The Centres of the Revolt of 1857: Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow and Jhansi

From Barrackpore to Meerut: How the Revolt of 1857 Broke Out

The First Sparks of 1857

The Revolt of 1857 did not begin on a single day or in a single place, but its decisive outbreak can be dated precisely. The long accumulation of political, economic, military and religious grievance, traced in Part 2, needed only a trigger, and the new greased cartridge provided it. The first open defiance came at Barrackpore, and the great outbreak followed weeks later at Meerut, from where it spread across the heart of North India.

This part follows the revolt from that first spark to the storm centres where it took firmest hold, and to the leaders who rose in each. The timeline below sets out the sequence, from Mangal Pandey at Barrackpore to the recapture of Delhi, so that the rest of the article can examine each centre in turn.

Mangal Pandey and the Barrackpore Spark (29 March 1857)

The first act of open resistance came at Barrackpore near Calcutta. On 29 March 1857, a sepoy of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry, Mangal Pandey, attacked his European officers in protest against the new cartridges, calling on his comrades to rise. He was overpowered and was executed on 8 April 1857, and his regiment was later disbanded.

Though his revolt was quickly crushed, Mangal Pandey became the symbol of the sepoy's refusal, and his name has since stood for the first defiance of 1857. His action showed how explosive the mood had become, but the true outbreak, large enough to seize a city, came six weeks later at Meerut.

The Meerut Outbreak of 10 May 1857

The trigger at Meerut was a punishment. In early May, eighty-five sepoys of the 3rd Light Cavalry who refused the new cartridges were court-martialled, stripped of their uniforms and shackled in irons before their comrades. The humiliation was deeply felt, and on the evening of 10 May 1857 the sepoys of the Meerut garrison broke into open mutiny.

The rising began in the infantry lines, spread swiftly to the cavalry and then to the city, where townspeople and villagers joined the soldiers. The sepoys seized the bell of arms, freed their imprisoned comrades, attacked and burned European bungalows, destroyed the jail, court and treasury, and cut the telegraph line to Delhi. As darkness fell, a body of sepoys rode off towards Delhi, thirty-six miles to the south.

The March to Delhi and the Proclamation of Bahadur Shah Zafar (11 May 1857)

The Meerut sepoys reached the gates of the Red Fort early on 11 May 1857. They appealed to the aged Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to accept the leadership of the revolt, telling him they had killed the English at Meerut because they had been asked to bite cartridges greased with the fat of cows and pigs. The emperor's first reaction was one of horror and reluctance, for he had few resources and no army of his own.

Only when the sepoys had pressed into the court did the old emperor agree to be the nominal leader of the rebellion. The choice was momentous, for it gave the revolt a focus and a legitimacy that a mere mutiny could never have had.

The uprising could now be carried on in the name of the Mughal emperor, the one symbol that both Hindus and Muslims of North India still recognised. As the timeline below shows, the fall of Delhi turned a local mutiny into a revolt with a capital and a cause.

The Pattern of the Rebellion: How a Mutiny Became a Popular Revolt

The Common Sequence in Every Cantonment

Once word spread that Delhi had fallen and the emperor had blessed the rising, cantonment after cantonment rose in mutiny across the Gangetic valley. What is striking is how similar the sequence of events was in each place, as if a common script were being followed. The figure below sets out the pattern that repeated from station to station.

The sepoys typically began with a signal, the firing of the evening gun or the sounding of the bugle. They then seized the bell of arms and plundered the treasury, attacked the jail, the telegraph office and the record room, and burned everything connected with Company rule.

Proclamations in Hindi, Urdu and Persian called on Hindus and Muslims alike to rise. As ordinary people joined, the targets widened to moneylenders and the rich, who were seen as allies of the British.

Lines of Communication: Panchayats, Emissaries and Sepoy Self-Organisation

The very uniformity of the pattern convinced the British that the revolt was planned and coordinated, not spontaneous. There is real evidence for this. After the 7th Awadh Irregular Cavalry refused the cartridges, they wrote to the 48th Native Infantry that they had acted for their faith and awaited the others' orders, and emissaries moved from one cantonment to another carrying news and intentions.

Decisions were often taken collectively. One early historian, Charles Ball, noted that panchayats, councils of native officers drawn from each regiment, were a nightly occurrence in the Kanpur sepoy lines. Because the sepoys lived in lines, shared a common lifestyle and often came from the same castes and villages, it is not hard to imagine them deciding their own future together. In a real sense the sepoys were the makers of their own rebellion, not the tools of distant conspirators.

Rumours, Chapatis and the Lotus: The Signals of 1857

The revolt was preceded and accompanied by a remarkable wave of rumour and prophecy. The most famous was the story that the new cartridges were greased with the fat of cows and pigs, which spread, as one account put it, like wildfire across the sepoy lines.

To this was added the rumour that the British had mixed the bone dust of cows and pigs into the flour sold in the markets. A widely believed prophecy held that British rule would end a hundred years after the Battle of Plassey, on its centenary in 1857.

Stranger still was the circulation of chapatis from village to village, a man arriving by night, handing a chapati to the watchman and asking him to make more and pass them on. The popular tradition adds the passing of a red lotus through the sepoy lines as a secret token of readiness.

The exact meaning of these signs was never clear, and standard accounts note that the purpose of the chapatis is uncertain even today. Yet people read them as omens of an upheaval, and they show how a society on edge prepared itself for revolt.

Mutiny and Revolt: A Necessary Distinction

It is important for the examination to keep two terms distinct. A mutiny is a collective disobedience of rules and discipline within the armed forces, while a revolt or rebellion is a rising of the civilian population, of peasants, zamindars and rajas, against established authority. In 1857 the two were joined: the mutiny was of the sepoys, but the revolt was of the people who rose with them.

This is why the events of 1857 cannot be reduced to a sepoy mutiny alone. Wherever the sepoys rose, they were quickly joined by their kinsmen in the villages and the ordinary people of the towns, who had grievances of their own against revenue, ruin and the firangi. The combination of military mutiny and popular revolt is what gave 1857 its scale and its staying power, and it is the central fact the centres and leaders illustrate.

The Storm Centres of 1857 and Their Theatres

The Geography of the Revolt: A Map of the Storm Centres

The revolt did not engulf all of India. It was concentrated in a broad belt of North and Central India, from Delhi and the western Doab through Awadh and Bundelkhand to western Bihar, while the Punjab, Bengal and most of the South stayed quiet or loyal. Within this belt a handful of storm centres stood out, each with its own leader and its own character of resistance.

The map below sets out these centres on real geography, colour-coded by theatre, with the leader and the month of rising for each, and the two British counter-attack lines that converged on Delhi and Awadh. The sub-sections that follow examine each centre in turn, from the symbolic capital at Delhi to the long resistance of Awadh and Bundelkhand.

Delhi: The Symbolic Capital under Bahadur Shah and Bakht Khan

Delhi was the symbolic heart of the revolt. Its capture on 11 May 1857 and the proclamation of Bahadur Shah Zafar gave the rising a capital and a sovereign, and rebels from across North India converged on the city to defend it. The emperor was old and without real power, so the true direction of the defence fell to the soldiers and their commanders.

The most capable of these was General Bakht Khan, who arrived from Bareilly in July 1857 with a strong and disciplined brigade and became the effective commander-in-chief of the rebel forces, honoured by the emperor with the title Saheb-i-Alam Bahadur.

Delhi held out through the summer, but in September 1857 the British, attacking from the Ridge, stormed the city. Bahadur Shah was captured at Humayun's Tomb by Major Hodson on 20 September 1857, tried, and exiled to Rangoon, where the Mughal dynasty came to its end.

Kanpur: Nana Sahib, Tantia Tope and Wheeler's Entrenchment

At Kanpur, the sepoys and townspeople turned to Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, whose pension the Company had refused to continue. Pressed by the rebels, he assumed the leadership and was hailed as Peshwa, giving the Maratha grievance a focus in the revolt. His general, the able Tantia Tope, became one of the most formidable rebel commanders of the war.

The British garrison under General Wheeler was besieged in a hastily fortified entrenchment for three weeks in June 1857. The siege ended in a negotiated surrender that broke down into the killing of the captives, an episode the British never forgot and avenged with terrible reprisals when they retook the city. Kanpur thus became, for the British, a byword for the horrors of the revolt, and for the rebels a centre of Maratha leadership under Nana Sahib and Tantia Tope.

