Chapter 1: History: The First War of Independence, 1857
In September 1857, after months of fighting, British troops took back the city of Delhi. In the days that followed, officers moved through the Red Fort and the lanes around it, collecting everything written that they could find. What they carried away was not treasure. It was paper — order books, petitions, receipts, complaints and chits scribbled by clerks. These were the ordinary working records of a city that had, for a few months, been governed by the rebels. The bundles were tied, listed and stored. They now sit in the National Archives of India in New Delhi, and historians call them the Mutiny Papers. Most are in Persian and Urdu, written in a fast, sloping hand that takes training to read. They are not what you might expect. Few of them are speeches or declarations. Most are small and practical. Someone asks to be paid for grain. A neighbourhood complains that its horses have been taken. A watchman reports a theft. An officer waits for orders that do not come. Fig. 1.0-1 shows what one such bundle looks like today. A photograph can prove that the record survived; it cannot tell you what any single sheet says, and it cannot show you the people who never got their complaint written down at all. The British wrote their own account of 1857 quickly, and in it the trouble starts with a rumour about rifle cartridges. These papers suggest something slower — about land, pay, prices and pensions lost long before 1857.
Diagram
Fig. 1.0-1 Caption: Records seized in Delhi in 1857 are preserved today in the National Archives of India. Brief: Photograph or careful drawing of a tied bundle of nineteenth-century papers, edges browned and uneven, covered in flowing Persian-Urdu script; label the bundle, the cloth tie and the archival tag. Emphasise that these are working papers, not printed books.
1.1 The Company’s Rule On The Eve Of 1857
A Trading Company That Ruled
The English East India Company was founded in 1600 to trade with the East. It came for pepper, cotton cloth, indigo and silk, not for territory.
To store and guard its goods, the Company built fortified trading posts called factories, at Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. Each factory needed guards. The guards grew into garrisons, and the garrisons grew into armies.
The turning point came in June 1757 at the Battle of Plassey, in Bengal. The Company’s forces defeated the Nawab of Bengal, and within a few years the Company controlled the revenues of one of the richest provinces in Asia. A firm that had once bargained over the price of cloth was now collecting land tax from millions of cultivators.
The hundred years between Plassey and 1857 were years of steady expansion. By 1857 the Company governed the greater part of the subcontinent directly, and influenced most of the rest.
The Army That Made It Possible
The Company could not have done this with British troops alone. Its power rested on the sepoy — an Indian soldier serving in a European-style regiment, trained, uniformed and paid by the Company.
Indian soldiers outnumbered European troops in India several times over. The officers, however, were British, and the highest commands were closed to Indians. British rule in India was therefore held up by Indian shoulders, a fact the Company itself understood very well.
An Empire Of Two Kinds
British India in 1857 was not one uniform territory. Some regions the Company had taken over completely; here annexation means the formal takeover of a territory, after which it is governed directly as part of the Company’s dominions.
Elsewhere the Company left an Indian ruler on his throne but took control of his defence and foreign relations. Such a state is called a princely state — a state ruled by an Indian prince who kept his throne and his internal administration, but accepted British supremacy and could not act independently outside his own borders.
Map 1.1 shows how the two kinds of territory lay side by side in 1857.
Map
Map 1.1 Caption: British India and the princely states in 1857, before the transfer of power to the Crown. Brief: Historical map of the subcontinent as it stood in 1857. Shade territory under direct Company administration in one tone and the princely states in another; label Bengal, Awadh, Punjab, Hyderabad, Mysore, Gwalior, Jhansi and Nagpur. These are the boundaries of 1857 and not the boundaries of today, and the map must say so in its key. It shows who held authority, not where people lived or how densely.
The map makes the pattern easy to see, but it also flatters it. A shaded block suggests firm and even control, when in practice the Company’s grip was tight around the towns, the revenue offices and the cantonments, and much looser in the hills and forests. The map also cannot show what mattered most in 1857 — what people in those shaded areas thought of the government that ruled them.
Revolts Before 1857
Resistance to the Company did not begin in 1857. Hardly a decade passed without a rising somewhere — by dispossessed chiefs, indebted peasants, or forest and hill communities whose lands and customs were being cut into.
The Santhal uprising of 1855–56 is one example. In the Rajmahal hills, in what is now Jharkhand, Santhal cultivators rose under two brothers, Sidhu and Kanhu, against moneylenders, landlords and the officials who backed them. Armed largely with bows and axes, they drove out the local administration before the Company’s troops put the rising down.
These earlier revolts share a pattern. They were local, scattered and separated from one another, and none of them threatened Company rule as a whole. What they did leave behind was a habit of resistance, and the knowledge that the Company’s authority could be defied.
What Made 1857 Different
The outbreak of 1857 was different in scale and in composition. It began in the army but did not stay there. Sepoys, peasants, artisans, dispossessed landholders and displaced rulers acted together, across a broad belt of northern and central India.
That combination is what makes 1857 worth studying closely. To understand it, we have to ask why so many different kinds of people, with very different daily lives, had all arrived at the same anger by the same year.
How The Causes Are Grouped
This chapter groups the causes under four heads — political, socio-religious, economic and military. The grouping is a convenience for study, and it should not be mistaken for four separate stories.
A sepoy from Awadh, for instance, appears under all four. His kingdom had been annexed, his family paid higher revenue on its land, his allowances had been cut, and his religious scruples had been brushed aside. The heads overlap because the grievances did.
1.2 Political Causes
The political causes of 1857 have one thing in common. In every case, someone who had held power, or expected to inherit it, found that the decision no longer belonged to them.
1.2.1 The Policy Of Expansion
Between 1757 and 1856 the Company took over territory at a pace no Indian power could match. It did this in four different ways — by war, by treaty, by a rule about inheritance, and by declaring a ruler unfit to govern.
The four methods look different on paper. In practice they pointed the same way, and Indian rulers watched them with growing alarm. A state that had signed a treaty with the Company was not safe; a state that had kept the peace was not safe either.
1.2.1.1 Expansion By Outright Wars
The most direct method was war. The Company fought long series of wars against the strongest Indian powers, and each series ended with territory changing hands.
The Battle of Buxar in 1764 was decisive in the east. The Company’s victory made it the effective master of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, and in 1765 the Mughal emperor granted it the diwani — the right to collect the land revenue of those provinces.
In the south, the Anglo-Mysore Wars ran from 1767 to 1799 and ended with most of the Mysore state’s territory in Company hands. In the west, the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817–18 destroyed the Peshwa’s government and brought Maratha territory north and south of the Narmada under the Company.
