Consequences of the Revolt of 1857 and the Government of India Act 1858

The End of the East India Company: The Government of India Act of 1858

The Abolition of Company Rule and the Board of Control

The most fundamental consequence of the revolt was the end of Company rule. The scale of the rising, and the cost of the suppression traced in Part 5, convinced the British Parliament that India could no longer be governed by a commercial company answerable to its shareholders.

By the Government of India Act of 1858, the rule of the East India Company was abolished and its powers transferred to the British Crown. The old dual structure of the Court of Directors and the Board of Control, which had governed India since 1784, was swept away, and a new and more direct system put in its place.

That old dual system dated from Pitt's India Act of 1784, under which the Company's Court of Directors had shared power with a government Board of Control. The arrangement had grown clumsy and divided, and the shock of the revolt gave Parliament the occasion to end it once and for all and to take India directly into its own hands.

The New Structure: The Secretary of State and the Council of India

In place of the Company, the Act created a new office, the Secretary of State for India, a member of the British Cabinet who was answerable to Parliament and held full authority over Indian affairs. He was assisted by a Council of India of fifteen members, most of them men with Indian experience.

This meant that India was now governed, in the last resort, from London and through Parliament, rather than from the Company's headquarters. The figure below sets out how the structure of rule changed from the Company to the Crown, the central constitutional fact of 1858.

The new arrangement made Parliament the ultimate authority over India for the first time, since the Secretary of State sat in the Cabinet and answered to the House of Commons. Yet the Council of India in London, made up largely of retired officials, also gave great weight to the views of the old India hands, so that policy remained cautious and conservative.

The Governor-General Becomes Viceroy

In India itself, the head of the government, the Governor-General, was given the additional title of Viceroy, meaning the personal representative of the sovereign. Lord Canning, who had directed the suppression of the revolt, became the first Viceroy of India.

The change was more than a matter of names. It marked the new idea that the Viceroy ruled India in the name of the Crown, and it gave the government a fresh dignity and authority. The participation and failure of the revolt, examined in Part 4, had thus led directly to a new constitutional order.

The Queen's Proclamation of 1858 and Its Pledges

Queen Victoria's Proclamation (1 November 1858)

The new order was announced to the people of India in the Queen's Proclamation, issued in the name of Queen Victoria and read out at Allahabad on 1 November 1858. It was meant to reassure a country shaken by revolt and reprisal, and to set out the spirit in which the Crown would govern.

The Proclamation has been called the Magna Carta of the Indian people, for the breadth of its promises. It declared an end to the era of annexation and conquest and offered a general amnesty to all who had not taken part in the killing of British subjects, seeking to draw a line under the bitterness of the war.

It was read out with ceremony at Minto Park in Allahabad, the seat from which Canning governed during the revolt. Although the hostilities were not formally declared over until July 1859, when the last resistance had been crushed, the Proclamation marked the symbolic beginning of the new Crown government and was meant to win back the goodwill of a wounded country.

The Promises: Religious Non-Interference, Equality and the Princes

The Proclamation made three great promises. It pledged that the Crown would not interfere in the religion of its Indian subjects, a direct answer to the fears that had helped cause the revolt. It promised that Indians would be admitted to office without distinction of race or creed, on the basis of ability alone.

It also promised to respect the rights and treaties of the princes and to attempt no further extension of British territory. These pledges, however generously phrased, were not always honoured in practice, but they set the official tone of the new Crown rule and were often quoted by Indians in the decades that followed.

The Reorganisation of the British Indian Army

More British Troops and the New European-to-Indian Ratio

Because the revolt had begun as a mutiny of the sepoys, the British were determined to remake the army so that it could never rise again. A royal commission, the Peel Commission of 1859, studied the question, and the army was thoroughly reorganised in the years after 1858, as the figure below sets out.

The number of British soldiers in India was greatly increased, and the proportion of Europeans to Indians was fixed at a much higher level, roughly one European to two Indians in Bengal and one to three in the south. The European troops were stationed at all the key points, so that they could always overawe the Indian regiments.

Artillery, Recruitment and the Divide-and-Counterpoise Policy

The artillery, the most powerful arm, was placed almost entirely in European hands, and Indians were kept out of the arsenals. The old Bengal Army, drawn so heavily from Awadh and the high castes, was broken up, and its dominance never restored.

Above all, the army was rebuilt on the principle of divide and counterpoise. Castes, regions and religions were deliberately mixed within and between regiments so that the soldiers would not again unite, and recruitment was shifted towards groups the British thought loyal. The aim was to make a united rising of the kind seen in 1857 impossible to repeat.

The New Policy Towards the Princely States

The End of Annexation and the Recognition of Adoption

The revolt also transformed British policy towards the princely states. Before 1857, the policy of annexation, the Doctrine of Lapse and the taking of Awadh, traced in the causes of the revolt, had made enemies of the princes and dispossessed many of them.

After 1857 this policy was reversed. The Crown announced that there would be no more annexations, and the right of a prince to adopt an heir, denied under the Doctrine of Lapse, was now formally recognised. The map below shows the India that resulted, a patchwork of directly-ruled provinces and surviving princely states.

Canning gave this reversal lasting form by issuing adoption sanads, formal deeds that guaranteed each prince the right to adopt a successor and so to keep his dynasty alive. In return the princes acknowledged the paramountcy of the Crown. The Doctrine of Lapse, which had done so much to cause the revolt, was thus quietly buried.

The Princes as Breakwaters in the Storm

The reason for this change was the loyalty most princes had shown during the revolt, examined in Part 4. Their support had been vital, and the British now saw the princes not as obstacles to be removed but as useful allies and supporters of their rule.

Lord Canning famously described the princely states as the breakwaters in the storm that had saved British rule in 1857. From then on the princes were preserved and cultivated as bulwarks against unrest, bound to the Crown by treaty and by a shared interest in the existing order, a relationship that lasted until 1947.

The Deeper Consequences: Race, Religion and the Economy

Racial Bitterness and the Policy of Divide and Rule

Beneath the constitutional changes lay a deep and lasting racial bitterness. The violence of the revolt and the reprisals left the British community in India suspicious and contemptuous of Indians, and a wide social gulf opened between rulers and ruled that had not existed in the same form before.

Out of this grew a deliberate policy of divide and rule. Having seen Hindus and Muslims unite in 1857, the British increasingly sought to keep the communities apart, favouring one against the other as it suited them, a policy whose consequences would shape Indian politics for the next ninety years.

Religious Caution and the Retreat from Social Reform

Because the fear of interference in religion had done so much to spread the revolt, the British government became markedly more cautious in matters of faith and custom. The Queen's pledge of non-interference was taken seriously, and missionary activity was no longer given official encouragement.

One result was a retreat from the social reform that had marked the earlier nineteenth century. The reforming zeal that had abolished sati and legalised widow remarriage gave way to a policy of leaving Indian society alone, for fear that reform would again be read as an attack on religion and custom.

The Financial Burden Placed on India

The revolt and its suppression had been enormously expensive, and the British placed the whole cost on India itself. The expense of the war, and of the larger British garrison that now had to be maintained, was charged to the Indian revenues.

This financial burden fell, as always, on the Indian taxpayer, above all the peasant, deepening the very economic distress that had helped cause the revolt. The cost of holding India down was thus paid by Indians, a pattern that continued throughout the period of Crown rule.

Why 1857 Was a Watershed in British India

From Company to Crown: The Great Divide

Taken together, these consequences make 1857 the great watershed in the history of British India. It ended the rule of a trading company and replaced it with the direct rule of the Crown; it remade the army, the policy towards the princes and the official attitude to religion and reform; and it hardened the racial and communal divisions that followed.

The table below summarises the main changes before and after the revolt. After 1857, British rule in India was more cautious, more military and more racially divided than before, and the confident reforming spirit of the early nineteenth century was gone. The revolt had failed as a rising, but it had transformed the very structure of the rule it had risen against.

Sources and Further Reading

• NCERT, Themes in Indian History Part III (Theme 11: Rebels and the Raj)
• Wikipedia: Government of India Act 1858
• Wikipedia: Queen Victoria's Proclamation (1858)
• Wikipedia: Secretary of State for India
• Wikipedia: Council of India
• Wikipedia: Charles Canning, 1st Earl Canning
• Wikipedia: Presidency armies
• Wikipedia: Princely state