Chronology Of Events That Took Place During The Sepoy Rebellion In India

The Sepoy Rebellion was a fierce revolt against British rule in India in 1857 and 1858. The extensive and failed rebellion has been called by other names, such as the Indian Mutiny, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the Indian Revolt of 1857. In Britain and throughout Europe and the West, the Sepoy Rebellion is often depicted as a succession of irrational and vicious rebellions incited by untruths about religious thoughtlessness.

In India, the rebellion is seen differently. The actions preceding the events of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 have been baptized as the first occurrence of a liberation drive against British control. It has been said that history is written by the victor. Let us examine the events leading up to the Sepoy Rebellion to attempt to get a better understanding of which side’s take on this tumultuous conflict is correct.

The origins of the Sepoy Rebellion can not be traced to one single event. Several causes, including social, economic, religious, and political combined to create the climate necessary for the revolt to take place.

Warnings of an uprising began when the British announced plans to begin issuing their new Enfield P-53 rifle to the Sepoys. Due to tighter tolerances than older muskets, the minie balls used as ammunition in the rifle required lubrication for them to be loaded into the barrel of the new rifle. Rumors swirled that the new cartridges contained grease which was created from cow and pig fat. Loading the Enfield mandated the user to rip open the oiled cartridge with his teeth. This affronted both Hindu and Muslim spiritual observances, as cows were considered divine by Hindus and pigs were thought to be impure by Muslims.

At least two years earlier company officials had cautioned of the potential issues that the new cartridges could cause if they were issued to native soldiers. Those concerns were ignored and in August 1856 production of the new greased cartridges began at Fort William in Calcutta, India. The grease being produced was manufactured using tallow—a beef or mutton derived fat—by the Indian manufacturing company Gangadarh Banerji & Co. Realizing the British had ignored the concerns of company officers rumors spread that the British were attempting to ruin the religious beliefs of the Indian soldiers by forcing them to desecrate their bodies by consuming ingredients thought of to be either hallowed or unclean.

An attempt to quell the ever-growing concerns was made in January of 1857 when British Colonel, Richard Birch issued a decree declaring that all cartridges issued to Indian soldiers were to be free of grease. Colonel Birch ordered the Sepoys to grease the cartridges with the best methods of their preference. Additionally, an order came down altering the method to load the cartridge. Drills were changed to train the Sepoys to open the cartridges with their hands instead of their teeth. These changes did little to halt the spread of rumors that the British were trying to destroy their religions. New rumors started with the issuing of new cartridges that had stiffer paper. The Sepoys believed the paper was saturated with grease. Claims were made that when the new paper was burned it smelled of animal fat. At a court inquiry in February of 1857, a representative for the Sepoys declared that the suspicion of the paper being soaked in grease could not be removed from their minds.

The citizen uprising was more diverse. These rebels were comprised of three groups: the medieval nobility, country landowners referred to as taluqdars, and the laborers and farmhands. The nobility, several of which had lost designations and provinces under the Doctrine of Lapse, which rejected the thought of adopted kids of royalty as lawful successors, felt that the Company and interfered with an old-style organization of inheritance. The significance of this cannot be ignored as some dissenting leaders were ready to agree to East India Company’s reign if only their adopted children were accepted as their heirs.

The next group—the taluqdars—had been stripped of half their land to peasant farmers as a result of the property restructurings that came in the wake of the takeover of Oudh. As the insurgency expanded, the taluqdars swiftly returned to the lands they had lost, and puzzlingly, did not face substantial hostility from the farmers, several of whom merged to join the mutiny, to the shock of the British. Also of note is that substantial land-revenue valuation in some zones by the British caused many landowning families to either lose their lands or go into debt to creditors, and essentially gave them a cause for rebellion. Like the East India Company, these creditors were specific objects of the mutineers' hostility.

