William Dalrypmple: Mutiny! The uprising that shook the world
[William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, which won the 2007 Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography, has just been published in paperback by Bloomsbury (£8.99)]
On the evening of Sunday 10 May 1857, 150 years ago next week, 300 mutinous sepoys from Meerut rose up against their officers. They shot as many as they could, then rode through the night to the old Mughal capital of Delhi, where there they massacred every Christian man, woman and child, and declared the 82-year-old Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to be their leader.
What is striking about so many of the proclamations coming out of the uprising's storm centre, Delhi, was the emphatically religious articulation that the rebels adopted. As the sepoys told Zafar on arrival: "We have joined hands to protect our religion and our faith." Later they stood in the Chandni Chowk, the main street of Delhi, and asked people: "Brothers: are you with those of the faith?" British men and women who had converted to Islam - and there were a surprising number of those in Delhi - were not hurt; but Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down immediately.
From the start, the odds were always against the rebels: they had a chaotic and officerless army of unpaid peasant soldiers set against the forces of the world's greatest military power. Yet the rebellion soon spread dramatically: of the 139,000 sepoys of the East India Company's Bengal Army - the largest modern army in Asia - all but 7,796 turned against their British masters.
In some parts of northern India, such as Avadh, the sepoys were joined by a very large proportion of the population. By early June the uprising had snowballed and turned into the largest anti-colonial revolt any European empire would face anywhere in the world in the entire course of the 19th century.
It quickly became a peculiarly bloody conflict. Atrocities abounded on both sides, no prisoners were taken, and the great Mughal capital, caught in the middle of a remarkable cultural flowering, was turned overnight into a battleground. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat....
At the centre of my book about the uprising, The Last Mughal, lies the very contemporary question of how and why the relatively easy inter-racial and inter-religious relationships of the time of Ochterlony gave way to the hatreds and racism of the high 19th-century Raj: how a close clasp of two civilisations turned into a bitter clash.
Two things in particular seem to have put paid to this easy co-existence. One was the rise of British power: in a few years the British had defeated all their Indian rivals, as they progressed from removing threatening Muslim rulers, such as Tipu Sultan of Mysore, to destabilising and annexing the land of even the most pliant. In February 1856 they annexed the prosperous kingdom of Avadh on the lame excuse that the Nawab was "excessively debauched". In this way, by early 1857, the East India Company was directly ruling about two thirds of the subcontinent.
Rather as happened with the Americans after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the changed balance of power quickly led to an attitude of undisguised imperial arrogance.
The other factor was the ascendancy of Evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in social, sexual and racial attitudes that this brought about. Many Evangelical British officials were nursing plans to impose not just British laws and technology on India, but also British values: not just to rule and administer India, but also to redeem and improve it. This meant banning the burning of widows, allowing widows to remarry, and outlawing infanticide....
Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as a religious war. Suicide jihadis fight what they see as a defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent civilians are slaughtered.
As before, Western Evangelical politicians are apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of "incarnate fiends" and simplistically conflate armed resistance to invasion and occupation with "pure evil." Again, Western countries, blind to the effect their foreign policies have on the wider world, feel aggrieved and surprised to be attacked - as they see it - by mindless fanatics.
Yet as we have seen in our own time, nothing so easily radicalises a people against us, or undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive Western intrusion in the East: the histories of Islamic fundamentalism and Western imperialism have often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined.
There are clear lessons here. For, in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke - himself a fierce critic of British aggression in India - those who fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it.
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
On the evening of Sunday 10 May 1857, 150 years ago next week, 300 mutinous sepoys from Meerut rose up against their officers. They shot as many as they could, then rode through the night to the old Mughal capital of Delhi, where there they massacred every Christian man, woman and child, and declared the 82-year-old Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to be their leader.
What is striking about so many of the proclamations coming out of the uprising's storm centre, Delhi, was the emphatically religious articulation that the rebels adopted. As the sepoys told Zafar on arrival: "We have joined hands to protect our religion and our faith." Later they stood in the Chandni Chowk, the main street of Delhi, and asked people: "Brothers: are you with those of the faith?" British men and women who had converted to Islam - and there were a surprising number of those in Delhi - were not hurt; but Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down immediately.
From the start, the odds were always against the rebels: they had a chaotic and officerless army of unpaid peasant soldiers set against the forces of the world's greatest military power. Yet the rebellion soon spread dramatically: of the 139,000 sepoys of the East India Company's Bengal Army - the largest modern army in Asia - all but 7,796 turned against their British masters.
In some parts of northern India, such as Avadh, the sepoys were joined by a very large proportion of the population. By early June the uprising had snowballed and turned into the largest anti-colonial revolt any European empire would face anywhere in the world in the entire course of the 19th century.
It quickly became a peculiarly bloody conflict. Atrocities abounded on both sides, no prisoners were taken, and the great Mughal capital, caught in the middle of a remarkable cultural flowering, was turned overnight into a battleground. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat....
At the centre of my book about the uprising, The Last Mughal, lies the very contemporary question of how and why the relatively easy inter-racial and inter-religious relationships of the time of Ochterlony gave way to the hatreds and racism of the high 19th-century Raj: how a close clasp of two civilisations turned into a bitter clash.
Two things in particular seem to have put paid to this easy co-existence. One was the rise of British power: in a few years the British had defeated all their Indian rivals, as they progressed from removing threatening Muslim rulers, such as Tipu Sultan of Mysore, to destabilising and annexing the land of even the most pliant. In February 1856 they annexed the prosperous kingdom of Avadh on the lame excuse that the Nawab was "excessively debauched". In this way, by early 1857, the East India Company was directly ruling about two thirds of the subcontinent.
Rather as happened with the Americans after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the changed balance of power quickly led to an attitude of undisguised imperial arrogance.
The other factor was the ascendancy of Evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in social, sexual and racial attitudes that this brought about. Many Evangelical British officials were nursing plans to impose not just British laws and technology on India, but also British values: not just to rule and administer India, but also to redeem and improve it. This meant banning the burning of widows, allowing widows to remarry, and outlawing infanticide....
Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as a religious war. Suicide jihadis fight what they see as a defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent civilians are slaughtered.
As before, Western Evangelical politicians are apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of "incarnate fiends" and simplistically conflate armed resistance to invasion and occupation with "pure evil." Again, Western countries, blind to the effect their foreign policies have on the wider world, feel aggrieved and surprised to be attacked - as they see it - by mindless fanatics.
Yet as we have seen in our own time, nothing so easily radicalises a people against us, or undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive Western intrusion in the East: the histories of Islamic fundamentalism and Western imperialism have often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined.
There are clear lessons here. For, in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke - himself a fierce critic of British aggression in India - those who fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it.