement by underestimating British strength.

This error was to cost the rebels of 1857 dear. At the same time the historical significance of this factor should not be missed.

People do not revolt simply because they have the desire to overthrow their rulers; they must, in addition, possess the confidence that they can do so successfully.

The annexation of Awadh by Lord Dalhousie in 1856 was widely resented in India in general and in Awadh in particular. More specifically, it created an atmosphere of rebellion in Awadh and in the Company’s army. Dalhousie’s action angered the Company’s sepoys, 75 000 of whom came from Awadh.

Lacking an all-India feeling, these sepoys had helped the British conquer the rest of India. But they did possess regional and local patriotism and did not like that their homelands should come under the foreigner’s sway.

Moreover, the annexation of Awadh adversely affected the sepoy’s purse. He had to pay higher taxes on the land his family held in Awadh.

The excuse Dalhousie had advanced for annexing Awadh was that he wanted to free the people from the Nawab’s mismanagement and taluqdars’ oppression, but, in practice, the people got no relief Indeed, the common man had now to pay higher land revenue and additional taxes on articles of food, houses, ferries, opium, and justice.

The dissolution of the Nawab’s administration and army threw out of jobs thousands of nobles, gentlemen and officials together with their retainers and officers and soldiers, and created unemployment in almost every peasant’s home.

Similarly, merchants, shopkeepers, and handicraftsmen who had catered to the Awadh Court and nobles lost their livelihood. Moreover, the British confiscated the estates of a majority of the taluqdars or zamindars.

These dispossessed taluqdars, numbering nearly 21,000, anxious to regain their lost estates and position, became the most dangerous opponents of British rule.

The annexation of Awadh, along with the other annexations of Dalhousie, created panic among rulers of the native states. They now discovered that even their most groveling loyalty had failed to satisfy the British greed for territory.

What is of even greater importance, the political prestige of the British suffered a great deal because of the manner in which they had repeatedly broken their written and oral pledges and treaties with the Indian powers and annexed them or reduced them to subordination and imposed their own nominees on their thrones?

This policy of annexation and subordination was, for example, directly responsible for making Nana Sahib, the Rani of Jhansi and Bahadur Shah their staunch enemies.

Nana Sahib was the adopted son of Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa. The British refused to grant Nana Sahib the pension they were paying to Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa, and forced him to live at Kanpur, far away from his family seat at Poona.

Similarly, the British insistence on the annexation of Jhansi incensed the proud Rani Lakshmibai who wanted her adopted son to succeed her deceased husband.

The house of the Mughals was humbled when Dalhousie announced in 1849 that the successor to Bahadur Shah would have to abandon the historic Red Fort and move to a humbler residence at the Qutab on the outskirts of Delhi.

And, in 1856, Canning announced that after Bahadur Shah’s death the Mughals would lose the title of kings and would be known as mere princes.

An important factor in turning the people against British rule was their fear that it endangered their religion. This fear was largely due to the activities of the Christian missionaries who were “to be seen everywhere in the schools, in the hospitals, in the prisons and at the market places”.

These missionaries tried to convert people and made violent and vulgar public attacks on Hinduism and Islam. They openly ridiculed and denounced the long-cherished customs and traditions of the people.

They were, moreover, provided police protection. The actual conversions made by them appeared to the people as living proofs of the threat to their religion.

Popular suspicion that the alien government supported the activities of the missionaries was strengthened by certain acts of the government and the actions of some of its officials.

In 1850, the government enacted a law which enabled a convert to Christianity to inherit his ancestral property. Moreover, the government maintained at its cost chaplains or Christian priests in the army.

Many officials, civil as well as military, considered it their religious duty to encourage missionary propaganda and to provide instruction in Christianity in government schools and even in jails.

The conservative religious and social sentiments of many people were also hurt by some of the humanitarian measures which the government had undertaken on the advice of Indian reformers.

They believed that an alien Christian government had no right to interfere in their religion and customs. The abolition of the custom of sati, the legalisation of widow remarriage, and the opening of Western education to girls appeared to them as examples of such undue interference.

Religious sentiments were also hurt by the official policy of taxing lands belonging to temples and mosques and to their priests or the charitable institutions which had been exempted from taxation by previous Indian rulers.

Moreover, the many Brahman and Muslim families dependent on these lands were aroused to fury, and they began to propagate that the British were trying to undermine the religions of India.

The Revolt of 1857 started with the mutiny of the Company’s sepoys. We have therefore to examine why the sepoys, who had by their devoted service enabled the Company to conquer India, and who enjoyed high prestige and economic security, suddenly became rebellious.

Here the first fact to be kept in view is that the sepoys were after all a part of Indian society and, therefore, felt and suffered to some extent what other Indians did.

The hopes, desires, and despairs of the other sections of society, especially the peasantry, were reflected in them. The sepoy was, in fact, a ‘peasant in uniform’.

If their near and dear ones suffered from the destructive economic consequences of the British rule, they, in turn, felt this suffering. They were also duly affected by the general belief that the British were interfering in their religions and were determined to convert Indians to Christianity.

