People's Democracy

Remembering 1857

Irfan Habib

We are due to commemorate the Revolt of 1857 as the year 2007 has come round to mark its 150th Anniversary. It is difficult in Free India to recall the times under the British, when no free and open discussion of the events of 1857 was possible. It was, then, only after independence that people became more and more familiar about the rebellion itself. Documents not known to scholars before 1947 have now been published, especially rebels’ proclamations, and other documents, newspaper accounts of the Mutiny, etc. 

LARGEST UPRISING

We did not, indeed, have merely an armed revolution — the only armed revolution on that scale that we have ever known in India. But it was more than that: it was the largest anti-colonial uprising anywhere in the world in the 19th century. If one looks at the whole of the 19th century, among anti-colonial revolutions all over the world, one will find successful anti-colonial revolutions in Latin America, but there was no anti-colonial revolution even there, remotely on this scale. There were armed revolutionaries under the great Bolivar, but they never exceeded more than a few thousands of armed men at any time. 

Here in India, on the other hand, there were over one hundred and twenty-five thousand of Bengal Army sepoys going into armed revolt. According to official figures, the Bengal Army consisted of over one hundred and thirty-five thousand ‘native’ sepoys. Of these only some seven thousand remained loyal according to a report laid before British Parliament in 1858. No less than a hundred and twenty-eight thousand men thus went into rebellion. We are here talking about what was the most modern army in Asia at the time, and the largest army within the British Empire overseas. In terms of the percentage of people inhabiting the rebellious territory involved, it consisted of about thirty percent of the population of the territory of the present Union of India. Thus if we look at the scale from any angle whatsoever, then 1857 was not only a major event in Indian history, it was a major event in modern world history. 

Revolutions often break out in situations often created by the ruling classes themselves. The revolt of the Bengal Army, seemingly the favoured child of the British regime (as Marx had noted) was brought about in part by a new phase in British colonial expansion, the Imperialism of Free Trade, which put this entire army under unprecedented pressure.

ROLE OF THE BENGAL ARMY

The Bengal Army was the ‘sword arm’ of British Imperialism in India and outside of it. Marx was completely sceptical about the peace pretensions of the Free Traders, who dominated British politics from the early 1830s onwards, a fact not known even to Lenin, for these articles of Marx had not yet been traced and published. His scepticism proved to be fully justified when historians like John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, in England, developed in the 1950’s began to analyse the phenomenon of “the imperialism of free trade”. They underlined the empirically observed fact that after the British Parliamentary Reforms of 1832, when British industrial classes came virtually into power, a new powerful wave of British colonial expansion began. It was in the process of this expansion that the Bengal Army sepoys were continuously made canon-fodder, to fight and die in battle-fields from Crimea to China.

The first campaign the Bengal Army was thrown in was the gruesome first Afghan War, in 1839-1842; then it fought in the Gwalior war of 1843, a half-forgotten war causing great losses on both sides; this was followed by the war to conquer Sind in 1844; then came the Punjab Wars, with huge losses for the Bengal Army in 1845-46 and in 1848-49. In 1852 the Army was sent to Burma for the Second Burma War, during which amidst dreadful pestilence it conquered southern Burma for the British. In 1840-42, it had to fight in China in the infamous Opium War, and then again during 1856-60. In 1854, contingent sent off to Crimea, to fight against Russia. It had thus been continuously fighting from 1839 to 1857. Even in 1856-57 a war was going on with Persia, with Indian troops fighting there. No other army in the world was so continuously involved in wars in contemporary times. It is an ordinary perception of professional generals that armies need rest; for eighteen years, such rest remained unknown to the Bengal Army. 

John William Kaye, who was more honest than other British military historians of the day, notes, wrote that it was common for British officials, while reprimanding the Sepoys of the Bengal Army, for any fault, to say that they would be “sent to Burma, or to China where the men would die.” It was not that the sepoys were excessively religious; it was just that they were human beings. Why was not the British Army, the home army, sent on all those expeditions? The only exception was the war in Crimea, the single war, and that seemingly bled Britain white. 