Expansion continued in the north and east. Assam, Arakan and Tenasserim came to the Company in 1826, Sindh was annexed in 1843, Pegu in 1852, and the Punjab in 1849 after the Second Anglo-Sikh War. Timeline TL 1.1 sets out the sequence.
Notice what the timeline cannot show. The spacing is even, but the last three entries fall within a single working lifetime, and a ruler in 1856 could remember when none of them had happened.
1.2.1.2 Expansion By The Subsidiary Alliance
Not every state had to be conquered. Some were brought under British control while their rulers kept their thrones, through the Subsidiary Alliance — an agreement between the East India Company and an Indian princely state, by which the state gave up its sovereignty, that is, its power to act independently in defence and foreign affairs, in return for British protection.
The system was developed by Lord Wellesley, who was Governor-General — the Company’s highest official in India — from 1798 to 1805. Hyderabad was the first state to accept it, in 1798.
Under the alliance, a ruler: (a) accepted the British as the supreme power in India; (b) handed over his relations with other states to the Company, and agreed neither to make alliances nor to wage war; (c) accepted a British Resident at his court, an officer stationed there to watch and advise, and agreed not to employ any European without the Company’s consent; (d) paid for the upkeep of Company troops stationed in his territory, often by surrendering a slice of land instead of cash; and (e) kept his throne, but lost the independence that had gone with it.
Awadh had entered into a similar arrangement much earlier, by the Treaty of Allahabad of 1765, under which the Company undertook to defend its frontiers while the Nawab met the cost. Among the states that later came under the Subsidiary Alliance were Hyderabad, Mysore, Tanjore, the Sindhia’s territory of Gwalior, the Rajput states of Jodhpur, Jaipur, Macheri and Bundi, and the ruler of Bharatpur.
The arrangement was a costly one for the ruler. He paid for an army he did not command, lost the right to negotiate with his neighbours, and had a British officer resident at his court. Meanwhile he remained answerable to his own subjects for taxes raised largely to meet that bill.
Fig. 1.2-1 sets out what each side gave and received.
Diagram
Fig. 1.2-1 Caption: What each side gave and gained under a Subsidiary Alliance. Brief: Two facing panels joined by arrows. Left panel headed ‘The Indian ruler gives’ — control of foreign relations, payment for Company troops, acceptance of a Resident. Right panel headed ‘The Company gives’ — protection from attack, a guarantee of the throne. Beneath, a single line reading ‘The ruler keeps the throne; the Company keeps the power.’
The diagram is a summary of the treaty terms, and no more than that. It cannot show how differently the bargain worked out from state to state, or how heavily the cost of the subsidiary troops fell on cultivators who had never seen the treaty.
1.2.1.3 Expansion By The Doctrine Of Lapse
A third method needed neither a war nor a treaty. Under the Doctrine of Lapse, if a ruler who was dependent on the Company died without a natural male heir, his adopted son would not be recognised as his successor, and his state would ‘lapse’ — that is, pass into the Company’s territory.
The doctrine is associated above all with Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General from 1848 to 1856, who applied it firmly. Under long-established custom, a Hindu ruler without a son could adopt one, and the adopted son inherited both property and throne. The Company now treated recognition of that adoption as a favour it could withhold.
States annexed by applying the doctrine included Satara, Jaitpur, Sambalpur, Udaipur, Jhansi and Nagpur. The same principle was used to end titles and pensions: the regal titles of the Nawab of Carnatic and of the Raja of Tanjore were taken away when their holders died.
Indian rulers drew the obvious conclusion. Loyalty was no protection, since a state could be absorbed the moment a succession fell awkwardly. That fear, spreading among rulers who had not yet lost anything, mattered as much politically as the annexations themselves.
1.2.1.4 Expansion On The Pretext Of Alleged Misrule
The fourth method dispensed even with the question of an heir. In February 1856 Dalhousie annexed Awadh on the ground that it was being misgoverned, and that British administration was needed to set it right. Nawab Wajid Ali Shah was deposed and sent away to Calcutta.
Awadh was a state that had kept its treaties with the Company for ninety years. Its annexation told every other ruler that a good record was no defence, because the Company would decide what counted as good government.
The takeover was also costly for the people of Awadh, and in several distinct ways: (a) Land revenue was reassessed and additional taxes were imposed, so cultivators paid more than before. (b) The Nawab’s army and household administration were dissolved, throwing thousands of soldiers, officials and dependants out of work. (c) Officials examined the titles of the taluqdars, the great landholders who collected revenue and held local authority, and many estates were confiscated when the paperwork did not satisfy them. (d) A large share of the Bengal Army’s sepoys came from Awadh, and their families now paid the higher revenue on land at home.
That last point matters more than it may seem. A sepoy from Awadh had until now enjoyed a real advantage: as a soldier of the Company he could get his family’s grievances heard through the Residency. Once Awadh became Company territory, that privilege vanished, and he became simply another taxpayer’s son in uniform.
1.2.2 The Treatment Of Bahadur Shah Zafar
By the 1850s the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar ruled almost nothing. He lived in the Red Fort at Delhi on a pension from the Company, and his authority barely reached beyond its walls. Yet the title still carried weight, and many rulers across northern India continued to regard the emperor as the formal head of Indian sovereignty.
The Company set about reducing that dignity step by step. The emperor’s name was removed from the coins the Company minted, so the currency in daily use no longer acknowledged him.
In 1849 Dalhousie announced that Bahadur Shah’s successors would not be permitted to keep the Red Fort as their palace, and would have to move to a residence near the Qutab Minar. In 1856 Lord Canning announced that after Bahadur Shah’s death his successors would give up the imperial title altogether and be known merely as princes.
Each announcement was a small administrative measure. Taken together they told the Mughal house, and everyone watching it, that the dynasty would be wound up on a date the Company chose. Zinat Mahal, Bahadur Shah’s wife, pressed hard in these years to have her own son recognised as heir, and the court at Delhi became a place of resentment and manoeuvre.
1.2.3 The Treatment Of Nana Saheb
A parallel case arose in the Maratha country. After the defeat of 1818, the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, was pensioned by the Company and settled at Bithur, near Kanpur, far from the Peshwas’ old seat at Poona.
Baji Rao II died in 1851, leaving an adopted son, Nana Saheb. The Company refused to continue the pension, holding that it had been granted to Baji Rao personally and did not pass to an adopted heir. Nana Saheb kept the family’s inherited wealth, but lost both the income and the standing that went with the Peshwa’s name.
He did not accept the decision quietly. He sent an agent, Azimullah Khan, to London to argue the case, and he travelled and corresponded widely across northern India. The refusal turned a pensioner into a man with a grievance, resources and contacts — a combination the Company would have cause to remember.
1.2.4 Absentee Sovereignty
Behind these particular grievances lay a general one. Absentee sovereignty means that India was ruled by a government seated in another country, thousands of miles away, whose rulers never lived among the people they governed.
Earlier conquerors of India had settled in the country. The Mughals built their capitals here, spent the revenue they collected here, and their courts, workshops and armies gave employment to Indians. Whatever else they were, they were not absentees.
The Company’s ultimate masters sat in London. Its senior servants came to India for a career and expected to retire to Britain with their savings. Decisions about India were taken in a place no Indian could reach, and the wealth drawn from Indian land did not stay in the country.
This is why absentee sovereignty appears among the political causes rather than the economic ones. Indians who lost land or office could see where the loss went, and could see that no Indian sat in the room where such decisions were made.
1.3 Socio-Religious Causes
The political grievances belonged mainly to rulers and landholders. The socio-religious grievances reached much further down, because they touched what people ate, married, worshipped and believed.
Two things need separating here, and the chapter will keep them apart. One is what the Company actually did. The other is what people came to believe it intended, which was often quite different — and it was the belief that moved crowds.
1.3.2 Suspicion Of Railways And The Telegraph
The 1850s brought two unfamiliar technologies to India. The first passenger railway ran between Bombay and Thane in 1853, and telegraph lines were strung across northern India in the same decade.
Both were built for the government’s convenience before anyone else’s. Railways moved troops and carried raw materials to the ports; the telegraph carried orders in hours over distances that had taken a messenger weeks.
Rumours spread quickly about both. Some said the telegraph poles had been put up to hang those who defied British rule. Others noticed that a railway carriage seated all its passengers together, and concluded that the government meant to break caste rules deliberately.
Fig. 1.3-1 shows an early telegraph line of the kind that provoked such talk.
Diagram
Fig. 1.3-1 Caption: A telegraph line of the 1850s, running beside a road in northern India. Brief: Line drawing or period photograph of a single-wire telegraph line on wooden poles crossing open country, with a bullock cart and travellers on the road below for scale. Label the wire, the insulators and the pole.
A picture like this shows the technology plainly enough. What it cannot show is the thing that mattered politically — what people watching the poles go up believed they were for. That belief has to be recovered from other evidence, and the government of the day made little effort to explain itself.
1.3.3 Western Education And Missionary Activity
The Charter Act of 1813 changed the Company’s position on religion. It allowed missionaries — people sent by a church to spread its faith — to enter Company territory freely, and it set aside funds for education in India.
Missionary numbers grew, and missionary schools spread. Many taught useful subjects at low fees, and Indian families used them. But missionaries also preached in public against Indian religious practices, and many people concluded that the government which had let them in shared their purpose.
The government also brought English teaching into institutions founded for traditional learning. Pandits and maulvis saw in this an attempt to push aside Sanskrit and Islamic studies, and with them their own place in society.
By the 1850s a suspicion had taken hold, in many parts of northern India, that the real object of Western education was not literature and science but conversion. That suspicion was not accurate as a statement of policy. It was, however, widely believed, and it was believed by people who had watched the government change its mind about interference once already.
1.3.4 Taxing Religious Lands And The Law Of Property
Under earlier rulers, land attached to temples and mosques was usually held free of revenue. The income supported the building, its ceremonies, and the families of those who served it.
The Company’s revenue officers took a different view. Grants were investigated, and those that could not be proved by documents were resumed and taxed. Families that had lived on such grants for generations found their income gone and their claim treated as a fraud.
A second measure touched inheritance. The Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850 provided that a person who changed religion, or lost caste, would not thereby forfeit the property he was entitled to inherit.
The intention was to end a penalty. The effect, in the eyes of many Hindus, was to make conversion financially safe, and so to encourage it. Taken with the taxing of religious lands and the spread of mission schools, it fitted neatly into a picture that was already forming — of a government working steadily against the religions of India.
1.3.5 Racial Discrimination
Alongside these grievances ran another, harder to legislate about and impossible to miss. Racial discrimination means treating people unequally because of their race, and by the 1850s it shaped daily life under Company rule.
Senior posts in the administration and the army were reserved in practice for Britons, whatever an Indian’s ability or record. British officials were expected to keep a social distance from Indians, on the argument that familiarity would weaken authority. Some officers insulted and ill-treated the Indians they dealt with, and complaints against them rarely succeeded.
The insult cut across every other division. A dispossessed prince, an educated clerk in a government office and a sepoy in the lines had little else in common, yet each met the same assumption that he was, by birth, the inferior of the man giving him orders.
This is why the socio-religious causes belong in a chapter about a rising. Land can be restored and a pension can be renewed. Contempt shown day after day, by a government that cannot be argued with, leaves a residue that no single measure can remove.
1.4 Economic Causes
Of all the causes of 1857, the economic ones reached the largest number of people. A weaver in a small town, a cultivator in a village and a scholar without a patron had never met, and had no shared politics. They were being squeezed by the same machinery.
1.4.1 The Exploitation Of India’s Resources
British industry in the nineteenth century needed two things from outside Britain — cheap raw materials to feed its mills, and markets to sell the finished goods in. India was made to supply both.
The result was a colonial economy, that is, an economy shaped to serve another country’s industry rather than its own, sending out raw materials and taking back manufactured goods. India exported raw cotton, raw silk, indigo, plantation crops such as tea, and food grains, at prices that suited the buyer.
The traffic in the other direction was made easy. British goods entered India free of duty, or at a nominal one, while Indian goods entering Britain met heavy import duties.
That difference is the heart of the matter, and it was not an accident of the market. The rules of trade between the two countries were framed by a Parliament in which India was not represented, and they were framed to favour the manufacturer at one end rather than the producer at the other.
1.4.2 The Drain Of Wealth
Before the conquest of Bengal, European traders had to pay for Indian goods in gold and silver, because India wanted little that Europe made. Indian exports therefore brought bullion into the country.
After 1757 that changed. The Company now controlled the revenues of Bengal, and it used a part of those revenues to buy the Indian goods it shipped to Europe. India’s exports were, in effect, being purchased with money already taken from Indian taxpayers.
This is what is meant by the drain of wealth — the transfer of wealth from India to England for which India received no proportionate economic return. It was not one payment but a steady outflow, and it included: (a) the salaries, allowances and pensions of British officials, and the savings they took home; (b) the cost of purchasing military and other stores in Britain for use in India; (c) interest paid on debts raised on India’s account; and (d) the expense of wars fought outside India in which Indian troops and Indian revenues were used.
The term itself came later. Indian critics of British rule worked the argument out carefully in the closing decades of the century, and gave it the name by which it is now known. What people felt in the 1850s was the plain fact underneath the argument: the country was producing a great deal, and getting visibly poorer.
