Revolt of 1857: Sepoy Mutiny or First War of Independence? Views of Historians

Nature of the Revolt of 1857: Three Names, Three Claims

Sepoy Mutiny, Revolt and War of Independence Defined

The name chosen for 1857 is already an argument. The uprising began on 10 May 1857 as a mutiny of sepoys of the Company's army at Meerut, and it was contained only with the rebels' defeat at Gwalior on 20 June 1858. On 1 November 1858 the British granted amnesty to all rebels not involved in murder, and they did not declare hostilities formally ended until 8 July 1859. In that period the events acquired many names: Sepoy Mutiny, Indian Mutiny, Great Rebellion, Revolt of 1857, Indian Insurrection and First War of Independence.

The terms differ in what they claim. A mutiny is a collective disobedience of rules and regulations within the armed forces, so the name limits 1857 to a rising of sepoys. A revolt is a rebellion of people against established authority and power; for 1857 the word refers mainly to the uprising of the civilian population, namely peasants, zamindars, rajas and jagirdars, while the mutiny was of the sepoys. A war of independence goes further and asserts a conscious, shared struggle to end foreign rule over India as a whole.

In India and Pakistan the events are called the War of Independence of 1857 or the First War of Indian Independence, though the term Revolt of 1857 is also common. In the United Kingdom and parts of the Commonwealth they are commonly called the Indian Mutiny. Some Indian politicians regard that name as belittling and imperialistic, and others dispute that reading.

The debate also decides how the later chapters of the freedom struggle are read. If 1857 was a war of independence, the national movement begins in 1857. If it was a regional rising of a society that had no common nationality yet, the national movement is a later creation.

Evidence Behind the Debate: Whose Records Survive

Colonial Records and Rebel Proclamations

Every interpretation depends on its evidence, and the evidence for 1857 is lopsided. Few records from the rebels' point of view survive, because most rebels were sepoys and ordinary people. What exists from their side is a handful of proclamations and notifications and some letters that rebel leaders wrote. Historians have therefore discussed rebel actions mainly through accounts written by the British, such as letters, diaries, autobiographies, official histories and the volumes of mutiny records, which reveal the fears and anxieties of officials more than the aims of the rebels.

The Azamgarh Proclamation of 25 August 1857 is one of the main sources of knowledge about what the rebels wanted. It addressed zamindars, merchants, public servants and artisans in turn, listing what each had lost under British rule and promising relief under the Badshahi, or imperial, government.

Newspaper reports also shaped opinion. The stories published in British newspapers and magazines narrated the violence of the mutineers in gory detail, and these stories inflamed public feeling and provoked demands for retribution and revenge.

British and Nationalist Images of the Revolt

Pictures were evidence too, and they carried arguments. Joseph Noel Paton's painting In Memoriam (1859) shows English women and children huddled in a circle, waiting for dishonour, violence and death; the rebels remain invisible, yet the picture represents them as violent and brutish. Another set of British sketches shows Miss Wheeler single-handedly killing the attackers, with a Bible on the floor, to suggest a battle to save the honour of Christianity. Photographs by Felice Beato of the Secundrah Bagh at Lucknow, where the forces of Sir Colin Campbell, the commander-in-chief, killed over 2,000 rebel sepoys, were meant as a cold warning of the futility of rebellion.

The twentieth-century national movement drew inspiration from 1857 and celebrated it as the First War of Independence, in which all sections of the people of India came together to fight imperial rule. The Rani of Jhansi became its chief image, portrayed in battle armour, sword in hand and riding a horse, as a symbol of resistance to alien rule. Children in many parts of India learnt Subhadra Kumari Chauhan's line "Khoob lari mardani woh to Jhansi wali rani thi".

Images did not merely reflect the time; they shaped it. The pictures that circulated in Britain led the public to sanction the most brutal forms of repression, while nationalist images helped to shape the nationalist imagination.

Contemporary British Views: Mutiny, Conspiracy and Civilisation

Palmerston, Disraeli and the Debate of July 1857

The argument about the nature of 1857 began almost from the moment the sepoys mutinied at Meerut. Speaking in the House of Commons in July 1857, Benjamin Disraeli called the events a "national revolt", while Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, tried to play down their scope as a "mere military mutiny". The two positions anticipate every later argument: One reads the events as a rising of a people, the other as a breach of army discipline.