BENGAL ARMY: NOT COMMUNAL

The frustration that the sepoys felt as soldiers was given expression to in ways that were determined by the very kind of army that the British had built. For reasons of convenience, the British recruited soldiers for the Bengal Army from an area where people spoke and understood the same language, namely, Hindustani. Therefore, the recruits came basically from an area comprising the present territories of UP, Western Bihar and Haryana. A very large recruiting ground in UP, consisted of the two present Divisions of Faizabad and Lucknow, which constituted before 1856, the kingdom of Oudh. Some 40,000 of Bengal Army men came from Oudh alone. Another point about this army was that it was recruited largely on a caste basis. The Brahmans constituted a very large part of the infantry. They were often literate, and were seen to be more prone to accept the discipline needed in for modern warfare, than the usual ‘martial’ elements in traditional Indian armies. Rules were framed in 1850 to include the stipulation that upper caste men only would be recruited to the Bengal Army. At the same time in order to encourage cohesive action at command, divisions on religious lines were not introduced in the Bengal Army. Imperialism had not discovered till then that it could everywhere use religious divisions between Hindus and Muslims. For this lapse they were censured by a loyal official and future educationist, Syed Ahmed Khan, when he wrote his book, Asbab-e-Bagawat-e-Hind (Causes of the Indian Rebellion), in which he argued that it was a mistake for the British Government to put both Hindu and Muslim Sepoys in the same regiments and companies, for when they shed their blood together, they became closer than brothers to each other, and could no longer be used against each other. Soldiers of this modern army, which had very little to do with the Indian ruling classes of older days, and which was perhaps the most numerous modern element in Indian society of that time, had thus evolved two important features. It was very highly caste-sensitive, and yet it was not communal. 

FUNDAMENTAL CAUSES

That is why the greased cartridges were particularly difficult for the Sepoys to accept. Caste was important for them. That kind of status was perhaps the only thing left to them: They could not become officers, or get promotions. At best, one out of twenty, or it could be thirty, could become a jamadar. Then from such jamadars, one out of thirty, perhaps, could become a Subedar; from those, just a few could become a Subedar Major; and that was the end in the promotion ladder. They had hardly any dignity as men left to them in the army. They were paid, but constantly humiliated by their officers as people of an inferior race. Only the pride of caste had been left to them and the British government was now taking even that away with its greased cartridges containing tallow from cow and pig fat. It is true, many good reasons could be given in favour of the use of greased cartridges. The difference between biting the cartridge or breaking it by fingers, could be one between life and death in battle. 

When Bahadur Shah was put on trial, the British prosecutor said that the mutineers who had objected to the greased cartridges when issued by their British officers, were using and biting the very same cartridge when they were firing them against the British. But that was done by them at their own free will, not under coercion. Their rejection of the greased cartridges stemmed from all the cumulative humiliations, especially the racial and religious humiliations they had been constantly subjected to, such as having to march off on a Sunday to hear some white missionary glorifying his faith at the cost of theirs, or suffering personal insults at the hands of European officers.

But there were more fundamental causes too behind the Bengal Army’s Mutiny than the ‘accident’ of the greased cartridges. It was, however, no ‘accident’ that the area the bulk of its sepoys came from, had been turned into the highest taxed area of the country. The peasantry as well as the ‘village zamindars’ here had been made subject to an ever rising burden of tax under the Mahalwari system since 1822. Bengal proper was under the Permanent Settlement, with land tax permanently fixed; the Rayatwari of the Madras Presidency was also a permanent settlement, made mainly with peasants; Bombay had settlements of thirty years. In Mahalwari, not only were the settlements made for twenty years only, but the revenue-rates could be changed at any time. There was also collective responsibility for payment: Even if one peasant or landholder paid his tax, but his neighbour had not paid, then his own land would also stand forfeited to Government. In Aligarh district, Eric Stokes tell us, between 1839 and 1858 half of the land changed hands; in Muzaffarnagar, a quarter, between 1841 and 1861. The tax-free (mafi) lands had also been resumed wholesale after 1833. The Brahmans and also ‘shaikhs’, from amongst Muslims, who were particularly recruited in the Bengal Army, often held mafi lands, which were ordinarily given to pundits and Muslims scholars under the pre-British regimes. Both as peasants and as mafi-holders, the classes that the Sepoys came from, were increasingly adversely affected, and this, of course, led to discontent spreading among the sepoys as well.