1.4.3 The Decay Of Cottage Industries And Handicrafts
For centuries Indian cotton and silk cloth had been sought after across Asia, Africa and Europe. It was made in villages and small towns, on hand looms, by families who had done the work for generations.
Two pressures broke this trade. In Britain, heavy duties were placed on Indian silk and cotton textiles, which shut them out of their largest new market. In India, machine-made British cloth arrived cheaply, and hand-spun yarn could not match its price.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the export of Indian cotton and silk goods had practically ceased. Spinning, which had given part-time work to enormous numbers of women in ordinary households, was among the first casualties.
The artisans’ difficulties were made worse by the collapse of their old customers. Courts, princes and great landholders had bought fine cloth, metalwork, jewellery and weapons; as those households lost their revenues, the orders stopped coming.
Fig. 1.4-1 shows a weaver at a pit loom of the kind still worked in the 1850s.
Diagram
Fig. 1.4-1 Caption: A weaver at a pit loom, the ordinary equipment of the Indian handloom trade. Brief: Line drawing of a weaver seated at a pit loom in a village workshop, feet in the pit working the treadles, warp threads stretched ahead. Label the loom, the warp, the shuttle and the finished cloth. Show one weaver only, in a domestic setting, not a factory.
The picture explains the craft, and that is all it can do. It cannot show the scale of what happened, because the evidence for that is not pictorial — it lies in customs returns, revenue reports and the complaints of weavers’ communities. A working loom is easy to photograph; a loom that has stopped is not photographed at all.
Nor could the displaced weaver move into a factory, because India was not being industrialised. He went back to the land instead, adding one more claimant to a village economy that was already under strain.
1.4.4 The Decline Of The Peasantry
Most Indians in 1857 lived by cultivation, and their central relationship with the government was the land revenue — the tax on agricultural land, which was the state’s main source of income.
The Company’s revenue systems differed from region to region, but they shared three features that pressed hard on the cultivator. The demand was pitched high, well above what earlier governments had taken from the same land. It was fixed in cash, so a peasant had to sell his crop whatever the price that season. And it had to be paid on the due date, whether the harvest had been good, poor or lost.
To meet the demand in a bad year, a cultivator borrowed. Interest ran high, the debt did not clear, and land began to pass from cultivating families to merchants and moneylenders who had bought it at auction or taken it for debt.
These new owners had no village standing to maintain and no interest in a bad season. They raised rents to what the land would bear and evicted tenants who fell behind.
Very little came back the other way. Almost nothing of the revenue was spent on irrigation works or on improving cultivation, and a cultivator in arrears could face imprisonment or flogging rather than relief. The courts existed, but a complex legal system in an unfamiliar language was of far more use to a creditor than to a debtor.
1.4.5 The Decline Of The Landed Aristocracy
Above the cultivator stood the landholders — taluqdars, hereditary chiefs and holders of rent-free grants — who collected revenue, kept local order and supported temples, mosques, schools and retainers.
Many held their lands on grants made generations earlier, sometimes without a document that a British court would accept. From the 1820s the government began systematically to examine such titles, and the Inam Commission appointed in 1852 in the Bombay Deccan carried the process furthest.
Where the holder could not produce satisfactory title deeds, the estate was resumed and sold by public auction to the highest bidder. Many thousands of holdings changed hands in this way.
The result satisfied nobody except the buyers. The old landholding families were reduced to poverty and lost their local authority. The peasants gained nothing, since the merchants and moneylenders who bought at auction pressed them harder than the families they had replaced.
1.4.6 Unemployment, Poverty And Famines
Each annexation put people out of work. When a state was taken over, its army was disbanded and its administration wound up, and soldiers, officials, clerks and household servants lost their employment at a stroke.
They had nowhere to go. British policy reserved the higher posts of the new administration for Europeans, so an experienced Indian official could not simply transfer into government service.
The same collapse of patronage struck scholars, poets, musicians, painters and craftsmen, whose livelihood had depended on the courts and on landholders. When those households fell, an entire world of employment fell with them.
Corruption made ordinary life harder still. The police and petty officials of the Company’s administration were badly paid and poorly supervised, and a person with money could often buy his way out of trouble while a person without it could not.
Behind all this stood famine. Famines struck India repeatedly in the century before 1857 — the Bengal famine of 1770 was the most terrible of them — and the government of the day did little to relieve distress or to prevent the next one.
1.5 Military Causes
The Company’s Indian army was not separate from Indian society. A sepoy was a cultivator’s son in uniform, and what happened to his village happened to him.
That is the first thing to hold on to about the military causes. The grievances of the lines were partly professional — pay, rank, allowances, postings — and partly the grievances of everybody else, arriving in a barracks.
1.5.1 Pay, Treatment And The Sentiments Of The Sepoy
The Company built its empire in India with Indian soldiers, and it did not pay them well for it. A sepoy’s pay had stood at much the same level for decades, and it was a fraction of what a British private in the same station received for the same campaign.
Conditions matched the pay. Sepoys were poorly fed and badly housed in the cantonment — the permanent military station, laid out apart from the town, where troops lived with their families.
The relationship with British officers had also changed. In the Company’s earlier campaigns, officers had commonly spoken their soldiers’ languages and taken trouble over their customs. By the 1850s many officers were distant from their men, and some were openly contemptuous of them.
Orders touching religion and appearance caused particular anger. Regulations restricted the wearing of caste and sectarian marks, and interfered with beards and turbans, in an army where such things were not decoration but identity.
Diagram
Fig. 1.5-1 Caption: Sepoys of the Company’s Bengal Army, photographed in the 1850s. Brief: Period photograph or careful drawing of a group of sepoys in Company uniform — tunic, cross-belts, headdress — standing in a posed line outside barracks. Label the uniform, the musket and the barracks behind. No fighting is shown.
A photograph of this kind is a record of appearance and equipment, and a useful one. What it cannot record is anything the section has just described — what these men were paid, what they were told about their beards, or what they thought of the officer who arranged them for the camera. For that we depend on regimental orders, petitions and enquiry reports.
1.5.2 Bleak Prospects Of Promotion
However long an Indian soldier served, and however well, he could not rise above the rank of subedar, the highest position open to an Indian in the Company’s army. Every rank above it was reserved for Britons.
The rule bit hardest on experienced men. A veteran of twenty or thirty years’ service could find himself taking orders from a British officer half his age and in his first year in India.
Men who had held real command elsewhere felt it worse still. Soldiers who had been officers in the armies of Indian rulers, before those states were annexed, entered the Company’s service to find that a ceiling had been placed above them at the moment of enlistment.
1.5.3 Deprivation Of Allowances
Beyond his pay, a sepoy counted on allowances, and these were steadily reduced as the Company’s territory grew.
