In April 1857 fires broke out in the soldiers’ quarters at Lucknow, capital of the newly conquered province of Awadh. The bungalow of the regimental surgeon was torched. A second incendiary wave began at the beginning of the next month. On 2 May one regiment of Indian infantry protested against using rifle cartridges they believed were contaminated with pig and cow fat. Another regiment, the 48th Native Infantry, was ordered to fire on the rebels. The following night the huts of the 48th were set alight in retribution for their suppression of the demonstration. Sir Henry Lawrence had arrived two months before as Chief Commissioner of Awadh, and walked through the lines that night. The men were, he said, ‘very civil’ though downcast at the loss of their homes and property to the fire.
Eventually Lawrence came across an Indian artillery officer, a forty-something Brahmin ‘of excellent character’. The two men talked for an hour. Lawrence was surprised by ‘the dogged persistence’ with which the soldier argued the British government was trying to convert the natives to Christianity. The British had conquered India by fraud, defeating princes at Bharatpur, Punjab and Awadh, the officer said. They wanted to turn Indian soldiers into an obedient force that would do as they were commanded. European soldiers were too expensive. Instead, the British ‘wished to take Hindoos to sea to conquer the world’ and could only do that if Indians ate what Europeans ate and did what Europeans did. This, the soldier said, was ‘what everybody says’. Another soldier wondered if the aim of the British was ‘to join London to Bengal’. Lawrence said he had heard similar views for a long while.1
Two days later and 280 miles away Indian soldiers at the garrison of Meerut rose up and killed their British officers. They then marched forty miles to Delhi, where they enlisted the support of the city’s mob and Bahadur Shah Zafar, the 82-year-old Mughal sovereign. Until that moment the Mughal empire possessed theoretical sovereignty over the whole of India, but its practical force extended no further than the outer limits of Delhi’s Red Fort. Illuminated with the lustre of Zafar’s authority the 300 Meerut mutineers became the core of an insurrection that overturned the East India Company’s government throughout north India and restored some kind of Mughal power throughout the empire’s old heartland. Lucknow and the surrounding province fell to insurgents on 30 June. The city’s 2,000 British inhabitants barricaded themselves into a sixty-acre plot of land centred on the Lucknow residency, where they were besieged until 27 November. The city itself was only recaptured in March 1858. Henry Lawrence did not last anywhere near that long. He was killed by shellfire on 4 July.
Ever-present precariousness
The insurrection of 1857–8 is often seen as an abrupt punctuation in the history of British power in India. Early commentators compared it to a natural rather than a human catastrophe: 1857 was described as a forest fire, a crashing wave, a bursting storm. ‘Little, I am certain, did any man there’, a Collector from Bihar suggested, ‘dream of the wild storm about to burst over us.’
To begin with, Britons were not sure how to explain it, or even how to describe it. An immediate response was to describe each individual garrison’s revolt as a series of ‘mutinies’, but the insurrection as a whole was described with different words, sometimes as a rebellion or revolt, but more frequently simply a crisis or calamity. From the mid-1860s, Britons began to talk about the events of 1857 as ‘the mutiny’ and to attribute it to human causes.
By then one explanation began to gain prominence. The insurrection, British writers argued, was sparked by British efforts to impose modern European practices and values. India began to be described as a traditional society which violently resisted the change overeager Britons had forced on it. This version of events spread particularly with John Kaye’s History of the Sepoy War, a work published in a series of volumes from 1864 onwards. Kaye argued that ‘it was the vehement self-assertion of the Englishman that produced this conflagration’. Indians, he argued, rose in resistance against English education, against British efforts to impose the rule of law, against modern forms of communication and the attempt to abolish ‘barbarous’ rituals such sati and to proselytize Christianity. Critical of the East India Company in many places, Kaye nonetheless excused the British from causing the mutiny because their actions were intended to do good. Such an interpretation has more or less prevailed in the 150 years since.2
Kaye’s story was an attempt to justify the great crisis by extolling the virtues of its cause. In fact, though, there is little evidence to suggest the East India Company attempted to transform Indian society before 1857; nor is there any evidence that Indians rose up against efforts at reform. Rather, insurgents like Sir Henry Lawrence’s artillery officer fought against the increasingly authoritarian way the British clung to power. The rebellion of 1857–8 was created by Britons’ fearful over-attention to dissent rather than their blithe efforts at reform.3
The 1857 rebellion was not a revolt against a confident regime intent on spreading capitalism, civilization and modernity throughout the world. It was an insurgency against an anxious regime’s counter-productive efforts to hold on to power. It was driven by the East India Company’s fearful effort to destroy any centres of authority in India that displayed the smallest flicker of independence, whether self-governing states, little kings, landholders or in its own army. It was led by the lower-middle-class men whose status and livelihood were most severely corroded by the tactics the British used to protect their rule. Uneven in its spread, the insurrection was concentrated in the regions of north India where the East India Company had recently imposed itself with greatest force but then left too little military manpower to hold onto its power.
A few British commentators understood the causes of the rebellion very well. The Protestant Irish doctor Montgomery Martin was one of them. Martin championed a vision of empire ruled by free trade and self-government rather than Britain’s monopolistic power. Serving in Ceylon, East Africa and Australia before working in Calcutta, Martin became friendly with the reformist circle around Rammohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore in Bengal. Informed by these liberal Indian connections, Martin’s account of the 1857 rebellion was critical of the way the East India Company exercised power in India. As he put it:
The constant preponderance of expenditure over income, and an ever-present precariousness, have been probably the chief reasons why the energies of the Anglo-Indian government have, of late years, been most mischievously directed to degrading kings, chiefs, nobles, gentry, priests and landholders of various degrees.
In Martin’s account, the mutiny was caused by the perennial British sense of danger in India, not self-confidence. Their anxiety, Martin argued, led them to act out of character in India. A people who developed a flexible form of government in their own country became rigid and paranoid in Asia. An elite which respected tradition in Britain had ‘rolled, by sheer brute force, an iron grinder over the face of Hindoo society’ in the subcontinent, intent on ‘crush[ing] every lineament into a disfigured mass’ in order to sustain ‘a small white oligarchy and an immense army of mercenary troops’. In fact, this description massively overstated the extent of British force before 1857, but it conveys a good sense of the kind of regime Indian insurgents thought they needed to challenge. It also explains why the violence was so brutal. Each side thought it was fighting for its survival.4
The idea of a homogeneous Indian peninsula
Montgomery Martin was also right about the effects of financial insecurity and political vulnerability on British policy. After the fiscal crises of the late 1820s, Governor-General Bentinck had reduced posts and salaries to create a short period of fiscal stability. But the cutbacks in spending together with the agricultural depression of the late 1830s weakened India’s economy, and shrank the Company’s income from land tax. Bentinck’s fiscal discipline was not followed by his successors, and spending on steamships and roads did not bring any financial return. From the late 1830s, the Company’s expenditure grew more quickly than its revenue, and debt was expanding once again. By 1846, the annual deficit of expenditure over income peaked at £2.58 million. In 1850 the total debt hit £50 million, more than twice the Company’s annual income, and the Company was forced to borrow at the relatively high rate of 5 per cent. The consequence was an effort to find additional sources of cash, and to do so by squeezing existing Indian hierarchies.5
Revenue and Expenditure, 1830–1874.6
The decade before 1857 saw an intensification of the British effort to extract revenue from rural India. Teams of surveyors were sent into territories to be settled, measuring every field and assessing how much they were due to pay. In north Indian villages two-thirds of the total produce of the land was supposed to be taken by the government. Trying to collect that money directly from villagers, British officers dismissed zamindars and other local lords as ‘a host of unproductives’. Many were dispossessed and pensioned off with sums far smaller than their previous income. Those who survived saw a serious cut in their living standards. The result was the suppression of a class of individuals who were occasionally rapacious, but usually essential to the flow of local resources needed to maintain the living standards of rural society.7
Even where they could not dispossess local lords, Company officers attacked other sources of mutual dependence between landholders and peasants. Privileged, low-rent forms of land tenure had long been essential to the management of rural society, allowing local figures to pay low rents or none at all and redistribute resources to the poor and lower middle class. Rent-free land allowed local leaders to fund institutions essential for the functioning of local society: schools, religious institutions, village officials. As historian David Washbrook argues, they provided a safety vent which allowed people to subsist in times of economic crisis, supporting India’s squeezed lower middle classes. But in the cash-strapped 1840s, the British saw these land grants as fraudulent devices which nefarious native elites used to undermine the Company’s power. Commissions and inquiries were set up to look into supposedly corrupt land claims, and taxes increased where the legitimacy of a claim to revenue-free land could not be proved.8