Disraeli also gave currency to the conspiracy view. Before the rebellion there were reports that holy men were mysteriously circulating chapatis and lotus flowers among the sepoys, and Disraeli argued that these objects were signs to rebel and evidence of a conspiracy; the press echoed the belief. After Delhi was retaken, the British saw an Islamic hand behind the mutiny, and acting on that belief they moved control of the city's learning and trade from Muslim to Hindu hands. The name "Mahomedan Rebellion" is among those used for 1857 in British usage.

Charles Ball, an early historian of the rebellion, shows that British writers were not consistent. He used the word mutiny in the title of his work but called the events a "struggle for liberty and independence as a people" in the text.

Seeley, Rees and Holmes: Sepoy Mutiny, Religious War and Civilisation

For many British historians 1857 was a mere Sepoy Mutiny. Sir John Seeley described it as a wholly unpatriotic and selfish Sepoy Mutiny with no native leadership and no popular support. Seeley's wider argument, in The Expansion of England, explains his reading: British rule survived because Indians were divided along racial and social lines, and "the mutiny was in a great measure put down by turning the races of India against each other". He added that if the population were ever welded into a single nationality, British dominion could not be expected to last.

Two other British interpretations turned the revolt into a clash of larger forces. L.E.R. Rees saw in it a war of fanatic religionists against Christians. T.R. Holmes saw a conflict between civilisation and barbarism. Both views are easily dismissed in the light of the rebels' proclamations, which addressed Hindus and Muslims together and listed grievances over land, trade and employment.

The British themselves left evidence against the narrow reading. British accounts said that if the rebels had had about a dozen leaders of the quality of Kunwar Singh and Amar Singh, the English could never have imposed their rule again.

Why the Mutiny Label Does Not Fit the Evidence

The mutiny label is incomplete because the revolt involved many sections of the civilian population and not just the sepoys. As soon as the British began counter-insurgency operations in the Gangetic plain, they realised that they were not dealing with a mere mutiny but an uprising that had huge popular support. In Awadh a British official called Forsyth estimated that three-fourths of the adult male population was in rebellion. When the soldiers rose, they were joined by peasants, artisans, zamindars and taluqdars.

The taluqdar's voice makes the point. Hanwant Singh, the Raja of Kalakankar near Rae Bareli, gave shelter to a British officer during the mutiny and conveyed him to safety. On parting he said that the British had taken from him at one blow lands which had been in his family from time immemorial, and that he now marched at the head of his retainers to Lucknow to try to drive the British from the country.

The sepoys themselves were not a rabble. Irfan Habib points out that the Bengal Army had 1,35,000 Indian soldiers, trained in modern methods of warfare, and that it formed the largest modern army in Asia. Out of those 1,35,000 only 8,000 remained loyal, which means that over 1,20,000 professional soldiers took the field, and he argues that no other anti-colonial revolt brought so many professional soldiers into the field.

Nationalist Interpretation: Savarkar and the War of Independence

Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence (1909)

At the start of the twentieth century 1857 came to be read as a planned war of national independence. V.D. Savarkar wrote The Indian War of Independence in Marathi, in response to celebrations in Great Britain of the 50th anniversary of the rebellion, and finished it in 1907 at India House in London. An English translation appeared in 1909. The book describes the revolt as a unified and national uprising of India as a nation against British authority.

Savarkar's picture of unity includes both communities. In the 1909 book he emphasised Hindu-Muslim unity, stating that Hindus and Muslims worked together for "freeing their country". He also admitted brutality on both sides but treated the Indian acts as justifiable vengeance and the British acts as oppressive and disproportionate, giving the example of the massacres by General James George Smith Neill.

The authorities treated the book as a dangerous weapon. It was seen as highly inflammatory, and the Marathi edition was banned in British India even before its publication. The English translation could not find a printer in Britain or a publisher in Paris, and the book was finally printed in the Netherlands in 1909, with false dust wrappers purporting to be copies of The Pickwick Papers and other literary works. In India it remained banned until the end of British rule in 1947. Other historians accept Savarkar's conclusion about the national character of the revolt, while some, including R.C. Majumdar, disagree with it.

How "First" Entered the Name: Kuala Lumpur 1945 and the Moscow Volume

The phrase "First War of Independence" is later than Savarkar's book. Savarkar's original edition did not use the word "First". It first appears in an edition of 1945 published in Kuala Lumpur by the Indian National Army, titled The Volcano, or The First War of Indian Independence.