Whatever sources of the discontent might have been, the fact that practically the entire Bengal army revolted, step by step, but with increasing tempo, remains a dramatic phenomenon. Over a hundred and twenty-five thousand revolting out of one hundred thirty-five thousand is itself, as we have mentioned above, an incredible development however one looks at it. It began in West Bengal, in Dumdum first, in January 1857; then, Mangal Pandey, enacted the first bold act of defiance, in March at Barrackpore. The flames spread to Lucknow early in May; and on May 9 and 10, a full scale mutiny erupted at Meerut. The Meerut Sepoys occupied Delhi on May 11. This proved to be the decisive general signal for the whole army to revolt.

POPULAR RESPONSE

Uptill now, despite much speculation, there has been no solid evidence that behind this sudden upsurge there was any long premeditated plan or a recognizable leadership, beyond a strong sense of brotherhood among the Sepoys. The brotherhood that had long been developed through shedding blood together in their masters’ wars can only explain how the mass of sepoys decided to follow the call of solidarity with the first rebels. Hindu and Muslim Sepoys of the Bengal Army thought that they had a common identity. Hence, when one set of sepoys revolted, the others could not hold back. When we deprecate the term ‘Mutiny’ given to the Revolt of 1857, we should not at the same time underestimate the vital role of the rebelling soldiers in the uprising. They remained throughout its course the backbone of the Revolt. The proper estimation of the Sepoys’ role in the rebellion is found in even the conventional narrative of Vincent Smith in his Oxford History of India (1916). One finds him speaking of how these hundred and twenty thousand men, went to their deaths, on the battlefield, or on the gallows, or in the tarai defiles; any one hardly escaping, with few ever surrendering. The Bengal Army Sepoys certainly deserve every tribute we can offer them, and the memory of their staunchness in resistance and suffering would hopefully live forever in the heart of the Indian people. 

It is also true that the rebel soldiers immediately found response in the civil population. The areas, where the Sepoys were recruited from, were immediately convulsed by a widespread sense of sympathy for the rebels; and other classes also revolted. 

A very well documented article, by Talmiz Khaldun in a volume on 1857 edited by P.C. Joshi argues that the Revolt turned into “a peasant war against indigenous landlordism and foreign imperialism”, and was thus primarily an anti-feudal movement, and only secondarily an anti-colonial uprising. One would agree with P.C. Joshi that this is an unjustified dilution of the anti-colonial character of 1857 and very unrealistic in its excluding landlord classes from the ranks of the Rebels. It is naturally also not in accordance with Marx’s assessment of the rebellion of 1857, as we have seen. To him, it was “a revolution”, “a national revolt”, in which the peasants, as well as section of the zamindars and the talukdars were also involved. All the classes in India were adversely affected by imperialism at that time, and the contradiction between Imperialism and the Indian people was at that particular juncture concentrated in those areas, where the Bengal Army Sepoys mostly came from. The land tax was intensely heavy there; and the land rights of the zamindars were being rendered increasingly vulnerable to forfeiture. The annexation of Oudh had taken place in 1856; and the talukdars, who were the great landed magnates of Oudh were threatened with the imposition of the same Mahalwari system that had ruined landed classes in the rest of the province. So there was a situation, in which both the peasants and the landed classes had to bear oppression from the same source. 

As would happen in any agrarian revolution, the conditions on the ground undoubtedly varied. Mark Thornhill claimed in a report (15-November 1858) that the upper landed castes, who had suffered most in the Mahalwari system in U.P., remained loyal to the British, whereas the peasants, “who have derived the most benefit from our rule(!) were the most hostile to its continuance.” This is an obviously one-sided version, foreshadowing the subsequent British policy of winning over the landlords and repressing the peasantry. In any case, in Oudh the Governor General Canning himself thought that the talukdars were the leaders of the rebellion, and therefore, issued his famous proclamation of 1857, in which he declared that the entire land of Oudh under the talukdars’ possession was now forfeited to the British Government. It was stated repeatedly on the floor of the British Parliament that both the talukdars and the peasants of Oudh had joined hands in the rebellion against the British Government. 