The most important was bhatta, the additional payment made for service outside Company territory. As state after state was annexed, districts that had been foreign service one year became Company territory the next, and the allowance for serving there simply ceased. Expansion thus cut the income of the very soldiers who had made it possible.
Other privileges went the same way. The Post Office Act of 1854 withdrew the right of free postage that sepoys had enjoyed, so a soldier now paid to write home.
Each measure was small, and each was defended as an economy. Taken together they told a sepoy that his service was worth less every year.
The differences between an Indian and a British soldier in the same army can now be set side by side.
1.5.4 The General Service Enlistment Act, 1856
In 1856 the government passed the General Service Enlistment Act. It required new recruits to the Bengal Army to serve wherever they were sent, including across the sea.
For many high-caste Hindu soldiers of that army, a sea voyage meant the loss of caste, and the Act therefore asked them to choose between their service and their standing at home. Existing sepoys were not covered by it, but they drew the obvious conclusion about their sons.
The Act reads as a straightforward measure of military administration, and that is how it was defended. Its authors do not appear to have weighed what it meant to the men it applied to.
1.5.5 The Strength And Distribution Of Troops
The army that held India was overwhelmingly Indian, and in the 1850s it was stretched thin. British regiments were repeatedly drawn away to wars elsewhere — in Persia, in the Crimea and in China — leaving fewer European troops in India than the size of the country warranted.
Their distribution mattered as much as their number. Places of first-rate importance, Delhi and Allahabad among them, were garrisoned entirely by Indian troops, with the arsenals and treasuries in their charge.
Sepoys were perfectly aware of this arithmetic. They could see that the government’s safety rested on their obedience, and that if it were withdrawn there was little immediately at hand to replace it.
1.5.6 Defeats That Broke The Myth Of Invincibility
The Company had traded for years on an idea as useful as any regiment — that a British army could not be beaten. Three campaigns in twenty years damaged that idea badly.
The First Afghan War of 1839–42 ended in disaster. A British force retreating from Kabul was destroyed almost entirely, and the news travelled through every cantonment in India.
The Punjab Wars of 1845–49 were won, but only after battles so hard-fought and costly that no one could call the result easy. Then came the Crimean War of 1853–56, fought far away against Russia, in which British mismanagement and heavy losses were reported at length in the newspapers.
The lesson drawn in the sepoy lines was not that the British were weak. It was that they were beatable, which is a different and more dangerous thought for a government to have circulating among its own soldiers.
1.6 The Immediate Cause: The Greased Cartridges
Everything described so far had built up over decades. What turned accumulated grievance into an outbreak was a change in the equipment of the infantry.
An immediate cause is the event that sets a conflict off, as distinct from the deeper causes that made a conflict possible. It is worth being clear about the difference. The immediate cause explains the timing; it does not explain the anger.
A New Rifle And A New Cartridge
In 1856 the military authorities decided to replace the old smooth-barrelled musket, long known in the army as the ‘Brown Bess’, with the new Enfield rifle. The rifle was more accurate and carried further, and from a purely military point of view the change was an improvement.
Loading a weapon of this period was a drill in several steps. The ammunition came as a paper tube, called a cartridge, holding the measured gunpowder and the ball. The cartridge was coated with grease so that it would run down the barrel smoothly, and the soldier had to bite off the end of the paper before pouring in the powder.
Fig. 1.6-1 sets out the cartridge and the loading sequence.
Diagram
Fig. 1.6-1 Caption: The paper cartridge of the 1850s and the loading drill it required. Brief: Two-part figure. Left, a cut-away drawing of a greased paper cartridge, labelling the paper tube, the powder charge, the ball and the greased coating. Right, four small numbered panels showing the drill — bite off the end, pour in the powder, ram down the cartridge, prime and fire.
The Rumour And Why It Was Believed
In January 1857 a rumour ran through the Bengal regiments that the grease on the new cartridges was made from the fat of cows and of pigs. If that were so, a Hindu sepoy who bit the cartridge would be defiled by the cow, sacred to him, and a Muslim sepoy by the pig, forbidden to him.
Nothing in the drill offered an escape. The cartridge had to be bitten, in the open, in front of the officer and the whole company.
Whether such grease ever reached an Indian regiment is a genuinely difficult historical question. Animal fats were in ordinary use in the manufacture of military stores in Britain, and it is generally accepted that they were used in preparing cartridges there. Tracing a particular greased cartridge into a particular soldier’s hand is another matter altogether.
For the events of 1857, however, the answer hardly matters. What moved men was not a laboratory finding but a belief, and the belief was entirely consistent with what they had watched happen for thirty years.
The Concession That Came Too Late
The authorities did respond once the alarm spread. Sepoys were told they might tear the cartridges by hand instead of biting them, and that they could grease cartridges themselves with materials they trusted.
The concession failed, and its failure is instructive. Coming after the rumour rather than before it, it looked less like a correction than an admission — proof, to men already suspicious, that there had been something to hide.
The cartridge is often described as the cause of what followed. It is better described as the point at which the other causes became impossible to contain. Grievances about land, revenue, pay, rank and religion had been accumulating for a generation; the cartridge gave them a date.
1.7 The Course Of The Uprising
The chapter now turns from why the outbreak happened to what actually happened. The narrative that follows is here so that the causes and the consequences make sense as one story, and so that the people involved are more than names attached to grievances.
1.7.1 The Outbreak
Trouble over the cartridges reached the regiments before it reached the newspapers. On 26 February 1857, at Berhampur in Bengal, the 19th Native Infantry refused to accept the cartridges issued to it. The regiment was disbanded, as a warning to the rest of the army.
The warning did not work. On 29 March 1857, at Barrackpore near Calcutta, a sepoy of the 34th Native Infantry named Mangal Pandey attacked his officers on the parade ground. He was tried by court martial and executed in April, and his regiment too was disbanded. Among his fellow sepoys he was remembered as a man who had refused.
The decisive incident came at Meerut. On 9 May 1857 eighty-five sepoys of the 3rd Light Cavalry, who had refused the cartridges, were court-martialled and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. They were stripped of their uniforms and put in irons in front of the whole garrison.
The next evening the sepoys at Meerut broke out. They released the prisoners, seized what they could, and set off along the road to Delhi. This was mutiny — the collective refusal of soldiers to obey their officers — and by the following morning it had become something larger.
1.7.2 The Main Centres Of The Uprising
The Meerut sepoys reached Delhi on 11 May and were joined by the regiments stationed there. They took the city and went to the Red Fort, where they called on the aged Bahadur Shah Zafar to lead them. He hesitated, and then accepted, and was proclaimed emperor of Hindustan.
