Was 1857 a mutiny, peasants’ war or war of independence?

The short answer

• Dalhousie’s annexations and the Doctrine of Lapse. Dalhousie’s annexations gave every Indian ruler a reason to fear the Company. Between 1848 and 1856 he added more territory to British India than any governor before him, by conquest in the Punjab (1849) and Lower Burma (1852) and by the Doctrine of Lapse, under which a dependent state passed to the Company if its ruler died without a natural son. Satara, Jhansi and Nagpur fell this way, and their adopted heirs were refused. Several who lost a throne or a pension to the Company, from the Rani of Jhansi to Nana Sahib, went on to lead the rising, so the annexations supplied the rebellion’s leaders as well as its grievances.
• Awadh: an annexation that reached the barracks. The annexation of Awadh turned a princes’ grievance into a soldiers’ grievance, because so many of the Bengal Army’s sepoys came from the province. It was annexed in February 1856 on the grounds of misgovernment, and its king, Wajid Ali Shah, was sent into exile in Calcutta. The summary revenue settlement that followed stripped the talukdars, Awadh’s great landholders, of thousands of villages. Soldiers, landholders and peasants there therefore shared a grievance, and that shared grievance is why the rebellion in Awadh became a popular war.
• An army that no longer trusted its masters. The Company’s Bengal Army was held together by pay, status and respect for caste, and in the 1850s each of those bonds weakened. Allowances for service in newly annexed provinces were cut, and the General Service Enlistment Act of July 1856 required new recruits to serve overseas, which many high-caste Hindus believed would break caste. Missionary preaching and reforms such as the law of 1856 allowing Hindu widows to remarry fed a fear that the Company meant to convert India by force. The sepoys’ loyalty, already strained, became conditional on how the next order was read.
• The cartridge: a rumour as trigger. A rumour became the trigger because it confirmed what sepoys already feared about the Company. The Enfield rifle issued in 1857 used paper cartridges that had to be bitten open, and word spread from Dum Dum and Barrackpore that their grease contained cow and pig fat, polluting to Hindus and Muslims alike. The army ordered the cartridges issued ungreased and changed the drill, yet it could not stop the story. At Barrackpore on 29 March Mangal Pandey attacked his officers, and at Meerut on 9 May, 85 troopers who had refused the cartridges were shackled on parade; the next evening their comrades rose, which shows how fast a rumour could turn private fears into a common act.

What it changed

The Crown replaces the Company. The rebellion moved the government of India from a trading company to the British state itself. The Government of India Act of 2 August 1858 ended the Company’s rule and placed India under the Crown, with a Secretary of State and his council in London and a Viceroy in Calcutta; Lord Canning became the first Viceroy. Daily administration changed little at first, while the principle changed completely, and every later Indian demand in this atlas was addressed to that state and to the promises it made in 1858.

The princes become the Raj’s allies. The princes, once the Company’s next targets, became the Raj’s most reliable allies. Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1 November 1858 promised that no more princely states would be annexed and that the princes’ rights and dignity would be respected. Rulers who had stood by Britain in 1857, such as those of Hyderabad, Gwalior and Patiala, were rewarded, and in the early 1860s the leading princes received sanads, charters guaranteeing their right to adopt an heir. The tan patchwork on the map was frozen in place until the accessions of 1947.

A rebuilt army and a more distant Raj. Britain rebuilt its Indian army so that it could not easily be turned against it again. The Peel Commission of 1859 recommended one British soldier for every two Indians in the Bengal army and one for every three in Madras and Bombay, and the artillery was kept almost wholly in British hands. Recruitment moved away from Awadh and Bihar towards the Punjab, Nepal and the north-west, whose men had stayed loyal. Britain also abandoned most social reform, judging that its attempts to change Indian customs had helped provoke the rising, and the Raj became more cautious and more racially aloof.

Two memories of one war. The war left two rival memories, and each did political work for a century. For British opinion 1857 became the Mutiny, remembered through Kanpur and the siege of Lucknow, a story that justified distance and suspicion between rulers and ruled. For later nationalists it became the first war of independence, proof that Indians had once fought together against foreign rule, and Savarkar’s book of 1909, written in London and banned in India, carried that reading into the revolutionary circles of the Swadeshi campaign of 1905–11. Both memories were selective, and both chose their dead.