Indian Rebellion of 1857

In 1857 and 1858 a great uprising shook British rule in India. It began as a mutiny of Indian soldiers (sepoys) in the army of the East India Company, a British trading company that had become the ruler of most of South Asia. It quickly grew into a wider revolt in which princes, landholders, religious leaders, peasants and townspeople took up arms across much of northern and central India.

For a time the rebels controlled Delhi, the old Mughal capital, and large parts of the Ganges plain. The British and their Indian allies fought back with reinforcements from Britain and loyal troops, recapturing Delhi in September 1857, Lucknow in March 1858 and the rebel strongholds of central India by mid-1858.

The uprising ended the rule of the East India Company. In 1858 the British Parliament transferred the government of India to the Crown, beginning the period known as the British Raj, which lasted until 1947. The last Mughal emperor was exiled, ending a dynasty that had ruled in India since 1526.

What to call the event is still debated. British writers long called it the “Indian Mutiny”, emphasizing the soldiers’ disobedience. Many Indians call it the First War of Independence, emphasizing resistance to foreign rule. Many historians use “rebellion” or “revolt” to cover both the military and civilian sides without assuming it was a single national movement.

The East India Company began as a trading company, but after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 it became a territorial power, first in Bengal and then across the subcontinent. By the 1850s it ruled directly or through dependent princes almost all of South Asia, collecting land revenue and maintaining large armies made up mostly of Indian soldiers.

Annexation angered many rulers. Under Governor-General Lord Dalhousie (1848–1856), the Company used the “doctrine of lapse” to take over states whose rulers died without a natural male heir, refusing to recognize adopted sons, as with Jhansi in 1853 and Nagpur in 1854. In February 1856 it annexed the large kingdom of Awadh (Oudh), claiming misgovernment. Nana Sahib, adopted son of the last Maratha Peshwa, was refused his father’s pension. These decisions threatened the status of princely families and their followers.

Rural society was under strain too. New land-revenue settlements, especially in Awadh after 1856, removed many large landholders (taluqdars) from their estates, and heavy revenue demands pushed some peasants into debt. Many sepoys of the Bengal Army came from high-caste families in Awadh and Bihar, so grievances in the villages reached the army directly.

Soldiers had their own complaints: limited chances of promotion, reductions in allowances, and the General Service Enlistment Act of 1856, which required new recruits to serve overseas, something many high-caste Hindus believed would break caste rules. Missionary activity, reforms such as the legalization of widow remarriage (1856) and new Western-style institutions fed a fear that the British intended to undermine Indian religions and convert people to Christianity. The rumour about greased cartridges brought these fears to a head.

The new Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle used paper cartridges that had to be torn open, traditionally with the teeth, before loading. Early in 1857 a rumour spread through the Bengal Army that the grease on the cartridges contained beef or pork fat. For Hindus the cow is sacred, and for Muslims pork is forbidden, so biting the cartridge seemed to threaten both faiths. The authorities changed the loading drill and allowed soldiers to grease cartridges themselves, but trust had already broken down. At the same time, mysterious chapatis (flat breads) were being passed from village to village in northern India, a phenomenon that alarmed British officials and whose meaning remains unclear.

In March 1857 at Barrackpore near Calcutta, the sepoy Mangal Pandey attacked his officers and was hanged. At Meerut, near Delhi, 85 troopers of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry who refused the cartridges were sentenced to long prison terms and publicly shackled on 9 May. The next evening, 10 May, their comrades rose, freed them, killed British officers and a number of civilians, and rode through the night to Delhi.

On 11 May the rebels entered Delhi, where regiments stationed in the city joined them. Many Europeans and Indian Christians in the city were killed. The sepoys went to the Red Fort and asked the 82-year-old Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, a poet whose real power extended little beyond his palace, to lead them. He reluctantly agreed. By proclaiming the Mughal emperor, the rebels gave their cause a legitimacy that many Indians, Hindu and Muslim alike, recognized.

Over the following weeks, regiment after regiment of the Bengal Army mutinied across the Ganges plain and central India. Of the 74 regular Bengal infantry regiments, the majority mutinied or were disarmed. In many places civil rebellion followed: local rulers reclaimed power, villagers attacked moneylenders and courthouses, and government records were destroyed.

Delhi (May–September 1857). A British force camped on the Ridge north of Delhi from June, too weak at first to attack. Inside the city the rebel administration, supported by the emperor’s court and a council of soldiers, struggled with shortages of money and food, and with tensions between sepoys, courtiers and townspeople. Reinforced by troops from the Punjab, including Sikh and Punjabi units, the British stormed Delhi on 14 September and took it after a week of street fighting. The city was looted, many inhabitants were killed or driven out, and the British officer William Hodson shot three Mughal princes after they had surrendered.

