“The Sepoy Mutiny also known as the Mutiny of 1857 was a widespread but unsuccessful rebellion against British rule in India. It began in Meerut among Indian troops in the service of the British East India Company”. While this mutiny is known as India’s First War of Independence and is known for the massive public sentiment it stirred among the Indian masses against the British, the little-discussed aspect of this mutiny is the way in which it changed Britain’s approach towards colonising India and the perspective of the British towards India.
The aftermath of the mutiny saw manifold changes in the administration of India. One of the important changes made by the British post the mutiny of 1857, was a widespread attempt to deconfigure the preexisting social basis in India. The British at the time were extremely cognizant of the fact that this mutiny began from within the ranks of the Indian officers in the army, namely in the Bengal regiment. The British administration, as a result, attempted to entirely deconfigure the social basis in the country. The Bengal regiment, within months after the end of the mutiny, completely ceased to exist, and recruitment from a number of other regions began; Bengal for the years that followed only predominantly manufactured infantry. Attempts were also made by the British to shift the centre of administration to regions only recently under their control. Punjab was a province at the time that perfectly fitted this description. Its strategic location in North India, close to the administrative bases of the British made it an ideal area from which large recruitment took place over the years and decades that followed.
Another glaringly evident change in the British administration and colonisation of India was the “Amalgamation of Presidential Armies” Within a few months after the uprising, the decision was made by the British, ensuring that India was no longer ruled and administered by the East India Company, but directly under the control of the British Crown, in an attempt to remove the commercial image that it mirrored. The East India Company, initially consisting of the 3 presidential armies: “The Bengal, Madras and Bombay army” (named after their three regiments), soon ceased to exist as different entities as they were taken over by the Crown, only to be combined a few years thereafter (1895) into what would be known as the Indian Army.
Another lesser-known effect that many historians believe owed its origins to the Sepoy Mutiny was the rise of a British Ideology known as the “Martial Race ideology”. This ideology was believed to be one that was used to recruit Indians into the army, under the assumption that certain Indian communities were more capable and equipped to fight in the army than others. This mass recruitment was conducted under stringent and under extensive ethnographic and anthropological terms by the British. These races were primarily recruited from North India, with a massive number of soldiers from Punjab, such as the Sikhs and Punjab Muslims, the Pashtoons (Pathans) from the North-West Frontier Province, areas from regions located a little down south of India such as the Jhaat Hindu peasantry, Rajputs from Western and Eastern Uttar Pradesh and the Marathas from Maharashtra. In the aftermath of the Mutiny, it was blatant that the British were increasingly recruiting soldiers for the army from minority communities; the same was done with a number of other administrative positions at the time. It was after the mutiny for the first time, that increasingly evident notions of ‘divide and rule’ began to get promulgated by the British, who were attempting to classify and categorise Indian society.
When the British first arrived in India vis-a-vis the East Indian Company, they largely administered over the Indians and imposed various reformist tendencies. Attempts were initially made to set aside what they believed to be barbaric unjust practices such as sati, etc. However, by the end of 1857, the British had arrived at an important realisation. One that caused them to realise that India was an agglomeration of various castes and communities that had glaring differences to Western and European nations at the time. It was their belief that these impulses largely triggered the anti-British sentiment and fuelled the cause of the mutiny. This epiphany caused the British to instead take a step back and simply overlook the administration of Indians, which they decided would be conducted by the native elites, who owed their allegiance to the British Raj for empowering them.
Over the years that followed, it was this empowerment of upper castes that caused Indian society as a whole to reorganise themselves and pledge their support to anti-elite practices, leaders etc. particularly in South India. This very change in the social composition paved the way for the Anti-British independence movements that followed in the next few decades.
Citations:
India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia- A book by Srinath Raghavan