In western India a commission was set up to look into landholding around Dharwad, near Hubli, in the southern Maratha lands in 1843, and later extended to the whole of Bombay presidency. Thirty-five thousand plots of land were investigated by a tribunal of three European officers, sitting day after day making quick judgment about who owned what and how much they should pay in taxes. By 1847, 20,000 plots were declared to be held illegally. The government did not have the power to put these paper decisions into practice. Only 23,334 rupees was ordered for immediate resumption, half of the total sum identified as fraudulently lost to the public coffers. But the effect on local opinion was profound. By 1856, a visiting British officer found the district ‘in a very excitable and discontented frame of mind’ because of the commission’s work. The following year the landholders of Dharwad were still angry. Most stayed nominally loyal to the East India Company throughout the rebellion, but their submission was extracted by fear not affection, particularly by the presence of a detachment of European troops and the brutal, exemplary execution of a small number of men suspected of plotting insurrection. Outside Dharwad town the region was in open revolt, as bands of insurgent leaders toured the countryside enlisting soldiers in the rebel army. The first Indian commentator on the causes of the revolt argued that the resumption of revenue-free land was the insurrection’s greatest cause.9
The Company did not only attempt to dispossess potential challengers in British-ruled territory. It also affected the British attitude to ‘native states’ throughout South Asia. The conquests of the 1800s and 1810s had not completed the East India Company’s subordination of Indian territory. Well into the 1840s a third of India was still governed by sovereigns who retained their independence, but had to suffer the close attention of a British Resident, constantly looking out for any sign for conspiracies to undermine the Company’s power. Potentially disloyal regimes were dispossessed, and neighbouring land occupied. Punjab, Sindh and Awadh were the most prominent threats. British officers were particularly concerned when a monarch died, and the loyalty of the new incumbent could not be assured. They worried that the death of a prince without a natural heir gave groups of people opposed to British rule an opportunity to conspire. These moments offered the British the chance to remove the source of threat and consolidate their power. In 1834 the Court of Directors had allowed the Company in India to annex the territories of heirless rulers, a process accelerated after 1847 when a new, more aggressive Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, took charge. Dalhousie talked about ‘the idea of a homogeneous Indian peninsula’. He imagined the British would only be safe if they were the sole sovereign power. In the eight years he was in charge, Dalhousie annexed more than any other single Governor-General, a quarter of a million square miles.10
Maratha states were particularly vulnerable to the rigid application of what became known as ‘the doctrine of lapse’. The reduced regime of Satara was the last possession of the direct heirs of the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji. Given its historic prestige, the British always saw Satara as a centre of possible opposition. Reports about its raja manoeuvring against the Company had inspired John Malcolm’s fear of the collapse of British power in 1828, at the time of the Moro Raghunath case. Twenty years later the death of the last king of Satara was followed by a minor rebellion and the Company decided to take over, sending the king’s family into exile. The same thing happened at Jhansi five years later, when Raja Gangadhar Rao died childless. His wife, Rani Lakshmibhai, was given a pension of 60,000 rupees but evicted from her husband’s ancestral fort along with the young boy she had adopted. Lakshmibhai became one of the most notable rebel leaders. As famous was Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last Peshwa. Despite frantic lobbying in Calcutta and London Nana Sahib was denied a pension by the Company, and went on to lead the fight against the British in the northern city of Kanpur.
The same kind of paranoia drove the British desire to consolidate power on the frontiers of Company territory. The invasions of Sikh-ruled Punjab in the west and Burma in the east were promulgated by fears about neighbouring states plotting ferment in British-ruled lands. Tension grew in Punjab during the succession struggle that followed the death of the founder of the Sikh empire, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, in 1839. Conflict had broken out between Punjab’s Persian-tpeaking royal court and middle-class Punjabi-tpeaking soldiers who claimed to act on behalf of the collective body of armed Sikh men, the khalsa. The British thought the rise of the khalsa threatened their own territories. Sikh soldiers thought the British were planning to invade Punjab. The first Anglo-Sikh war of 1845–6 ended with British victory, the Sikh state’s partial dismemberment and growing resentment at British involvement in Punjab’s affairs. The second Anglo-Sikh war began when British officers were attacked by anxious troops in Multan. Company soldiers began to seize forts in Punjab, Sikh soldiers starting fighting in response and local chiefs supported heavily armed locals instead of an alien power. Dalhousie described what happened: ‘[t]he question was for us no longer one of policy or expediency, but one of national safety. Accordingly, the Government put forward its power.’ British power was asserted in a ‘struggle severe and anxious’, a short and brutal war in which few prisoners were taken on either side. Punjab became a British province in March 1849, and Dalhousie was promoted to the British peerage, from Earl to Marquess.11
Three years after the annexation of Punjab, Dalhousie’s government went to war with Burma. Again, conflict grew as a neighbouring state showed signs of hostility to the expansion of British power. When merchants were harassed and the Burmese government did not demonstrate appropriate respect, the British invaded in 1852. Echoing the language of the British participants at Plassey in 1757 or the Maratha wars of the early 1800s, Dalhousie argued that ‘dread is the only real security we can ever have . . . for stable peace with the Burman state.’ The Company wanted to fight until ‘the Burman Court and the Burman people alike have shown that they now dread our power’. War led to the assimilation of the southern half of Burma into Britain’s Indian empire. It also sparked bitter condemnation from liberals in Britain.
The Manchester industrialist and MP Richard Cobden ridiculed Dalhousie’s belief that war against such a puny power was necessary. Cobden thought British public opinion was driven by the desire to seek revenge against previous humiliation. Britons supported conquest in India ‘so long as [it was] believed to be profitable’. His 1853 pamphlet How Wars Are Got Up in India proved it wasn’t, and ended with a prediction. ‘[D]eeds of violence, fraud and injustice’ would be repaid with a violent penalty. Cobden recognized something later historians have missed, that violence in India was driven by passion as much as reason, by a sense of the need for retribution against past wrongs as much as a desire to advance clearly calculated interests. His aim was to rouse ‘the national conscience’, to avert ‘by timely atonement and reparation, the punishment due for imperial crimes’.12
There was no such atonement. The final annexation took place in Awadh in 1856, in the last days of Dalhousie’s years as Governor-General. Awadh occupied a rough square of territory 250 miles across centred on Lucknow, the city where Sir Henry Lawrence was to lose his life. Since the late eighteenth century, Awadh’s practical autonomy had been steadily restricted in the interests of the East India Company’s security. An army was imposed and revenue demanded to pay for it. When rulers resisted, as Nawab Wazir Ali did in 1798, territory was occupied by the British. In 1801, the half of Awadh which lay between the Jamuna and Ganges rivers was annexed by the Company. For the next fifty-five years this shrunken province stayed intact, but its government was trapped between increasingly powerful local landholders and British networks of power. Awadh became a major source of soldiers for the East India Company’s army, as 40,000 troops were recruited from the province. And the province bought an increasingly large quantity of British goods. Hemmed in by these imperial networks, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, sovereign from 1847, ended up with little room for political manoeuvre. Instead of exercising governmental power, he retreated into the world of culture and sought to construct an autonomous life in music, poetry and theatre. Seen as an overly sensuous lush by his British critics, Wajid Ali Shah was one of nineteenth-century India’s most important artistic innovators, reviving the khatak style of Indian dance, founding a music school and writing some of the first plays in the Urdu language.13
All but a few British officers were unsympathetic. William Sleeman, appointed as Resident to Awadh in 1848, described the province as ‘a scene of intrigue, corruption, depravity, neglect of duty and abuse of authority’. Lucknow, he argued, was ‘an overgrown city, surrounding an overgrown court, which has, for the last half century, exhausted all the resources of this fine country’. Sleeman believed Wajid Ali Shah’s court had ‘alienated the feelings of the great body of the people’. Before his appointment to Awadh, Sleeman had been in charge of the government department concerned with catching dacoits and ‘thugs’: the word originally referred to criminals the British believed were members of a religious cult. There, he developed a particularly suspicious frame of mind. He ‘was ever on the look-out to capture a thief’. A British critic described him as an ‘able and zealous officer’, but also ‘the emissary of a foregone conclusion’. Those words were written by Captain Robert Bird, a refined and well-connected officer in the Bengal army whose fluent Persian led to his appointment as Sleeman’s assistant. Sleeman accused Bird of spending too much time buying and selling horses, and being too friendly with the Nawab, and had him transferred to Punjab. Bird felt Sleeman’s investigation was prejudiced. He collected evidence to prove that Sleeman’s portrayal of social breakdown could not be accurate. If British-ruled districts were so much better off than Awadh, why did peasants not move there, he asked? If they had become so badly alienated from their rulers people would have fled Awadh, and there was no evidence they had.14
Sleeman’s biggest criticism was that the King of Awadh presided over a state of war and anarchy which threatened to spill out into British lands. The level of violence in Awadh was certainly high. In the 1850s an average of 628 people were killed each year, a murder rate comparable to that of present-day South Africa. But most of this violence occurred in the process of tax collection, as Awadh’s government tried to collect land revenue needed to pay money demanded by the Company. As Sleeman’s successor admitted, death had not arisen from ordinary crime or disorder, but from ‘faction fights’ and ‘collisions’ between revenue collectors and landholders. The scale of violence does not show that Wajid Ali Shah’s court had abandoned order for the sake of drunken revelry, quite the reverse in fact. Awadh’s government was trying to assert its own authority over the province’s society by violent means. Because its power had become so closely entangled with the Company it lost the capacity to persuade powerful social groups to submit to its authority without using force.