Kanpur (June–July 1857). At Kanpur (Cawnpore), a British garrison and many civilians under General Hugh Wheeler were besieged from 5 June. On 25 June they accepted Nana Sahib’s offer of safe passage by river to Allahabad, but on 27 June at Satichaura Ghat firing broke out as they boarded the boats, and most of the men were killed. About 200 surviving women and children were held in a house called the Bibighar and were killed on 15 July as a British relief force approached. Whether Nana Sahib ordered these killings is still debated. The Bibighar massacre caused outrage in Britain, and British troops under Brigadier James Neill and others carried out savage reprisals, hanging suspects without trial.

Lucknow (June 1857–March 1858). In Lucknow, capital of Awadh, the British and loyal Indian troops, with many civilians, held out in the fortified Residency compound from the end of June. Their commander Sir Henry Lawrence was killed early in the siege. A relief force under Henry Havelock and James Outram broke in on 25 September but was itself besieged; Sir Colin Campbell relieved the garrison in November and evacuated it. Awadh became the centre of the most widespread popular revolt, led by Begum Hazrat Mahal on behalf of her young son, by taluqdars and by the religious leader Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah. Campbell recaptured Lucknow in March 1858, but guerrilla resistance continued in the countryside.

Central India and the end (1858–1859). Sir Hugh Rose’s Central India Field Force stormed Jhansi in April 1858. Rani Lakshmibai escaped, joined Tantia Tope, and with him seized Gwalior; she was killed in battle near Gwalior in June 1858. In Bihar the aged landholder Kunwar Singh fought until his death in April 1858. Tantia Tope led a long guerrilla campaign until he was betrayed, captured and hanged in April 1859. Nana Sahib disappeared, probably into Nepal. On 1 November 1858 Queen Victoria’s proclamation offered amnesty to most rebels, and peace was officially declared on 8 July 1859.

The rebels were diverse. At their core were the mutinous regiments of the Bengal Army, trained soldiers with arms and organization. Alongside them fought princes and their retainers, such as the Rani of Jhansi and Nana Sahib; taluqdars and landholders of Awadh; religious leaders who called for holy war; and villagers and townspeople with their own local grievances. Both Hindus and Muslims took part, and rebel proclamations often appealed to both communities together.

The rebels never formed a single command. Different centres, Delhi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Jhansi, pursued their own aims, and many leaders sought above all to restore their own lost positions. Some historians see this as a weakness; others argue that it reflects the local roots of the revolt and warn against judging it by the standards of a modern nationalist movement.

The British side was also largely Indian. The armies of the Madras and Bombay Presidencies stayed mostly loyal. Newly recruited Sikh, Punjabi and Pathan soldiers from the recently conquered Punjab, where many had little sympathy for a restored Mughal empire or for the Bengal sepoys who had helped conquer them, played a decisive role at Delhi. Gurkha regiments and troops sent by Jung Bahadur Rana of Nepal fought in Awadh. Major princely states such as Hyderabad and Kashmir stayed loyal, and the ruler of Gwalior sided with the British even though his army joined the rebels.

British reinforcements arrived from Britain, from the Crimea and from troops originally destined for China. Control of the telegraph, of the rivers and roads, and of the revenue of the provinces that remained quiet gave the British a decisive advantage over a rebellion concentrated in one region.

The war was marked by atrocities on both sides. Rebels killed British officers, their families, and Indian Christians and others associated with the Company in places such as Meerut, Delhi, Jhansi and Kanpur. These killings, especially of women and children at Kanpur, became the centre of the British public’s view of the conflict. Reports of mass rape of British women circulated widely in Britain; later investigations found little evidence to support them, but they fuelled demands for vengeance.

British retribution was on a much larger scale. Columns marching up the Ganges hanged villagers suspected of sympathy with the rebels, burned villages, and executed captured sepoys by hanging or by blowing them from the mouths of cannons. Delhi’s population was expelled and many of its buildings destroyed; Muslims in particular were treated as collectively guilty. The Governor-General, Lord Canning, who tried to restrain indiscriminate punishment, was mocked in Britain as “Clemency Canning”.

About 6,000 Britons, soldiers and civilians, died. Indian deaths were far higher but were never counted. A widely cited estimate puts them at around 800,000 or more, including deaths from famine and epidemics caused by the war; some writers have proposed much higher figures, which other historians regard as unsupported. Whatever the precise number, most victims were Indian soldiers and civilians.

