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Imperial authority examined

In May 1857 soldiers of the Bengal army shot their British officers, and marched on Delhi. Their mutiny encouraged rebellion by considerable numbers of Indian civilians in a broad belt of northern and central India - roughly from Delhi in the west to Benares in the east. For some months the British presence in this area was reduced to beleaguered garrisons, until forces were able to launch offensives that had restored imperial authority by 1858.

British public opinion was profoundly shocked by the scale of the uprising and by the loss of life on both sides - involving the massacre by the rebels of captured Europeans, including women and children, and the indiscriminate killing of Indian soldiers and civilians by the avenging British armies. Shock inevitably stimulated much self-examination, out of which emerged an explanation of these terrible events; this explanation has exercised a powerful influence over opinion in Britain ever since.

Map of India showing the areas affected by rebellion in 1857  © Indians were assumed to have been a deeply conservative people whose traditions and ways of life had been disregarded by their British rulers. Reforms, new laws, new technology, even Christianity, had been forced upon them. They found these deeply offensive and were driven to resist them with violence.

A history in two halves

British soldiers racing to quash the Indian mutiny at Lucknow in 1857  © The lesson that the British drew from 1857 was that caution must prevail: Indian traditions must be respected and the assumed guardians of these traditions - priests, princes or landholders - were to be conciliated under firm authoritarian British rule.

Thus British Indian history in the 19th century is often divided into two halves, separated by the great watershed of 1857: an age of ill-considered reform, followed by an age of iron conservatism. Conservatism was eventually to provoke a different form of reaction, the nationalism out of which modern India was to be born.

There are, however, serious difficulties in any interpretation of 19th-century Indian history that divides it into an age of reform that gave way under the shock of rebellion to an age of conservatism. This may in a very rough sense reflect the intentions of India's British rulers, but what the British intended and what they were able to achieve were often very different things. Outcomes depended as much on the inclinations and efforts of Indian people as on the initiatives of their rulers.

Before the rebellion

In the first half of the 19th century, when the East India Company still ruled India on Britain's behalf, there was a heady rhetoric of reform and improvement in some British circles. The aspiration of Thomas Macaulay - a member of the Company's ruling council in 1835, as well as a historian - to foster 'a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions in morals and in intellect' is often quoted. Less often quoted is his preceding sentence, in which he admitted that 'it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people'.

The means of the Company's government were indeed limited. The greater part of its resources went on its armed forces, not on schemes for improvement. An insecure government of necessity moved cautiously, in spite of its rhetoric, and at the time the Indian economy was generally stagnant.

European influences were strongest in the towns of India. This was especially true in the old bases of British trade, such as Calcutta, Madras or Bombay, where a new Indian intelligentsia had begun to take root. Whatever the British may have intended, their early rule seems generally to have consolidated the hold of what they regarded as 'traditional' intellectuals, rather than displacing them by new ones, and the authority of Brahmins and of doctrines of caste separation grew stronger, not weaker.

In the countryside the vital issues were the control of the land, the amount of tax the peasant farmers had to pay, and the opportunities they had to find outlets for their surplus crops. Early British occupation was disruptive: aristocracies lost power and influence to the new rulers, the conditions under which land was held could be changed, and taxation was more rigorously enforced. It took time for winners to emerge in this situation, people who had been able to extract gains from the new order, and who would compensate for those who had lost out.

Disaffection

Any attempt to explain the revolt of 1857 as traditional India's rejection of modern reform is far too crude. Impulses towards change before then had been weak and uneven. In Bengal and in the south, which had long been under British rule, there were no revolts. In the areas that did rebel in 1857, the British seem to have succeeded in creating disaffection, and deposed noble Indians from their thrones, without as yet attracting significant support.

In the most recent British acquisition of all, the kingdom of Awadh (Oudh), annexed in 1856, not only had the ruler been deposed but many landowners had lost control over what they regarded as their estates. Taxes were high throughout the region, and there were few opportunities for the enterprising to make a profit. Western influences were limited in the towns, but the first Christian missions had appeared there, and new colleges had opened, which seemed to be an unwelcome intrusion to many devout Hindus and Muslims. They also fed fears of a Christian offensive and of forced conversions.

Northern India had a long tradition of spasmodic disorder and resistance to government. These upheavals would probably have become more intense in the mid 19th century, but could have been contained if the British had not alienated a group of people on whom their security depended. These people were the soldiers, or sepoys, of the Bengal army, whose mutiny eventually set off the 1857 rebellion.

