Indian Mutiny (1857-8). This was a climactic point in British imperial history, encapsulating the best and the worst of the Victorian era. By the time of Queen Victoria's coronation (1837) the East India Company (EIC) had effectively become an agent of the British government and ruled India through three self-contained presidencies, Bombay, Madras, and Bengal, with the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, a company puppet in his powerless court at Delhi.
The mutiny was confined to units of the the Bengal army stationed along the Ganges river valley and near the Grand Trunk Road that ran from Calcutta to Delhi. This consisted of 10 regular and 18 irregular regiments of cavalry, 74 regiments of infantry, and 22 artillery batteries. The Bengal army was the backbone of the Indian army and although not all regiments mutinied, had there been unity of purpose and command the British could scarcely have withstood it. It was above all a traditionalist revolt against a wave of administrative, technological, and social reforms and became focused on the perceived British attack on the Hindu caste system, distilled by the fact that the Bengal army sepoys were largely high-caste Brahmins. Contemporary accounts also stress that the quality of people sent out from Britain had declined, with a greater incidence of racism and contempt for local customs. The chairman of the EIC himself declared that ‘Providence has entrusted the empire of Hindustan to England in order that the banner of Christ should wave from one end of India to the other.’ Past and present governor generals Ellenborough and Canning both warned of the mortal danger to British rule posed by proselytizing officers, but they were not heeded.
The proximate cause was the General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 which required troops to serve overseas, itself a threat to caste, as well as involving voyages by sea where the risk of contamination in confined quarters from those of lower caste by shared messing and sanitary facilities was ever present. The famous greased (in fact waxed) cartridge introduced the same year proved to be the last straw. It was rumoured that they were lubricated with grease from cattle (holy to Hindus) or pigs (unclean to Muslims). On 29 March sepoy Mangal Pandy of the 34th Native Infantry ran amok on the parade ground at Barrackpore and not only he but also a native officer who had failed to stop him were hanged. Thereafter the mutineers were known to the British troops as ‘pandies’.
On Sunday 9 May 1857, after some troopers had previously refused the new load and been drummed out, the 3rd Light Cavalry and 11th and 20th Native Infantry at Meerut (Mirath), near Delhi, opened fire on their officers at church parade. In the absence of prompt action by the local British commander, they massacred British families and then marched on Delhi, where the garrison also mutinied and massacred the Europeans. They proclaimed the bemused and aged Bahadur Shah restored to power, and under pressure from his sons he agreed to serve as their nominal leader. A similar sequence followed at Agra and at Jhansi, where on 8 June 66 British men, women, and children who had held out for five days were butchered after surrender. It was at this time that Nana Sahib, adopted son of the deposed Maratha Peshwa, and Lakshmibai the maharanee of recently annexed Jhansi, came forward to provide some direction to what was otherwise a spontaneous and leaderless explosion of resentment.
Both at the time and since the earlier massacres were overshadowed by what followed at Cawnpore, where Gen Wheeler commanded a small force of soldiers with around 330 women and children in a hastily constructed defensive position outside the city. Having negotiated safe passage with Nana Sahib, Wheeler led his force and dependants down to the river Ganges and into waiting boats. Whether the attack was ordered or the result of the tension of the moment has never been established, but the embarkation was brought under heavy fire. One boat managed to escape but Wheeler and most of the soldiers were killed, leaving only some 200 women and children to be taken prisoner. When news reached the rebels of an approaching relief force under Havelock and Brig James Neill, itself committing systematic atrocities, they massacred the prisoners and threw their dismembered bodies into a well, which became and remains the cause célèbre of the mutiny.
Even before this, the reaction of the badly frightened British had been sanguinary and included a revival of the old Mughal punishment of tying captured mutineers over the mouths of cannon and blowing them apart. After it, something akin to bloodlust became commonplace, especially among irregular units such as Hodson's Horse. September saw the British retake Delhi after an extremely fierce fight in the city streets where no distinction was made between non-combatants and mutineers. Bahadur Shah and his sons were captured, the latter being murdered by the infamous Hodson despite or perhaps because of the payment of a large ransom. Fighting continued throughout the following year with the British and loyal Indian forces under two able commanders, the methodical Sir Colin Campbell and the less well-known but perhaps more brilliant Sir Hugh Rose. The former entered the Victorian pantheon by his relief of Lucknow, where an earlier relief column under Havelock was besieged, overcoming odds of ten to one, while Rose overcame the same numerical disadvantage to defeat the rebels' last important field army under Tantia Tope, their only general of merit, at Betwa on 1 April 1858. Lakshmibai was killed while leading cavalry in June, and Nana Sahib mysteriously disappeared, allegedly to Russia whose agents also played a part in the mutiny.
Lord Canning declared the mutiny officially over on 8 July 1859, but before that the long reign of the EIC was over. The company was dissolved and the British government took over direct administration of India, which was ruled until 1949 by a viceroy. The Indian Mutiny was one of those conflicts, like the American civil war, where so many of the vital threads of history came together and in which so many remarkable people took part that it repays study without offering any prospect of a definitive answer to all the questions it raises. The experience of India was formative not only for the British army but for British society as a whole. It was in many ways far more significant than the legacy of empire in the subcontinent itself where, as the mutiny revealed, deep-seated cultural forces retained an authority that was never more than subdued by the latest in a long series of conquerors.
Bibliography
- Hibbert, C., The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (London, 1978)
— Hugh Bicheno