On March 29, 1857, on the training field at Barrackpore, a Sepoy named Mangal Pandey fired set off the historic events of the rebellion when he fired the first shot of the revolt. Pandey’s unit in the Bengal Army refused to use the new cartridges issued for the British Enfield P-53 rifle. In turn, the British officers in charge of Pandey’s unit were readying to punish the unit for their disobedience. Pandey revolted by shooting a British Sergeant-Major James Hewson as well as his unit’s Lieutenant, Henry Baugh. During the dispute, Pandey was encircled by British forces and shot himself in the chest. Pandey survived his attempted suicide and was subsequently put on trial. British officials court-martialed and hanged him on April 8, 1857.

As the rebellion advanced, the British began calling the rebels “Pandies,” essentially making Mangal Pandey a martyr for the cause of the rebels. The quarter guard, Jemadar Ishwari Prasad, was court-martialed and sentenced to death for refusing to stop Pandey’s rebellion. Prasad was hanged on April 22, 1857. After the two executions, the entire regiment was disbanded and stripped of its uniforms because their seniors believed they would continue to begrudge the leaders of their regiment. Once the news spread, Sepoys in other regiments around the country viewed this treatment of excessive and harsh. The disgraceful show put on by the British officers helped stoke the fire of rebellion amongst the Sepoys around the nation.

On April 24, 1857, Lieutenant Colonel George Carmichael-Smyth, an uncaring commander of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry, issued orders for 90 of his men to muster and perform firing maneuvers. All but five of the men on participating in the maneuvers rebuffed the orders to receive their cartridges. On May 9, 1857, most of the 85 men who refused were court-martialed with the majority being given 10-year sentences to prison camps to perform hard labor. Eleven of the 85 men were given lighter sentences of five years incarceration. The entire troop was then marched out and surveyed as the convicted men had their uniforms stripped and were placed in chains. As the men were paraded off to serve their prison terms, the sentenced soldiers harangued their brothers in arms for not supporting them.

The following day some of the Indian soldiers were determined to rescue their comrades from their newfound prison camps. The soldiers warned off-duty officers of their plans, yet the officers took no action to prevent them. The Sunday following the disbanding of the group of 85, the entire regiment at Meerut broke into open revolt. The soldiers of the 3rd Cavalry attacked British officers and civilians, killing or wounding dozens. During the conflict, some Sepoys aided in the removal of local trusted British officers and their families before returning to the revolt.

In the early hours of May 11, 1857, an initial party of the 3rd Cavalry arrived in Delhi. Sepoys of the 3rd Cavalry called out for the King, located in Delhi, to lead the rebellion. King Bahadur Shah did not acknowledge the soldiers, allegedly believing them to be the usual citizen petitioners. Others in the palace rapidly aided the members of the 3rd Cavalry by joining the revolt. As the day progressed the uprising spread. Crowds of rioters and Sepoys killed European soldiers and civilians, as well as Christian business owners. Stationed near the city were three battalion-sized regiments of Bengal Native Infantry. Some of the soldiers were quick to join the insurgency, while most refrained to join their comrades but also rebuffed orders to act against them.

On the afternoon of the 11th of May 1857, a fierce explosion in Delhi was heard for numerous miles. Concerned that the arsenal—containing large amounts of weapons, ammunition, and gunpowder—were falling into rebel possession, British officers at the arsenal had opened fire on the Sepoys. Once the fight seemed fruitless, the officers scuttled the arsenal. When information of these happenings reached the Sepoys posted around Delhi they launched into open rebellion. The Sepoys salvaged some armaments from the battery and a satellite arsenal located a few miles outside of Delhi. Once news of the day’s events had reached the King, he was alarmed but agreed to accept the offer of loyalty from the Sepoys.

