Consequently, East India personnel took more interest in religious affairs and allowed more missionary work to be carried out under their aegis. As the Nineteenth Century progressed, religion began to play a more important role. In the Eighteenth Century, the East India Company had been interested only in profit and commercial areas. The threat was the increased religious overtones of the East India Company and of the Europeans operating in the sub-continent. The common thread that will tie most of the factors together and bringing an unlikely alliance between the Muslims and Hindus was the perceived threat to the native religions of the Indian sub-continent. However the causes of the mutiny were far more varied and interconnected with one another in quite unforeseen and complicated manners. These events certainly did occur and were significant in their own right. Indians were told that 1857 was the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Plassey and that British rule would come to an end on that date. For generations, British schoolboys and girls were told that it all had to do with a misunderstanding and mistakes over a new kind of cartridge issued to the Sepoys and Sowars. For the sake of convenience and familiarity, I will use the term mutiny throughout although with the understanding that it did escalate further.Īgain, there is much debate into why the mutiny did break out in India in 1857. Therefore, you could claim to call these events a mutiny that escalated into a rebellion but it never did hit the hoped for nationalist uprising status. The hoped for general Indian uprising never did take place and despite attempts to escalate the events through various atrocities and sieges, the British were able to reorganise their forces in the Indian sub-continent and slowly but surely reestablish their control over the Bengal and other affected areas. This did attract wider support but the old Emperor did not have the energy or the resources to fully take on the power of the British in India. Undoubtedly, the Bengal Army took the lead through their initial mutinies, but they quickly tried to politicise and widen the event through asking the last Mughal Emperor to reassert his claims and reestablish the old Mughal Empire. The truth was obviously somewhere in between. It was unusual in that it did attract Muslims and Hindus to the cause, but the event was clearly confined to Northern India in general and Bengal in particular. It is clear why they would like to brand this event as a nationalist uprising. Post 1947 Indian Nationalists have thought to refer to the events as India's First Nationalist Uprising. The British recognised that there were a number of fellow travellers who joined in and took advantage of the collapse of authority throughout Northern India, notably Ghazis and Gujars. Indeed the British were fortunate that it was only the Bengal Army, with a few exceptions, the Bombay and Madras armies stayed remarkably quiescent. The British authorities firmly regarded the event as a mutiny by large sections of the Bengal army. One hundred and fifty years after the events of 1857, there is still great debate in what they should actually be called.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |