Causes of the Revolt of 1857: Political, Economic, Military and Religious

Build-Up of Grievances, 1798 to 1857

From the Subsidiary Alliance to the Meerut Rising

The grievances built up over six decades. Lord Wellesley brought in the Subsidiary Alliance in 1798, and the Nizam of Hyderabad was among the first rulers to accept it; Awadh came under it in 1801. Sati was abolished in 1829. Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General from 1848 to 1856, annexed several states under the Doctrine of Lapse, from Satara in 1848 to Nagpur in 1854, and took Awadh in 1856. The General Service Enlistment Act followed on 25 July 1856, and the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act became law the same year.

The final months moved quickly. In the third week of January 1857 a rumour about greased cartridges began at Dum Dum. On 29 March 1857 Mangal Pandey attacked his officers at Barrackpore, and on 10 May 1857 the sepoys at Meerut rose.

These grievances overlapped. In Awadh the annexation of 1856 at once removed a popular Nawab, stripped the taluqdars of their estates, raised the revenue demand on peasants and touched the families of many sepoys of the Bengal Army, who came from its villages.

Political Causes: Annexation and the Doctrine of Lapse

Subsidiary Alliance and the Weakening of Indian States

The Subsidiary Alliance was a system devised by Lord Wellesley in 1798 to bring Indian states under British control without the cost of ruling them directly. A ruler who entered it accepted four terms:

• Protection: The British would protect the ally from external and internal threats.
• Troops: A British armed contingent would be stationed in the ally's territory.
• Cost: The ally would provide the resources to maintain that contingent.
• Foreign relations: The ally could make agreements with other rulers or go to war only with British permission.

A British Resident, the Governor-General's representative, lived at the ruler's court. The alliance appeared to preserve the sovereignty of the princely states, but it transferred real power to the British and made the rulers pay for their own subjugation, creating what was called "an empire on the cheap". Mysore was reduced to a subsidiary state after the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War of 1799, Awadh accepted the system in 1801 and the Peshwa in 1802, and the wars against Mysore and the Marathas brought most of the remaining powers into it. By 1857 the surviving states were weak and dependent.

Doctrine of Lapse: Meaning and the States Annexed

The Doctrine of Lapse was the rule by which a princely state under Company suzerainty was annexed if its ruler died without a natural male heir, or was judged manifestly incompetent. It refused to recognise an adopted son, although the Hindu tradition of adoption was a legitimate means of succession in Indian royal houses. The Court of Directors stated the idea as early as 1834, and Mandvi, Colaba, Jalaun and Surat were annexed under it between 1839 and 1842. The policy is most closely linked with Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General from 1848 to 1856, who applied it vigorously.

Under Dalhousie the Company annexed Satara, Jaitpur, Sambalpur, Udaipur (in present-day Chhattisgarh), Jhansi and Nagpur. It also annexed Baghat in the Simla hills; Baghat and Udaipur were later restored to native rule. Through these annexations the Company added about four million pounds sterling to its annual revenue. The Doctrine of Lapse was renounced after the Crown took over the government of India in 1858.

The dispossessed houses became natural leaders when the revolt came. Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi had asked the Company to accept Damodar Rao, the son whom Raja Gangadhar Rao had adopted, as heir, and her petition was rejected. Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, was refused the family title and also turned against the British.

Annexation of Awadh in 1856 on the Ground of Misgovernment

Awadh was annexed in February 1856 on the plea that it was misgoverned. In 1851 Lord Dalhousie had described the kingdom as "a cherry that will drop into our mouth one day". The conquest came in stages. The Subsidiary Alliance imposed in 1801 had made the Nawab disband his army, accept British troops and follow the advice of the Resident, so he could no longer control his rebellious chiefs and taluqdars.

The British wanted Awadh because its soil suited indigo and cotton and its position made it ideal as the principal market of Upper India. Its takeover was expected to complete a process of annexation that had begun with the conquest of Bengal almost a century earlier. Nawab Wajid Ali Shah was dethroned and exiled to Calcutta. The British assumed he was unpopular; he was in fact widely loved, and many followed him from Lucknow as far as Kanpur singing songs of lament.

The removal of the Nawab dissolved his court and its culture. Musicians, dancers, poets, artisans, cooks, retainers and administrative officials lost their livelihood at once. In Awadh, more than anywhere else, the Revolt of 1857 became an expression of popular resistance to an alien order.

Taluqdars of Awadh and the Summary Settlement of 1856

The taluqdars were the great landholders of the Awadh countryside, whose estates and forts had for generations given them control over land and power. Under the Nawab they kept armed retainers, built forts and enjoyed a degree of autonomy as long as they paid the revenue of their taluqs. Some of the bigger taluqdars had as many as 12,000 foot-soldiers.

The British would not tolerate this power. Immediately after the annexation the taluqdars were disarmed and their forts destroyed. The first British revenue settlement, the Summary Settlement of 1856, assumed that the taluqdars were interlopers with no permanent stake in the land, who had won their hold by force and fraud, and it removed them wherever possible. Before British rule the taluqdars had held 67 per cent of the villages of Awadh; after the Summary Settlement they held 38 per cent. The taluqdars of southern Awadh were hit hardest, and some lost more than half their villages.

British revenue officers believed that removing the taluqdars would let them settle the land with its actual owners, reduce the exploitation of peasants and still raise the state's income. The income rose, but the burden on the peasant did not fall. Large areas of Awadh were overassessed, with the demand raised by 30 to 70 per cent in some places. The peasant also lost the taluqdar's support in hard times, since there was no longer any assurance that the state would reduce or postpone its demand in a year of crop failure. Neither the taluqdars nor the peasants had any reason to welcome the annexation, and in 1857 the taluqdars and their peasants did much of the fighting in Awadh.

Humiliation of the Mughal House and the Old Aristocracy

The Mughal emperor in Delhi had lost real power long before 1857, and Bahadur Shah Zafar's authority was limited to a small area of Delhi. The British humbled even this symbol. When Prince Faqiruddin, the heir whose succession Lord Dalhousie had recognised only on conditions, died in 1856, Lord Canning announced that the next heir would have to give up the regal title and the ancestral Mughal palaces.

The fall of the old ruling houses reached beyond the rulers themselves. Courts had supported those who lived by cultural and religious pursuits, and these people lost their patrons when the rulers fell. When the sepoys of Meerut reached Delhi in May 1857, they proclaimed the elderly emperor their leader, a sign that the Mughal name still counted.

Administrative Causes: An Alien and Distant Rule

The Company's administration replaced the old order in every territory it annexed. The British brought in their own system of administration, their own laws and their own methods of land settlement and revenue collection. To many in northern India the new order appeared more impersonal, alien and oppressive than the one it replaced.

Corruption was widespread at the lower levels of the administration, especially among the police, petty officials and the lower law courts. British rule was also an absentee sovereignty, exercised by a power whose seat lay in Britain, which made it look alien in Indian eyes. The justice system was seen as biased. Parliamentary reports on torture in India, laid before the House of Commons between 1855 and 1857, recorded that Company officers accused of brutality against Indians were often shielded by long appeals and rarely punished.

Economic Causes: Land Revenue and the Ruin of Crafts

Heavy Land Revenue, Debt and the Loss of Land

Land revenue was the Company's chief demand on the countryside. Under the Permanent Settlement, in operation in Bengal from 1793, the estates of zamindars who failed to pay were auctioned to recover the revenue. Impoverished by heavy taxation, peasants borrowed from moneylenders and traders at usurious rates, and those who could not repay were evicted. The moneylenders and traders who took over the land emerged as new landlords.

The landed classes suffered too. The Company's resumption, or taking back, of tax-free lands and its confiscation of jagirs angered jagirdars and zamindars. Lord Dalhousie appointed an Inam Commission to examine the titles to tax-free land and gave it powers of confiscation. Land confiscated from landlords was auctioned, and merchants and moneylenders speculated in these sales. Most sepoys came from agricultural families hurt by these revenue policies, so the distress of the village reached the army directly.

Ruin of Artisans and the Decline of Indian Industry

British trade policy ruined India's traditional industries, a decline known as deindustrialisation. Britain imposed heavy duties on Indian textiles entering Britain while forcing India to accept British manufactured goods at minimal tariffs. Britain also controlled most of the sea trade and the exchange rates, so Indian traders found it hard to export. Communities of skilled artisans were reduced to poverty and forced back to subsistence farming on land that was already overtaxed. In 1834 the Governor-General, William Bentinck, observed: "The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India."

Annexation deepened the damage, because each fallen court took away the patronage on which craftsmen depended. The destruction of handicrafts was not matched by the growth of modern industry, so the craftsmen had to look for other work that hardly existed.

Military Causes: Grievances of the Bengal Army

Bengal Army Sepoys and Their Links with Awadh

On the eve of the revolt the Company's army had over 3,00,000 sepoys and about 50,000 British soldiers. It was divided into three presidency armies, of Bengal, Madras and Bombay. The Bengal Army recruited high castes such as Brahmins, Rajputs and Bhumihars, mostly from Awadh and Bihar, and Awadh was called the "nursery of the Bengal Army".

In its early years the Company adapted army practice to the sepoys' rituals. High-caste soldiers dined in separate facilities, were not required to serve overseas and saw Hindu festivals officially recognised. This left the sepoys sensitive to any change that seemed to threaten their caste.

The link between sepoy and village ran both ways. The fears of the sepoys' families reached the barracks, and the sepoys' grievances over the cartridge, leave and racial abuse reached the villages. In 1857 peasants joined the mutinous sepoys swiftly for this reason.

Pay, Batta and Racial Discrimination

The sepoys had complained for decades of the difficulty of getting leave and of pay below that of British soldiers, and promotion went by seniority, so many Indian officers reached commissioned rank only when they were too old to be effective. Racial discrimination and a sense of being subordinate at every step deepened the grievance.

The loss of batta, the extra allowance paid for service beyond the Company's territory, added to it. After Sindh, the Punjab and Awadh were annexed, sepoys posted there no longer received batta, because those lands no longer counted as foreign service. The attitude of officers also changed. In the 1820s many British officers were friendly with their men, spoke Hindustani and shared their leisure. From the 1840s officers increasingly treated sepoys as racial inferiors, abuse and physical violence became common, and trust gave way to suspicion. The Company's increased recruitment of Sikhs and Gurkhas, whom the Bengal sepoys regarded as lower in caste, also made them fear that their own service was no longer needed.

General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 and Overseas Service

The General Service Enlistment Act, despite its name an order of the Government of India rather than a law of a legislature, was issued on 25 July 1856, under Lord Canning. It required every new recruit to the Bengal Army to serve overseas if ordered. Men of the Bengal Army had until then enlisted only for service in territories to which they could march, while the Madras and Bombay armies already accepted overseas duty. Dalhousie had seen this as an anomaly, because the burden of service in Burma and China, reached only by sea, fell on the two smaller armies.

For a high-caste Hindu of the time, crossing the sea, the kala pani, meant the loss of caste. The order applied only to new recruits, but serving sepoys feared it would be extended to them. They also feared it would stop their sons from following them into an army with a strong tradition of family service. Overseas service had caused trouble before: Sepoys required for the Second Anglo-Burmese War refused to embark.

British Setbacks Abroad and the Loss of Invincibility

Events outside India weakened the sepoys' belief that the British could not be beaten. In the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838‑1842), the British army under General Elphinstone, which included three Bengal regiments, was massacred while retreating from Kabul. The British also suffered serious losses in the Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845‑1849) and the Crimean War (1854‑1856).

Several British regiments had been withdrawn from India for the Crimean War or the Anglo-Persian War of 1856, so the sepoys' grievances came to a head when British strength in India was low.

Social and Religious Causes of the Revolt of 1857

Social Reform Laws from Sati to Widow Remarriage

From the late 1820s, under Governor-General Lord William Bentinck, the British adopted policies aimed at "reforming" Indian society through Western education, Western ideas and Western institutions. The Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829 made sati illegal. The Caste Disabilities Removal Act, 1850, sometimes called the Religious Disabilities Act, allowed a Hindu who changed his religion to keep his rights of inheritance. The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856, drafted under Dalhousie and passed under Canning, legalised the remarriage of widows.

Indian reformers campaigned for some of these laws, and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was the most prominent campaigner for widow remarriage. Conservative opinion opposed them. A counter-petition by Radhakanta Deb and the Dharma Sabha against the widow remarriage bill carried nearly four times as many signatures as Vidyasagar's petition. A large section of the population saw these reforms as interference by outsiders in social and religious life. The government's decision to tax the lands of mosques and temples added to the suspicion. Schools that taught secular subjects and educated girls were also feared as a threat to traditional values.

Christian Missionaries and the Fear of Conversion

The Charter Act of 1813 encouraged Christian missionaries to come to Bombay and Calcutta, and their activity grew steadily. By 1851, 19 Protestant religious societies were at work in India with the aim of converting Indians to Christianity. Some officers of evangelical belief, among them Colonel S. G. Wheler, preached to their own sepoys in the hope of converting them, and chaplains were often maintained at the Company's expense.

