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Indian Rebellion of 1857
Uprising against British Company rule / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown.[4][5] The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the form of a mutiny of sepoys of the company's army in the garrison town of Meerut, 40 mi (64 km) northeast of Delhi. It then erupted into other mutinies and civilian rebellions chiefly in the upper Gangetic plain and central India,[lower-alpha 2][6][lower-alpha 3][7] though incidents of revolt also occurred farther north and east.[lower-alpha 4][8] The rebellion posed a military threat to British power in that region,[lower-alpha 5][9] and was contained only with the rebels' defeat in Gwalior on 20 June 1858.[10] On 1 November 1858, the British granted amnesty to all rebels not involved in murder, though they did not declare the hostilities to have formally ended until 8 July 1859.
Indian Rebellion of 1857 | |||||||||
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![]() A 1912 map of Northern India, showing the centres of the rebellion. | |||||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||||
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Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
The Earl Canning | |||||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||||
6,000 British killed, including civilians[lower-alpha 1][2] Based on a rough comparison of the sketchy pre-1857 regional demographic data and the first 1871 Census of India, probably 800,000 Indians were killed, and very likely more, both in the rebellion and in the famines and epidemics of disease that were caused as a result in its immediate aftermath.[2] |
The name of the revolt is contested, and it is variously described as the Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian Mutiny, the Great Rebellion, the Revolt of 1857, the Indian Insurrection, and the First War of Independence.[lower-alpha 6][11]
The Indian rebellion was fed by resentments born of diverse perceptions, including invasive British-style social reforms, harsh land taxes, summary treatment of some rich landowners and princes,[12][13] and scepticism about the improvements brought about by British rule.[lower-alpha 7][14] Many Indians rose against the British; however, many also fought for the British, and the majority remained seemingly compliant to British rule.[lower-alpha 8][14] Violence, which sometimes betrayed exceptional cruelty, was inflicted on both sides, on British officers, and civilians, including women and children, by the rebels, and on the rebels, and their supporters, including sometimes entire villages, by British reprisals; the cities of Delhi and Lucknow were laid waste in the fighting and the British retaliation.[lower-alpha 9][14]
After the outbreak of the mutiny in Meerut, the rebels quickly reached Delhi, whose 81-year-old Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was declared the Emperor of Hindustan. Soon, the rebels had captured large tracts of the North-Western Provinces and Awadh (Oudh). The East India Company's response came rapidly as well. With help from reinforcements, Kanpur was retaken by mid-July 1857, and Delhi by the end of September.[10] However, it then took the remainder of 1857 and the better part of 1858 for the rebellion to be suppressed in Jhansi, Lucknow, and especially the Awadh countryside.[10] Other regions of Company-controlled India—Bengal province, the Bombay Presidency, and the Madras Presidency—remained largely calm.[lower-alpha 10][7][10] In the Punjab, the Sikh princes crucially helped the British by providing both soldiers and support.[lower-alpha 11][7][10] The large princely states, Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore, and Kashmir, as well as the smaller ones of Rajputana, did not join the rebellion, serving the British, in the Governor-General Lord Canning's words, as "breakwaters in a storm".[15]
In some regions, most notably in Awadh, the rebellion took on the attributes of a patriotic revolt against British oppression.[16] However, the rebel leaders proclaimed no articles of faith that presaged a new political system.[lower-alpha 12][17] Even so, the rebellion proved to be an important watershed in Indian and British Empire history.[lower-alpha 13][11][18] It led to the dissolution of the East India Company, and forced the British to reorganize the army, the financial system, and the administration in India, through passage of the Government of India Act 1858.[19] India was thereafter administered directly by the British government in the new British Raj.[15] On 1 November 1858, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation to Indians, which while lacking the authority of a constitutional provision,[lower-alpha 14][20] promised rights similar to those of other British subjects.[lower-alpha 15][lower-alpha 16][21] In the following decades, when admission to these rights was not always forthcoming, Indians were to pointedly refer to the Queen's proclamation in growing avowals of a new nationalism.[lower-alpha 17][lower-alpha 18][23]