Karl Marx wrote a short article, The Indian Revolt, in the New-York Tribune in 1857. Some later writers wrongly claimed that Marx inspired Savarkar's use of the term, but Marx never used the term "war of independence" for 1857. A volume of his articles published in Moscow in 1959 carried the title The First Indian War of Independence 1857‑1859, and it was based on a Russian edition whose title did not use "First". Marx nevertheless called the events a "national revolt", as Disraeli had done in the Commons, although he used the term Sepoy Revolt to describe them.

Jawaharlal Nehru insisted on the term First War of Independence, and the Government of India adopted it. Some South Indian historians have opposed it, arguing that earlier anti-British risings such as the Vellore Mutiny of 1806 preceded 1857, and some Sikh groups argue for the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845 to 1846.

Arguments For and Against Calling 1857 a War of Independence

The Case For: Common Purpose and the Delhi Court

Those who defend the name point to what the rebels did and said. Even though the rebellion had various causes, most rebel sepoys who were able to do so made their way to Delhi to revive the old Mughal Empire, which signified national unity even for the Hindus among them. The sepoys did not seek to revive small kingdoms in their regions. They proclaimed a country-wide rule of the Mughals and vowed to drive the British out of India as they knew it.

Their slogan summed up the claim: "Khalq Khuda Ki, Mulk Badshah Ka, Hukm Subahdar Sipahi Bahadur Ka", meaning that the people belong to God, the country to the Emperor and authority to the sepoy. The proclamation issued in the name of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the Mughal emperor (the "King of Delhi" of British accounts), appealed to the people to fight under the standards of both Muhammad and Mahavir. The Delhi Urdu Akhbar addressed its readers as "fellow countrymen" and called the sepoys the fauj Hindustani, the Indian Army. In November 1857 the Awadh court's reply to Queen Victoria's proclamation appealed to "the Army and people of India".

The sepoys also showed organisation. Everywhere they formed councils and elected their representatives. In Delhi they set up a Court of Administration of representatives of the different contingents, which took governing decisions in practice and set aside the titular emperor Bahadur Shah. Habib suggests that, had the revolt succeeded, the Court of Administration of Delhi might have served as the initial Parliament in India.

The Case Against: Area, Allies and Divided Rulers

The sceptics answer with the geography and the politics of the revolt. A united India did not yet exist in political, cultural or ethnic terms. The rebellion was put down with the help of Indian soldiers drawn from the Madras Army, the Bombay Army and the Sikh regiments, and 80 per cent of the East India Company's forces were Indian. Many local rulers fought among themselves instead of uniting against the British, and many rebel sepoy regiments disbanded and went home rather than fight. Not all the rebels accepted the return of the Mughals, and Bahadur Shah had no real control over the mutineers.

The revolt was also largely limited to north and central India. Risings elsewhere had little impact, and a number of revolts occurred in areas not under British rule, against native rulers, as a result of local politics. The large princely states of Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore and Kashmir, as well as the smaller ones of Rajputana, did not join the rebellion; Lord Canning called them "breakwaters in a storm". Mewar, with its old stronghold of Chittor in present-day Rajasthan, was among the Rajput states that stayed out.

By one estimate not more than one-fourth of the total area and not more than one-tenth of the total population was affected. Modern educated Indians viewed the revolt as backward looking, and most Indian rulers refused to join and often helped the British.

Scholars' Views: Majumdar, Sen and Datta

R.C. Majumdar: Neither First, Nor National, Nor a War of Independence

R.C. Majumdar gave the sharpest dissent. He held that the so-called First National War of Independence of 1857 was neither the first, nor national, nor a war of independence, because large parts of the country remained unaffected and many sections of the people took no part in the upsurge. His case rests on the limited area of the revolt, the Indians who fought on the British side, the lack of a united India and the weak centre in Delhi.

Majumdar's view had an institutional history. When the Government of India set up an editorial committee to write a history of the freedom struggle, he was its principal member. After a dispute with Education Minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad over how 1857 should be interpreted, he left the government project and published his own book, The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857. In his larger scheme the origins of India's freedom struggle lie in the English-educated Indian middle class, and he dated its beginning to the Banga Bhanga movement of 1905.

S.N. Sen and K. Datta: From Religion to Politics, or a Localised Outbreak

S.N. Sen, in Eighteen Fifty-Seven, held that the revolt began as a fight for religion but ended as a war of independence. In his account the mutiny became a revolt and took on a political character when the mutineers of Meerut placed themselves under Bahadur Shah and a section of the landed aristocracy and civil population decided in his favour.

K. Datta was more cautious. He saw 1857 as in the main a military outbreak, taken advantage of by certain discontented princes and landlords whose interests had been affected by the new political order. It was, he said, never all-Indian in character, but localised, restricted and poorly organised, and it lacked cohesion and unity of purpose among the rebels.

What the rebels built once British rule collapsed supports a middle view. In Delhi, Lucknow and Kanpur they tried to establish structures of authority: Appointments were made to posts, arrangements were made to collect land revenue and pay troops, and orders were issued to stop loot and plunder. The rebel leadership, however, wanted to restore the pre-British world of the eighteenth century, harking back to the Mughal court as a symbol of all that had been lost. Sen's war of independence and Datta's localised outbreak are both partly right.

Marxist, Feudal and Peasant Readings of 1857

The Marxist Reading and the Feudal Reaction Thesis

Marxist historians described 1857 as the struggle of the soldier-peasant democratic combine against foreign as well as feudal bondage. They trace the revolt to what colonialism did to the economy. In the Mahalwari areas of Uttar Pradesh and parts of central India, which were the heart of the rebellion and the home of the Bengal sepoys, taxation increased by 70 per cent in real terms between 1819 and 1856, and in most districts up to half of the land changed hands between 1839 and 1858. After the Charter Act of 1833 English manufactures entered India practically free of duty, and Indian spinners and weavers were thrown out of employment.

The objection is that the leaders of the revolt came from a feudal background. Jawaharlal Nehru, in The Discovery of India, called the rebellion basically a feudal uprising, and many leaders were indeed princes or zamindars, among them Kunwar Singh and Amar Singh of Jagdishpur, the Rani of Jhansi and Begum Hazrat Mahal. Irfan Habib answers that when taluqdars, zamindars and princes rose against the greatest colonial power of the world on the support of sepoys, peasants and artisans, their own conceptions changed. The first Awadh proclamation spoke of restoring the zamindars' old hierarchy, but the Awadh court's reply to Queen Victoria in November 1857 addressed the Army and people of India.

The Rani of Jhansi shows the change. She had no quarrel with the British until Jhansi was annexed and her adopted son pushed aside. After she joined the rebels, she told a Deccan Brahmin that she was fighting "for the honour of Hindu dharma", which meant to her that foreigners should be overthrown and not that she should remain a secluded widow.

Eric Stokes, Subaltern Studies and Local Studies

Eric Stokes (1924‑1981) undermined the assumption that 1857 was a response to general causes affecting entire classes. In The Peasant and the Raj (1978) he argued that those who suffered the greatest relative deprivation rebelled, and that the decisive factor in precipitating a revolt was the presence of prosperous magnates who supported British rule. His book The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857 was published after his death, in 1986, edited by C.A. Bayly, and traces the links between sepoy mutiny and civil rebellion in districts such as Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur.

The Subaltern Studies group arose in the 1980s under the influence of Stokes and Ranajit Guha. Its approach is history from below, focused on non-elites as agents of political and social change. For 1857 this means asking what the rebels did as well as what leaders proclaimed. In villages they burnt account books and ransacked moneylenders' houses, an attempt to overturn traditional hierarchies that suggests a more egalitarian vision, although the proclamations did not articulate it. A British District Magistrate of Mathura, Thornhill, wrote in late 1858 that the peasants were the most hostile to the continuance of British rule and that the British should now support the landowners and repress the peasants.

Michael Adas (1971) sorted the writing on the revolt into four main approaches, namely the Indian nationalist view, the Marxist analysis, the view of the rebellion as a traditionalist rebellion, and intensive studies of local uprisings.

Religion, Race and Hindu-Muslim Unity in the Rebel Voice

Rebel sources used religion and race as common causes. The British were presented as people of a different race who were insulting Indians; the Delhi Urdu Akhbar put it in the line that the English are foreigners, goras, and Indians are blacks. The rebels also argued that Hindus and Muslims share monotheist values while the English hold the doctrine of the Trinity. Religion was a slogan, but in the rebel proclamations it widened into a patriotic, non-sectarian form.

Unity across communities was also an observed fact. Religious divisions between Hindus and Muslims were hardly noticeable during the uprising, and in Bareilly in December 1857 the British spent 50,000 rupees to incite the Hindu population against Muslims, an attempt that failed. Syed Ahmad Khan, in Causes of the Indian Rebellion, blamed the British for putting Hindus and Muslims in the same battalions, so that their blood mingled in battle and they became brothers.

Religion also supports a more cautious reading. William Dalrymple, in The Last Mughal, stressed religion and the divisions among the rebels and found little proto-nationalism or roots of modern India in the rebellion. Sabbaq Ahmed has studied how royalism, militarism and Jihad influenced the behaviour of contending Muslim factions.

