Follow Us: The cause of the Sepoy Mutiny, also known as the Indian Rebellion of 1857, is often attributed to the incident which is believed to have sparked the uprising: the opposition by Hindu and Muslim soldiers in the British Army of Bengal, known as "sepoys," to the issue of ammunition for the new 1853 Enfield rifle ...
Some scholars consider the term "mutiny" as demeaning. The uprising by the native soldiers is now viewed by many historians as part of a broad-based civil insurrection and war of national liberation. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, in a July 27, 1857, speech to the House of Commons, reacted to news of the uprising by attributing ...
The Sepoy Mutiny was a violent and very bloody uprising against British rule in India in 1857. It is also known by other names: the Indian Mutiny, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, or the Indian Revolt of 1857. In Britain and in the West, it was almost always portrayed as a series of unreasonable and bloodthirsty uprisings spurred by falsehoods about ...
Legacy of the Uprising of 1857. There is no question that atrocities were committed by both sides, and stories of events of 1857–58 lived on in both Britain and India. Books and articles about the bloody fighting and heroic deeds by British officers and men were published for decades in London.
One common punishment was to tie mutineers to the mouth of a cannon and then fire the cannon, completely obliterating the victim. A popular American illustrated magazine, "Ballou's Pictorial", published a full-page woodcut illustration showing the preparations for such an execution in its issue of October 3, 1857.
Throughout May and June 1857 more units of Indian troops mutinied against the British. Sepoy units in the south of India remained loyal, but in the north, many units of the Bengal Army turned on the British. And the uprising became extremely violent.
In India, it has been viewed quite differently. The events of 1857 have been considered the first outbreak of an independence movement against British rule .
Under a British policy called the "doctrine of lapse," the East India Company would take control of Indian states in which a local ruler had died without an heir. The system was subject to abuse, and the company used it to annex territories in a questionable manner.
In an elaborate ceremony, Lord Lytton, the serving viceroy of India, honored a number of Indian princes.
To regard the rebellion merely as a sepoy mutiny is to underestimate the root causes leading to it. British paramountcy —i.e., the belief in British dominance in Indian political, economic, and cultural life—had been introduced in India about 1820. The British increasingly used a variety of tactics to usurp control of the Hindu princely states that were under what were called subsidiary alliances with the British. Everywhere the old Indian aristocracy was being replaced by British officials. One notable British technique was called the doctrine of lapse, first perpetrated by Lord Dalhousie in the late 1840s. It involved the British prohibiting a Hindu ruler without a natural heir from adopting a successor and, after the ruler died or abdicated, annexing his land. To those problems may be added the growing discontent of the Brahmans, many of whom had been dispossessed of their revenues or had lost lucrative positions.
In late March 1857 a sepoy named Mangal Pandey attacked British officers at the military garrison in Barrackpore. He was arrested and then executed by the British in early April. Later in April sepoy troopers at Meerut refused the Enfield cartridges, and, as punishment, they were given long prison terms, fettered, and put in jail. This punishment incensed their comrades, who rose on May 10, shot their British officers, and marched to Delhi, where there were no European troops. There the local sepoy garrison joined the Meerut men, and by nightfall the aged pensionary Mughal emperor Bahādur Shah II had been nominally restored to power by a tumultuous soldiery. The seizure of Delhi provided a focus and set the pattern for the whole mutiny, which then spread throughout northern India. With the exception of the Mughal emperor and his sons and Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the deposed Maratha peshwa, none of the important Indian princes joined the mutineers.
A grim feature of the mutiny was the ferocity that accompanied it. The mutineers commonly shot their British officers on rising and were responsible for massacres at Delhi, Kanpur, and elsewhere. The murder of women and children enraged the British, but in fact some British officers began to take severe measures before they knew that any such murders had occurred. In the end the reprisals far outweighed the original excesses. Hundreds of sepoys were bayoneted or fired from cannons in a frenzy of British vengeance (though some British officers did protest the bloodshed).
The pretext for revolt was the introduction of the new Enfield rifle. To load it, the sepoys had to bite off the ends of lubricated cartridges.
One notable British technique was called the doctrine of lapse, first perpetrated by Lord Dalhousie in the late 1840s.
There was a widespread belief that the British aimed at breaking down the caste system. The introduction of Western methods of education was a direct challenge to orthodoxy, both Hindu and Muslim.