The Indian Rebellion, 1857-1859 by Frey James;

Author:Frey, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Incorporated
Published: 2020-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

{81} Fig. 4. Captain Hodson Capturing the King of Delhi. In James Grant, Cassell’s Illustrated History of India, 2 vols., 2: 277. London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1880.

When news of the rebellion reached Britain in June 1857, the public clamored for explanations of what was happening. Many volumes were pitched at this market, often consisting of excerpts from general works on India, paraphrased newspaper articles, and quoted letters. Rants about {82} race, religion, and the Company abounded. The British survivors of the revolt also penned personal accounts as they returned home, many of which were published by firms like John Murray, which had long specialized in books about India. Eventually, hundreds of books and articles were written about the revolt, only a small selection of which can be discussed here.

Charles Ball’s History of the Indian Mutiny was written as the revolt was happening, and published even before it was over, in 1858. Like other early accounts of the rising, Ball’s emphasized the influence of caste, arguing that Bengal Army sepoys had leveraged their status to compel the EIC to indulge them, and that the rebellion was driven by the “prejudice” of soldiers who had been spoiled by their officers.18 A more serious effort to interpret the revolt was John William Kaye’s History of the Sepoy War in India (1864), a three-volume epic that benefited greatly from the author’s connection with the India Office and its records. Kaye also identified caste as a chief cause of the mutinies, but hinted that the sepoys’ feelings had been manipulated by anti-British conspirators.19 This theme of conspiracy was taken up in depth by George Bruce Malleson, who completed Kaye’s unfinished work. A major theme in both Kaye’s and Malleson’s writings was the EIC’s failed effort to govern India, which had alienated the people to such an extent that a sepoy mutiny could quickly grow into a full-blown insurrection.

The idea that a conspiracy underlay the revolt persisted despite the fact that no hard evidence for such activities had surfaced.20 The first Indian accounts of the rising downplayed any notion that the rebellion had been a sophisticated political movement. The chief concern of the earliest published Indian accounts was to paint the rebels as misguided mobs whose actions briefly stimulated a dying feudal aristocracy.21 Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, however, cogently argued that the EIC’s mistake {83} was its development of a well-meaning, but alien state, entirely out of touch with the people it ruled.22 Rajanikanta Gupta, whose five-volume account of the conflict was based on a variety of British sources, concluded that Indian and British views of the revolt differed due to their divergent feelings and habits of memory.23 In the early twentieth century, however, Vinayaka D. Savarkar revived the idea of a conspiracy, arguing that the revolt was a mature revolution—a premeditated, well-planned war of national liberation. Savarkar’s book—in combination with other activities—landed him in prison on a charge of sedition.24

By the 1930s, some Britons had begun to view the so-called “mutiny” with a more critical eye, and Francis W.

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