The last annexation took place on 30 January 1856. Wajib Ali Shah was asked to sign over his state to the East India Company, he refused, and it was forcefully taken away. But the king did not rebel. Worried about the consequences of resistance, he asked his subjects to stay loyal to the British. Instead, he travelled to Calcutta with the intention of going on to London to plead his case before Queen Victoria. Wajid Ali Shah persuaded Robert Bird to leave the East India Company’s service and become his agent, with a view to sending him to London to lobby Parliament and the British press for the return of his lands. Bird arrived in London, but only a senior queen and one son accompanied him from the Nawab’s family. The British incarcerated Wajid Ali Shah until six months after the rebellion ended. Once they had deposed him, the Company tried to impose their authority on the war-torn countryside more emphatically than even Wajid Ali’s government had done. Awadh’s landholders were dispossessed and a revenue survey started to collect tax directly from peasants. Throughout 1856 and the first half of the next year, British officers suffered constant attacks, and the Company found revenue impossible to collect until, in June 1857, the scale of rebel violence forced them to flee the countryside entirely.15
The governed not the governing class
British commentators on the events of 1857–8 sometimes imagined the rebellion was driven by the rage of recently dispossessed kings and aristocrats, whether Maratha princes or Awadhi taluqdars (landlords). It is easy to misunderstand the impact of these evictions and annexations. As the ‘loyalist’ Indian Muslim leader Sayyid Ahmad Khan argued, it was ‘the governed not the governing class’ who rebelled. Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s perspective is worth paying attention to. From a Pathan family of Mughal officials, he grew up around the Mughal court and was employed as a government officer from 1838. He lived through the rebellion itself in rebel-held Bijnor. A historian and poet, Sayyid Ahmed’s writings before 1857 barely acknowledged the British. It was possible to live as a member of the northern Indian gentry without paying much attention to British power. The insurrection changed that, making Sayyid Ahmed believe he had no choice but to deal with the British. His pamphlet The Causes of the Indian Revolt, published in Urdu from Agra in 1858, was the first Indian account of the rebellion. Sayyid Ahmed went on to become an advocate of Indian Muslim engagement with western science and a supporter of British rule, for which he received a knighthood, becoming Sir Sayyid. His loyalty, though, was complicated and partial. It was a strategy for coping with the defeat of Muslim power in India rather than a decision born from active love for British rule. Some of his relatives joined the insurgency, as many of his colleagues in the Company’s service did. But Sayyid Ahmad thought rebellion was the work of a disorderly mob who could not create a stable regime. Perhaps he also recognized that though rebel victory would not dent his chances of continuing in government service, joining the insurgency would end his career if the British won. ‘The mutineers were for the most part men who had nothing to lose,’ he wrote, and Sayyid Ahmed himself had a lot.16
Sayyid Ahmed argued that the insurrection was not a campaign by feudal magnates to restore their lost principalities. After all, the King of Awadh thought that appealing to Queen Victoria was a better way to restore his control of Awadh than a full-scale revolt. Most large landholders equivocated before joining the insurrection. Some of the greatest rebel leaders, Rani Lakshmibhai of Jhansi, for example, only turned into rebels very later in the revolt, when their loyalty was challenged by the British. The insurrection was led by north India’s dislocated lower middle classes. The proclamations of rebel leaders particularly called upon soldiers, clerics, artisans, petty officers, minor landlords and merchants to join the revolt. These were not the Mughal elite, but men who benefited from the institutions the Mughal regime and its successors sustained. Before 1857 they flourished in the spaces which India’s pre-colonial regimes left open for self-rule. Few had been hostile to the British to begin with. As Sayyid Ahmed argued, the revolt was not an effort ‘to throw off the yoke of foreigners’.
In the northern Indian provinces where the revolt was eventually fiercest, the British had begun their rule by promising to be impartial, not taxing too much, offering security for trade during troubled times and providing a major source of employment for soldiers and officials. They did not introduce peace and stability and were too arrogant to listen to their subjects well enough, but north India’s middle classes imagined the British might be taught how better to exercise their power. But as the Company’s sway expanded across the whole of the subcontinent, British paranoia grew and power was asserted with ever-greater force. Lord Dalhousie’s annexations and wars of conquest made belief in British benevolence impossible to sustain. As the historian F. W. Buckler argued almost a century ago, the insurgents of 1857 believed the British, not they, had overturned legitimate political order.17
Soldiers faced the power of the British most directly. That is why they were the first to revolt. According to Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the pride of Indian troops had grown as the Company acquired more and more land. ‘It is we’, an early soldiers’ proclamation declared, ‘who have conquered the whole territory extending from Calcutta to Kabul for the English, because they did not bring any English army with them from England.’ But these soldiers felt humiliated just as their pride grew. As British territory expanded so pay shrank, as troops had less opportunity to earn the allowance for working in foreign territory they had previously been entitled to. Army discipline became more severe. And since January 1857, a rumour had started to circulate that the cartridges used to fill their rifles contained cow and pig fat. In fact, animal grease was quickly withdrawn. Soldiers were allowed to buy their own grease and test the paper in water to ensure it did not contain oil. As Kim Wagner notes, ‘not a single greased cartridge was ever distributed to the sepoys’. But the soldiers saw the British response to their anxieties as irrationally violent, proof perhaps that there was a conspiracy to undermine their way of life. Protests in Bengal in April led to the hanging of isolated rebels, and the disbanding of regiments. On 4 May, fires began to be lit at the cantonment in Ambala in Punjab, and the regiment there was instantly disarmed. When a section of the Meerut garrison refused to use the new cartridges at the end of April, eighty-five of them were court-martialled and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. On 9 May, their comrades were forced to watch as the reluctant soldiers were stripped, shackled and marched off in chains to begin their sentences. Prostitutes in the marketplace taunted those soldiers still under British orders: ‘If you had an atom of manhood in you, go and release them,’ they are reported to have said. In another story, respectable women asked the soldiers for their arms: ‘we shall fight and liberate the brave officers [instead]’, they said. The cowardly troops were asked to ‘keep inside the home and put on bangles’. Humiliation of this kind could not be borne for long.18
On the morning of 10 May, rumours circulated that the garrison at Meerut would mutiny. Indian servants insisted their European masters stay at home. At dusk a cavalry regiment rode out to free imprisoned comrades. One of the infantry regiments followed. A third regiment was agitated but wavered. Colonel Finnis, their British commander, implored them to put down their arms. A shot, perhaps fired by accident, went off, which injured his horse. Finnis was then blasted at close range by a soldier from one of the regiments that had already mutinied. Frightened they would be hanged for murder, the rest of the garrison believed they had no choice but to join the rebellion. Finnis’s death was followed by the killing of three other British officers, eight women and eight children. Mutineers on horseback rode to Delhi. Others rode into the countryside, spreading violence into the villages around Meerut. Soldiers had talked for weeks beforehand about resisting the cartridges. But the first spark of rebellion was not the product of a long-term plan. It was sparked by soldiers’ fears about the brutal consequences of British power.19
For eleven days Meerut and Delhi were the only garrisons that mutinied, creating a short-lived belief among the British that the uprising would quickly be quelled. After all, plenty of similar mutinies had been suppressed quickly in the past. The difference now was that thousands of civilians in the surrounding towns and countryside quickly took up arms. At Meerut, the kotwal, or head of the city police, sided with the rebels, and quickly freed a small number of prisoners in the gaol before fleeing himself. The remaining 839 prisoners were liberated later by the crowd, ‘yelling and shouting, and vociferating savage denunciations of vengeance on all Europeans’, as one observer put it. Those Britons who could barricaded themselves into the garrison’s ammunition storehouse, but forty Europeans were killed at Meerut in a night of violence and panic. The mutinying soldiers were mostly Brahmins, but urban celebrations involved large numbers of Muslims, particularly Shia, as groups roamed the streets chanting ‘Ali, Ali, our religion has revived’. This was an uprising of butchers and weavers, cooks and grass cutters, aided by the almost instant defection of the police to the mutineers’ side, with a large number of liberated prisoners joining in, too. The same social groups participated in the revolt once it reached Delhi. Rebel cavalrymen arrived from Meerut early in the morning of 11 May, burning the city’s eastern toll-house and the telegraph office. Within hours, crowds of lower-middle-class Delhi residents had formed a mob. Delhi’s elite had a disdainful attitude to this band of badmashes, or ruffians. ‘No person from a decent family was a part of this crowd of rioters,’ one Mughal courtier wrote. ‘[T]he respectable people were all locked inside their houses.’20
The mutiny of 1857 quickly turned into a peasants’ revolt as well. As Eric Stokes wrote, ‘rural disturbance at first outpaced military mutiny’. At Meerut most of the police were Gujars, belonging to a community of cattle herders who had a reputation for their warlike behaviour but particularly suffered from the Company’s high taxation. Gujar leaders organized bands of men to attack centres of prosperity and power, creating what British observers described as ‘anarchy’. The British presence at Sikrandabad, forty miles south of Meerut, was attacked on 12 May. By that date, Sayyid Ahmad Khan reported that it was impossible to travel on the roads of Bijnor, forty-five miles north-west of the rebellion’s epicentre, without being attacked.
Amid this growing insurgency of soldiers, peasants and artisans, the revolt did have one very significant noble backer. Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar had long felt humiliated by the British effort to limit his power and to snuff out the last traces of Mughal authority. When the mutineers arrived in Delhi, they sought Bahadur Shah Zafar’s support, which was quickly offered. In doing so Zafar did not seek political power as we would normally understand it. A philosopher and poet rather than a political leader, Zafar saw the insurrection as an opportunity to restore a Mughal system of government and exact retribution for the dishonourable way he had been treated by the British. His purpose was not to augment his own capacity to command. Bahadur Shah Zafar shaped the rebel government, making sure sepoy leaders were not displaced by nobles, but he did not direct it. Instead, he provided moral sanction for the new regime, then tried to use his authority to direct it away from excessive violence.21
With Zafar’s support, the circulation of insurgents between towns in northern India intensified. A second wave of garrison uprisings occurred in late May and early June. On 20 May part of the army rebelled at Agra, the capital of the North Western Provinces, but was quickly disarmed by European soldiers. Soldiers in the cantonments of Lucknow and Muttra rose up on 30 May. The garrison at Bareilly, capital of the Afghan-dominated region of Rohilkhand, revolted the following day. Kanpur (called Cawnpore by the British at the time) mutinied on 5 June, and British soldiers took refuge in an entrenchment at the north of the town. Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last Maratha Peshwa, lived at Bithoor, fifteen miles away. The day after the Kanpur mutiny he declared his support for the uprising and sought the backing of the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar.
After two weeks of sustained bombardment, Nana Sahib offered safe passage to the British at Kanpur on 25 June, but the British men were massacred as they boarded boats onto the Ganges two days later, probably because the sepoys had become increasingly frightened about being attacked themselves. On 15 July, 200 British women and children were shot and butchered as a British army led by General Henry Havelock approached in an effort to recapture Kanpur. It was this ‘Cawnpore massacre’ that defined the horror of 1857 for generations of Britons afterwards. ‘Remember Cawnpore!’ became the cry during the war of reconquest. The massacres occurred at the lowest point of British power. With the exception of a few besieged residencies and cantonments, the East India Company’s authority had been extinguished from a vast swathe of territory between Patna in the east and Patiala in the west. Beyond that territory, British survival relied on embattled garrisons surrounded by people happy to submit to a rebel regime.
These massacres show that 1857 was far more than a political conflict for the insurgents. It was a struggle for survival. As historian Faisal Devji argues, the rebels were concerned above all to protect the distinctions that constituted Indian social life. At the core of Indians’ sense of self in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was their membership of groups which distinguished them from their neighbours. These groups were defined in different ways, by caste, occupation, gender and geography. For many of the rebels, though, religion provided a common denominator, a way to articulate the sense an individual had of belonging to a particular way of life they would fight to protect. Religious belonging depended on shared practices rather than beliefs. Friendship across community divisions depended on respect for different customs. Culinary habits were particularly important. North Indian society held together because everyone respected that Brahmins refused to eat food that was not cooked by other Brahmins, Hindus refused beef and Muslims rejected pork. Forcing everyone to eat the same foodstuffs would annihilate the distinctions that each individual’s status and honour relied on, and in doing so erode the very fabric of Indian social life.
The one element that cut through all rebel statements was the fear that the Company was making everyone eat the same food together, and so corrode the most fundamental character of Indian life. Joint messing, in prison or the army, was a particular target of criticism in rebel proclamations. The rebels rose up seeking autonomy from a domineering power which they thought wanted to turn them into an undifferentiated, statusless mass. This was certainly a war fought for independence, but it was fought in fervent opposition to the idea that Indians shared a common culture or nationality. Against the supposed British attempt to flatten difference and create unity, rebel proclamations emphasized Indian plurality, in the name of ‘the Hindus and Musalmans of Hindustan’.22
British officers thought the concern about animal fat was ridiculous. But Indian fears reflected an accurate understanding of British desires, if not the practical realities of Company rule. Take religion, for example. Among Britons in India, evangelical Christianity was on the rise in the 1840s and 1850s. Most British officers probably did think India’s Muslims and Hindus were infidels who would suffer eternal damnation if they did not convert. Proselytizing pamphlets had been circulated with greater frequency, even in cantonments. European religion and the British government seemed to occupy the same space, as the 1830s and 1840s saw new churches built in cantonments, often bringing the centres of British worship and British power within a few yards of each other. The British did talk about subjugating the whole of India to a single, unitary form of power, even if they saw the East India Company as a decidedly secular kind of authority. The Company wanted to introduce a single set of laws and create a system of communications, steamships, telegraph, roads and railways which would make their government more secure by annihilating distance and difference.
The British did not try to convert Indians to one religion. Most officials were extremely anxious about any hint of official support for evangelism. A story circulated that the Governor-General, Dalhousie contributed money to missionary organizations in India. Lord Ellenborough, President of the Board of Control, described the news as ‘one of the most dangerous things which could have happened to the security of our government in India’, a rumour that could be the cause of ‘the most bloody revolution which has at any time occurred in India’. In the minds of most Britons, the conquest of territory or imposition of new laws was a separate matter from the conversion of Indians to Christianity. But with no place for conversation with Europeans, lower middle-class Indians did not know that.23
Sayyid Ahmad Khan knew there was no government plan to Christianize India, but his account of the revolt was a damning indictment of a regime whose way of working allowed such misunderstandings to grow. The British, he said, had no regard for the ‘characteristics’ or ‘daily habits’ of the people they ruled. ‘Our Government never knew what troubles each succeeding sun might bring with it to its subjects, or what sorrow might fall upon them with the night.’ The consequence was that ‘Hindustanees 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 fellows of their religion.’ The ‘real cause’ of the revolt was the absence of conversation between the Company and its subjects. In particular, Sayyid Ahmed blamed the fact that the ‘people do not have a voice in Government’s councils’.
Sayyid Ahmed was not talking about the flow of abstract information through official inquiries and surveys, nor did he think a free press made any difference. For him, politics was personal. Good government relied on face-to-face conversation between people who were not afraid of each other. It depended on the existence of ‘common friendship . . . which springs from the heart’ between ruler and ruled. Sayyid Ahmed repeated the complaint that men and women familiar with Mughal idioms of government had made against the Company for a long time. The British did not cultivate the friendship of Indians. They kept themselves apart. They refused to live among the people they ruled. They spoke with contempt and ill temper to their subjects. Even the most senior Indian officials were abused. It was ‘well-known to Government [that] even natives of the highest rank never come into the presence of officials, but with an inward fear and trembling’. The disastrous result of this was that Indians connected law, religion and conquest with a single image of British force intent on subjugating every distinction of Indian society under British power. As one Muslim in Sayyid Ahmed’s town of Bijnor asked, ‘what ease have we, they are always inventing new laws to trouble us, and to overturn our religion’. If British rule continued, ‘there would be no difference between Mahomedans and Hindoos, and whatever they said, we should have to do’.24
Badshahi Sarkar
The rebels sought relief in the restoration of a Mughal empire. Despite British efforts to diminish the prestige of the descendants of Timur, Mughal allegiances remained strong through most of the subcontinent. Up to 1857, soldiers fighting for the British had been commanded by a Company that, nominally in its own eyes, was a vassal of the emperor. The sovereignty of the empire was proclaimed in the qasbah towns of north India as the mantra khalq khuda ka / mulk badshahi ka / hukm kampani bahadur ka (creation belongs to God, the country is the emperor’s and administration the Company’s) was shouted to beating drums. As Meerut’s cavalrymen put it in their first message to the emperor, ‘the English have been ruling on your behalf’.
Once the insurrection spread, petty lords and great kings rose up alike claiming they were vassals of Bahadur Shah, sending anxious letters to Delhi asking to be confirmed in their possessions, often using the moment to dispossess local rivals. This was as true for Hindu Rajputs and Marathas as much as former Mughal officials, even for kings who had thrown off Mughal authority before 1857. The rulers of Awadh had declared their independence from Mughal power in an elaborate ceremony held in 1819, where the Nawab was converted into a Padshah, or emperor: the British merely called him King. But when the Lucknow garrison revolted and returned power to the old court, the mutineers demanded the new Awadh regime declare its allegiance to the Mughal emperor once again. The new rebel Nawab, Wajid Ali Shah’s young son Qadir Birjis, declared he ruled merely as a provincial governor of the Mughal empire. With the submission of both the Nawab of Awadh and the man claiming to be Peshwa to the emperor’s authority, the rebellion tried to recreate the exact constitutional form of the Mughal empire as it existed in the early eighteenth century.25
This return of Mughal authority was supposed to replace the aloof British regime with an empire based on friendship and conversation. In many places, those conversations took new forms. Old Mughal officers like the kotwal and kazi returned alongside new, more plebeian councils and courts, where troops particularly had a voice. The insurrection began with fierce debates between soldiers in garrisons, and the restored Mughal regime was not going to suppress the conversation its existence relied on. In Delhi, the rebels created a court of administration, ‘a sort of military junta’, where six elected soldiers met with four representatives of the palace to talk and decide about the life of the city. To begin with, the court’s president was Bakht Khan, an officer (like the man Henry Lawrence had spoken to in May 1857) from the artillery corps who had served in the Company’s army for forty years. In practice the court was constantly harassed by Delhi’s princes, and found it impossible to speak with a single common voice. In Lucknow, the mutineers decided to elect a new king, but two factions, which divided the infantry and cavalry regiments from one another, backed different claimants. Eventually, Birjis Qadir, the twelve-year-old son of Wajid Ali Shah, was chosen. But Lucknow’s military council retained effective control. The democratic sentiments of the mutineers meant a clear line of command only came into being when the approach of General Henry Havelock’s army created a mood of urgency.26
Throughout the months in which the Badshahi Sarkar (the emperor’s government), ruled, the Mughal regime existed as an ideal more than a political reality. In Delhi itself the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar tried to put the Mughal idea of ensuring a balance between different communities and interests into practice. He attempted to protect Europeans from massacre, ensured Muslims did not kill cows and insisted that both soldiers and nobles were represented on the government’s council. The emperor asserted that the Mughal regime was not fighting an Islamic war. When a group of Sufi Maulvis tried to fly the green standard of holy war on Delhi’s largest mosque, the Jama Masjid, Bahadur had it taken down, saying that ‘such a jehad was quite impossible and an act of extreme folly, for the majority of the Purbea [ex-Company] soldiers were Hindus’. But these efforts to balance and incorporate depended on the moral aura of Zafar’s physical presence, not the emperor’s construction of an effective form of conciliatory practice. The emperor could not insist on any kind of order or hierarchy beyond the city walls of Delhi. Outside the capital the Badshahi government was a system of independent franchises. Leaders who fought in the name of the emperor were driven by different motivations, and put very different styles of political rule into practice. The history of the rebellion showed the enduring power of the ideal of Mughal sovereignty. But it also demonstrated that a century of war and Company government had destroyed the practical authority of Mughal institutions. With their demise, the memory of how the different communities and interests of India could coexist without serious social fracture had been annihilated. Eighteen fifty-seven brought together groups of armed men to fight against the same enemy with radically different political visions.27
One vision, articulated by a significant minority of rebels, saw the war as an attempt to eradicate the rule of infidels and create a polity able to sustain a regenerated version of Islam. In the early nineteenth century this kind of politics was nurtured on the fringes of British power, in kingdoms beyond the borders of the East India Company’s regime such as Afghanistan or in princely states under British ‘protection’ such as Tonk, Hyderabad or even Hindu-ruled Gwalior. Here, political radicals linked up with sufi saints to offer an ethical alternative to British power.
The most famous sufi radical of 1857 was Maulavi Ahmadullah. A tall, muscular man with ‘beetle brows’ and an aquiline nose, Ahmadullah was the son of a south Indian nobleman who was educated in Hyderabad and spent some time in London as a young man. After studying the arts of war Ahmadullah became a disciple of a sufi master near Amir Khan’s old centre of power at Tonk, in Rajasthan. In the 1830s and 1840s Ahmadullah lived in the princely state of Gwalior, a centre of anti-British organization. He was present when British security concerns forced Gwalior to disband its army, a moment of humiliation which may have strengthened his desire to challenge British power. From the early 1850s, Ahmadullah began to travel throughout northern India to preach holy war to evict the British from India. At Agra he lived in a palace but wore the clothes of a faqir, a Muslim holy man, meditating and holding his breath to demonstrate his physical prowess at prayer meetings. Ahmadullah used music to attract support, holding parties in the evening where members of the town’s Muslim middle classes would gather to hear qawwali, or sufi devotional songs, to build support for jihad. ‘He is a dervish only in name, actually he is a prince and is preparing the masses to wage a war against the government,’ one British officer asserted.28
Ahmadullah’s move from nobleman to sufi warlord marked a more fundamental transition, particularly in his relationship to authority. The power of Sufi leaders was based on popular support rather than government patronage. They acquired money and recruited followers from the people who listened to them rather than relying on official backing. Consequently, they were less vulnerable to the corrosion of India’s Muslim political hierarchy than other religious leaders. During the uprising, Ahmadullah thought his purpose was to lead a popular uprising that would renew Islam, not restore a political order he thought was decaying. His style was prophetic rather than authoritarian, based on a passionate denunciation of British crimes, a reputation for invincibility and a wariness, verging on paranoia, about aristocratic plots which might derail the uprising.
The relatives of the last Nawab of Awadh saw the rebellion in a different light, using it as a way to restore the authority of the region’s time-honoured rulers. The conflict between the two groups in Awadh was a battle between demagoguery and aristocratic authority, a clash between a movement that renounced worldly goods in the name of moral renewal and a form of statecraft wanting to re-establish a traditional political order based on wealth and patronage. After a particularly impressive victory against the British, the prince offered his spiritual allegiance to Ahmadullah, agreeing that the whole army should be placed in the Maulvi’s hands. But Ahmadullah demanded the prince’s officers only join his army if they renounced their wealth. The two sides went their separate ways again. It was not the last time a leader who had freed himself from worldly possessions would claim to lead India’s masses against British power.
