![]() Famously, one contemporary account – included in scholar Christopher Herbert’s book, A War of No Pity ( x) – stated simply, Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, Britons at home (as well as abroad) returned to the Indian Uprising as an example of military incompetence (second only to the Crimean War earlier that decade) and appalling barbarism by what many saw as foreign natives in need of stern colonial rule. Scenes from Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, and many more highlight the critical mishandling of political rule by British administrators, and increasingly urge for sympathy and compassion for the Indian people as a result of their conditions before and during the Rebellion. ![]() By late 1858, the rebellion had been effectively ended (as had the East India Company), and the new era of Raj rule in Indian began. From June to September, the equally brutal Siege of Delhi was taking place, a confrontation between the large massed troops of Indian and British, resulting in thousands of casualties and fatalities on both sides. The Siege of Lucknow, the capital city of the Awadh region/kingdom, lasted from May until September 1857, while British held the city against constant siege attempts, through starvation and the deaths of roughly two-thirds of the residents, including leader Sir Henry Lawrence. The two famous sieges became – and to some extent, remain –rallying cries in the British and Indian imaginations. In retaliation for this and other atrocities, British leaders such as General James George Neill and others shot, hanged, and even strapped Indians he saw as threats to canons and killed them by scattering their remains over an assembled audience, often without any other evidence or explanation than ‘suspicion’. Famous incidents included the massacre at Kanpur/Cawnpore, where the British residents sought refuge first under the commander of General Wheeler and, after the men were separated and killed and the rest taken captive, at local leader Nana Sahib’s compound there, the 120 women and children were all later dismembered and killed. Once the sepoys began to revolt, the summer of 1857 became one of the most appalling military and civilian conflicts of the 19th century. The grievances of the Indian people were long, and ongoing: land was stolen or reappropriated, taxes had been raised, soldiers’ pay had been cut, former bands of loyal soldiers from non-British companies were disbanded and left without positions or income, and the Emperor Bahadur Shah II (who was a figure for some, but not all, of those who rose up) had been forcibly informed by the East India Company in Dehli that a new era of British rule would effectively end the Mughal Empire after his reign. It is therefore the bounden duty of all the wealthy people of India to stake their lives and property for the well-being of the public. ![]() ![]() ‘It is well known to all, that in this age the people of Hindustan, both Hindoos and Mahommedans, are being ruined under the tyranny and oppression of the treacherous and infidel and treacherous English. This proved the final straw for many non-European soldiers, who stated in a now-famous Azamgarh Proclamation(Sept. The immediate catalyst for the first uprising was the rumor that all cartridges (whose ends required being bitten off in order to pour in powder before loading in guns) would be sealed with pig- or cow-fat, an affront to the Muslim and Hindu sepoys who were religiously banned from consuming those products. The very name – first labeled the ’ Indian Mutiny’ by horrified Britons across the empire, upon hearing of the first atrocities later reclaimed as the ’ First Indian War of Independence’ by nationalists who saw the failed rebellion as the first major step towards a post-colonial India – continues to be debated by scholars and politicians alike.īetween May 1857 and the late summer of 1858, Hindu and Muslim sepoys (soldiers) from within the British colonial military launched a series of chaotic, bloody attacks against their former leaders, resulting in numerous lengthy sieges at major North West Indian cities – most famously, Lucknow and Delhi – in an effort to throw off colonial rule which had been growing increasingly oppressive in the preceding decades. Of all the major Victorian historical events, the Indian Uprising of 1857 is still perhaps the most hotly-contested as a political as well as social catastrophe. The INDIAN UPRISING (aka the Sepoy Rebellion, First War of Indian Independence, and/or the Indian Mutiny) (1857) ![]()
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