The Bengal army was recruited not from Bengal itself but from northern India, especially from Awadh. To be a soldier in the Bengal army had become an occupation to which high status was attached. The sepoys saw themselves as an élite. Over many years the Bengal army had fought faithfully for the British, but on their own terms. They would not go overseas and they required an elaborate train of camp followers, and by 1857 the British high command was losing patience with this.

Supplies of more flexible soldiers who would not stand on their privileges were becoming available in Nepal and the Punjab, and the Bengal army was told it must modernise - by accepting obligations to serve outside India, and by using a new rifle. The spark that ignited the soldiers' great fear - that their cherished status was to be undermined - was the rumour concerning the use of pig and cow fat, forbidden in the Muslim and Hindu religions respectively, as lubricant on the cartridges for the new rifles. Cantonment after cantonment rebelled. When the soldiers refused to acknowledge British authority, the way was left open for disaffected princes and aristocrats, and for village and town people with grievances, to revolt alongside the soldiers.

A new royal government

Indian cavalry at the coronation of George VI in 1936  © After the rebellion had been put down, the new royal government of India that replaced that of the East India Company promised that it had no intention of imposing 'our convictions on any of our subjects'. It distanced itself further from the Christian missionaries. A stop was put to the deposing of princes, and greater care was shown to the rights of landlords. The major part of the army was in future to be drawn from so-called 'martial races'. The huge parades, or durbars, at which the new empress of India received the allegiance of the hierarchies of traditional India through her viceroy, seemed to symbolise the new conservatism of the regime.

Yet beneath the trappings of conservatism, Indian society changed much more rapidly in the second half of the 19th century than it had done in the first. The British had much more to offer Indians. Imports of Western technology had been limited before the 1850s. Thereafter a great railway system was constructed - 28,000 miles of track being laid by 1904 - and major canal schemes were instituted that more than doubled the area under irrigation in the last 20 years of the century. The railways, the vastly increased capacity of steamships, and the opening of the Suez Canal linked Indian farmers with world markets to a much greater degree. A small, but significant, minority of them could profit from such opportunities to sell surplus crops and acquire additional land. Some industries developed, notably Indian-owned textile manufacturing in western India. The horrific scale of the famines of the 1880s and 1890s showed how limited any economic growth had been, but the stagnation of the early 19th century had been broken.

Universities, colleges and schools proliferated in the towns and cities, most of them opened by Indian initiative. They did not produce replica English men and women, as Macaulay had hoped, but Indians who were able to use English in addition to their own languages, to master imported technologies and methods of organisation and who were willing to adopt what they found attractive in British culture. The dominant intellectual movements cannot be called Westernisation. They were revival or reform movements in Hinduism and Islam, and were the development of cultures that found expression in Indian languages.

Within the constraints of a colonial order, a modern India was emerging by the end of the 19th century. British rule of course had an important role in this process, but the country that was emerging fulfilled the aspirations of Indians, rather than colonial designs of what a modern India ought to be.

Find out more

Books

Aftermath of the Revolt: India 1857-1870 by Thomas R. Metcalf (Princeton, 1964)

Awadh in Revolt, 1857-1858: A Study of Popular Resistance by Rudrangshu Mukherjee (Delhi, 1984)

'India 1818-1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism' by D. A. Washbrook, published in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, III, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999)

Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (London, 1998)

The New Cambridge History of India, II. 1, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire by C. A. Bayly (Cambridge, 1988)

The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857 edited by C. A. Bayly (Oxford, 1986)

Links

The provides access to material relating to all the cultures of Asia and North Africa and the European interaction with them.

, Chelsea has information specifically about the Indian mutiny.

, Sandhurst, has a permanent exhibition on the Indian army.

Places to visit

, Clock Tower Yard, Temple Meads, Bristol, BS1 6QH, will open its galleries on 26 September 2002. There will be a temporary exhibition, called 'India: Pioneering Photographs, 1850-1900' during 2002. Meanwhile, inquiries to see the collections of photographs and documentary archives or to use the oral history archive are welcome (telephone: 0117 925 4980).

About the author

Professor Peter Marshall is Professor Emeritus at King's College, London University, where he was Rhodes Professor of Imperial History from 1981 until his retirement in 1993. He is the author of a number of books on the early history of British India and was editor of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1996; paperback edition, 2001) and of the second volume, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998) of The Oxford History of the British Empire. He was President of the Royal Historical Society, 1996-2000.