Indian National Movement: Rise of the Sepoy Rebellion

Indian National Movement
Indian (John Com pany’s) Arm y
For more than 150 years the Honorable East India Company
(John Company) had raised its own armed forces. The three
administrative areas of India, the Presidencies of Bombay,
Madras and Bengal each maintained their own army with its
own commander-in-chief. The C in C Bengal was regarded as
the senior officer of the three. These armies were paid for
entirely out of the Company’s Indian revenues and together
were larger than the British Army itself. All the officers were
British and trained at the Company’s military academy in
England. There were a few regiments of European infantry but
the vast majority of the Company’s soldiers were native troops.
These sepoys, as they were called, were mostly high caste
Hindus and a great many of them, especially in the Bengal army,
came from Oudh in what is now Uttar Pradesh state in
northern India. They were organised in numbered regiments
and drilled British style. The sepoy regiments were officered by
Europeans, with a stiffening of European NCO’s, and were
treated with great affection and trust by their regimental
commanders.
Attached to this formidable force were Queen’s regiments,
actual units of the British Army lent by the Crown to the East
India Company. Though relations between the two parts of the
army in India were polite, they were never cordial. Company
officers thought Queen’s officers to be snobbish and in return
the Queen’s regiments tended to view their colleagues in the
Company army as rather second -rate kind of people. That
most of the best appointments, especially the post of CinC
Bengal, were reserved for Queen’s officers was a source of never
ending irritation to Company officers and men.
In 1857 the total number of soldiers in India was 34,000
Europeans of all ranks and 257,000 sepoys.
The Causes
There had been a British presence in India for more than 200
years before the rising of 1857 took place. The British had
started as merchant venturers and their initial toeholds on the
sub-continent had been perilously small. Over the years they
had expanded, building larger trading stations and forts to
protect them. Eventually, to ensure the stability that an
uninterrupted flow of trade required, they had raised forces of
their own and become an active power in the politics of 18th
century India. Clive, with his great victory at Plassey, had ended
French pretensions to an Indian empire and firmly established
the British as one of the arbiters of India’s fate. A generation
later, Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) and his
galloping guns had crushed the power of the Peshwas and
Britain no longer had any serious rivals to its Indian
paramountacy. Sometimes by design, sometimes almost by
accident the area controlled by the British increased, until by
1857 everything from the borders of Afghanistan in the west to
the jungles of Burma in the east, from the Himalayas of Nepal
to the beaches of Ceylon were, if not directly under the
Company’s rule, very definitely in its pocket.
Somewhere along the way the Britsh seemed to lose touch with

their Indian subjects. Some blamed the advent of steamships
that so reduced the journey times from Britain to India that it
was now possible for officers to go home on leave and for
wives and children to come out and live with their menfolk.
Before officers had spent all their time with their sepoys or with
Indian mistresses; now a re-creation of English domestic bliss
awaited them when their hours of duty were over. The
closeness of the British and the Indians so apparent in the early
days of the British presence started to fade and by 1857 it was a
gulf. The arrival of missionaries had also caused great unease
among the Indians. Evangelical Christians had little understanding
of, or respect for, India’s ancient faiths and the attitude
of scrupulous non-interference in religious affairs that had
characterised British rule in the 18th century was forgotten by a
native populace that came to believe the British wished to
convert them. On the political stage, the annexation of the state
of Oudh by Lord Dalhousie and the doctrine of lapse, which
decreed that the lands of any Indian ruler dying without a male
heir would be forfeit to the Company, struck directly at the heart
of India’s traditional ways of life and were widely condemned
and hated throughout the sub-continent.
Against this backdrop of Indian unease muttered rumours and
tales of old prophecies began to circulate. There was talk of
magical chappattis (the unleavened bread of India) being
secretly passed from regiment to regiment on the stations of
the Grand Trunk Road, which led from Calcutta to Peshawar.
People whispered of the old prophecy which stated that 100
years after the battle of Plassey, the rule of ‘John Company’
would end. Plassey had been in 1757 and in the hundredth year
after the battle it seemed everyone was awaiting a spark. When it
came, it came in the shape of a new cartridge.
The projectile for the new Enfield rifle was part of a selfcontained
paper cartridge that contained both ball and powder
charge. It required only the end to be bitten off and the
cartridge then rammed down the muzzle of the weapon. To
facilitate this process the cartridge was heavily greased - with
animal fat. Sepoys heard and quickly passed on the rumour that
the grease was a mixture of cow (sacred to Hindus) and pig
(abhorrent to Moslems) fat. Biting such a cartridge would break
the caste of the Hindu sepoys and defile the Moslems. The
UNIT I
2
INDIAN GOVERNM ENT AND POLITICS
British realised their mistake and tried to have the sepoys make
up their own grease from beeswax or vegetable oils, but in the
atmosphere of distrust that prevailed in 1857 the damage had
been done. The stage was set for a great tragedy to unfold.
The Spark
It began at Barrackpore at the end of March 1857. Mangel
Pande, a young sepoy of the 34th Native Infantry, shot at his
sergeant major on the parade ground. When the British
adjutant rode over, Pande shot the horse out from under him
and as the officer tried to extricate himself Pande severely
wounded him with a sword. Drawn by the commotion the
commanding officer of the station, General Hearshey, galloped
to the scene accompanied by his two sons. The sepoy panicked

