The 1857 Indian Revolt

• An aggressive expansionism of British authority in India including through military conquest and through the Govenor General's, Thomas Babington Macaulay's, 'doctrine of lapse'. This was a political and diplomatic means of acquiring territories in the context of disputes over succession. He established a claim of authority for the British government of India where, if they didn’t like the character of someone about to inherit authority for a particular region, he would intervene and take that authority for the British. Large amounts of Sindh and Punjab were acquired through this.
• Conquest was followed by the right to collect tax from the citizens.
• They believed the education and governing of India should continue in the Indian way, but Thomas Babington Macaulay believed it should be done in the British way as it was a British colony. So, this is what happened.
• The Enfield rifle required beef and pork fat to lubricate it. This was corrected relatively quickly, but the damage had already been done.
• There was an increasing cultural gulf, and the sepoys in the Bengal army were all Brahmins, upper class Hindus, from the Hindi speaking plains of the United Provinces. By the 1840s, they realised the British couldn't fully integrate themselves, and the sepoys underwent forced conversions. The sepoys could thus speak to each other and express their discontent at the amount of overseas service required of them, the fact that the Indian ports were being used as the centre for wars, they had a cut in pay and hugely increased taxes.

The rebellion began in Meerut but spread, and it took 9 months before it was even begun to be repressed. It broke out in May and it accumulated rebels and acts of violence very quickly. 100s of 1000s of people rejected British authority, and they marched directly towards Delhi (very significant). The rebels attacked: government buildings, telegraph offices, post offices, record rooms, courts, jails, European property, the indigo factory in Aligarh, money-lenders, and local businessmen (all assoiciated with imperial authority).

Delhi was captured pretty quickly in May as it was undefended. The Europeans there either fled or were killed. People wanted to restore the mogul order (Indian empire), so the rebels declared the 82 y/o, Bahadur Shah Zafar, as their new leader, even though he was just a reactive claim to authority and didn’t actually do anything. They formed a new government which sparked more uprisings in most military stations in the North Western Provinces and Awadh (Oudh). This made them lose Delhi, but they recaptured it on 20th Sep 1857, losing almost 4000 soldiers. New rebels had to declare their loyalty to the mogul order. This was one of the key aims of the rebellion. But, the indigenous elites were only responding to the rebellion rather than leading it.

Kanpur was a small military town where a few small rebellions had occured. In one of these, a British soldier shot an Indian soldier and he was acquitted, leading to huge resentment. On the 4th June, rebellion broke out. 900 people hid from the rebels in a poorly defended entrenchment. Hugh Wheeler, the commander at Kanpur, knew a rebellion had broken out in Meerut, but only made very selective preparations for the defence of Kanpur.

The siege on the entrenchment lasted for 23 days. Nana Saheb, the leader of the rebels, offered Wheeler a deal: safe passage down to the river to use the boats and leave. This was really an opportunity to stage a huge public massacre of those in the entrenchment. 12,000 people came to watch. 450 left the entrenchment, about 20 people escaped and 300 survived. 10 out of the 110 men of the survivors were shot.

The women were taken to Bibighar, a small room where they were confined. By mid-July, Nana Saheb heard word that the counter-insurgency was on its way and was succeeding. The women were now a problem so he ordered their execution. But there was much opposition, so he had to get professional executioners. The women were shot and their bodies thrown into a well.

James Neill, the Brigadier-General who arrived at Kanpur, was furious about the massacre, and there are even reports of one person having to lick the blood off the floor.

The rebellion came to an end at the end of 1857 to the beginning of 1858 once Delhi had been recaptured. Once the rebellion had been put down, the British army launched an extraordinary counter-insurgency in terms of the volume and indiscrimate violence meted out (and not just on the rebels). Neill personally devastated the area around Allahabad in June 1857. Villages were burned, peasants were killed, the inhabitants of Delhi were slaughtered, there were mass indiscriminate hangings, mass executions, and Muslims were expelled from Delhi because the rebels had become personified as Muslims. The punishments were deliberate ways to violate the bodies, like the canon thing, and religious sensibilities (e.g. making them come into contact with substances they viewed as being abhorrant or repellant).

But it provided a key moment in the reformulation of British Authority in South Asia. The East India Company was finally disbanded, and governments established under its authority were taken under the authority of parliament and the Crown. There was an attempt to reorientate the practices of governance respecting religious sensibilities. These changes lasted until 1947.

The army also underwent reformation. Indians were prohibited from being officers, and there had to be a racial ratio of British officer to Indian soldier so now some sepoys were white (although this was rescinded in WWII because they needed as many officers and soldiers as possible).

Saïd was particularly involved in Palestinian liberation. His book, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, said that Europe created a body of knowledge about the identity of the coloniser and the colonised. He called this body of knowledge 'Orientalism'. It divided the world into West and East geographically and was a way for the Europeans to create a sense of themselves as being opposite to others. For example, where Europe is strong, the Orient is weak; where Europe is honest, the Orient is corrupt etc. 

The orient was a place that Europeans could imagine themselves that they couldn't in Europe. This led to exciting fantasies and stories being created. Europeans became accultured to believe themselves of being a higher being than the Oriental. The East was seen as being of a lower moral standard, and their culture was eroticised in the West.

People were very triggered when it came to violence, especially sexual violence, against white women, and even though there is no evidence to suggest that there was any sexual violence conducted by the rebels, the West made it seem like they had. This reduced the complexity of the causes of the rebellion though and distilled it in the British imagination. They saw it as an unspeakable unsettling of racial hierarchy, and the presumption that the rebels were violating white women.

There was a large corpus of artwork that seemed to dramatise the events of 1857, and specific attention was always given to the events at Bibighar.