How the 1857 Indian Mutiny threatened Great Britians control over India Since the beginning of the 16th century Britain used to have the colonies in India, a land that had given to the world Vedas, Upanishadas, Sanscrit, Yoga, the reacheast mythology and philosophy of the ancient civilizations Mohenjodaro and Harappa (now in Pakistan).
The British perceived India principally as a place to make money, and its culture, beliefs and religions were left strictly alone. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the British Empire was the largest and richest empire in the world and naturally had come to believe they were a chosen race; chosen to distribute the benefits of western civilization to the backward areas of the globe. That the inhabitants of such areas often didnt want these benefits and certainly not the accompanying British control of their lives was immaterial to Britains sense of a mission. Native opposition frequently required military force to be brought against it and few years passed without the British Army being involved, somewhere in the empire, in a continual series of border skirmishes and punitive expeditions. One of the most well-known uprisings during the British colonization of India was a mutiny of the native troops known as sepoys. The Indian Mutiny in northern India in 1857 (or as it is sometimes calls The First War for Independence), led to the demise of the East India Company, and administration of the country was belatedly handed over to the British government. The next 50 years were the golden years of the empire on which ‘the sun never set’.
The Term Paper on British Empire and India
... of the kingdom weakened the empire and by the 1800’s the empire had fallen. British India East India Trading Company By the early ... East India Trading Company lost control over India and the British government took control. British Raj After the Sepoy Mutiny the British rule ... and Leisure Activities The four major holidays in India are New Years Day, Republic Day, Independence Day, and Gandhi’s ...
Of course the British had been involved in European wars much more expensive in blood and treasure than any that ever occurred in the overseas possessions, but they didnt seem to catch the imagination of the British public in the same way that colonial conflicts did. In 1857, the Indian Mutiny broke out and it rapidly became the greatest of all the imperial wars. It was followed avidly by the British public and as the myths of the Mutiny grew it came to be seen almost as a latter-day British Iliad with gentleman-warriors of homeric proportions manfully defending the position, dignity and God-given duty of their race. For more than 150 years the Honourable East India Company (John Company) had raised its own armed forces. The three administrative areas of India, the Presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal each maintained their own army with its own commander-in-chief. The CinC Bengal was regarded as the senior officer of the three.
These armies were paid for entirely out of the Company’s Indian revenues and together were larger than the British Army itself. All the officers were British and trained at the Company’s military academy in England. There were a few regiments of European infantry but the vast majority of the Company’s soldiers were native troops. These sepoys, as they were called, were mostly high caste Hindus and a great many of them, especially in the Bengal army, came from Oudh in what is now Uttar Pradesh state in northern India. They were organised in numbered regiments and drilled British style. The sepoy regiments were officered by Europeans, with a stiffening of European NCO’s, and were treated with great affection and trust by their regimental commanders.
In 1857 the total number of soldiers in India was 34,000 Europeans of all ranks and 257,000 sepoys. Somewhere along the way the Britsh seemed to lose touch with their Indian subjects. Some blamed the advent of steamships that so reduced the journey times from Britain to India that it was now possible for officers to go home on leave and for wives and children to come out and live with their menfolk. Before officers had spent all their time with their sepoys or with Indian mistresses; now a re-creation of English domestic bliss awaited them when their hours of duty were over. The closeness of the British and the Indians so apparent in the early days of the British presence started to fade and by 1857 it was a gulf. The arrival of missionaries had also caused great unease among the Indians. Evangelical Christians had little understanding of, or respect for, India’s ancient faiths and the attitude of scrupulous non-interference in religious affairs that had characterised British rule in the 18th century was forgotten by a native populace that came to believe the British wished to convert them.
The Research paper on British East India Company
The British East India Company was the main source of trade between the east and Britain for more that 200 years. I chose to do my research paper on the British east India Company. The British east India Company was the most important of the various East India companies; this company was a major force in the history of India for more than 200 years. Queen Elizabeth I granted the original charter ...
On the political stage, the annexation of the state of Oudh by Lord Dalhousie and the doctrine of lapse, which decreed that the lands of any Indian ruler dying without a male heir would be forfeit to the Company, struck directly at the heart of India’s traditional ways of life and were widely condemned and hated throughout the sub-continent. As a famous historian Vincent Arthur Smith said about the start of the Mutiny unrest was in the air. It began at Barrackpore at the end of March 1857. Mangel Pande, a young sepoy of the 34th Native Infantry, shot at his sergeant-major on the parade ground. When the British adjutant rode over, Pande shot the horse out from under him and as the officer tried to extricate himself Pande severely wounded him with a sword. Drawn by the commotion the commanding officer of the station, General Hearshey, galloped to the scene accompanied by his two sons.
The sepoy panicked and instead of shooting at the general, turned his rifle on himself and pulled the trigger. He survived this suicide attempt and was later court-martialled and hanged. As a collective punishment the 34th Native Infantry was disbanded; its shameful fate being publicly proclaimed at every military station in British India. Pande achieved a certain kind of immortality in that his name entered British military slang as the general nickname for a mutineer and eventually a derogatory term for any Indian. Unfortunately for the British, the 34th Native Infantry were considered by the majority of sepoys to have been unjustly treated and soon came to be regarded as quasi-martyrs. Sunday, the 10th of May, dawned in peace and happiness.
The Term Paper on The British East India Company
The British East India Company was an English and later (from 1707) British joint-stock company formed for pursuing trade with the East Indies but which ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent. The East India Company traded mainly in cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpetre, tea and opium. Shares of the company were owned by wealthy merchants and aristocrats. The government owned no ...
The early morning service, at the Cantoment Church, saw many assembled together, some never to meet on earth again. The day passed in quiet happiness; no thought of danger disturbed the serenity of that happy home. The next act in the tragedy followed only a few weeks later when 85 troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry in Meerut refused orders to handle the new cartridges. They were arrested, court-martialled and sentenced to 10 years hard labour each. At an appalling ceremony in front of the whole Meerut garrison, they were publicly humiliated: their uniforms were stripped from them, they were shackled with leg and arm irons and led off to imprisonment. The following day was a Sunday and as Britons prepared for church parade, Meerut exploded. Enraged sepoys broke open the town gaol and released their comrades.
Then accompanied by a mob from the bazaar poured into the cantonment where the Europeans lived and murdered any Europeans or Indian Christians they could find. Whole families, men, women, children and servants, were slaughtered. Some sepoys tried to protect their officers but they were in the minority. The cantonment was put to the torch and after a few hours of mayhem the sepoys, fearing retaliation as the British recovered and organized the European forces, fled down the main road to Delhi and the Palace of Bahadur Shah, the last of the Moghuls. All night as the muniteers rode down to Delhi they had anxiously listened for the sound of pursuit, but none came. Perhaps the British were so shocked by what had happened that they were unable to instantly react.
Perhaps they feared for the safety of the remaining women and children in Meerut. Whatever the reason, the only chance of containing the mutiny had been lost. Already the mutineers had British blood on their hands and knew they would receive no mercy if captured. Their only hope now was to create a general rising that would drive the British out of India completely and they turned to Bahadur Shah to lead them. On the morning of 11th May the bridge of boats that carried the Meerut road across the Jamuna River into Delhi rattled with the sound of the mutineers’ horses’ hooves. Gathering below the walls of the Red Fort, the mutineers called for Bahadur Shah. From the walls high above Captain Douglas ordered them to disperse. It was an order not likely to be obeyed and an hour or so later the sepoys again accompanied by a mob from the bazaar burst into the palace, murdered Douglas and four other Britons (two of them women) and begged Bahadur Shah to reclaim his patrimony.
The Review on Aligarh Movement Background: Arrival of British
As a background we have to understand that after 1857 Muslims were passing through a very difficult period, a period of degeneration and decay but the roots of this decay can be traced back to the earlier period. In fact, the decay of the Muslims started with the degeneration of the Mughal Empire and in that context Europeans started coming to India. The British being last of them and ultimately ...
Bahadur Shah was appalled by the wild mob carousing in his palace and had sent messengers to the British garrison at Agra asking for help. None came and the old man finally gave in, accepted the allegiance of the mutineers and became the titular leader of the Indian Mutiny. Most of the Europeans in Delhi were murdered along with Indian Christians. Some managed to escape the city only to be killed by villagers or brigands on the roads to Meerut or Agra. The loss of Delhi was a crushing blow to British prestige and the symbolic associations of the capital of the Moghuls being the centre of the mutiny were something the Britsh could not ignore. Only Delhi had the aura of authority that could provide any serious focus of resistance to British rule. From Meerut and Simla two British columns set out for the capital. Hampered by lack of transport, it was weeks before they joined forces at Ambala.
Punishing disloyal villages as they advanced, one could have charted their course by the scores of corpses they ….