and instead of shooting at the general, turned his rifle on
himself and pulled the trigger. He survived this suicide attempt
and was later court-martialled and hanged. As a collective
punishment the 34th Native Infantry was disbanded; its
shameful fate being publicly proclaimed at every military station
in British India. Pande achieved a certain kind of immortality in
that his name entered British military slang as the general
nickname for a mutineer and eventually a derogatory term for
any Indian. Unfortunately for the British, the 34th Native
Infantry were considered by the majority of sepoys to have been
unjustly treated and soon came to be regarded as quasi-martyrs.
Meerut
The next act in the tragedy followed only a few weeks later when
85 troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry in Meerut refused orders to
handle the new cartridges. They were arrested, court-martialled
and sentenced to 10 years hard labour each. At an appalling
ceremony in front of the whole Meerut garrison, they were
publicly humiliated: their uniforms were stripped from them;
they were shackled with leg and arm irons and led off to
imprisonment. The following day was a Sunday and as Britons
prepared for church parade, Meerut exploded. Enraged sepoys
broke open the town gaol and released their comrades. Then
accompanied by a mob from the bazaar poured into the
cantonment where the Europeans lived and murdered any
Europeans or Indian Christians they could find. Whole
families, men, women, children and servants, were slaughtered.
Some sepoys tried to protect their officers but they were in the
minority. The cantonment was put to the torch and after a few
hours of mayhem the sepoys, fearing retaliation as the British
recovered and organized the European forces, fled down the
main road to Delhi and the Palace of Bahadur Shah, the last of
the Moghuls.
The Indian M utiny
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the British had come
to believe they were a chosen race; chosen to distribute the
benefits of western civilization to the backward areas of the
globe. That the inhabitants of such areas often didn’t want
these benefits and certainly not the accompanying British
control of their lives was immaterial to Britain’s sense of a
mission. Native opposition frequently required military force to
be brought against it and few years passed without the British
Army being involved, somewhere in the empire, in a continual
series of border skirmishes and punitive expeditions.
Of course the British had been involved in European wars
much more expensive in blood and treasure than any that ever
occurred in the overseas possessions, but they didn’t seem to
catch the imagination of the British public in the same way that
colonial conflicts did. In 1857, the Indian Mutiny broke out and
it rapidly became the greatest of all the imperial wars. It was
followed avidly by the British public and as the myths of the
Mutiny grew it came to be seen almost as a latter-day British
Iliad with gentleman-warriors of homeric proportions manfully
defending the position, dignity and God-given duty of their
race.
It was even called the ‘epic of the Race’ by the historian Sir
Charles Crostwaithe and though this may sound ridiculous to

