Indian Rebellion of 1857

"Sepoy Mutiny" redirects here. For other uses, see Sepoy Mutiny (disambiguation).

"Indian War of Independence" redirects here. For other uses, see The Indian War of Independence (disambiguation).
Indian Rebellion of 1857

A 1912 map of Northern India, showing the centres of the rebellion.
Date10 May 1857 (1857-05-10) – 1 November 1858 (1858-11-01)
(1 year and 6 months)
Location
India
Result British victory
Territorial
changes		 Some princely states annexed into British India. Other princely states retain their dominions and autonomy.
Belligerents
Commanders and leaders

The Earl Canning
George Anson †
Sir Patrick Grant
Sir Colin Campbell

Sir Henry Havelock †

Surendra Bikram Shah

Randhir Singh

Sir Yusef Ali Khan
Casualties and losses

6,000 British killed, including civilians[a][2]

Based on a rough comparison of the sketchy pre-1857 regional demographic data and the first 1871 Census of India, probably 800,000 Indians were killed, and very likely more, both in the rebellion and in the famines and epidemics of disease that were caused as a result in its immediate aftermath.[2]

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown.[4][5] The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the form of a mutiny of sepoys of the company's army in the garrison town of Meerut, 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Delhi. It then erupted into other mutinies and civilian rebellions chiefly in the upper Gangetic plain and central India,[b][6][c][7] though incidents of revolt also occurred farther north and east.[d][8] The rebellion posed a military threat to British power in that region,[e][9] and was contained only with the rebels' defeat in Gwalior on 20 June 1858.[10] On 1 November 1858, the British granted amnesty to all rebels not involved in murder, though they did not declare the hostilities to have formally ended until 8 July 1859.

The name of the revolt is contested, and it is variously described as the Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian Mutiny, the Great Rebellion, the Revolt of 1857, the Indian Insurrection, and the First War of Independence.[f][11]

The Indian rebellion was fed by resentments born of diverse perceptions, including invasive British-style social reforms, harsh land taxes, summary treatment of some rich landowners and princes,[12][13] and scepticism about the improvements brought about by British rule.[g][14] Many Indians rose against the British; however, many also fought for the British, and the majority remained seemingly compliant to British rule.[h][14] Violence, which sometimes betrayed exceptional cruelty, was inflicted on both sides, on British officers, and civilians, including women and children, by the rebels, and on the rebels, and their supporters, including sometimes entire villages, by British reprisals; the cities of Delhi and Lucknow were laid waste in the fighting and the British retaliation.[i][14]

After the outbreak of the mutiny in Meerut, the rebels quickly reached Delhi, whose 81-year-old Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was declared the Emperor of Hindustan. Soon, the rebels had captured large tracts of the North-Western Provinces and Awadh (Oudh). The East India Company's response came rapidly as well. With help from reinforcements, Kanpur was retaken by mid-July 1857, and Delhi by the end of September.[10] However, it then took the remainder of 1857 and the better part of 1858 for the rebellion to be suppressed in Jhansi, Lucknow, and especially the Awadh countryside.[10] Other regions of Company-controlled India—Bengal province, the Bombay Presidency, and the Madras Presidency—remained largely calm.[j][7][10] In the Punjab, the Sikh princes crucially helped the British by providing both soldiers and support.[k][7][10] The large princely states, Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore, and Kashmir, as well as the smaller ones of Rajputana, did not join the rebellion, serving the British, in the Governor-General Lord Canning's words, as "breakwaters in a storm".[15]

In some regions, most notably in Awadh, the rebellion took on the attributes of a patriotic revolt against British oppression.[16] However, the rebel leaders proclaimed no articles of faith that presaged a new political system.[l][17] Even so, the rebellion proved to be an important watershed in Indian and British Empire history.[m][11][18] It led to the dissolution of the East India Company, and forced the British to reorganize the army, the financial system, and the administration in India, through passage of the Government of India Act 1858.[19] India was thereafter administered directly by the British government in the new British Raj.[15] On 1 November 1858, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation to Indians, which while lacking the authority of a constitutional provision,[n][20] promised rights similar to those of other British subjects.[o][p][21] In the following decades, when admission to these rights was not always forthcoming, Indians were to pointedly refer to the Queen's proclamation in growing avowals of a new nationalism.[q][r][23]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Tyagi1974 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ a b c Peers 2013, p. 64.
  3. ^ Buettner, Elizabeth (2000), "Problematic spaces, problematic races: defining 'Europeans' in late colonial India", Women's History Review, 9 (2): 277–298, 278, doi:10.1080/09612020000200242, ISSN 0961-2025, S2CID 145297044, Colonial-era sources most commonly referred to individuals whom scholars today often describe as 'white' or 'British' as 'European' or 'English'.
  4. ^ Marshall 2007, p. 197
  5. ^ David 2003, p. 9
  6. ^ a b Bose & Jalal 2004, pp. 72–73
  7. ^ a b c d e f Marriott, John (2013), The other empire: Metropolis, India and progress in the colonial imagination, Manchester University Press, p. 195, ISBN 978-1-84779-061-3
  8. ^ a b Bender, Jill C. (2016), The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire, Cambridge University Press, p. 3, ISBN 978-1-316-48345-9
  9. ^ a b Bayly 1987, p. 170
  10. ^ a b c d e Bandyopadhyay 2004, pp. 169–172, Brown 1994, pp. 85–87, and Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, pp. 100–106
  11. ^ a b c d Peers, Douglas M. (2006), "Britain and Empire", in Williams, Chris (ed.), A Companion to 19th-Century Britain, John Wiley & Sons, p. 63, ISBN 978-1-4051-5679-0
  12. ^ Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, pp. 100–103.
  13. ^ Brown 1994, pp. 85–86.
  14. ^ a b c d e f Marshall, P. J. (2001), "1783–1870: An expanding empire", in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, Cambridge University Press, p. 50, ISBN 978-0-521-00254-7
  15. ^ a b Spear 1990, pp. 147–148
  16. ^ Bandyopadhyay 2004, p. 177, Bayly 2000, p. 357
  17. ^ a b Brown 1994, p. 94
  18. ^ Bandyopadhyay 2004, p. 179
  19. ^ Bayly 1987, pp. 194–197
  20. ^ a b Adcock, C.S. (2013), The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom, Oxford University Press, pp. 23–25, ISBN 978-0-19-999543-1
  21. ^ a b Taylor, Miles (2016), "The British royal family and the colonial empire from the Georgians to Prince George", in Aldrish, Robert; McCreery, Cindy (eds.), Crowns and Colonies: European Monarchies and Overseas Empires, Manchester University Press, pp. 38–39, ISBN 978-1-5261-0088-7, archived from the original on 19 September 2023, retrieved 30 March 2017
  22. ^ Peers 2013, p. 76.
  23. ^ a b Embree, Ainslie Thomas; Hay, Stephen N.; Bary, William Theodore De (1988), "Nationalism Takes Root: The Moderates", Sources of Indian Tradition: Modern India and Pakistan, Columbia University Press, p. 85, ISBN 978-0-231-06414-9, archived from the original on 19 September 2023, retrieved 19 September 2023


Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).