Presages of the Revolt
THE rapid expansion of the British dominion in India, attended as it was by changes in the administrative system and modes of existence to which the people had been accustomed through long ages, disturbed the placid currents of Indian life and produced commotions in different parts of the country. Mention may be made, in this connection, of the Bareilly rising of A.D. 1816; the Cole outbreak of 1831-1832, and other minor risings in Chota Nagpur and Palamu; the Muslim movements like the Ferazee disturbances at Barasat (Bengal) in 1831 under the leadership of Syed Ahmad and his disciple, Meer Niser ‘Ali or Titto Meer, and later in 1847 at Faridpur (Bengal) under the guidance of Deedoo Meer; the Moplah outbreaks in 1849, 1851, 1852, and 1855; and the Santal insurrection of 1855-1857. These risings testify to the general ferment in the British Empire in India, the last and the most severe being the Revolt of 1857-1859, which shook its mighty fabric to its very foundations.
Causes of the Revolt
The Revolt was the outcome of the changing conditions of the time; and its causes may be conveniently summed up under four heads–political, economic and social, religious, and military. The political causes had their origin in Dalhousie’s policy of annexation, the doctrine of lapse or escheat, and the projected removal of the descendants of the Great Mughul from their ancestral palace to the Qutb, near Delhi. AllNana Saheb this naturally gave rise to considerable uneasiness and suspicion in the minds of the old ruling princes, Muslim as well as Hindu. The annexation of Oudh, and the idea of doing away with the bedimmed splendour that still surrounded the Mughul Emperor, wounded Muslim sentiments; and the refusal to continue the pension of the ex-Peshwa, Baji Rao II, to his adopted son, Nana Saheb, agitated some Hindu minds. As a matter of fact, some of the discontented rulers and their friends were conspiring against the Company’s government even before the Revolt. The more important among them were Ahmad Ullah, an adviser of the ex-King of Oudh; Nana Saheb; Nana Saheb’s nephew, Rao Saheb, and his retainers, Tantia Topi and ‘Azimullah Khan; the Rani of Jhansi; Kunwar Singh, the Rajput chief of Jagadishpur in Bihar, who had been deprived of his estates by the Board of Revenue; and Firuz Shah, a relation of the Mughul Emperor, Bahadur Shah.
The expropriation of some landlords by the British Government, and the growing unemployment among the followers and retainers of the dispossessed princes, gave rise to acute economic grievances and social unrest in different parts of the country. The resumption of rent-free tenures by Bentinck no doubt secured for the State increased revenue but at the same time it reduced many of the dispossessed landlords to a state of indigence. During the five years before the outbreak of the Revolt, the Inam Commission at Bombay, appointed by Lord Dalhousie to investigate the titles of landowners, confiscated some 20,000 estates in the Deccan, without considering for a moment that such a drastic measure was sure to create complications in the economic condition of the country. In Oudh especially, there prevailed terrible bitterness of feeling,
The conservative sections of the Indian population were alarmed by the rapid spread of Western civilisation in India during the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. They saw in inventions like the railway and the telegraph, in the extension of Western education, in the abolition of practices like Sati and infanticide, in the protection of the civil rights of converts from Hinduism by the Religious Disabilities Act of 1856, in the legalization of widow remarriage by the Hindu Widows Remarriage Act of 1856, and in the unwarranted aggressive spirit of some Christian missionaries, attempts on the part of the Government to destroy their social polity, to westernize their land at the cost of their time-honoured customs and practices and to convert India to Christianity. The activities of the Wahhabi sect must have contributed to inflame the feelings of the Muslims.
Thus several factors generated fumes of discontent in different parts of the country, the bursting of which into a devouring flame would not, however, have been possible if the Sepoy Army had remained, as before, loyal to the Company. “In the control of the Sepoy Army lay,” observes Innes “the crux of the position.” But, for several reasons, the attitude of the Sepoys towards the Company had become by this time far from friendly. Frequent engagement in prolonged campaigns in distant lands, which the Sepoys disliked, had severely tried their loyalty. Some regiments of Sepoys had already mutinied on four occasions, during the thirteen years preceding the outbreak of 1857, as their demands for extra allowances for fighting in remote regions had not been met by the Company’s government: the 34th N.I. in 1844, the 22nd N.T. in 1849, the 66th N.I. in 1850 and the 38th N.I. in 1852. Further, the discipline of the Sepoy army, especially of the Bengal Division, had been rapidly deteriorating, owing largely to the defective policy of the Government which unwisely transferred able military officers from the field to political jobs and retained the rule of promotion by seniority, irrespective of any consideration of age or efficiency. General Godwin, for example, commanded in the Second Burmese War at the age of seventy. The so-called ” Bengal Army” was recruited not in Bengal proper, but from high-caste men in Oudh and the North-Western Provinces. Being very sensitive about their caste privileges they were not easily amenable to discipline and also shared the general suspicion as to the westernizing and Christianizing policy of the Government.