Lucknow and Awadh: Begum Hazrat Mahal, Birjis Qadr and the Residency Siege

Nowhere was the revolt more popular or more lasting than in Awadh, where the recent annexation and the exile of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah were still raw. At Lucknow the people hailed the young Birjis Qadr, son of the deposed Nawab, as their ruler, and his mother, Begum Hazrat Mahal, became the real leader of the resistance, rallying the talukdars and their armed retainers to the cause.

The British took refuge in the fortified Residency, where the Commissioner, Henry Lawrence, was killed early in the siege. The garrison held out under repeated assault, was relieved with difficulty by Havelock and Outram in September 1857 and finally rescued by Colin Campbell.

Yet Awadh as a whole resisted the longest of all. A British officer, Forsyth, estimated that three-fourths of the adult men of Awadh were in rebellion, and the province was subdued only in March 1858 after protracted fighting.

Jhansi and Bundelkhand: Rani Lakshmibai

In Bundelkhand, the revolt found its most celebrated leader in Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi. Born Manikarnika Tambe, she had been denied the throne for her adopted son under the Doctrine of Lapse, and when the rising reached Jhansi the popular pressure around her left her little choice but to assume its leadership. She organised the defence of her city with notable skill and resolve.

When the British general Hugh Rose besieged and took Jhansi in 1858, the Rani escaped to join Tantia Tope, and together they seized the great fortress of Gwalior. It was there, fighting on horseback, that Rani Lakshmibai was killed in June 1858, becoming at once a martyr and the most enduring symbol of the courage of 1857. Even her British adversary, Hugh Rose, described her as the bravest and best of the rebel leaders.

Arrah and Bihar: Kunwar Singh of Jagdishpur

In the east, the revolt's leader was Kunwar Singh, the Rajput zamindar of Jagdishpur in the Shahabad district of Bihar. Already about eighty years old, he gave the rising in Bihar a seasoned and determined leadership, and his name remains a living folk memory in the Bhojpuri country to this day. The fighting in Bihar centred on the town of Arrah, where a small British garrison was besieged in July 1857.

Kunwar Singh carried the war far beyond Bihar, fighting alongside the rebels in Awadh and Central India through 1857 and into 1858. In his last campaign he won a final victory near his ancestral seat of Jagdishpur in April 1858, reportedly losing an arm to a bullet on the way, and died there on 26 April, undefeated in his own country. He stands as the great example of the landholding gentry who turned their old authority against the Company.

Bareilly, Faizabad and the Wider Gangetic Belt

Beyond the great centres, the revolt threw up leaders across the whole Gangetic belt. At Bareilly in Rohilkhand, Khan Bahadur Khan, a descendant of the old Rohilla rulers, set up a rebel government and led the resistance in the region before sending his trained brigade to Delhi under Bakht Khan. Rohilkhand, like Awadh, held out well into 1858.

At Faizabad in Awadh, the religious leader Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, known as Danka Shah for the drum that announced his arrival, had preached resistance even before the outbreak. He led the rebels to victory over Henry Lawrence at the Battle of Chinhat in June 1857 and was widely believed to be invincible.

Across the belt, then, the revolt was not the work of a few famous names alone, but of many local leaders who turned their own followings against British rule.

The Leaders of 1857: A Centre-by-Centre Matrix

Who Led Where: The Leaders of the Revolt at a Glance

Because the revolt had no single command, its leadership is best understood centre by centre. A striking feature of the revolt is that most leaders did not seek the role but were pressed into it by the soldiers and people around them, who turned to figures of old authority for legitimacy.

The table below summarises who led where, in what capacity and to what end. The sub-sections that follow draw out the three main types of leader, the court figure, the professional commander and the popular leader who rose from below.

Court Leaders Pressed into Rebellion

The first type of leader was the figure of old authority, the emperor, the Peshwa, the rani and the nawab's family, to whom the rebels turned for legitimacy. Bahadur Shah Zafar at Delhi, Nana Sahib at Kanpur, Rani Lakshmibai at Jhansi and Birjis Qadr at Lucknow were all given little choice but to lead by the popular pressure around them.

This pattern is significant. It shows that the rebels wanted to restore the old order they had lost to annexation, and that the dispossessed princes and their grievances supplied the natural symbols of revolt. Each of these leaders had a personal cause for resentment, a lost throne, a refused pension or an unrecognised heir, which the Company's own policies had created.

The Military Commanders: Bakht Khan and Tantia Tope

A second type was the professional commander who gave the revolt its military backbone. General Bakht Khan, a veteran subedar of the Bengal artillery, brought discipline and a trained brigade to the defence of Delhi and became the rebels' effective commander-in-chief, the nearest the revolt came to a unified military head.

Tantia Tope, Nana Sahib's general, was the most resourceful soldier of the war, fighting across Kanpur, Bundelkhand and Central India and leading the daring seizure of Gwalior in 1858. His long guerrilla resistance ended only when he was betrayed by a friend, captured and executed in 1859, a fate that made him one of the most admired of the rebel leaders.

Popular and Religious Leaders: Shah Mal, Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah and Gonoo

A third type, easily overlooked, was the popular leader who rose from below. Shah Mal, a Jat headman of pargana Barout near Delhi, mobilised the cultivators of eighty-four villages, broke the bridges and roads that symbolised British power, set up a rough court of justice and ruled his little territory until he was killed in July 1857.

Religious figures played a similar part. Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah of Faizabad preached resistance and led the rebels in battle, while Gonoo, a Kol tribal cultivator of Singhbhum in Chotanagpur, became a leader of his people's rising. These leaders show that 1857 was not only a revolt of princes and sepoys but also of peasants, artisans and tribals, who found their own voices and their own commanders.

The Vision of Unity and the Search for Alternative Power

Hindu-Muslim Unity and the Rebel Proclamations

One of the most remarkable features of 1857 was its Hindu-Muslim unity. The rebel proclamations appealed to both communities together, and though many were issued in the name of Muslim princes, they took care to honour Hindu sentiment. The proclamation issued under Bahadur Shah's name called on the people to fight under the standards of both Muhammad and Mahavir, and religious divisions were hardly noticeable during the uprising.

The fullest statement of the rebel cause was the Azamgarh Proclamation of 25 August 1857, issued in the name of the Mughal house. It addressed zamindars, merchants, public servants, artisans and the learned in turn, promising each relief from the wrongs of the firangi and a place in the restored order. So deliberate was this unity that British attempts to set Hindus against Muslims, including a sum of fifty thousand rupees spent at Bareilly to incite communal feeling, simply failed.

Restoring the Eighteenth-Century Order: Rebel Administration

Where British rule collapsed, the rebels did not aim at a new kind of state but at the restoration of the old. In Delhi, Lucknow and Kanpur they tried to set up structures of authority, appointing officers, arranging the collection of revenue and the payment of troops, and issuing orders to stop loot and plunder. In all this they looked back to the eighteenth-century Mughal world that annexation had destroyed.

These administrations were short-lived and shaped mainly by the demands of war, but they reveal the rebels' purpose. Only in Awadh, where resistance lasted longest, did the rebel court at Lucknow keep a working chain of command into 1858. The search for an alternative power shows that 1857 was a conscious political act, an attempt to put back together a world the Company had taken apart, not a mere outburst of violence.

From Uprising to Watershed: Why the Scale of 1857 Mattered

The reach of the revolt across so many centres, and its popular character, are exactly why 1857 became a watershed in the history of British rule in India. What the Company had dismissed as a sepoy mutiny turned out to be an uprising with deep roots in the countryside, capable of holding the heart of North India for the better part of a year and of uniting Hindu and Muslim, prince and peasant, against the firangi.

The shock of that scale forced a fundamental change of course. The revolt brought the rule of the East India Company to an end and ushered in direct Crown rule under the Government of India Act of 1858, along with a wholesale rethinking of the army, the princes and British policy towards Indian society.

Those consequences are the subject of Part 6; here it is enough to see that the geography and leadership of 1857 are what gave the revolt the weight to change the very form of British rule. The participation, the nature and the causes of its ultimate failure are taken up next, in Part 4.

Sources and Further Reading

• NCERT, Themes in Indian History Part III (Theme 11: Rebels and the Raj)
• Wikipedia: Indian Rebellion of 1857
• Wikipedia: Bahadur Shah Zafar
• Wikipedia: Rani of Jhansi (Lakshmibai)
• Wikipedia: Nana Sahib
• Wikipedia: Tantia Tope
• Wikipedia: Begum Hazrat Mahal
• Wikipedia: Kunwar Singh