The Indian Rebellion of 1857 ended on November 1 1858, 160 years ago
Artist: Edward Armitage (1817- 1896)
Jon Wilson, ‘India Conquered: Britain's Raj and the Chaos of
Empire ‘, 2016:
“... After two weeks of sustained bombardment, Nana Sahib
offered safe passage to the British at Kanpur on 25 June, but the British men
were massacred as they boarded boats onto the Ganges two days later, probably
because the sepoys had become increasingly frightened about being attacked
themselves. On 15 July, 200 British women and children were shot and butchered
as a British army led by General Henry Havelock approached in an effort to
recapture Kanpur. It was this ‘Cawnpore massacre’ that defined the horror of
1857 for generations of Britons afterwards. ‘Remember Cawnpore!’ became the cry
during the war of reconquest. The massacres occurred at the lowest point of
British power. With the exception of a few besieged residencies and
cantonments, the East India Company’s authority had been extinguished from a
vast swathe of territory between Patna in the east and Patiala in the west.
Beyond that territory, British survival relied on embattled garrisons
surrounded by people happy to submit to a rebel regime.
These massacres show that 1857 was far more than a political
conflict for the insurgents. It was a struggle for survival. As historian
Faisal Devji argues, the rebels were concerned above all to protect the
distinctions that constituted Indian social life. At the core of Indians’ sense
of self in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was their membership
of groups which distinguished them from their neighbours. These groups were
defined in different ways, by caste, occupation, gender and geography. For many
of the rebels, though, religion provided a common denominator, a way to
articulate the sense an individual had of belonging to a particular way of life
they would fight to protect. Religious belonging depended on shared practices
rather than beliefs. Friendship across community divisions depended on respect
for different customs. Culinary habits were particularly important. North
Indian society held together because everyone respected that Brahmins refused
to eat food that was not cooked by other Brahmins, Hindus refused beef and
Muslims rejected pork. Forcing everyone to eat the same foodstuffs would
annihilate the distinctions that each individual’s status and honour relied on,
and in doing so erode the very fabric of Indian social life....
.... The great rebellion of 1857 created what historian
Francis Hutchins described as ‘an illusion of permanence’, an idea that British
power in India could withstand a challenge on any scale. For many Indians, it
killed off the idea that this strange, aloof regime was a temporary anomaly. It
forced serious thinking about how practically to cooperate, accommodate or
resist it. But one of its most important effects was on the psychology of the
British practitioners of empire in India. Eighteen fifty-seven was followed by
new efforts to justify the exercise of British power in the Indian
subcontinent, by the first serious efforts to seek legitimacy through
‘improvement’. Most of these efforts were directed at a British public,
particularly British parliamentarians, who wondered whether the attention,
lives and money of their compatriots should be spent governing a society that
so obviously did not want British rule. But for the cadre of imperial
bureaucrats themselves, many of whom came from families whose Indian careers stretched
back three or four generations, 1857 removed the need for any kind of
justification at all. For official families, the ‘mutiny’ was simply the most
extreme moment in the continual cycle of resistance and conquest, of
humiliation and then vindication, which governed Britain’s empire in India.
After 1858 British power was asserted, violently and permanently, not to
benefit Indians nor to pragmatically advance British interests, but to undo the
dishonour of 1857’s tragic defeat.”
Retribution, 1858....Britannia – personified as a
sword-wielding woman – slaying an insurgent tiger over the corpse of a mother and her child.
courtesy:Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery)