The British Governor-General of India from 1848 to 1856 was Lord Dalhousie who passed the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856 which allowed widows to remarry, like Christian women. As the mutiny spread, the British began called mutineers "pandies." Although the armies of many Rajas or states which rebelled contained large numbers of guns, the British superiority in artillery was to be decisive in the siege of Delhi after the arrival of a siege train of thirty-two howitzers and mortars. In the altercation, Pandey was surrounded by British troops and shot himself in the chest. In sum, this combination of factors produced, besides the normal tensions endemic in India, an uneasy, fearful, suspicious, and resentful frame of mind and a wind of unrest ready to fan the flame of any actual physical outbreak. Prior to the outbreak of the Revolt, Bahadur Shah Zafar lived in Delhi as a Pensioner of the British. This allowed different meanings an interpretations to be attributed to them, and the chapattis became an index of peoples thoughts and worries. When the mood of the sepoys turned against their masters, they remembered Kabul and that the British were not invincible. Some currents simply ran cold, while others moved in parallel, or paused before continuing. Before loading these rifles the sepoys had to bite off the paper on the cartridges. Published online by Cambridge University Press: In 1885, however, the founding of the Indian National Congress marked the beginnings of effective, organized protest for national self-determination. The revolt of 1857, which the British call the Indian Mutiny but many Indians prefer to think of as the First War of Independence, was the defining event in British imperial history. 1857 revolt started firstly on 29th March 1857 from Bairakpur (West Bengal) by Mangal Pandey. It is however also possible to enclose within the paper container the bullet as well as the powder and the cartridge then becomes a balled cartridge. The officers continued to be British, but they were more closely linked with their men. It is no surprise, the historian Kim Wagner notes, that, faced with such a plethora of portents, the British regarded with deep suspicion, bordering on paranoia, any type of communication in India which they could not understand. The colonial administration well understood that rumors, however unfounded, could have serious consequences, and there were plenty of notably more dangerous urban legends about. Increasing numbers of Christian missionaries began arriving in India, and their presence gave credence to rumors of impending conversions. Seen from a distance of 150 years, the chupatty movement can appear a quaint anomaly, a strange and colorful rumor of interest mostly to historians and psychologists. Since the batta made the difference between active service being considered munificent or burdensome, the sepoys repeatedly resented and actively opposed inconsiderate unilateral changes in pay and batta ordered by the Military Audit department. Government was ostentatiously neutral, but Hindu society was inclined to regard the missionaries as eroding Hindu society without openly interfering. A rumour spread that the cartridges of the new enfield rifles . From the confidential physician to the King of Delhi: Nobody can tell what was the object of the distribution of the chupatties. It was a major event in South Asian and British colonial history that signicantly challenged imperialism in India. "useRatesEcommerce": false It consisted of the distribution of many thousands of chapatisunleavened Indian breadsthat were passed from hand to hand and from village to village throughout the mofussil (interior) of the subcontinent. The rifle's cartridges contained 68 grains of FF black powder, and the ball was typically a 530-grain Pritchett or a Burton-Mini ball. Before Smithsonian.com, Dash authored the award-winning blog A Blast From the Past. Vital though their Indian empire was to them, they controlled the subcontinent with a comparative handful of menabout 100,000 in all, less than half of whom were soldiers, ruling over a population of 250 millionand they were all too aware of just how inadequate these numbers would be in the event of any serious rebellion. Stbere im grten eBookstore der Welt und lies noch heute im Web, auf deinem Tablet, Telefon oder E-Reader. The revolt began on May 10, 1857, at Meerut as a sepoy mutiny. [11] If the caste of high-caste sepoys was considered to be "polluted", they would have to expend considerable sums of money on ritual purification before being accepted back into society. The traditional story of the Sepoy Mutiny is that the introduction of a new cartridge for the Enfield rifle provoked much of the trouble. [14], The pay of the sepoy was relatively low and after Awadh and the Punjab were annexed, the soldiers no longer received extra pay (batta or bhatta) if posted there, because this was no longer considered "foreign service". . The Sepoy Mutiny was a violent and very bloody uprising against British rule in India in 1857. Outraged by events such as the massacre of women and children at Cawnpore, some British officers believed that hanging mutineers was too humane. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox. The military cause was both particular and general. British officials were alarmed at the rapid distribution of mysterious Indian breads across much of the Raj, There is a most mysterious affair going on throughout the whole of India at present, Dr. Gilbert Hadow wrote in a letter to his sister in Britain in March 1857. He also resumed the practice of tax-free lands in some areas. In contrast to their Indian predecessors, the British considered such refusals at times to be outright "mutinies" and therefore to be suppressed brutally. Q. The mysterious appearance of chapatisloaves of an Indian unleavened breadspooked the British administrators of the Raj shortly before the outbreak of rebellion in 1857. The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010);Andrew Ward. There at a stroke was an army, a cause, and a national leaderthe only Muslim who appealed to both Hindus and Muslims. History of the Sepoy War in India, 1857-58 (London, 3 vols. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. The army so far had been quipped with the smooth-barrelled musket, which had a protracted loading procedure and was not accurate over long ranges. Mutiny Memoirs of an Old Officer (London: Folio Society, 1984);Troy Downs. It came as a greater shock than the loss of the American colonies, and prompted reprisals far more hysterical and vicious than those visited on rebellious subjects elsewhere in the Empire. The Lucknow garrison held out in the residency from July 1, in spite of the death of Sir Henry Lawrence on July 4. [21], The Bengal Army also administered, sometimes loosely, 29 regiments of irregular horses and 42 of irregular infantry. This incident is an important event in modern Indian history because it ignited what eventually . Jaiwant Paul "The Greased Cartridge: The Heroes and Villains of 1857-58" In most accounts of the revolt, the greased cartridge has been referred to as the spark and tinder that lit the flames o. The Greased Cartridge: The Heroes and Villains of 1857-58, Rezensionen werden nicht berprft, Google sucht jedoch gezielt nach geflschten Inhalten und entfernt diese. By the time the British came to examine the causes of the rebellion, therefore, the chupatty movement had assumed a fresh significance. Or it might have been an aristocratic plot, set off too soon by the Meerut outbreak. Scottish Highlanders charge during the suppression of the rebellion of 1857. A man had come out of the jungle with them, and given them to the watchman with instructions to make four like them and to take these to the watchman in the next village, who was to be told to do the same.. Mason, Philip (1974), pages 186 and 313 "A Matter of Honour", London: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston. The Revolt of 1857, also known as the First War of Indian Independence, was a significant uprising against British colonial rule in India. Your Privacy Rights A Chowkeydar ran up to another village with two chupatties. The sepoys were generally under the command of British officers. [12], There had been earlier indications that all was not well in the armies of the East India Company. Christian organisations from Britain had additionally created 222 "unattached" mission stations across India in the decade preceding the rebellion. The rapid spread of disorder in 1857when regiment after regiment had mutinied, and revolts against British rule had sprung up throughout most of northern and central Indiamade it almost impossible to believe that the rebellion could have been spontaneous (as most modern historians concede it was), and considerable effort was made to chronicle the movement and trace the spread of the anomalous chapatis. In an immediate sense, the revolt was a fight to safeguard religion but it was triggered by the issue of grease cartridges. In spite of their apparently desperate situation, the British possessed long-term advantages: they could and did receive reinforcements from Britain; they had, thanks to the resolution of Sir John Lawrence, a firm base in the Punjab, and they had another base in Bengal, where the people were quiet; they had virtually no anxiety in the south and only a little in the west; and they had an immense belief in themselves and their civilization, which gave resolution to their initial desperation. Though the revolt was suppressed later, it shook the foundation of British rule in India. From the interrogation of an official at the King of Delhis court: I did hear of the circumstance. Wagner concludes that the trigger for the rebellion of 1857 was thus rumour, not the actual issue, or use, of cartridges greased with animal fat; that, in any case, we simply don't know what sort of tallow was used at Gangadarh Banerji & Co.; and that - remarkable as it now seems - the truth of the matter never was established, even by the Finally, there was the activity of Christian missionaries, by that time widespread. Several events happened that led to the Sepoys revolting and was called the Indian Revolt of 1857. From Delhi the revolt spread in June to Kanpur (Cawnpore) and Lucknow. The Indian Mutiny of 1857-59 was a widespread but unsuccessful rebellion against the rule of British East India Company in India which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British crown. It is not known who first projected the plan. The whole episode falls into three periods: first came the summer of 1857, when the British, without reinforcements from home, fought with their backs to the wall; the second concerned the operations for the relief of Lucknow in the autumn; and the third was the successful campaign of Sir Colin Campbell (later Baron Clyde) and Sir Hugh Henry Rose (later Baron Strathnairn of Strathnairn and Jhansi) in the first half of 1858. Prior to the period of British rule, any refusal to proceed on service until pay issues were resolved was considered a legitimate form of displaying grievance by Indian troops serving under Indian rulers. The Revolt of 1857 eventually broke out over the incident of greased cartridges. In a few hours the whole country was in a stir, from Chowkeydars flying around with these cakes. Then the bullet had to be rammed down the rifled barrel. 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