the modern ear it was nothing more than a reflection of the
confidence, indeed arrogance, with which the British of
Victoria’s 20th year on the throne viewed the world in general
and their empire in particular. It also reflected the shock and
horror that the Mutiny had provoked in Britain and the pride
that followed on the heels of Britain’s ultimate victory; one
seemingly achieved against great odds. Though the Mutiny
dragged on for almost two years it was effectively fought and
won in a six-month whirlwind of murder, siege, atrocity, forced
marches, heroism, savagery and brutality. Women and children
were butchered by both sides. Great cities were sacked and the
British armies which swept across the north of India to relieve
their besieged comrades and avenge their murdered compatriots
were perhaps the most enraged and cruelest troops ever to have
been put in the field by the government and people of Britain.
The Devil’s Wind
In the winter of 1857 and the first six months of 1858, the
British slowly retook everything they had lost. With the relief
of Lucknow, there were no large pockets of British lives to be
saved and no serious possibility of British defeat. Massively
reinforced from Britain, the armies which spread out over the
north of India were vengeful and cruel, with a distinct taste for
looting. They saw themselves as dispensers of divine justice and
given the frenzy of murder that had accompanied the start of
the mutiny felt their cruelties to be simply repayment in kind.
As the myths of the mutiny grew, every dead British child
became a slaughtered angel, every woman a violated innocent,
every sepoy a black-faced, blood-crazed savage. There was little
room for mercy in the hearts of the British troops and those,
such as the Governor Lord Canning, who spoke of restraint,
were derided by their countrymen. Canning became known
contemptuously as ‘clemency Canning’. The Times newspaper
called for the execution of every mutineer in India and in a
debate at the Oxford Union, one speaker roused his audience by
declaring,” When every gibbet is red with blood, when the
ground in front of every cannon is strewn with rags and flesh
and shattered bone, then talk of mercy. Then you may find
some to listen.” Lord Palmerston articulated the feelings of
most Britons when he described the atrocities committed by the
mutineers as acts “ such as to be imagined and perpetrated only
by demons sallying forth from the lowest depths of hell” .
In the early months of the British recovery, few sepoys were left
alive after their positions were overrun. The British soldiers
seemed to have made a collective decision not to take prisoners
and most actions ended with a frenzied use of the bayonet. On
3
the line of march whole villages were sometimes hanged for
some real or imagined sympathy for the mutineers. Looting
was endemic and neither the sanctity of holy places nor the rank
of Indian aristocrats could prevent the wholesale theft of their
possessions. Many a British family saw its fortune made during
the pacification of northern India. Later, when prisoners started
to be taken and trials held, those convicted of mutiny were
lashed to the muzzles of cannon and had a roundshot fired
through their body. It was a particularly cruel punishment with

a religious dimension in that by blowing the body to pieces the
victim lost all hope of entering paradise.
For more than a year the people of northern India trembled
with fear as the British sated their thirst for revenge. The
Indians called it ‘the Devil’s Wind’.
And finally, in one of those ironical twists that the forces of
history seem to revel in, the prophecy that had said, “ a hundred
years after the Battle of Plassey the rule of John Company will
end” actually came true. When the British desire for punishment
and revenge was spent, they started to think about how
future mutinies could be prevented. They realised that it was
inappropriate for a land the size of India to be governed by a
private company and instead introduced direct rule through the
India Office, a British department of state. A hundred years
after Plassey the rule of the Honourable East India Company
finally did come to an end.
India’s First War of Independence, termed Sepoy Riots by the
British was an attempt to unite India against the invading
British and to restore power to the Mogul emperor Bahadur
Shah. The resistance disintegrated primarily due to lack of
leadership and unity on the part of Indians, as also to cruel
suppression by the British Army. It was a remarkable event in
Indian history and marked the end of the Mogul empire and
sealed India’s fate as a British colony for the next 100 years.
Conditions
Indians working for the British Army, due to their deep
traditions and faith faced numerous social barriers. In 1856 it
was rumored that additional troops were to be recruited for
service in Burma, where they could not follow all their religious
rules, and that Christian missionary efforts among the troops
were to receive official encouragement. The Zamindars (land
owners) of the time wanted to protect their interests in the
wake of land reforms by the British and funded anti-English
activities.
The insurrection was triggered when the British introduced new
rifle cartridges rumored to be greased with oil made from the fat
of animals. The fat of sacred cows was taboo to Hindus while
Muslims were repelled by pig fat.
Violence
The violence started on May 10, 1857 in Meerut, when Mangal
Pandey, a soldier in the Army shot his commander for forcing
the Indian troops to use the controversial rifles. Indians
constituted 96% of the 300,000 British Army and the violence
against British quickly spread (Hence the name Sepoy Mutiny).
The local chiefs encouraged scattered revolts in hopes of
regaining their lost privileges.
Siege of Delhi
Bahadur Shah II, pensioned descendant of the Mogul dynasty,
was popularly acclaimed emperor. On June 8 a British relief
force defeated an army of mutineers at Badli Sari and took up a
position on the famous ridge, overlooking the city of Delhi.
Nominally the besieging force, they were themselves besieged by
the mutineers, who made a daring attempt to intercept their
train. The arrival of more British reinforcements finally led to
the defeat of the mutineers by John Nicholson, commander of
the relief force. After six days of street fighting, Delhi was

recaptured. This action was the turning point in the campaign
and is known as Siege of Delhi. Bahadur Shah was captured
and was exiled to Burma.
British Take Control
In spite of the loyalty of the Sikh troops, conquered only eight
years before, and of the Gurkhas, the British commander, Sir
Colin Campbell, had a difficult task. In addition to quelling the
disturbance, he also had to protect the Ganges Valley and all of
Hindustan against possible attacks from central India, to the
south. Forces were dispatched from Madras and Bombay.
However, the revolt had quickly spread to Kanpur and
Lucknow. Kanpur, a city controlled by British on the Ganges
250 miles southeast of Delhi, surrendered to the Indian
soldiers on June 28, 1857, and was the scene of a massacre
before it was recaptured by the British on July 16. Lucknow, 45
miles to the northeast, had been immediately besieged by the
mutineers and was relieved by Henry Havelock’s troops on
September 25, five days after the final reoccupation of Delhi, the
other chief center of the mutiny. However, Havelock’s forces,
even when joined by those of James Outram, were not strong
enough to disarm and remove the enemy garrison, and they
had to be relieved on November 16 by troops under Colin
Campbell. The civilians of Lucknow were evacuated, but not
until the siege of Mar. 9-16, 1858, had enough British troops
massed to defeat the rebel army.
The final stage of the mutiny took place in central India, which
was aroused by a roving band of rebels under the Maratha
General Tatya Tope. After his capture and execution in April
1859, the leaderless Indians were soon pacified.
Why It Failed
• Native Indian states, influenced by the example of powerful
Hyderabad, did not join the rebels
• Sikh soldiers of the Punjab area remained loyal to the British
throughout. The Sikhs were a strong, well-trained army, who
the British had conquered using Indian soldiers.
• The aging Bahadur Shah was neither a brave general, nor an
astute leader of the people
Sum m ary
This lesson would make the students understand the causes
and the conditions, which paved the way for such a mutiny.
4
Topics Covered
Freedom Struggle- Events between 1857-1885,famines and
peasant uprisings-Ilbert Bill- new leadership- Founding of
Indian National Congress-Principles and Methods- Unfulfilled
demands-Growing disillusion ment-Emergence of Militant
Nationalist Leadership – Swadeshi and Boycott- Congress splitin1907-
Morley –minto Reforms –Rise of terrorist and
revolutionary movements-Montague Chemford reforms-
Jallianwala Bagh –Gandhism-N.C.O movement –Formation of
Swaraj party- Communal tensions- Civil Disobedience movement-
Gandhi Irwin Pact.
The main object of this lesson is to portray the social background
and the social-genetic causes of the rise of Indian
Nationalism.