Relying on nothing more than his ability to persuade men to follow him, Ahmadullah survived far longer than other rebel rulers. Once both Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi and Birjis Qadir in Lucknow were defeated, Ahmadullah retreated in March 1858 to the rebel heartland of Rohilkhand, 200 miles north-west of Lucknow. He was captured in July 1858 after a local raja betrayed him. The raja had Ahmadullah blown up by a cannon, then cut his head from the remains of his body to hand to the British Collector in exchange for a reward of 50,000 rupees. The head was put on a stick and displayed outside the newly restored British government’s office.29
Pragmatic radicals
Maulvi Ahmadullah’s prophetic visions were very different from the reasons which drove Nawab Mahmud Khan to take part in the uprising, although the story had a similar end for both. Mahmud Khan was leader of the insurgency at Najibabad, a small town 120 miles or four days’ ride north-east of Delhi in the district of Bijnor where Sayyid Ahmad Khan was stationed. Like Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Mahmud Khan was a descendant of Afghans who had come to north India with the Persian conqueror Nader Shah and then settled in the area where the north Indian plain meets the foothills of the Himalayas. If Ahmadullah was an enthusiastic opponent of British power, Mahmud Khan was a reluctant rebel.
When mutinous soldiers first sought his support, Mahmud Khan sent them away, telling them they could ‘make trouble’ near the district capital of Bijnor as long as they left him alone. The first weeks of June saw the East India Company’s authority in the district challenged by gangs of rebels throughout the countryside. When he decided to leave Bijnor, the British Collector chose to hand the government’s buildings and property, including 109,430 rupees in cash and 38,000 in stamped paper, to Mahmud for safekeeping. Mahmud arrived to meet the British collector ‘wringing his hands and making a very sad face’ at the growing power of the insurgents, according to Sayyid Ahmad. By the end of the month he had plumped for the rebels’ side and used it to strengthen his power. He moved money from the Company’s treasury to his own fort twenty miles away, and replaced British-appointed officers with his own staff. By the middle of July, the Mughal emperor formally invested Mahmud Khan with the title of Nawab, and the town criers of Bijnor had begun to cry Khalq khoda ka, mulk badshah ka, hukm Nawab Mahmud Khan ka: the people belong to God, the country to the king and administration to Mahmud Khan.30
Mahmud Khan’s regime tried emphatically to return to Mughal patterns of rule. Sayyid Ahmad Khan reported that he had developed an ‘obsession with displaying at least some of signs of royal rule, and wiping out the chief symbols of the Government’s authority’, altering the weights and measures ordered by the Company’s government, for example. But the formal trappings of Mughal administration did not give Mahmud unbridled power. His regime alienated local landlords, and these men began to challenge him. Mahmud’s troops started to raid and ransack the forts of ‘troublemakers’. As it escalated, violence polarized along religious lines, as Mahmud’s largely Muslim officers fought largely Hindu rural elites. Fear and a desire for revenge grew, as retaliatory violence intensified. ‘This hatred’, Sayyid Ahmad Khan noted, ‘became so bitter that no one could put any credence in what Muslims said about Hindus, and vice versa.’ What began as a political battle turned into a religious war with Hindus massacring Muslim confectioners and cloth-printers in the town of Haldaur, and Muslims ransacking and killing anyone they could find in Hindu temples. Mahmud Khan ended up fighting beneath a Muslim flag. Sayyid Ahmad Khan believed this was mere opportunistic pragmatism. The Nawab’s men, he said, chose to leave Muslims unharmed as a ‘matter of political expediency, for the wretches were only interested in keeping the Muslims on their side’.
Calcutta is quite safe
Despite the often limited coherence of rebel forces, the British response to any threat of insurgency was usually to retreat to their few fortified citadels. Europeans abandoned their collectorates and business houses for the nearest fort, seeking protection behind thick walls and guns commanded by soldiers with white skins. The summer of 1857 saw British officials and their entourages packing up their instruments of government and abandoning the courts and revenue offices scattered around the small European settlements of India’s dispersed district capitals, often long before rebels arrived. The British retreat from Bijnor on 7 June was one of the earliest flights. Had the Collector stayed, Mahmud Khan might have remained on the British side. At Tirhoot, at the other, eastern, end of the zone under insurgent control, indigo planters fled their estates in early July, moving to the East India Company’s station at Muzaffarnagar. Eighty men, thirty women and forty children crammed themselves into two houses. All but two of the British civil stations in Bihar had been abandoned by the beginning of August even though the province saw very little fighting. Gorakhpur, near the border with Nepal, was abandoned on 13 August, despite the only sign of insurrection being a small ‘poorly armed rabble’. The speed of British retreat turned ambivalent leaders into rebels and hastened the spread of the revolt.31
Panic was rife even in places far from the main centres of revolt. Indian soldiers refused to use the new cartridges at two garrisons near Calcutta, Barrackpore and Berhampore, but they were quickly disarmed. Pro-British Indian observers were sure there were sufficient European soldiers to protect the city’s European inhabitants. But Calcutta’s British residents imagined conspiracies were being hatched at every corner to overthrow their power. The exiled Emperor of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, living by then in an unarmed palace in Calcutta’s southern suburb of Metiya Burg, was the favourite demon figure of British fantasy. Once rebellion broke out in Lucknow, Europeans imagined him to be conspiring with disbanded soldiers to murder them in their beds. ‘Calcutta is quite safe – although the magnates of Chowringhee don’t think so,’ the Indian liberal journalist Girish Chunder Ghose wrote. On 9 June Ghose noted that the ‘ladies and gentlemen’ in the British suburb of Ballygunge were so scared they had ‘started from their beds at midnight’ in a state of panic. In fact, the noise came from ‘the festive glee and pyrotechnic wonders’ of a wedding party. Five days later Calcutta was affected by more serious panic. Europeans fled to Fort William or took refuge on steamships in response to a rumour that the garrison had revolted again. Late into the night the house belonging to the major in charge of Calcutta’s defence was ‘besieged by all sorts of people wishing to obtain shelter in the Fort’.32
The limits of the insurrection were defined by the distribution of European soldiers. Indian troops mutinied throughout India and beyond, not only in north India but also at Peshawar and Ambala in Punjab, Barrackpore near Calcutta and Chittagong in far southeastern Bengal, at Madras, Karachi and Bombay, even in the Indian garrison at Singapore. Where the British presence was protected by large detachments of European troops, these garrison mutinies did not spark a broader revolt. Calcutta was defended by two European battalions, with perhaps 2,500 soldiers in total, more than 10 per cent of the total of 22,698 European soldiers in the Company’s north Indian army. There was a strong garrison at Dinapur, on the outskirts of Patna, to protect the western frontier of Bengal. At the far north-west of India, in Punjab, soldiers were concentrated to keep the population of a newly conquered and supposedly warlike province in check. Punjab was occupied by eleven battalions of British troops, dispersed between eight garrisons. Because Punjab was seen as the most dangerous place in India it was defended with enough troops to defend British power. By contrast, the Mughal empire’s old Hindustani heartland had scant European troops, with only one infantry regiment apiece at Lucknow, Meerut and Agra. Even if the British had responded more quickly to rebellion, these scattered detachments of about 4,000 soldiers would have been no match for the perhaps 100,000 sepoys who took up arms against their employers on north India’s plain.
By the end of July 1857 many British officers started to believe that they could only survive by abandoning the stretch of territory between Bihar and Punjab where the rebellion was most intense. The priority was for the Company to keep its capacity to collect revenue from the fields of eastern India’s profitable rivers and deltas. ‘For the moment,’ the newly appointed Governor-General Charles, Earl Canning wrote on 8 August, ‘everything must give way to the necessity of arresting rebellion or general disorder below Benares. If this is not done our slender remains of revenue will be in jeopardy.’ This strategy left embattled enclaves of Britons stranded at Lucknow and Delhi. British opinion in London demanded that Europeans besieged in the midst of the insurgency be rescued. Between defence and rescue, British policy vacillated. Small forces were sent to capture Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow, but most troops were forced to sit and wait for the arrival of reinforcements.33
The greatest early British triumph happened at Delhi, but this was an equivocal victory. A small British force pushed its way from Ambala in Punjab to Delhi soon after the Mughal capital was captured by rebels. It was joined by a second detachment on 14 August, led by the brutal Ulsterman John Nicholson, a man who liked to keep the head of a chief he had executed on his desk. In the years soon after the revolt, the British imagined their assault was the victory of Nicholson’s ‘gallant few’ fighting against hordes of zealous ‘fanatics’. In Self-Help, his 1859 post-mutiny celebration of British national character, the journalist Samuel Smiles spoke of 3,700 British-led ‘bayonets’ defeating an army of 75,000 crazed Muslim insurgents.