Their own experience predisposed them to such a belief. They knew that the army was maintaining chaplains at state cost. Moreover, some of the British officers in their religious ardor carried on Christian propaganda among the sepoys.

The sepoys also had religious or caste grievances of their own. The Indians of those days were very strict in observing caste rules, etc. The military authorities forbade the sepoys to wear caste and sectarian marks, beards or turbans.

In 1856, an Act was passed under which every new recruit undertook to serve even overseas, if required. This hurt the sepoys’ sentiments as, according to the current religious beliefs of the Hindus, travel across the sea was forbidden and led to loss of caste.

The sepoys also had numerous other grievances. A wide gulf had come into existence between the officers and the sepoys who were often treated with contempt by their British officers.

A contemporary English observer noted that “the officers and men have not been friends but strangers to one another. The sepoy is esteemed an inferior creature. He is sworn at. He is treated roughly. He is spoken of as a nigger’. He is addressed as a ‘suar’ or pig. The younger men treat him as an inferior animal.”

Even though a sepoy was as good a soldier as his British counterpart, he was paid much less and lodged and fed in a far worse manner than the latter.

Moreover, he had little prospect of a rise; no Indian could rise higher than a subedar drawing 60 to 70 rupees a month. In fact, the sepoy’s life was quite hard. Naturally, the sepoy resented this artificial and enforced position of inferiority. As the British historian T.R. Holmes has put it:

Though he might give signs of the military genius of a Hyder, he knew that he could never attain the pay of an English subaltern and that the rank, to which he might attain, after some 30 years of faithful service, would not protect him from the insolent dictation of an ensign fresh from England.

A more immediate cause of the sepoys’ dissatisfaction was the recent order that they would not be given the Foreign Service allowance (batta) when serving in Sindh or in the Punjab.

This order resulted in a big cut in the salaries of a large number of them. The annexation of Awadh, the home of many sepoys, further inflamed their feelings.

The dissatisfaction of the sepoys had in fact a long history. A sepoy mutiny had broken out in Bengal as early as 1764. The authorities had suppressed it by blowing away 30 sepoys from the mouths of guns. In 1806 the sepoys at Vellore mutinied but were crushed with terrible violence, with several hundred men dying in battle.

In 1824, the 47th Regiment of sepoys at Barrackpore refused to go to Burma by the sea-route. The Regiment was disbanded, its unarmed men were fired upon by artillery, and the leaders of the sepoys were hanged. In 1844, seven battalions revolted on the question of salaries and batta.

Similarly, the sepoys in Afghanistan were on the verge of revolt during the Afghan War. Two subedars, a Muslim and a Hindu, were shot dead for giving expression to the discontent in the army. Dissatisfaction was so widespread among the sepoys that Fredrick Halliday.

Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal in 1858 was led to remark that the Bengal army was “more or less mutinous, always on the verge of revolt and certain to have mutinied at one time or another as soon as provocation might combine with opportunity”.

Thus widespread and intense dislike and even hatred of foreign rule prevailed among large numbers of Indian people and soldiers of the Company’s army. This feeling was later summed up by Saiyid Ahmad Khan in his Causes of the Indian Mutiny as follows:

At length, the Indians fell into the habit of thinking that all laws were passed with a view to degrade and ruin them and to deprive them and their compatriots of their religion. At last came the time when all men looked upon the English government as slow poison, a rope of sand, a treacherous flame of fire.

They began to believe that if today they escaped from the clutches of the government, tomorrow they would fall into them or that even if they escaped the morrow, the third day would see their ruin.

The people wished for a change in the government, and rejoiced’ heartily at the idea of British rule being superseded by another.

Similarly, a proclamation issued by the rebels in Delhi complained:

First, in Hindustan they have exacted as revenue Rupees 300 where only 200 were due, and Rupees 500 where but 400 were demandable and still they are solicitous to raise their demands. The people must therefore be ruined and beggared.

Second, they have doubted and quadrupled and raised tenfold the Chowkeedaree Tax and have wished to ruin the people.

Third, the occupation of all respectable and learned men is gone, and millions are destitute of the necessaries of life.

When any one in search of employment determines on proceeding from one Zillah to another, every soul is charged six pie as toll on roads, and has to pay from 4 to 8 annas for each cart.

Those only who pay are permitted to travel on the public roads. How far can we detail the oppression of the Tyrants! Gradually matters arrived at such a pitch that the government had determined to subvert everyone’s religion.

The Revolt of 1857 came as a culmination of popular discontent with British policies and imperialist exploitation. But it was no sudden occurrence. For nearly a century there had been fierce popular resistance to British domination all over India.

Armed rebellions began as British rule was established in Bengal and Bihar, and they occurred in area after area as it was conquered. There was hardly a year without armed opposition or a decade without a major rebellion in one part of the country or the other.

From 1763 to 1856, there were more than forty major rebellions and hundreds of minor ones. These rebellions had been often led by rajas, nawabs, zamindars, landlords and poligars, but their fighting forces had been provided by peasants, artisans and ex-soldiers of the deposed Indian rulers and dispossessed and disarmed zamindars and poligars.

These almost continuous rebellions were massive in their totality, but were wholly local in their spread and isolated from each other. They were also localised in their effects.