Revolt of 1857

In 1857, a hundred years after Plassey, the Company's Indian army, which had won its wars for it, turned its guns on its masters. Historians do not treat the greased cartridge as the whole cause. A fire starts with a spark, but only if the grass is dry, and by 1857 the grass was dry in every part of Indian life: political, economic, social-religious and military. This is why the Revolt of 1857 is the biggest challenge the Company ever faced.

The Revolt began as a military mutiny but became a civil rebellion wherever ordinary people joined: the ruined taluqdar, the angry peasant, the craftsman, the dispossessed prince. The sepoys were peasants in uniform, and this is why the revolt spread fastest where the sepoys and the people had a common grievance, such as Awadh. Where the people had no such feeling (Punjab, most of Bengal and the south) it stayed quiet.

The spark. The new Enfield rifle had cartridges that had to be bitten open before loading. A rumour spread that they were greased with cow and pig fat, which would offend both Hindu and Muslim sepoys. At Barrackpore (near Calcutta) on 29 March 1857, Mangal Pandey of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry attacked his British officers; he was hanged on 8 April 1857. At Meerut on 24 April, 85 sepoys of the 3rd Light Cavalry refused the cartridges and were jailed on 9 May with heavy sentences. The next day, Sunday 10 May 1857, their comrades broke open the jail, shot their officers and marched to Delhi.

Once the sepoys of Meerut reached Delhi on 11 May 1857, the revolt stopped being a mutiny at a single station and became a chain of risings. Regiment after regiment in the Bengal Army rose; in many cities the people joined them; and everywhere the rebels looked for a figure whose name carried legitimacy. They found him in the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II, who was proclaimed Emperor of India. Remember the revolt as a map with six main centres: Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Jhansi (Central India), Bareilly and Bihar (Jagdishpur), and for each centre learn two names: the Indian leader and the British officer who crushed it.

Notice the leadership pattern. The rebels did not have one commander or one plan. Each centre had its own leader, mostly from the groups that the British had hurt: a dispossessed Peshwa's heir (Nana Saheb), a queen refused her adopted heir (Lakshmibai), a deposed Nawab's family (Hazrat Mahal), a ruined taluqdar and an old zamindar (Kunwar Singh). That is why the revolt was widespread but not coordinated, and why the British could defeat one centre at a time.

By the autumn of 1857 the British had retaken Delhi, and by mid-1858 the last great centres had fallen. The revolt was crushed, yet it changed India more than any war since Plassey. To study it well, ask three questions: why did it fail, what did the British change afterwards, and what was it really? The last question is not only for historians; examiners love the names attached to each view.

The British learnt a hard lesson and changed the method, not the aim. They now ruled in the Crown's name, kept the princes as loyal supports (Canning called them 'breakwaters in the storm'), strengthened the army's European core and made 'divide and rule' a deliberate policy. The promises of 1858 were kept only in part, and this gap fed the later national movement.

The revolt of 1857 did not come from nowhere. For ninety years before it, the countryside of India rose again and again against the new order: peasants, tribals, fakirs, soldiers and dispossessed chiefs. They fought for land, forests, customs and faith, not for a nation, and they were put down one by one. These risings are important because they show what the Company's revenue system and its outside agents (the diku, as the Santhals and Mundas called landlords, moneylenders and officials from outside) did to rural society.

Look at what these revolts have in common: an outsider takes something the community thought was its own (land, forest, custom, livelihood or honour). The leader gives it a religious or moral language, and the Company answers with troops. Learn each revolt as a pair: who was hurt and by what, and who led it.

After 1857 the British ruled more firmly, but the countryside did not become quiet. Land revenue stayed heavy, moneylenders spread, forests were closed to tribals, and tenants were squeezed by zamindars and planters. The revolts that followed were more organised and more legal than those before 1857: they used petitions, boycotts, strikes and courts, and some leaders, like Birsa Munda, joined religion to politics. They are the bridge between the old local risings and the national movement.

Sort every post-1857 revolt by who the enemy was. If it is a planter, a zamindar or a moneylender, it is a peasant revolt (Indigo, Pabna, Deccan). If it is a forest officer, a missionary or an outsider taking tribal land, it is a tribal revolt (Munda, Rampa, Naga). Reform laws, such as the Bengal Tenancy Act and the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, are the direct results.