That proclamation mattered out of all proportion to his actual power. It gave scattered risings a single name to act under, and it turned a soldiers’ revolt into a challenge to British authority itself.
At Kanpur the leadership was taken by Nana Saheb, whose pension the Company had refused. The British garrison there was besieged and surrendered in June 1857 on a promise of safe passage; most of those who surrendered, including women and children, were then killed. The killings were widely reported in Britain and were afterwards used to justify severe reprisals.
At Lucknow the rising was led by Begum Hazrat Mahal, a wife of the deposed Nawab of Awadh, in the name of her young son. The British residency was besieged for months, and Awadh proved the hardest region of all for the British to recover.
Central India saw the longest campaign. Rani Lakshmibai defended Jhansi against a British force under Sir Hugh Rose in March and April 1858, and after the town fell she escaped to Kalpi and joined Tantia Tope, Nana Saheb’s general. Together they seized the fortress of Gwalior in June 1858, and the Rani was killed in the fighting there on 17 June.
Other centres had leaders of their own. At Bareilly, Khan Bahadur Khan, a descendant of the former ruling house of Rohilkhand, took command. In Bihar the struggle was led by Kunwar Singh, the elderly zamindar of Jagdishpur, who had been deprived of his estates. At Faizabad the leadership was taken by Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah.
Map 1.2 shows where these centres lay.
Map
Map 1.2 Caption: The main centres of the uprising of 1857–58 in northern and central India. Brief: Historical map of northern and central India in 1857. Mark and label Barrackpore, Berhampur, Meerut, Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Faizabad, Bareilly, Allahabad, Jhansi, Kalpi, Gwalior and Jagdishpur. Shade the belt of country where the uprising was strongest. These are the boundaries and place names of 1857, not of today, and the key must say so. Do not draw troop movements or battle symbols.
The map is worth reading twice — once for what is marked, and once for what is not. The marked centres cluster along the Ganga plain and central India. The great expanse to the south, east and north-west carries no marks at all, and that absence is one of the most important facts about 1857.
1.7.3 The Suppression Of The Uprising
The British recovered Delhi in September 1857, after a siege lasting some months, and took Bahadur Shah Zafar prisoner. He was afterwards put on trial for his part in the rising.
Kanpur was retaken in the summer of 1857, though fighting continued around it into December. Lucknow fell to a large British force in March 1858, and Begum Hazrat Mahal withdrew towards the Nepal frontier. Central India was subdued through the summer of 1858, and Tantia Tope kept up a moving resistance for months more before he was betrayed, captured and executed in April 1859.
The reprisals were harsh. Villages suspected of helping the rebels were burnt, and prisoners were executed after brief trials or none at all. Both the killings at Kanpur and the punishments that followed the reconquest were reported at length, and each hardened opinion against the other side.
Why The Uprising Failed
The uprising did not fail for any single reason, and the reasons interlock.
It had no common plan and no central command. Each centre fought its own war, and there was no arrangement for the centres to support one another.
It had no agreed goal beyond removing the British. Leaders wanted different things — a restored Mughal emperor, a restored Peshwa, a restored Nawab — and these aims did not fit together.
It did not spread nationally. South India stayed quiet, as did most of Bengal, Rajputana, Sindh and the Punjab, and the Bombay and Madras armies remained loyal.
Many rulers and large landholders stood aside or actively helped the British, calculating that their estates were safer under Company rule than under a restored Indian power.
Some educated Indians and merchant communities did not support the rising, believing that British rule was carrying India towards modern education, law and trade.
British resources were far greater. Reinforcements could be brought from outside India, and the telegraph and the new railways let the government move orders and troops faster than the rebels could move at all.
Historians have argued about this for over a century, and the disagreement is not merely about words. V. D. Savarkar, writing in 1909, called it a planned war of national independence. The historian S. N. Sen, in a study published a hundred years after the events, concluded that it began as a fight over religion and ended as a war of independence. Others have read it as a series of local revolts sharing a moment rather than a plan.
What is not in dispute is the scale. Whatever name is given to it, 1857 was the first occasion on which soldiers, cultivators, artisans, landholders and princes across a large part of India acted against the same government at the same time.
1.8 The Consequences Of The First War Of Independence
The uprising was suppressed, and in that narrow sense it failed. Yet the government that emerged from it in 1858 was not the government that had entered it in 1857.
The British had been badly frightened, and they redesigned their rule accordingly. Four changes matter most: in the administration, in the promises made to Indians, in the treatment of the princely states, and in the army.
1.8.1 Changes In The Administration: The Government Of India Act, 1858
The most important result of the uprising was the end of the East India Company’s rule. A trading company had been governing a subcontinent, and 1857 made that arrangement impossible to defend. The Government of India Act of 1858 transferred the government of India directly to the British Crown.
The Act made the following provisions: (a) It transferred the power to govern India from the East India Company to the British Crown. (b) It abolished the Company’s Board of Control and its Court of Directors. (c) It created the office of Secretary of State for India, a member of the British Cabinet, who was made responsible for all matters relating to the governance of India, and who was assisted by a Council of India to advise him. (d) It left the ultimate authority over India with the British Parliament. (e) It provided that governance in India would be carried on, as before, by the Governor-General, who was now also given the title of Viceroy — the personal representative of the Crown in India. Lord Canning was the first Viceroy under the Act. (f) It provided that appointments to the civil service would be made by open competition, under rules framed by the Secretary of State.
Fig. FC 1.1 sets out the chain of authority the Act created.
Flowchart
FC 1.1 — How India Was Governed After 1858 Caption: The line of authority over India from the British Parliament down to the district, as established by the Government of India Act of 1858. Nodes: British Parliament → Secretary of State for India, a member of the British Cabinet → advised by the Council of India → Viceroy and Governor-General in India → Provincial governments (Presidencies and Provinces) → District administration → If the Secretary of State and the Viceroy disagreed, the Secretary of State’s decision prevailed; if Parliament disagreed with the Secretary of State, Parliament prevailed.
Read the chain from the bottom upwards and its most striking feature appears. At no point does it pass through any body of Indians, elected or otherwise. The Act changed who ruled India, not the fact that India was ruled from outside.
1.8.2 Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, 1858
The transfer of power was announced to India in a proclamation issued in the Queen’s name. It was made public at Allahabad on 1 November 1858 by Lord Canning.
The Proclamation was a political document with work to do. It had to reassure a country that had just been through a rising, and to reassure the princes in particular that the years of annexation were over.