1857 Within a Century of Rebellions

Earlier Risings and the Grievances They Shared

The revolt did not come out of nowhere. For a century before it, peasants, tribals and deposed rulers had risen against the Company region by region, and the same grievances recur in rising after rising, among them famine and enhanced land revenue, the transfer of land to outsiders, interference with religious practice and the loss of livelihood. The risings were local and were put down one by one.

What 1857 Added and Where It Fell Short

Three things set 1857 apart. The first was its scale. Over 1,20,000 professional soldiers of the Bengal Army took the field, a force that no local rising had commanded. The second was the joining of sepoys with peasants, artisans, taluqdars and dispossessed rulers across north India. The third was the shared symbol of the Mughal emperor, accepted as nominal leader by the rebels from Delhi to Kanpur, and the cooperation of Hindus and Muslims at all levels.

The limits matter equally. The revolt was poorly organised, with no coordination or central leadership. The mutineers lacked a clear understanding of colonial rule and did not have a forward-looking programme, a coherent ideology, a political perspective or a societal alternative. The rebels were short of modern arms and ammunition, and much of the civilian rising fought with swords and spears, whereas the British had the new Enfield rifle, and the electric telegraph kept the commander-in-chief informed of the rebels' movements. The British were fortunate in having men of exceptional ability, including the Lawrence brothers, John Nicholson, James Outram and Henry Havelock.

The lack of unity among Indians was perhaps unavoidable at this stage of Indian history, since modern nationalism was yet unknown in India. The revolt, however, played an important role in bringing Indian people together and imparting to them a consciousness of belonging to one country.

Where the Debate Stands Today

The Official View: The 150th Anniversary of 1857

The Government of India has adopted the nationalist label. It celebrated 2007 as the 150th anniversary of India's First War of Independence, with a yearlong programme across the country whose opening days ran from 7 to 11 May 2007. A speech to Parliament on that anniversary described 1857 as the first significant moment in India's struggle to free herself from British domination, in which sepoys and princes, peasants and taluqdars, artisans and intellectuals came together to fight British rule, and said that a military mutiny quickly transformed itself into a battle for freedom. The speech noted that Karl Marx and Benjamin Disraeli, from two different ideological perspectives, both conceded that the uprising was nothing short of a "national revolt".

The same speech added a caution about meaning. The rebels fought for freedom from foreign rule and also to protect their deen and dharma, which should not be read in the narrow sense of the word "religion": What they defended was a way of life that they feared the British were destroying.

A Balanced Verdict on the Nature of the Revolt of 1857

Recent scholarship keeps the debate open. Kim Wagner, in a survey of the literature, argues that modern Indian historiography is yet to move beyond responding to the prejudice of colonial accounts. Wagner also sees no reason to understate or inflate atrocities committed by Indians merely because they offend post-colonial sensibilities. Historians remain divided on whether the rebellion can properly be called a war of Indian independence, although it is popularly considered one in India.

The revolt of 1857 is not easy to categorise. It was far more than a mutiny, but it cannot quite be called a war of independence in the modern sense. It had seeds of nationalism and anti-imperialism, yet the concept of common nationality and nationhood was not inherent in the revolt. It may be called the first great struggle of Indians to throw off British rule, one that established local traditions of resistance which paved the way for the modern national movement. In short, it was not quite the first war of independence but it sowed the seeds of nationalism and the quest for freedom from alien rule.

Sources

• NCERT: Class 12 Themes in Indian History Part III, Chapter 2
• Lok Sabha Secretariat: Perspectives on the 1857 Uprising, lecture by Irfan Habib (9 May 2007)
• Press Information Bureau: India Celebrates 150th Year of its First War of Independence (4 May 2007)
• Prime Minister's Office: Address on the 150th anniversary of 1857 in Parliament
• Wikipedia: Indian Rebellion of 1857
• Wikipedia: India's First War of Independence (term)
• Wikipedia: The Indian War of Independence (book)
• Wikipedia: Ramesh Chandra Majumdar
• Wikipedia: Surendranath Sen
• Wikipedia: Eric Stokes (historian)
• Wikipedia: Subaltern Studies
• Wikipedia: John Robert Seeley
• Wikipedia: Causes of the Indian Rebellion of 1857
• Wikipedia: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
• Wikipedia: Anandamath
• Wikipedia: The Life Divine
• Wikipedia: Rabindranath Tagore
• Wikipedia: Kim A. Wagner
• Wikipedia: Chittorgarh
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers