This made them more accurate and gave them a longer range. [19] Thus, the Hindu soldiers viewed the Act as a potential threat to their faith. hasContentIssue true, THE FIRING PARADE OF 24 APRIL AND ITS SEQUEL, THE OUTBREAK: (a) The Native Infantry Lines, THE OUTBREAK: (b) The Native Cavalry Lines, THE OUTBREAK: (d) The European Troop Movements and the European Lines, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511563386.003, Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. The revolt of 1857 was one of the greatest & most significant developments in the history of the 19th century. This included an increase in the taxation on land. The company had an unbroken series of victories in India, against the Marathas, Mysore, north Indian states, and the Gurkhas, later against the Sikhs, and further afield in China and Burma. Christian organisations from Britain had additionally created 222 "unattached" mission stations across India in the decade preceding the rebellion. And yet its just as possible to see the bloody results of the mutual incomprehension between the British and native communities in India as a potent reminder that mistrust and panic can have serious consequences. These are deep waters that we trawl in, and dangerous ones, too. Before Smithsonian.com, Dash authored the award-winning blog A Blast From the Past. Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (London: John Murray, 2004). Vital though their Indian empire was to them, they controlled the subcontinent with a comparative handful of menabout 100,000 in all, less than half of whom were soldiers, ruling over a population of 250 millionand they were all too aware of just how inadequate these numbers would be in the event of any serious rebellion. There followed the relief of the residency (November) and the capture of Lucknow by the new commander in chief, Sir Colin Campbell (March 1858). A chowkidaran Indian village watchman. On 29 March 1857, Mangal Pandey, a sepoy of the 34 th Bengal Native Infantry (BNI) mutinied against his commanding officers of the East India Company. Thousands of entirely blameless Indians who found themselves caught up in the hysterical aftermath of the rebellion were flogged, or blown from cannon, or forced to clean bloodied paving stones using only their tongues before being summarily hanged. The first sepoy who rebelled by aiming his loaded weapon at a British officer was Mangal Pandey who was later executed.[25]. 24 October 2009. Pandey, it should be noted, is considered a hero in India, and has been portrayed as a freedom fighter in films and even on an Indian postage stamp. Loading the Enfield often required tearing open the greased cartridge with one's teeth, and many sepoys believed that the cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat. By a campaign in Avadh and Rohilkhand, Campbell cleared the countryside. In sum, this combination of factors produced, besides the normal tensions endemic in India, an uneasy, fearful, suspicious, and resentful frame of mind and a wind of unrest ready to fan the flame of any actual physical outbreak. At other times however, the Company directly or indirectly conceded the legitimacy of the sepoy's demands, such as when troops of the Bengal and Madras armies refused to serve in Sindh without batta after its conquest. The revolt of 1857, which the British call the Indian Mutiny but many Indians prefer to think of as the First War of Independence, was the defining event in British imperial history. The cartridge was then rammed down the muzzle of the rifle.. Author Pramod Nayar points out that by 1851 there were nineteen Protestant religious societies operating in India whose goal was the conversion of Indians to Christianity. Rich people like the merchants and moneylenders were, therefore, able to speculate in British land sales and drive out the most vulnerable peasant farmers. Economically and socially, there had been much dislocation in the landholding class all over northern and western India as a result of British land-revenue settlements, setting group against group. In addition, the General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 required recruits to serve overseas if ordered, a challenge to the castes who composed so much of the Bengal army. In 1877, outside Delhi, essentially in the spot where bloody fighting had taken place 20 years earlier, an event called the Imperial Assemblage was held. Mason, Philip (1974), page 263 "A Matter of Honour", London: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, Last edited on 28 September 2022, at 04:39, Details of the rifle issued as a result of the mutiny, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Causes_of_the_Indian_Rebellion_of_1857&oldid=1112793629, This page was last edited on 28 September 2022, at 04:39. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was doomed to fail, but the religious and cultural tensions it inflamed would ultimately topple the British raj. One of the first officials to encounter it was Mark Thornhill, magistrate in the little Indian town of Mathura, near Agra. [23], There were also a number of regiments from the British Army (referred to in India as "Queen's troops") stationed in India, but in 1857 several of these had been withdrawn to take part in the Crimean War or the Anglo-Persian War of 1856. To load both the old musket and the new rifle, soldiers had to bite the cartridge open and pour the gunpowder it contained into the rifle's muzzle, then stuff the paper cartridge (overlaid with a thin mixture of beeswax and mutton tallow for waterproofing) into the musket as wadding, the ball being secured to the top of the cartridge and guided into place for ramming down the muzzle. (See Barrackpore Mutiny.). Thornhill examined the chapatis in his office. Mike Dash is a contributing writer in history for Smithsonian.com. History of the Siege of Delhi (Edinburgh: A&C Black, 1861);John Kaye. But the wars against the Afghans and the Sikhs and then the annexations of Dalhousie alarmed and outraged them. Centers and leaders of the revolt of 1857. It was generally believed, in retrospect, that the circulation of the breads had been a warning of trouble ahead, and that the wave of chapatis must have been set in motion by a cunning group of determined conspirators who had begun plotting the rising months, if not years, in advance. [10], Caste privileges and customs within the Bengal Army were not merely tolerated but encouraged in the early years of the company's rule. However, nearly every sepoy was either Muslima religion that forbids eating the fat or any other part of a pig, or Hinduwhere the same rule applies to cows. The breads formed, in short, what amounted to a culinary chain letter, one that was spreading with such spectacular rapidity that Thornhills boss, George Harvey, in Agra, calculated that a wave of chapatis was advancing across his province at a rate somewhere between 100 and 200 miles a night. The whole episode falls into three periods: first came the summer of 1857, when the British, without reinforcements from home, fought with their backs to the wall; the second concerned the operations for the relief of Lucknow in the autumn; and the third was the successful campaign of Sir Colin Campbell (later Baron Clyde) and Sir Hugh Henry Rose (later Baron Strathnairn of Strathnairn and Jhansi) in the first half of 1858. "The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857." Company officers became aware of the rumours through reports of an altercation between a high-caste sepoy and a low-caste labourer at Dum Dum. There has been much controversy over its nature and causes. Their educational policy was a Westernizing one, with English instead of Persian as the official language; the old elites, schooled in the traditional pattern, felt themselves slighted. There is no doubt that conflict over the new rifle cartridges sparked the uprising in 1857, but the reality is that social, political, and even technological reforms had set the stage for what happened. By origin, a cartridge is a container, usually of paper, designed to hold enough powder for one discharge of the weapon. (2021, July 31). McNamara, Robert. A keen cricketer and tennis player, he now lives in Delhi and serves as director of a few companies. Indian soldiers in the East India Company's armies believed they risked defilement because the new rounds were being issued greased with the fat of pigs and cowsuntrue, but sufficient to spark the most dangerous uprising against British imperial rule since the American Revolution. Find out more about saving to your Kindle. The Revolt of 1857, an anti-colonial movement which fought against the imperialist policies of the British East India Company, is an important event that took place in Indian history. However much of this sense of the invincibility of the British was lost in the First Anglo-Afghan War where poor political judgment and inept British leadership led to the massacre of Elphinstone's army (which included three Bengal regiments) while retreating from Kabul. On March 29, 1857, on the parade ground at Barrackpore, a sepoy named Mangal Pandey fired the first shot of the uprising. What was the main cause of revolt of 1857? Mason, Philip (1974), page 190 "A Matter of Honour", London: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston. Narasimha Rao, The BJP becomes the largest party in the Lok Sabha, BJP reelection bids and tensions in Kashmir, Addressing COVID-19 and its economic impact. In another, however, the appalling atrocities visited by the Companys armies on the people of northern India were far from justified, since the British proved to be just as prone to rumors and panics as their Indian subjects. A Chowkeydar