In reality, the victory was much less impressive. The Company possessed 6,800 troops, mostly Indian or Nepali, and there were not many more Mughal soldiers in Delhi. A few Muslim jihadis had arrived throughout July, but they came in small numbers, the last and largest contingent of only 600 coming from Amir Khan’s old state of Tonk on 21 July. For the most part Delhi’s rebel army had begun to dissipate in the month before the attack, as soldiers went unpaid and supply routes had been blocked by British forces. By the end of July, there were only 10,000 badly equipped, hungry Mughal soldiers left in the old capital. When the British started to shell Delhi six weeks later, many troops and most of Delhi’s administrators fled, including the last Mughal chief of police, Gangadhar Nehru, grandfather of independent India’s first Prime Minister. By the time the British army marched to the city walls, they probably had a small numerical advantage over the forces they challenged. As usual, the idea of a tiny number of morally superior Britons holding massive Indian forces at bay was a myth. The battle for Delhi was a fight between two starving, demoralized and badly disciplined armies.
The British started to march from their ridge-top position in the middle of the night of 13 September, but their movement was disordered and far slower than planned. To begin with the emperor’s troops retained control of Delhi’s key sites, the Jama Masjid, Chandni Chowk and the main police station. John Nicholson was fatally wounded. The British lost more than 1,100 men and 60 officers in the first few hours of fighting. Exhausted and disheartened, large numbers of British soldiers broke into liquor shops, absenting themselves from the fight by getting drunk on looted alcohol.
Samuel Smiles described the storming of Delhi as ‘the most illustrious event’ to occur during the mutiny. He wrote that every member of the ‘English race’ had been a hero and quoted Captain William Hodson, ‘one of the bravest’, saying that no other nation would have stood its ground so doggedly. The passage Smiles quoted was written in Hodson’s diary before the fighting had even started, when Hodson imagined a great, noble victory was possible. The reality of war transformed his opinion. After the battle Hodson wrote that it was the first time he saw ‘English soldiers refuse repeatedly to follow their officers’. ‘[T]he troops are utterly demoralized by hard work and hard drink.’ Thirty-eight per cent of the British infantry were killed or wounded, with more than half the officers also lost in the fighting. After the first day, the Mughal army could easily have driven the British out of Delhi if an order had been given to counter-attack, but the emperor’s forces were themselves fractured. They did not have a single leader, did not share a strong enough sense of common purpose and, unlike the British, had homes in India to return to. After days of street fighting the rebel soldiers retreated in waves, some to fight on elsewhere, others to their families. Only a small contingent surrounding the man who had no home but this defeated city, the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was left to surrender to the British army. Delhi was under British control by 21 September.34
The conquest of Delhi created an island of British power at the western end of the rebel-controlled zone. It also ended the rebels’ claim to be the heirs of Mughal power. But it did not end the revolt. Awadh remained a rebel stronghold. A force led by Sir Henry Havelock eventually reached Lucknow, but was besieged itself until liberated by an army led by Sir Colin Campbell which arrived on 15 September 1857. Campbell’s army relieved the Europeans stranded at the residency but was then forced to retreat, leaving the rebels in charge of Awadh’s capital city until March the following year. The human cost of these limited gains was extraordinary. A third of the original Lucknow garrison had died, in addition to 256 soldiers within the relieving force losing their lives.
The reconquest of India only began once 40,000 soldiers arrived from Europe to give the British numerical superiority. As it marched up from Calcutta, the British army gained the support of groups of Indians who had fallen out of favour with rebel forces in each place. In Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Bijnor, for example, the predominantly Hindu landholders whom Mahmud Khan had tried to tax quickly rallied to the British standard. Landlords in Awadh worried about the radicalism of the rebel army and thought the British were more likely to protect their property and supported the Company to.
Despite gathering some degree of elite Indian support, the British reconquest was marked by massive, indiscriminate violence. This violence was not a fine-tuned effort by the British to rebuild power. It had the character of a forward panic, caused by the sudden release of fear and the quick appearance of passive targets on which to take out pent-up feelings of anger.35
The desire for vengeance was shared by high officials and junior soldiers, from India to Britain. Exaggerated reports had been transmitted to London about terrible violations and atrocities committed by Indian insurgents, as false tales were circulated about European women ‘turned naked into the streets’ and ‘abandoned to the beastly lusts of the blood-stained rabble’, as one early book put it. There was, missionary Alexander Duff wrote, ‘some species of hallucination respecting the real condition of affairs here’. The passion these stories excited was extreme. ‘I wish I were commander-in-chief in India,’ Charles Dickens wrote, ‘I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.’ Thomas Macaulay was unusually reflective about his state of mind. He noted the British nation’s ‘one terrible cry for revenge’ but was, he felt, ‘half ashamed only half ashamed, for the craving for vengeance which I feel’. ‘I could be very cruel just now if I had power,’ Macaulay wrote. He wondered whether ‘the severity which springs from a great sensitivity to human suffering’ was better than ‘lenity which springs from indifference’. As Macaulay debated the intellectual case for and against brutality as a response to rebellion, British officers and soldiers in India were acting out countless varieties of genuine cruelty.36
Delhi was one of the most brutal sites of revenge. In the days that followed its capture, 200 suspected rebels were hanged from gallows in the centre of the city without trial. The Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar had been promised that his life would be saved if he gave himself up. He was captured, found guilty of treason and then exiled to Burma for the rest of his life. His two sons were summarily shot to prevent them being the subjects of a new wave of rebellion. The entire population of Delhi was evicted, and British officials debated demolishing the whole city. In fact, only the structures inside Delhi’s Mughal Red Fort were knocked down. But the city was ransacked and plunder given official sanction by the appointment of British prize agents whose job was to collect wealth and divide it in exact proportions among the conquering army. A few notables, able to provide clear evidence of continued loyalty to the British through the short-lived Mughal regime, were given protection tickets and left alone. Without that evidence, dispossession was severe.
The merchant Umed Singh claimed he had suffered during the uprising for the crime of being able to read English and remaining a ‘partisan’ of the East India Company. After the reconquest, his house was demolished and land dug up to recover buried gold and jewels to the value of 60,000 rupees. This was a personal catastrophe. ‘The labour of a whole life, the accumulation of many long years of all of us, is thus knocked on the head,’ he said. Already an old man, he was left with nothing to live on in retirement. An Indian observer from nearby Mhow thought the violence of the British reconquest was worse than Nadir Shah’s sacking of Delhi 118 years before. ‘No one ever thought that the capture of Delhie by Englishmen would be attended with more cruelty to the general population, than that by a Nadir,’ wrote Sannat Nana. Trade bounced back, but the dislocation of 1857 permanently killed off Delhi’s cultural life. As their sources of patronage were annihilated, musicians and musical connoisseurs, poets and calligraphers went elsewhere seeking work and Delhi’s 300-year history as the cultural capital of Mughal India came to a quick end. After 1857 Delhi was a very different city.37
British violence was driven by the ‘anguish’ of humiliation, as John Kaye put it, motivated by a visceral desire to undo ‘the degradation of fearing those whom we had taught to fear us’. Kaye thought British brutality dissipated as passions subsided, but violence seems often to have become routine, something to which initially anxious soldiers became desensitized. The 47-year old Scottish Brigadier General James Neill was author of some of the earliest, most brutal violence at Allahabad and Kanpur. Early in the war he hanged six supporters of Maulvi Ahmadullah on thin evidence, nervously writing about carrying out ‘a duty I never contemplated having to perform’. ‘I have’, he went on, ‘done all for the good of my country, to re-establish its prestige and power.’ But on his march upcountry Neill killed indiscriminately, gunning down bystanders on the banks of the Ganges from his steamship and burning entire villages. Like other British soldiers, Neill justified cruelty with cruelty, believing that barbarity could only be stopped by reciprocal acts. As time passed Neill would deliberately offend Indian religious sensibilities. At the site of the Bibighur massacre he forced the men accused of rebellion to clean the blood of Europeans with their tongues before hanging them.38
Amid these cruel, cathartic acts of reconquest, the need to rebuild British authority created a countervailing set of arguments. Governor-General Charles Canning worried that British vengeance would incite further opposition and create news cycle of violence. Canning famously offered clemency to rebels who switched sides in July 1857. ‘There is a rapid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad . . . which it is impossible to contemplate without a feeling of shame for one’s own countrymen,’ he wrote to Queen Victoria. Canning’s approach was dominated by an effort to rein in British passions in the interests of British power. ‘I will not’, he insisted in December, ‘govern in anger.’
These sentiments were vigorously lampooned in the British press. The satirical magazine Punch, for example, published cartoons which stoked up ‘the British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger’. It celebrated the noble deeds of previous conquerors like Robert Clive and urged its readers to ‘Cry Havelock! And let slip the dogs of war’. In response to similar pressure from Europeans in India, Canning himself equivocated, issuing a proclamation in March 1858 which insisted that the property of north Indian landholders would be confiscated. But politicians, if not the rabid sections of the press, came increasingly to see that conciliation was the only way to end the war.
Dominated more by battles between different groups of politicians than public opinion, the British Parliament seems to have been largely immune from the cry for revenge. When the uprising took place, a Whig ministry led by Lord Palmerston was desperately trying to cling to power. In Parliament Palmerston minimized the scale of the crisis. When details of the rebellion began to arrive in July and August 1857, Palmerston’s government denied it was anything other than a minor military mutiny, which a detachment of additional troops would quickly suppress. The government sent reinforcements by slow steamship rather than using quicker vessels equipped with new screw propellers. Amid growing public clamour for retaliation, Whig ministers left London for their country estates in one of the hottest summers in living memory. Palmerston’s government was splitting into rival factions. The only way to keep it together was to minimize the scope for argument.
The Conservative MP Benjamin Disraeli was one of the few politicians to challenge the ministry’s inaction, and it was his approach which shaped the new order created to rule India after 1858. Once rebel strongholds there had been defeated the biggest question was how to encourage India’s elites to submit to British power and what to do with the East India Company. Disraeli’s argument was that the revolt had been sparked by the dispossession of India’s great landed magnates. The British state, he said, needed to stand forth as the protector of the subcontinent’s ruling classes, guaranteeing their security in return for their submission not merely to the East India Company, but to the British Crown. To begin with, this was simply clever rhetoric to humiliate the Palmerston administration. But Disraeli quickly found himself in power, appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative administration led by Lord Derby once the Whig government had collapsed. As a minister Disraeli worked closely with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to create a new political order in India based on the conservative principles he had used to attack Palmerston.
The East India Company was finally abolished as the institution for governing India in October 1858. Day-to-day direction of the Britain’s government in India would be carried out by a new Secretary of State, advised by a council of old imperial bureaucrats. Formal sovereignty lay with the monarch. Officially, Victoria was merely declared India’s Queen. But as historian Miles Taylor shows, in practice she used the title of Empress long before this was formally granted in 1877, particularly when she was standing with the monarchs who used imperial titles on the European continent. The royal couple wanted to create a style of regime in India which emulated the absolutist monarchies with which Prince Albert was familiar in Austria and Germany. Before his death in 1852, the foremost British influence on royal thinking about India was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, a man who always insisted on the need to uphold centralized, authoritarian and military power. Before and during the rebellion Victoria tried to present herself as warrior-queen, harassing and cajoling her ministers to send more troops, trying to impose the forceful authority of a single homogeneous British army. Once the war was over, the Queen was presented as Victoria Beatrix, the peacemaking despot who would heal the wounds of a fractured society once Britain’s absolute authority had been restored.39
The British government’s post-mutiny strategy was to suppress opposition, try and assert absolute authority, then conciliate the Indian elites whose reasons for loyalty critics like Disraeli doubted. Conciliation occurred partly through symbolism, partly through practical shifts in policy. The first move was a proclamation from Queen Victoria in November 1858 asserting that India would be ruled with the same sense of obligation as ‘all our other subjects’ and that the British state had no desire to alter Indian ways of life. Positions in Britain’s imperial bureaucracy would, Victoria promised, be ‘admitted to offices in our service’. The next move was not, of course, a massive opening up of the civil service to Indian talent but the creation of a new Indian order of chivalry. In the early 1860s, the Queen, the Prince and the new Chancellor of the Exchequer created the order of the Star of India which Albert envisaged as a kind of aristocratic Indian parliament in which ancient rulers were represented in the same fashion as the imperial German diet. More pragmatically, landholders in northern India were allowed to return to their landed estates, as long as they submitted to the authority of the new Royal British Raj. The Government of India recognized it could not rule without the acquiescence of a large proportion of the country’s regional magnates. Massive violence had eradicated the idea that large-scale opposition to British power had any chance of success. But the government’s purpose was to ensure the submission of Indian nobles was not as humiliating as it might otherwise have been.
For large numbers of northern India’s landed elites, submission to British authority was the only way to end the chaos and violence which had raged over the previous eighteen months. There does not seem to have been great enthusiasm for British power. In most cases India’s elites simply saw that India’s new Queen and her local officers were on the side of order and peace. An address submitted by landholders to British officers in the war-torn province of Awadh in October 1859 drew no great moral distinction between British and rebel violence. The British as much their opponents had initially been authors of disorder. ‘[I]n one direction’, they narrated,
the pile of the fire of rebellion blazed high and consumed the plain of the citizens. On the other side, the storm of the water of the swords of the troops of the Commander-in-Chief, coming in waves to extinguish the fire, turned the whole kingdom into chaos.
The peace-loving subjects of the province had been squeezed between the destruction of both rival armies, the taluqdars and ordinary people ‘overwhelmed by destruction’ until Victoria’s new government ‘drew the reins of the horse of anger, and spread the carpet of [the] counsel of friendship’. The nobles of Awadh ended their comments with optimism about their future under the British. The British had undoubtedly conquered India. Their ‘house’ was emphatically ‘founded by the sword’. But, at last, with the proclamation declaring that Queen Victoria would rule by seeking the friendship of her subjects, the British seemed to have recognized that ‘the perpetual stability of that house depends on the love of the people’, and that ‘The basis of empire is strengthened by the ties of affection.’ Explicitly placing British rule within the lineage of good Mughal governance, the taluqdars noted that the Emperor Akbar had ‘followed that course’. By returning the estates of landholders, involving talqudars in maintaining local law and order and opening the imperial bureaucracy to Indians, the ‘re-established English power’ acted upon the same foundations.40
With their talk of consolidating conquest by seeking the affection of subjects, the taluqdars spoke a long-standing political language which emphasized the importance of conciliation and balance, sometimes even affection and love, in maintaining the bonds between ruler and ruled. The petition intended to offer counsel to India’s British rule, suggesting that their regime would only thrive if they gave up the arrogant and high-handed ways that had caused the mutiny. Some British officers, Lord Canning among them, tried to follow this advice. But over the next few decades, the same language of love and affection was spoken by Indian interlocutors with greater despair, as negotiation between the imperial bureaucracy and its Indian subjects proved to be impossible.
The great rebellion of 1857 created what historian Francis Hutchins described as ‘an illusion of permanence’, an idea that British power in India could withstand a challenge on any scale.41For many Indians, it killed off the idea that this strange, aloof regime was a temporary anomaly. It forced serious thinking about how practically to cooperate, accommodate or resist it. But one of its most important effects was on the psychology of the British practitioners of empire in India. Eighteen fifty-seven was followed by new efforts to justify the exercise of British power in the Indian subcontinent, by the first serious efforts to seek legitimacy through ‘improvement’. Most of these efforts were directed at a British public, particularly British parliamentarians, who wondered whether the attention, lives and money of their compatriots should be spent governing a society that so obviously did not want British rule. But for the cadre of imperial bureaucrats themselves, many of whom came from families whose Indian careers stretched back three or four generations, 1857 removed the need for any kind of justification at all. For official families, the ‘mutiny’ was simply the most extreme moment in the continual cycle of resistance and conquest, of humiliation and then vindication, which governed Britain’s empire in India. After 1858 British power was asserted, violently and permanently, not to benefit Indians nor to pragmatically advance British interests, but to undo the dishonour of 1857’s tragic defeat.