The Government of India Act of August 1858 abolished the East India Company’s rule and transferred its powers to the Crown. A Secretary of State for India in London, advised by a Council of India, took charge, and the Governor-General also became Viceroy. Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1 November 1858 promised religious toleration, equal treatment under the law, respect for the rights and dignity of the princes, and no further annexation of their territories; in effect, the doctrine of lapse was abandoned.

Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried by a British military commission in 1858, convicted and exiled to Rangoon in Burma, where he died in 1862. With him the Mughal dynasty came to an end. His poetry of loss has become part of the memory of the fall of Delhi.

The army was reorganized. The proportion of British to Indian soldiers was raised, artillery was placed largely in British hands, and recruitment shifted toward groups the British now called “martial races”, especially Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Pathans and Gurkhas, rather than the high-caste soldiers of the old Bengal Army. The British also changed their policy toward Indian society: they sought alliances with princes and large landlords, such as the taluqdars of Awadh, and became more cautious about social reform.

In the long term, relations between rulers and ruled became more distant and more openly racial, as the British lived more separately and many viewed Indians with suspicion. Among Indians, the reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan wrote The Causes of the Indian Revolt (1859), arguing that the British had failed to understand their subjects, and later founded the college at Aligarh. The memory of 1857 became a powerful resource for later nationalist movements.

Britain. Victorian Britain remembered the “Indian Mutiny” as a story of treachery and heroic endurance: the defence of Lucknow, the relief columns, the victims of Kanpur. Memorials, paintings, poems and many novels spread this story. At Kanpur a marble angel by Carlo Marochetti was placed over the Bibighar well; after Indian independence it was moved to the garden of a nearby church. The British flag at the Lucknow Residency was flown continuously as a commemoration until 1947. This narrative largely left out British atrocities and Indian motives.

Indian nationalism. In 1909 V. D. Savarkar published The Indian War of Independence of 1857, presenting the revolt as a planned national war for freedom; the British banned the book. Marx and Engels had earlier written newspaper articles on the revolt for the New-York Daily Tribune, later collected in the Soviet Union as The First Indian War of Independence. Rani Lakshmibai became a symbol of courage and patriotism, celebrated in Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s popular Hindi poem “Jhansi ki Rani”, and in 1943 Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army named its women’s regiment after her.

Independent India. For the centenary in 1957, the Government of India commissioned an official history by S. N. Sen, which treated 1857 as more than a mutiny but cautioned against seeing it as a fully national war. The historian R. C. Majumdar argued, in the same year, that it was neither a first war of independence nor purely a mutiny. The 150th anniversary in 2007 was celebrated as a national event in India. In Pakistan, 1857 is also remembered as a war of independence, with emphasis on Muslim participation and suffering; British tendencies to blame Muslims for the revolt shaped later Muslim politics in South Asia.

Contested terms. Each name for the event carries a view: “Mutiny” stresses military disobedience and implies British legitimacy; “First War of Independence” reads later nationalism back into 1857; “Rebellion”, “Revolt” or “Uprising” try to describe its breadth without a single interpretation. The debate over naming is itself part of the history of how 1857 has been remembered.

British sources. Official correspondence, military dispatches, parliamentary papers and the testimony gathered in inquiries are abundant. So are letters, diaries and memoirs of officers, soldiers and civilians, especially survivors of Lucknow. These sources are rich but one-sided, and many were written in the heat of fear and anger. The multi-volume histories by John Kaye and G. B. Malleson (1864–1880) shaped Victorian understanding for generations.

Indian sources. Indian voices are harder to recover because rebels’ papers were often destroyed and survivors had reason to stay silent. Important exceptions include the “Mutiny Papers”, thousands of documents from the rebel administration in Delhi preserved in the National Archives of India, which William Dalrymple used extensively in The Last Mughal (2006); rebel proclamations; the record of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s trial; the poet Ghalib’s Persian diary of the siege of Delhi, Dastanbuy, written cautiously for a British readership; and Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s The Causes of the Indian Revolt.

Historiography. Twentieth-century scholars moved from asking whether 1857 was a mutiny or a national war to asking who rebelled and why. Eric Stokes, in The Peasant Armed (published posthumously in 1986), studied regional variations in rural participation. Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Awadh in Revolt (1984) showed how taluqdars and peasants in Awadh united against the Company. Scholars of the Subaltern Studies school, beginning with Ranajit Guha, emphasized the autonomous politics of peasants. More recent work, such as Kim Wagner’s The Great Fear of 1857 (2010), examines rumour and panic, while other studies look at regions beyond the main centres of fighting.

Open questions. Historians still debate how far the revolt was planned, the role of religion versus material grievances, how far it can be called national, who was responsible for the Kanpur massacres, and how many Indians died. Because both British and nationalist narratives have been so influential, much recent research aims to recover the experiences of ordinary soldiers, villagers and women on all sides.