Restrictions on caste and sectarian marks in the army, and rumours of chaplains seeking converts, were read by the sepoys as interference in their religion. The activity of missionaries aggravated the wider feeling that British rule threatened everything Indians held sacred. The rebel proclamations of 1857 later expressed the widespread fear that the British meant to destroy the caste and religion of Hindus and Muslims and convert them to Christianity.

Rumours, Prophecies and a Climate of Suspicion

Early in 1857 northern India was full of rumours. One said that the British had mixed the bone dust of cows and pigs into the flour sold in the market, and in towns and cantonments people refused to touch the flour. A prophecy foretold that British rule would end on the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, on 23 June 1857. Chapattis passed from village to village by night, and their purpose was not clear even then, but people read them as an omen of an upheaval.

Rumours circulate only when they match people's deeper fears and suspicions. The reforms since the late 1820s, the annexations and the missionaries had prepared the ground, so stories about cartridges and flour found ready belief.

Immediate Cause: The Greased Cartridges

Enfield Rifle and the Greased-Cartridge Rumour

The immediate cause of the revolt was the cartridge of the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle, introduced to Indian troops in 1856. To load it, a soldier bit open a paper cartridge, poured the gunpowder down the barrel and rammed the ball home. The cartridges were greased to ease loading, and the rumour spread that the grease was the fat of cows and pigs. The cow is sacred to Hindus and the pig unclean to Muslims, so biting the cartridge threatened both communities at once.

Captain Wright, commandant of the Rifle Instruction Depot, reported how the rumour began, although the accuracy of his report is not known. In the third week of January 1857, he wrote, a "low-caste" khalasi, a labourer at the magazine in Dum Dum, asked a Brahmin sepoy for a drink of water from his lota, a brass water pot, and was refused. The labourer retorted that the sepoy would soon lose his caste anyway, since he would have to bite cartridges covered with the fat of cows and pigs. The story spread like wildfire through the sepoy lines of northern India.

British Response and the Deepening of Suspicion

British officers tried to reassure the sepoys, but no assurance could stop the rumour. The Company ordered that future cartridges be supplied without grease and allowed sepoys to apply their own, such as ghee or vegetable oil. A new drill, in which the cartridge was torn by hand instead of bitten, was also proposed. These concessions convinced many sepoys that the original cartridges had indeed been greased with forbidden fat. The sepoys also rejected the new drill, since men used to biting cartridges might do so again out of habit. They acted on what they believed about the cartridges, and the belief was strong because it fitted everything they already feared about British intentions.

From Berhampur and Barrackpore to Meerut

Open defiance began weeks before the main outbreak. In February 1857 the 19th Native Infantry at Berhampur refused to use the new Enfield rifle, and the regiment was disbanded in March. On 29 March 1857 at Barrackpore, Mangal Pandey of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry attacked his British officers; his motives are still debated, and he was hanged on 8 April 1857. At Meerut, troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry who refused the cartridges were jailed in irons. The rising at Meerut on 10 May 1857 and the march to Delhi that followed began the revolt itself.

Dalhousie's Record and How the Causes of 1857 Combined

Lord Dalhousie: Moderniser and Annexationist

Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General from 1848 to 1856, left a double legacy. He built much of the machinery of modern India. The Railway Minute of 1853 was followed in the same year by the first railway line, from Bombay to Thane. Telegraph lines connected Calcutta with Bombay, Madras and Peshawar, the Post Office Act of 1854 reformed the postal service, and a separate Public Works Department was set up in every province. The Ganges Canal was opened in 1854, Wood's Educational Despatch of 1854 came in his time, and so did the draft of the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act.

The same Governor-General annexed the Punjab in 1849 and Lower Burma in 1852, applied the Doctrine of Lapse and took Awadh in 1856. His policies, especially the Doctrine of Lapse, added greatly to the discontent that broke out in 1857, the year after he left India. The modern state he built and the resentment he left behind both belong to his record.

How the Causes of 1857 Worked Together

No single cause explains the revolt. A chain of grievances linked prince, taluqdar, peasant and sepoy, and each came to identify British rule with the end of a world they valued. The rebel proclamations condemned the annexations and the broken treaties, the revenue settlements, the ruin of artisans and the threat to caste and religion together.

Sources

• NCERT: Class 12 Themes in Indian History Book 3, Chapter 2, Rebels and the Raj
• NCERT: Class 12 Themes in Indian History Book 3, Chapter 1, Colonialism and the Countryside
• NCERT: Class 8 Exploring Society: India and Beyond Book 1, Chapter 4, The Colonial Era in India
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