Its principal promises were these: (a) The government would follow a policy of non-intervention in the social and religious matters of Indians. (b) All subjects, Indian and European alike, would be treated as equals, and education and ability alone would be the basis of appointment to office. (c) A general pardon was granted to all who had taken part in the uprising, except those found guilty of the murder of British subjects. (d) The government would do its best to advance the industries of India. (e) It would promote works of public utility, so as to ensure the material as well as the moral progress of the people.
Its opening passage stated the principle on which the rest rested.
The record on that question is mixed, and honesty requires saying so. Religious non-interference was largely observed after 1858. Equality of appointment was not: the higher posts of the administration and the army stayed in British hands for decades, and the examination for the civil service was held in England, which put it beyond the reach of most Indians.
That gap between the promise and the practice had consequences of its own. Educated Indians would spend the next fifty years quoting this Proclamation back at the government, and asking why its own declared principle was not being applied.
1.8.3 Relations With The Princely States
Two old dynasties ended with the uprising. Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried, deported to Rangoon in Burma, and died there in 1862, and with him the Mughal dynasty came to an end. Nana Saheb fled towards Nepal after the defeat, and the office of the Peshwa ended too.
For the surviving princes, the change was in the opposite direction. Many rulers had stayed loyal during the uprising, and some had actively helped to suppress it, and the British had noticed how useful they were.
The new policy followed from that. The Doctrine of Lapse and the policy of annexation were abandoned, the right of a ruler to adopt an heir was recognised, and the integrity of princely territories was guaranteed against future annexation.
What the princes received was security; what they gave up was any pretence of independence. Their thrones now rested on paramountcy — the supremacy of the British Crown over the princely states, under which a ruler kept his state but held it subject to the Crown’s overriding authority. In 1876 Queen Victoria assumed the title of Empress of India, and the princes became, in effect, junior partners of an imperial system.
1.8.4 Changes In The Army
The army had begun the uprising, and the army was reorganised most thoroughly of all. The object was stated plainly at the time: to make a repetition impossible.
The strength of European troops in India was increased, and a fixed proportion was laid down between European and Indian soldiers — roughly one to two in the Bengal Army, and two to five in the Madras and Bombay armies. European troops were stationed at the key geographical and military positions, and were kept in charge of the arsenals.
Artillery and the more sophisticated weapons were placed exclusively in European hands, and Indian artillery units were disbanded, with the exception of a few mountain batteries. A rising, if one came, would now face guns it could not obtain.
The pattern of recruitment changed as well. Recruitment shifted away from Awadh and the Ganga plain, which had supplied so much of the old Bengal Army, and towards the Punjab, the north-west and Nepal. Caste, region and community were deliberately used in forming regiments, so that units would be composed of men with little in common outside the service, and would be unlikely to combine.
The army was also insulated from opinion. Newspapers, journals and, later, nationalist publications were kept from reaching the soldiers, so that the army would remain separate from the political life of the country around it.
Taken together, the four changes point one way. British rule after 1858 was more cautious, more heavily garrisoned and more careful of the princes, and it had learnt to speak the language of duty towards its Indian subjects. It had not become a government in which Indians had any share, and that unfinished business is where the next chapter begins.
1.9 Summary
The East India Company came to India in 1600 to trade, and became a ruling power after the Battle of Plassey in 1757. By 1857 it governed most of the subcontinent directly and influenced the rest, and its authority rested on an army in which Indian sepoys greatly outnumbered European troops.
Resistance did not begin in 1857. Risings such as the Santhal uprising of 1855–56 were local, scattered and quickly suppressed, but they kept alive the knowledge that Company authority could be defied.
The political causes arose from expansion. The Company enlarged its territory in four ways, and each alarmed Indian rulers:
- by outright war, from Buxar in 1764 to the annexation of the Punjab in 1849;
- by the Subsidiary Alliance, under which a ruler kept his throne but surrendered his defence and foreign relations, accepted a Resident and paid for Company troops;
- by the Doctrine of Lapse, under which a dependent ruler’s adopted son was not recognised and the state passed to the Company, as at Jhansi in 1853; and
- on the pretext of alleged misrule, as in the annexation of Awadh in 1856.
Particular grievances sharpened the general fear. The Mughal dynasty was told it would lose the Red Fort and then its imperial title; Nana Saheb was refused the Peshwa’s pension; and absentee sovereignty meant that India was ruled from a country its subjects could never reach, with the revenue spent there rather than here.
The socio-religious causes worked on a wider public. Reforms such as the ban on sati and the Widows’ Remarriage Act had Indian support, but a foreign government legislating on custom alarmed people; rumours attached themselves to railways and the telegraph; the Charter Act of 1813 let missionaries in and mission schools spread; religious lands were taxed and resumed; and racial discrimination was a daily fact of life under Company rule.
The economic causes reached the largest number of people:
- India was turned into a colonial economy, exporting raw materials and taking back British manufactures under unequal duties;
- the drain of wealth carried salaries, savings, stores, interest and war costs out of India without a proportionate return;
- handicrafts and cottage industries decayed, and displaced artisans found no new industry to absorb them;
- high cash land revenue drove cultivators into debt and land into the hands of moneylenders; and
- the resumption of estates, the collapse of court patronage, unemployment and repeated famines completed the picture.
The military causes turned all this into an armed grievance. A sepoy was poorly paid, could rise no higher than subedar, lost bhatta as the empire expanded, and was required by the General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 to serve overseas. Defeats in Afghanistan, the Punjab and the Crimea had shown that British armies could be beaten.
The immediate cause was the greased cartridge of the new Enfield rifle, which had to be bitten before loading. The rumour of January 1857 that the grease contained cow and pig fat was believed because thirty years of interference had made it credible.
The uprising began with refusals at Berhampur and Barrackpore and broke out at Meerut in May 1857. Delhi was seized and Bahadur Shah Zafar proclaimed emperor; risings followed at Kanpur under Nana Saheb, at Lucknow under Begum Hazrat Mahal, at Jhansi and Gwalior under Rani Lakshmibai, at Bareilly, at Faizabad and in Bihar under Kunwar Singh.
It was suppressed by April 1859. It failed because it had no common plan, no central command and no agreed goal, because it did not spread to the south, east or north-west, because many princes and landholders stayed loyal, and because British resources, the telegraph and the railways were decisive.
The consequences reshaped British rule in four ways:
- the Government of India Act of 1858 ended Company rule, created a Secretary of State for India in the British Cabinet with a Council of India to advise him, left ultimate power with the British Parliament, and gave the Governor-General the title of Viceroy;
- Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, read at Allahabad on 1 November 1858, promised religious non-interference, equal treatment and appointment by ability, a general pardon with exceptions, and support for industry and public works;
- annexation and the Doctrine of Lapse were abandoned, the right of adoption was recognised, and the princely states were guaranteed under the paramountcy of the Crown; and
- the army was reorganised, with more European troops, artillery in European hands, recruitment shifted to the Punjab, the north-west and Nepal, regiments deliberately mixed, and soldiers kept away from newspapers.
