A Mutiny in India
World History Name: ______
E. Napp Date: ______
Historical Context:
“On 10th May 1857 Indian soldiers from the Bengal section of the East India Company’s army rose up and shot their British officers. By nightfall the troops had marched on Delhi and the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II had been nominally restored to power. Nearly 15 months later, after great violence on both sides, the revolt was suppressed, but it left British rule in India transformed and, arguably, doomed.
The trigger for the Mutiny was a rumor that cartridges for the new British rifles were coated with pig and cow fat, thereby insulting both Hindu and Muslim troops. But the Indian Rebellion was also a more complex story of economic strains, religious insensitivity and well-intentioned but provocative liberal reforms.
The events of 1857 have resonated through history and have been appropriated and mythologized by the British press and Indian nationalists alike. However, the shocking violence of the Rebellion on both sides has meant that it has defied attempts to fit it into a coherent narrative structure. It has overshadowed British foreign policy and Indian politics ever since.”
~ bbc.co.uk
What are the main points of the passage?
The Article: The Great Mutiny; New York Times, May 12, 1996, Karl E. Meyer
A Review of Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857. By Andrew Ward. Illustrated. 703 pp. New York: A John Macrae Book/ Henry Holt & Company.
It can be sensibly argued that no human earthquake in the imperial era was so misnamed or misunderstood as the Indian Mutiny of 1857. To many of the British it was only that: a mushrooming mutiny of native troops, or sepoys, against their European officers and the East India Company, which then ruled India. Its immediate cause was the belief among Indian troops that their newly issued Enfield rifles would have to be loaded with cartridges coated in grease taken from cows, anathema to Hindus, or from pigs, abominable to Muslims. Worse, the cartridges had to be bitten.
When the first rumblings reached the colonial authorities in January, a prompt order exempted sepoys from using lard. Native troops were instructed to concoct their own grease from vegetable oils and beeswax. But objectors saw this as yet another ruse to degrade their faiths. In March, a young sepoy named Mungal Pandy was executed for defying and wounding an officer. A protracted rebellion followed in northwest India. It came close to unseating the British Raj, and it resulted in savage atrocities that were to haunt India and Britain for generations. This was no simple mutiny. In “Our Bones Are Scattered,” Andrew Ward focuses on Cawnpore, scene of some of the worst butchery, weaving a narrative from a host of old and newly available sources. He has striven, I think successfully, for fairness, but so overcrowds his canvas that even a patient reader may lose sight of its design.
The revolt erupted in barracks just north of Delhi. The rebel troops swiftly overran Delhi and proclaimed themselves followers of the last Mogul Emperor, Bahadur Shah, whom the British had kept on his throne as a powerless pawn. His Hindu counterpart was Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last Maratha ruler. Although Nana had been deprived of his titles, he lived in courtly splendor in Bithur, 10 miles from Cawnpore, a garrison town on the Ganges. As the rebellion spread, Nana was hailed by mutineers as the heir to the once mighty Marathas.
The British were absurdly outnumbered. Some 250,000 Indian soldiers were led by 34,000 Europeans. But the rebels had no unity of command or shared political purpose. The British quickly limited the contagion by disarming wavering sepoys and calling in reinforcements to relieve besieged Europeans in Lucknow and Cawnpore. Britons were hopeful, since the formidable Sir Henry Lawrence was in charge at Lucknow, while the commander at Cawnpore was the battle-tested Maj. Gen. Sir Hugh Wheeler. But Wheeler, whose wife was Indian, vainly overestimated his influence on Nana Sahib. Nana declared for the rebels, and may have connived with them owing to the skillful nudges of a British-loathing aide, one Azimullah Khan, who prowls like an avenger through Mr. Ward's pages. When Nana switched sides, Wheeler’s British officers, faithful sepoys, servants and civilian noncombatants came under raking fire in an exposed entrenchment. Wheeler in desperation agreed to an offer from Nana of safe boat passage for all those willing to leave for Allahabad, the next big city downstream.
On the riverbank there ensued a massacre of British officers and sepoys. Some 125 surviving women and children were rounded up, taken to a dwelling called Bibighar and stabbed to death, and their dismembered bodies flung into a well. Mr. Ward makes a persuasive case that allegations of rape were exaggerated and probably unfounded. But the slaughter was deeply shaming to the rebels; it drew Britons together and drove Indians apart. In England, the prevailing belief that European women had been raped seemed to many a nightmare fouler than death.
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When Cawnpore was retaken, retribution was savage. “Officers and men searched the Bibighar for inscriptions that might prove their worst fears,” Mr. Ward relates, “and, finding none, invented their own: . . . ‘My child! My child!’ ‘Think of us.’ ‘Avenge us!’ . . . And in several places, daubed in broad and clumsy strokes, ‘Remember Cawnpore!’ which would become the British battle cry for the remainder of the rebellion.” Even suspicion of sympathy for rebels could mean hanging or being tied to the mouth of a cannon and blown apart.
But blood cooled, and Queen Victoria spoke out for conciliation. The most obvious lessons of the Great Mutiny were quickly absorbed: the ratio of Europeans to sepoys was diminished; more care was taken to heed signals of discontent. But the wider import of the mutiny was not generally grasped: The rebellion grew in soil fertilized by the average Briton’s contempt for India’s history and culture, by a pervasive racism expressed in scornful kicks and derision, by the Raj’s reluctance to open high-ranking positions to Indians and by the religious intolerance of missionaries. It was fed by the shattering encounter of a traditional society with European ideas and technology. I wish Mr. Ward had dealt more fully with these matters, which are discussed in previous accounts of the mutiny whose help he acknowledges. It is a pity, as he remarks, that so little testimony by Indians exists about such unsolved puzzles as Nana Sahib’s fate.
In my own delving, I was struck by the prescient reportage of William Howard Russell of The Times of London. Russell sailed to India after covering the Crimean War, was repelled by the nasty racism among Anglo-Indians and took note of crude forgeries of Cawnpore atrocities. He went on to remark that the horror of Cawnpore was that black men dared to shed the blood of their masters: “Here . . . we had a war of religion, a war of race and a war of revenge, of hope, of some national promptings to shake off the yoke of a stranger, and to re-establish the full power of native chiefs, and the full sway of native religions. There is a kind of God’s revenge against murder in the unsuccessful issue of all enterprises commenced in massacre, and founded on cruelty and bloodshed. Whatever the causes of the mutiny and the revolt, it is clear enough that one of the modes by which the leaders, as if by common instinct, determined to effect their end was the destruction of every white man, woman and child who fell into their hands – a design which the kindliness of the people . . . frustrated on many remarkable occasions.”
The soundness of Russell's judgment is demonstrated in Andrew Ward's welcome and definitive narrative.
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