ran up to another village with two chupatties. Rumors spread with great rapidity before and during the mutinynot least because of the large number of British women and children at the mercy of the rebels in towns such as Delhi and Kanpur. Before the rebellion, there were reports that "holy men" were mysteriously circulating chapatis and lotus flowers among the sepoys. Mason, Philip (1974), pages 226-228 "A Matter of Honour", London: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston. It is not surprising that one of the many subsidiary rumors that accompanied the chupatty movement was that the breads were being carried and distributed, the eventual trial of the King of Delhi noted, by the hands of the very lowest caste men that can be found; and the natives say that it is intended by Government to force or bribe the headmen to eat the bread, and thus loose their caste. Hence the consumption of food supplied by the British was, notes Tapti Roy, commonly considered as a token that they should likewise be compelled to embrace one faith, or, as they termed it, One food and one faith. . Is the sending of such articles about the country a custom among the Hindoos or Mussulmans; and would the meaning be at once understood without any accompanying explanation? The British military commander Sir James Outram thought it was a Muslim conspiracy, exploiting Hindu grievances. Partly owing to this, Bengal sepoys were not subject to the penalty of flogging as were the European soldiers. And, historically, much the same thing had happened before in times of trouble. Another important source of discontent among the Indian rulers was that the British policies of conquest had created significant unrest. The Indian papers are full of surmises as to what it means. Did an Ancient Magnetic Field Reversal Cause Chaos for Life on Earth 42,000 Years Ago? He was informed that they had been brought in by one of his Indian police officers, who had received them from a puzzled village chowkidar (watchman). Another suggestion they put forward was to introduce a new drill, in which the cartridge was not bitten with the teeth but torn open with the hand. It is no surprise, the historian Kim Wagner notes, that, faced with such a plethora of portents, the British regarded with deep suspicion, bordering on paranoia, any type of communication in India which they could not understand. The colonial administration well understood that rumors, however unfounded, could have serious consequences, and there were plenty of notably more dangerous urban legends about. Mason, Philip (1974), page 264 "A Matter of Honour", London: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston. The sepoys' British officers dismissed these claims as rumors and suggested that the sepoys make a batch of fresh cartridges, using a religiously acceptable greasing agent such as ghee or vegetable oil. Nationalist historians have seen in it the first Indian war of independence. Eleven of the sepoys were executed and hundreds more sentenced to hard labor. The general factors that turned a military mutiny into a popular revolt can be comprehensively described under the heading of political, economic, social, and cultural Westernization. The Siege of Delhi. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/sepoy-mutiny-of-1857-1774014. To save content items to your account, This seems to have been a very important reason for the spread of the rebellion, keeping in view the speed at which they ignited in many villages in northern India where farmers rushed to get back their unfairly grabbed title deeds. Large numbers of native soldiers, known as sepoys, were employed by the company to maintain order and defend trading centers. Loading the Enfield often required tearing open the greased cartridge with one's teeth, and many sepoys believed that the cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat. Fighting in some places continued well into 1858, but the British were ultimately able to establish control. The revolt was sparked by a number of reasons, including economic exploitation, cultural repression, and mistreatment of Indian soldiers. ThoughtCo, Jul. To facilitate its passage, the cartridges were greased with tallow, which, in the U.K., was made of beef and pork fat. was the rumour that the newly issued rie cartridges would be greased either with tallow, derived from beef and thereby oensive to Hindus, or lard, derived from pork and thereby oensive to Muslims. Certain actions of the government, such as increased recruitment of Sikhs and Gurkhas, peoples considered by the Bengal sepoys to be inferior in caste to them, increased the distrust of the sepoys who thought that this was a sign of their services not being needed any more. In the taxation on land outraged them ran up to another village two... 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