The broadcast of the proceedings at Delhi traveled quickly, stoking rebellions amongst Sepoys and conflicts in numerous regions. In several cases, it was the behavior of British military and noncombatant leadership themselves which hastened the turmoil. Knowledge of the fall of Delhi reached many Company leaders by telegraph, causing them to speedily extract themselves and their families to places determined to be safer. Aiding in the confusion and helping to fuel the fires was the way some of the military leadership reacted in such an incoherent way. Some in the British military believed they could trust the Sepoys in their command to remain loyal while others tried unsuccessfully to neutralize them by stripping them of their weapons. Officers at Benares and Allahabad, created more havoc when they failed to efficiently remove weapons without causing chaos, leading to even more open revolts.

A majority of Muslims did not dislike the British administrators as much as their Hindu compatriots. In addition, Muslim leaders could not decide on whether to announce a jihad. Some Islamic scholars did decide to take up weapons against the British administration but a great quantity of Muslims—including the leaders of Shia and Sunni sects—remained loyal to the British. The most powerful member of Ahl-i-Hadith leadership in Delhi fought pressure from the rebels to announce a jihad, deciding instead to profess his allegiance to British rule. The reasoning behind this was because he viewed the connection with the British as a lawful agreement that could not be broken unless the sacred rights of Muslims were attacked. Both the Sikhs and the Pathans embraced the British and aided in their reoccupation of Delhi. After years of persecution by the Mughal Dynasty, Sikhs were afraid of the possible restoration of Mughal control in northern India.

British citizens did not understand the grievances of the Sepoys or other Indian natives. The news was often skewed in one direction or the other, depending on what the Queen wanted her subjects to know. In the case of the Sepoy Rebellion, the news that reached the British citizens back home was that the Indian natives were revolting for no reason and killing innocent civilians in the process. The British press, fuming by the rumors of suspected rape committed by the insurgents against British women, and the murders of British citizens and soldiers, did not make any efforts to explain the issues leading up to the rebellion to their local readers. The scale of the penalties given by the British soldiers was considered mostly suitable and defensible in a Britain stunned by inflated stories of slaughters against British and European noncombatants by the mutineers. Occurrences of rape supposedly committed by Indian insurgents against British women and girls horrified the European community. These supposed mayhems were frequently used to rationalize the British response to the mutiny. British journalists published innumerable stories supposedly from witnesses of the rapes committed by Sepoys and civilian rebels.

One of the more famous of these accounts was printed, concerning an episode in which 48 English teenagers as children as young as ten years old had been attacked and raped by rebels. The story was criticized by independent journalists and scholars as dishonest propaganda, and news surfaced that the account had been written by a cleric in Bangalore, far away from the actions of the revolt, with no evidence to back up his claim. Distinct events garnered the populace's attention and were heavily conveyed by the media. Following the conflict, the British conducted numerous investigations to find out if there was any truth to the claims that mass atrocities had been committed against European women and children by the Indian rebels. The consensus was that there was no substantial information to support the claims of such wrongdoings having been committed.

The differences that the Sepoy Rebellion has garnered when comparing the viewpoints of the British and Indian citizens are clear. How each group of people reached the conclusions they have about the conflict are fuzzier. Even after taking an in-depth look at the events preceding the full-scale revolt it is still difficult to decide which side of the conflict is right. On the one hand, the Sepoys and Indian natives were being occupied, colonized, and controlled by the British regime. Their freedoms and lands were being stripped away and they were being degraded as religious insensitivities were threatening to take away one of the last major rights they still possessed—the right to worship their God. The Indians had a right to their freedoms no different than anyone else on the earth does. As such it is easy to understand why many see the Sepoy Rebellion as a fight for independence instead of a cruel uprising.

On the other hand, the view by the British was that the Indians were massacring women and children and going on rampages for no reason at all. They were making these judgments based on little accurate information. With that in mind, it is easy to appreciate their viewpoint that the rebellion was irrational and unjust. However, given the amount of information we have available to us in the 21st century I believe the Indians were righteous in their mutiny. No man, woman, or child deserves to be subjects of another and as such, it was the right of the Indians to fight for their independence. The Indians were fighting for their right to be free from the rule of foreign occupiers. The British were fighting for their perceived right to be overlords over an entire population.