Moreover, apart from the rural roots of the rebellion that Marx has underlined, there were also urban elements involved in it. British rule had meant considerable growth of urban unemployment. Lucknow might not have had a population of one million at the time of annexation (1856), as estimated by some British observers, but it certainly had a population of above six hundred thousand, at that time, to judge from a police-house-survey made just before the Mutiny. It was therefore, a large city, possibly even larger at the time than Calcutta. After the Annexation it was full of people deprived of their livelihood, because the court was gone. The artisans, especially weavers, were the hardest hit because of imports of British products. This was notably because while, on the one hand, there was an influx of cheap factory-made cloth and other products from Britain, there was simultaneously the loss of their traditional markets for town artisans, as the princely courts and their dependents were destroyed. As L.E.S. Rees, an English eye-witness of the events at Lucknow in 1857, admitted: “That the Lucknow people should rise against us was a very probable event… We had done very little to deserve their love and much to merit their detestation.” What was true of Lucknow was true, in varying measure, of most towns of the affected region. Therefore, the Revolt of 1857 was more than an agrarian war: people of cities also joined the rebellion: Delhi, Lucknow, Bareilly, Kanpur, Jhansi and other towns became determined centres of resistance. 

APPEAL TO THE MASSES

We must remember that the British regime by the processes of tribute extraction and de-industrialization it had unleashed had caused extreme impoverishment among millions of Indians. Tribute was the cause behind heavy taxation; and it had to be remitted constantly to meet what would later be known as the “Home Charges”, and for transfers of private wealth to Europe. The degree of colonial exploitation was so extreme that many classes, which perhaps did not understand what their misery was due to, still took to the path of revolt. They sensed that in the overthrow of the British, lay the only source of relief; and so, whether in villages or in towns, they joined the Revolt.

The documents that became known to us in the 1950s are important in this regard, as they bring out some of these sentiments of the rebels. For example the Mughal Prince Firoz Shah’s proclamation of 25 August 1857 lists many of the popular grievances of the time and seeks by certain specific promises to attract many sections of the population to the Rebel banner. It begins with an appeal to the zamindars: the British were levying heavy taxes on them, and the Badshahi Government would only take half the produce in tax; those landowners who aided it with money and men will be made tax-exempt; those who gave money only would need to pay only a fourth of the produce in tax. Moreover, their dignity as against “common Ryots” would be protected. The merchants would be aided with funds and “will have the benefit of the Government steam vessels and steam-carriages for the conveyance of their merchandise gratis” — this has the appearance of a particularly “modern” project. Salaries of public servants and soldiers would be raised. Artisans were promised employment, their present plight being described thus: “The Europeans by the introduction of English articles into India, have thrown the weavers, the cotton dressers, the carpenters, the blacksmiths and the shoemakers, etc., out of employ… so that every description of native artisan has been reduced to beggary”. Finally, “pundits, fakirs and learned men”, both Hindu and Muslim, would be given lands, provided they declare in favour of the Rebels. It will be seen that practically every class of society is appealed to — except the peasants. Clearly, even among the more intelligent and determined rebel leaders, as Firoz Shah turned out to be, the full potential of peasant unrest and its value for the success of the Rebellion was not still understood.

Yet even the most traditional of rebel leaders were conscious of the need for making an appeal to the masses. This is particularly to be seen in their use of the printing press to publish their proclamations. The Oudh Court, in the name of Birjis Qadr, issued a printed “General Notice (Ishtiharnama) to the zamindars and General Inhabitants of this Country”, which was a bilingual document in Hindustani in Urdu characters (on the right) and Nagari (on the left). The language was deliberately kept simple, and the document shows that the days of Hindi-Urdu controversy had not yet dawned. S. Athar Abbas Rizvi has published a facsimile of this “Notice” as well as a printed ishtihar of Nana Sahib, printed at Kanpur in July 1857, in similarly idiomatic but simple Urdu. Throughout the period of rebel control of Delhi (May-September 1857) weekly Urdu newspapers continued to be printed and issued in the city.

RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES RECEDE

The last-mentioned proclamation of Nana Sahib is also important in another respect. It has long been the custom of certain historians to treat Nana Sahib and Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi as representing the chiefly “Hindu” centres of the Rebellion, while Delhi and Bareilly were regarded as particularly “Muslim” centres, with an assumption of an underlying sense of hostility between them. One can see how this assumption is at work in V.A. Smith’s account of the Revolt in his Oxford History of India. How wrong such a conception could be is shown by the fact that not only is Nana Sahib’s ishtihar published in Urdu, and bears a Hijri date, but its main theme is that the Sultan of Turkey had intervened on behalf of the Indians, so that when the British ships had brought the European troops to Egypt on their way to India, the Sultan issued a farmaan to the Pasha of Egypt to slaughter the English, and he had done so. This was nothing but fantasy, of course. Yet the expectation of support from the Sultan is good evidence that Nana Sahib’s world-view was not clouded by religious prejudices. As for the Rani of Jhansi, some of her most determined fighters were Muslim gunners and Pathan guards. On the supposedly ‘Muslim’ side, the way the standard of jehad was removed from the Jama Masjid in May 1857 at Delhi, lest it be apprehended as being directed against the Hindus, and all cow and buffalo-slaughter was banned at the Muslim Iduz Zuha festival in July, showed the Rebels’ determination to prevent all religious disputation — a realm in which Percival Spear (Twilight of the Mughals) in his detailed account of the Rebel regime in Delhi, credits them with the “most striking success.” At Bareilly, Bahadur Khan, the principal rebel leader, printed an appeal to Hindu chiefs to join the struggle against the British, detailing the attacks on Hindu customs and taboos by the British and offering, on behalf of Muslims, to utterly abjure cow-slaughter and the eating of beef!

In his important book, Felt Community, Rajat Kanta Ray has very comprehensively dealt with the attitude of mind of the various sections of the rebels. He particularly underlines the fact that in the rebellion of 1857, in the minds of most of the participants, even when they were not Sepoys, but civilians, the sense of religious differences receded to a surprising degree. Hindu contingents would elect Muslims as their representatives; Muslim contingents would accept a Hindu Subedar major as their head. Among the Muslims who voluntarily joined the Rebellion, under the impulse of joining a righteous war, or jihad and so were called mujahids or jihadis (“fanatics” in official British translation and often wrongly identified with Wahabis), there was the same acceptance of the need for Hindus and Muslims coming together to fight for a common cause: the target was the British alone. 

In the Risala Fath-i Islam (Tract on the Victory of Islam) composed under the supposed aegis of the famous rebel leader-and theologian Ahmadullah Shah the appeal is repeatedly made to both Hindus and Muslims to fight unitedly to defend their respective faiths against their English oppressors. In a contemporary eye-witness description of a mass rebel ceremony at Bareilly that Rajat Ray extracts from a Bengali source, we are told of Bahadur Khan moving through Bareilly with two banners, one the banner of Islam, the green banner, and another large banner, the holy dhvaj. A similar ceremony had been undertaken by Nana Saheb at Kanpur.

The final aspect, and that is often ignored in the discussions about the rebellion, is the racial question. W.W.Hunter, in the preface to his book Indian Musalmans (1871), admitted that “the chronic peril, which environs the British power in India, is the gap between the Rulers and the Ruled”. It was a barrier, set by not just power and wealth, but also and most visibly, by race. Though India was always familiar with social hierarchies, and the rebel leaders themselves often wanted to restore and strengthen the traditional social hierarchy, this kind of racial difference, based on colour, was unknown to them. (Later on, there would be railway carriages for the Europeans’ exclusive use, separate from those for Indians. Those who, like our Prime Minister, praise the Indian Civil Service as the great contribution of the British to India, forget that as late as 1916, out of every twenty ICS officers only one was an Indian.) The first common perception once the English were overthrown in any locality was obviously that now the relationship stood reversed, infusing a sense of elation in the consciousness of the Indians that Rajat Ray does well to underline.

REASONS FOR FAILURE

There were many reasons that could be advanced for the failure of India’s great rebellion. As we have noted, there had been no organised conspiracy behind this. Plots and plans began only once the initial sepoy mutinies had occurred. There is no proof of detailed plans of the kind that the BJP put in its NCERT textbooks, attributing these to Nana Sahib, and bemoaning a ‘premature’ outbreak spoiling a well-prepared design. Marx’s statement that one could not expect the Indian revolt to be a kind of modern European revolution introduces for us an important element of caution. There was neither a large bourgeoisie as yet, nor a working class in India. There were no political parties. The French Revolution would have not developed the way it did, if the Jacobins had not established through their Jacobin clubs a true political party. Such organisations gave direction, thrust, and boldness to the French Revolution. Mao Zedong in his characterization of the long series of Chinese peasant revolutions notes especially as the cause of their failure that there were then no political parties to guide the revolts. One of the great Marxist thinkers, Antonio Gramsci, in his essay, The Modern Prine has, indeed, said that the political party is the basic unit of modern polity. And, for the working class, of course, its own party is a crucial instrument of action. There was not yet any working class or even a modern, educated middle class in the zone of the Rebellion. In the absence of these classes, and any organisation answering to the form of a political party, the rebel leaders could conceive only of a polity of the old type, envisioning basically a restoration of Pre-British system of local regimes bound together with vague loyalties to a central monarchy. They could not think of a modern Indian national state, though they did definitely think of India as a country to which they owed loyalty. 

It is relevant here to refer to the spirited reply that the rebels gave to Queen Victoria’s proclamation of November 1858 in the name Birjis Qadr. They said that the promises the Queen was holding forth to Indians were totally deceptive; the British had never fulfilled their promises. The British had destroyed Indian states, one after another, and the Rebels gave a list which included practically every important state in India demolished by Britain, from that of Tipu Sultan in Mysore, to that of Duleep Singh in the Punjab. The rebels were thus concerned with what had happened to the whole of “Hindustan”. The proclamation told the Sepoys, and all rebels, not to believe the British, who would ultimately kill them. Queen Victoria’s promises meant nothing: the Indians were destined under her to be only the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and not masters of their own house. The reply is totally defiant and uncompromising, even when as in November 1858, everything seemed lost. One’s heart is warmed by the fact that the Rebels still spoke of India and remained steadfast in what they believed to be her cause.

Such firmness of sentiment did not, however, change the situation on the ground, which was that even the Bengal Army sepoys never attained unity of command; they in their different units cooperated with or even joined the service of different traditional authorities. They had no single high command, because among the Sepoys, none had had any experience of being officers; they were only soldiers, though their leaders might now be called Generals or Colonels. It is true that they did not only follow English military titles, they also almost everywhere tended to form “councils”, to manage their affairs. In Delhi, they formed the famous Council of Administration, which in every way was modelled after British practices. But these organs of power were no substitute for a unified command for the whole Rebel movement, which was not only a political but a military necessity. One of the great advantages of the British was that they could devise strategies and plan troop movements according to need. The Sepoys could decide only on tactics, and could not concentrate their military strength at vital points. Despite their large numbers, they could yet be overthrown in detail. 

The result was that the rebels were actually placed between two enemy pincer movements, one from the east, and the other from the northwest; and ultimately so trapped, they were destroyed. They were not however, destroyed easily. The defence of Delhi lasted for more than four months, with Bakht Khan as its leading commander. Lucknow lasted for almost ten months, repulsing the first invasion by General Campbell himself. The Gwalior contingent defeated the British troops and occupied Kanpur, inflicting on General Windham one of the few defeats in an open engagement, ever suffered by the British in India. The bitter defence of Jhansi under its brave Rani remained memorable. And for ever an epic was the campaign over a surprisingly large area by that old and able chieftain, Kunwar Singh of Jagdishpur. Tatiya Tope valiantly continued his battle against the British for almost two years and was hanged on April 18, 1859. The rebels hardly ever went down without fighting, or without resisting. 

One needs to remember here the recurring descriptions of the rebels, who were tortured and hanged. They went to their deaths unbowed, and hardly anyone craved pardon. There was often the same stoical and defiant streak, which was to be seen later in the Singapore Mutiny of 1915. And not only among Sepoys, but also among ordinary men. Let us hear J.W. Kaye, author of The Sepoy War, on the conduct of Peer Ali, a simple bookseller of Patna:

“Brought before the Commissioner and other English gentlemen, ‘heavily fettered, his soiled garments stained deeply with blood from a wound in his side’, he was asked whether he had any information to give that might induce the Government to spare his life. With dignified composure, such as our people (i.e. the English) did not always maintain under exciting circumstances, he confronted his questioners… He denounced the oppression of the English … Peer Ali was [then] taken out to execution… He was hanged, his house was razed to the ground and his property was confiscated.”

BRITISH ATROCITIES

It had repeatedly been said that many Englishwomen had been dishonoured; this was said on the floor of British Parliament again and again. Marx disbelieved such inflammatory rumours with remarkable prescience, as may be seen an article of his in New York Tribune, 15 April 1858. After the rebellion was suppressed, despite the English assiduously trying to find evidence against the Rebels for molesting English women nothing by way of evidence could be found. Yet the cry that “the natives have dishonoured our women”, was a very important piece of hate propaganda spread in England against the Mutineers and used to justify all barbarities perpetrated. 

Even before they could have possibly known of the Kanpur massacre that took place later, the English had begun committing atrocities on Indian men, women and children. Let us hear what J.W. Kaye, says about the haunting dilemma that British atrocities posed for him.

“An English man is almost suffocated with indignation when he reads that Mrs. Chambers or Miss Jennings was hacked to death by a dusky ruffian. But in native histories, or history being wanting in native legends and traditions, it may be recorded against our people, that mothers, wives and children with less familiar names, fell miserable victims to the first swoop of English vengeance, and these stories may have as deep a pathos as any that rend our own hearts”.

Such atrocities undertaken by the English from the beginning of the Mutiny enflamed the Rebels and hardened their hearts. The English gave no quarter to their opponents: As Engels recalled in 1870 they violated all laws of war in killing the prisoners of war; and they did so by ever imaginable, fiendish means, like hanging after binding their victims in contorted forms or — a special favourite — blowing the captives from mouths of their guns. 

Right from the beginning, with Col. James Neill’s expedition in early June 1857 horrible bouts of atrocities were committed by the British as they regained each village or town from the rebels. There was a frenzied general massacre of civilians at Delhi upon its fall in September 1857, devastating and depeopling the whole city — an account of which may be read in William Dalrymple’s Last Mughal. Every subsequent success of the British was similarly marked by a general massacre and plunder of civil populations. William Russell of London Times was a witness to the British loot of Lucknow in March 1858. A Maharashtrian pilgrim caught in the Rebellion similarly described the slaughter of civilians, including women and children, wrought by the British at Jhansi and neighbouring places. The repression continued even after the end of the Rebellion. There were pursuits, trials and executions. Confiscations of lands and properties followed. Not only individual rebels but whole families, whose members were suspected of having been involved in any way in the Mutiny were deprived of their lands. The confiscated lands were given to British families and to such ‘natives’ as could claim to have rendered service against their own compatriots. 

The defeat of the Rebellion of 1857 seemed at the time total, and as a consequence, the repressive and exploitative nature of British rule now appeared in a still more naked form. And yet even in its defeat, the Revolt weakened the capacity of British imperialism to continue with its policy of territorial aggrandisement, since it could no longer rely on Indian troops for external adventures. Before 1857 there were over 2,00,000 Indian sepoys in the three Presidency Armies. This number had been reduced to 1,21,000 by 1862-63, while the number of European soldiers in India was increased from 38,000 to 76,000 — so that there was now one European soldier to watch over every two Indian sepoys! Moreover Indians were excluded from the Artillery branch. Since a European soldier’s pay was several times that of an Indian, the burden of military expenditure fell ever more heavily on the Indian tax-payer’s shoulders. Yet the army was far less effective. Thus the grand designs of British imperialism which had been based on the use of Indian troops as cannon fodder, could no longer be pursued with the same élan. To this extent the 1857 helped to shield other Asian nations from British onslaughts for a long time.

Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal king, is not one of the heroic figures of the Revolt of 1857. But he was a poet, and as he was being tried, deprived of pen and paper, he scrawled with charcoal on the walls of his cell, verses of sorrow and sadness at the tragic end of the Great Rebellion. The bulk of the verses I translate below belong to a poem that was already being sung by “the minstrels of India”, according to a report of the Political Agent of Bhopal, dated 14 June 1862.

“The way the wind has changed so suddenly and totally, my heart now knows no quiet.
How can I recount that tale of cruelty, for my breast is shattered by sorrow?
How have the people of India been destroyed! What cruelties have been perpetrated on them!
Whomever the victorious masters saw, they said, 
‘He is fit enough for the gallows.’
No one buried the dead under the earth, no one gave them a shroud, 
They could never attain their native place, nor is there any sign anywhere of their graves.”
“Friends, I am that slaughtered man, at whose corpse, 
a whole world will continue to look with grief and envy.
O Zafar, so long as the country of India endures, 
the star of the glory of this flower will ever shine.”

The last lines contained a proud boast on behalf of the rebel dead. It is for the people of India to show a hundred and fifty years later how much they care for the memory of those who died so bravely for her.