Historians still disagree about what to call the events of 1857. What is not disputed is that soldiers, cultivators, artisans, landholders and princes across a large part of India acted against the same government at the same time, and that the government which replaced the Company had to justify itself in a way the Company never had.
1.10 Key Terms
- Absentee sovereignty — rule over a country by a government seated in another country, whose rulers never live among the people they govern.
- Annexation — the formal takeover of a territory, after which it is governed directly as part of the ruling power’s dominions.
- Cantonment — the permanent military station, laid out apart from the town, where troops lived with their families.
- Colonial economy — an economy shaped to serve another country’s industry, sending out raw materials and taking back manufactured goods.
- Doctrine of Lapse — the rule that if a dependent ruler died without a natural male heir, his adopted son would not be recognised and his state would pass to the Company.
- Drain of wealth — the transfer of wealth from India to England, through salaries, savings, stores, interest and war costs, for which India received no proportionate economic return.
- Immediate cause — the event that sets a conflict off, as distinct from the deeper causes that made the conflict possible.
- Land revenue — the tax on agricultural land, which was the state’s main source of income.
- Missionary — a person sent by a church to spread its faith.
- Mutiny — the collective refusal of soldiers to obey their officers.
- Paramountcy — the supremacy of the British Crown over the princely states, under which a ruler kept his state but held it subject to the Crown’s overriding authority.
- Princely state — a state ruled by an Indian prince who kept his throne and his internal administration, but accepted British supremacy and could not act independently outside his own borders.
- Racial discrimination — treating people unequally because of their race.
- Sepoy — an Indian soldier serving in a European-style regiment, trained, uniformed and paid by the Company.
- Subsidiary Alliance — an agreement by which an Indian state gave up its power to act independently in defence and foreign affairs, in return for British protection.
- Viceroy — the title given to the Governor-General after 1858 as the personal representative of the Crown in India.
1.11 Points to Ponder
Most of the surviving written evidence about 1857 was produced by the government that was being risen against. What kinds of things are likely to go unrecorded in such a record, and how might a historian go about filling the gap?
The Doctrine of Lapse took over states without a battle being fought. Is a takeover decided by an administrative rule a lesser thing than one decided by war, or a greater one?
The ban on sati ended a practice that killed women, and Indian reformers had campaigned for it — yet the law was still resented. What does that tell you about the difference between what a law does and who has the authority to make it?
The greased cartridge is often called the cause of 1857. If the cartridge had never been introduced, do you think nothing would have happened? What does your answer show about the difference between a cause and a trigger?
The Proclamation of 1858 promised that ability alone would decide appointments, but the examination for the civil service was held in England. When a promise and the arrangements for keeping it point in different directions, which is the better guide to what was intended?
After 1858 regiments were deliberately composed so that their soldiers had little in common outside the service. What does it suggest about a government’s confidence when it designs its own army so that it cannot easily combine?
1.12 Objective Questions
The Subsidiary Alliance was introduced in India by
- Lord Dalhousie
- Lord Wellesley
- Lord Canning
- Lord Cornwallis [1 mark]
Under the Doctrine of Lapse, a dependent state passed to the Company when its ruler died
- leaving unpaid debts to the Company
- without having signed a treaty of alliance
- without a natural male heir
- while his territory was under British occupation [1 mark]
Awadh was annexed by Lord Dalhousie in the year ____________, on the ground of alleged misrule. [1 mark]
Match the measures in Column A with the years in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Treaty of Allahabad | i. 1856 |
| b. Charter Act | ii. 1765 |
| c. General Service Enlistment Act | iii. 1858 |
| d. Government of India Act | iv. 1813 |
Assertion (A): The withdrawal of bhatta reduced the income of many sepoys. Reason (R): As the Company annexed new territory, service in those districts stopped counting as foreign service.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
Assertion (A): Indian handloom weavers lost their livelihood in the first half of the nineteenth century. Reason (R): Machine-made British cloth entered India at a nominal duty, while Indian cloth met heavy duties in Britain.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false: The Government of India Act of 1858 gave Indians a share in taking decisions about the governance of India. [1 mark]
The first Governor-General to hold the title of Viceroy was
- Lord Wellesley
- Lord Dalhousie
- Lord Canning
- Lord Lytton [1 mark]
1.13 Check Your Concepts
Give the meaning of absentee sovereignty. [2 marks]
Name any two states annexed by the application of the Doctrine of Lapse. [2 marks]
State any three conditions that an Indian ruler accepted when he entered into a Subsidiary Alliance. [3 marks]
Differentiate between an immediate cause and a deeper cause, using one example from this chapter. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example, how the annexation of Awadh in 1856 affected the sepoys of the Bengal Army. [4 marks]
Trace the chain by which duties on cloth in Britain led to greater pressure on Indian agriculture. [4 marks]
Describe the main provisions of the Government of India Act, 1858. [5 marks]
Explain the changes made in the Indian army after 1858, and state what each change was intended to prevent. [6 marks]
1.14 Show Your Skills
- In 1857 a landholding family in Awadh had, within eighteen months, seen its kingdom taken over, its title to its estate questioned by revenue officers, and the revenue demand on its villages raised. The eldest son of the family was serving as a sepoy in the Bengal Army, several hundred kilometres away.
- On what ground was Awadh annexed, and in which year? [2 marks]
- Explain any two ways in which the annexation affected families such as this one. [2 marks]
- Explain why a grievance of this kind did not stay in the village but reached the army lines. [2 marks]
- Study the description of the object given below and answer the questions that follow. A silver rupee minted by the East India Company in the 1830s. The coin carries the Company’s own name and design. The name of the Mughal emperor, which had appeared on the coinage of northern India for generations, does not appear anywhere on it.
- Which change in the Company’s treatment of the Mughal house does this coin illustrate? [2 marks]
- Explain why such a change mattered politically, even though the emperor had little real power. [3 marks]
- State one thing about the Company’s policy towards the Mughal house that this coin cannot tell you. [1 mark]
- In 1860 the ruler of a small princely state receives a written assurance from the British government. He is told that his right to adopt an heir will be recognised, and that the territory of his state is guaranteed against future annexation. In the same letter he is reminded that he must accept the supremacy of the Crown in all matters beyond his own borders.
- Which two policies of the period before 1857 had been abandoned by the time this assurance was given? [2 marks]
- Name the term used for the supremacy referred to in the letter, and give its meaning. [2 marks]
- Evaluate the claim that the princes gained more than they lost from this settlement. [3 marks]