The Freedom Struggle
The British Empire contained within itself the seeds of its own
destruction. The British constructed a vast railway network
across the entire land in order to facilitate the transport of raw
materials to the ports for export. This gave intangible form to
the idea of Indian unity by physically bringing all the peoples of
the subcontinent within easy reach of each other.
Since it was impossible for a small handful of foreigners to
administer such a vast country, they set out to create a local elite
to help them in this task; to this end they set up a system of
education that familiarised the local intelligentsia with the
intellectual and social values of the West. Ideas of democracy,
individual freedom and equality were the antithesis of the
empire and led to the genesis of the freedom movement
among thinkers like Raja Rammohan Roy, Bankim Chandra and
Vidyasagar. With the failure of the 1857 mutiny, the leadership
of the freedom movement passed into the hands of this class
and crystallised in the formation of the Indian National
Congress in 1885. The binding psychological concept of
National Unity was also forged in the fire of the struggle
against a common foreign oppressor.
At the turn of the century, the freedom movement reached out
to the common unlettered man through the launching of the
Swadeshi movement by leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak
and Aurobindo Ghose. But the full mobilisation of the masses
into an invincible force only occured with the apperance on the
scene of one of the most remarkable and charismatic leaders of
the twentieth century, perhaps in history.
Principal Events betw een 1857 and 1885
Before tracing the rise of the Indian National Congress which
was founded in 1885 by the liberal Indian intelligentsia
supported by a section of the commercial bourgeoisie and
which signalized the first real growth of the Indian national
movement on an all-India basis, we will refer to some of the
principal events between 1857 and 1885.
The social forces of the old society were vanquished in their
final attempt at rehabilitating their former power and status in
1857. They were too exhausted and weakened to embark upon
a fresh enterprise in future. The new social forces namely the
intelligentsia and the commercial bourgeoisie, which were to be
the pioneers of the first organized nationalist movement, had
still not matured to begin their historic task. It was only after
1870 that, due to the combination of a number of factors, the
country was again permeated with serious political ferment and
the new social forces acquired appreciable political consciousness
and economic and numerial strength and began to be politically
articulate. The new development resulted in the formation of
the Indian National Congress in 1885.
The period between 1857 and 1870, however, witnessed two
antiBritish movements which had as their declared aim the
armed, overthrow of the British government. The first was the
movement of the Wababis, a militant Muslim sect, whose
adherents had participated in the revolt of 1857 and who, after
it was suppressed, continued their activities for some years. The
other was that of a group of Marathas who, undaunted by the
defeat of 1857, carried on subsequently, conspirational activity

for the same aim. By 1871, the Wahabi movement, after a series
of armed collisions, was successfully suppressed by the
government. The anti-British conspirational Maratha centre at
Poona
Rise of Political Movements I 295 was unearthed in 1863 and
suppressed by the government. These two movements were the
last remnants of the revolt.
Disastrous Famines and Peasant Uprisings
It was, however, after 1870 that large-scale political and economic
discontent developed, culminating in the rise of the
premier political organization of the Indian nation, the Indian
National Congress established in 1885. In the post-Mutiny
period, the discontent of the agrarian population began to
grow steadily due to their progressive impoverishment under
the British rule. The increasing burden of land revenue and
rents was tensely felt by the peasant population. The crippling
of handicraft and artisan industries had reached serious
dimensions by 1870 resulting in a disastrous overpressure on
agriculture. The agricultural depression of 1870 seriously
affected the farmers and led to an alarming growth of indebtedness
among them. A number of disastrous famines broke out
between 1867 and 1880. The famine of 1877 was exceptionally
severe affecting an area of “ 200,000 square miles and population
of thirty-six millions” , in Bombay, Madras and other parts of
the country.
“ The group of famines which occurred between 1865 and 1880
are important, not only for the suffering and loss of life
involved, but because they happened at a transitional period
when India was gradually changing on to a cash basis ...
References-
1. Public Policy and politics in India By Kuldeep Mathur
2. Indian Political Trials By A.C. Noorani.
3. Basu, Durga Das. The Laws of the Press in India(1962) Asia Publishing House, Bombay

Indian National Movement: Rise of the Sepoy Rebellion

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Indian National Movement: Rise of the Sepoy Rebellion