India's First War of Independence, the Great Rebellion, the Indian Mutiny, or the Sepoy Mutiny began this day, May 10, 159 years ago.
Henry David Thoreau:
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph
from Maine to Texas but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to
communicate."
Christopher Hitchens:
“...Marx's appreciation of the laws of unintended
consequence, and his disdain for superficial moralism, also allowed him to see
that there was more to the British presence in India than met the eye. No doubt
the aim of the East India Company had been the subordination of Indian markets
and Indian labour for selfish ends, but this did not alter the fact that
capitalism was also transforming the subcontinent in what might be called a
dynamic way. And he was clear-eyed about the alternatives. India, he pointed
out, had always been subjugated by outsiders. "The question is not whether
the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India
conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by
the Briton." If the conqueror was to be the country that pioneered the
industrial revolution, he added, then India would benefit by the introduction
of four new factors that would tend towards nation building. These were the
electric telegraph for communications, steamships for rapid contact with the
outside world, railways for the movement of people and products, and "the
free press, introduced for the first time to Asiatic society, and managed
principally by the common offspring of Hindus and Europeans". His insight
into the Janus-faced nature of the Anglo-Indian relationship, and of the
potential this afforded for a future independence, may be one of the reasons
why Marxism still remains a stronger force in India than in most other
societies...”
Saul David writes in 'The Indian Mutiny, 1857', 2002 in the chapter titled ‘The Electric Telegraph has saved us’:
"...By enabling the authorities at Lahore, in the words of one
senior official, to ‘disarm the native troops before they had received one
word’ of the uprisings at Meerut and Delhi, the telegraph messages played a key
role in the preservation of British India. ‘The Electric Telegraph has saved
us,’ wrote Donald MacLeod, the Financial Commissioner of the Punjab. He was
right. If Lahore had fallen to the rebels, the rest of the Punjab would
probably have followed suit. And if the Punjab — where the majority of European
troops were stationed — had been lost, British India might not have endured. As
it was, its survival was in the balance for many months to come..."
Artist: Helen E. Hokinson, The New Yorker, April 1 1933