Introduction
By 1857, the East India Company, a British government agency, had been running India for a hundred years. The Company’s ruthless acquisition of territory, and its high-handed treatment of respected figures and institutions, alienated Indians of all classes; and that May, soldiers in the Company’s militia rose up against their officers. Jawaharlal Nehru explains what happened next.
Apparently a date was fixed for the revolt to begin simultaneously in many places.* But some Indian regiments at Meerut went ahead too fast and mutinied on May 10, 1857. This premature outburst upset the programme of the leaders of the revolt, as it put the government on their guard. The revolt, however, spread all over the United Provinces and Delhi and partly in Central India and Bihar. It was not merely a military revolt;
it was a general popular rebellion in these areas against the British.
Bahadur Shah, the last of the line of the Great Moghals, a feeble old man and a poet, was proclaimed by some as Emperor.* The Revolt developed into a war of Indian independence against the hated foreigner, but it was an independence of the old feudal type, with autocratic emperors at the head. There was no freedom for the common people in it, but large numbers of them joined it because they connected their miserable condition and poverty with the coming of the British, and also in some places because of the hold of the big landlords. Religious animosity also urged them on. Both Hindus and Mohammedans took full part in this war.
Précis
In 1857, the British East India Company’s high-handed management of India provoked a rebellion. It began in the army, and widened out to become a more general protest against foreign rule. It was not a democratic revolution but an attempt to protect and restore traditional Indian values, supported by Muslims and Hindus alike.
(53 / 60 words)
In 1857, the British East India Company’s high-handed management of India provoked a rebellion. It began in the army, and widened out to become a more general protest against foreign rule. It was not a democratic revolution but an attempt to protect and restore traditional Indian values, supported by Muslims and Hindus alike.
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