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.
* For the background, see The Causes of the Indian Mutiny.
* Bahadur Shah II (1775-1862), who ruled as the 20th Mughal Emperor from 1837 to September 1857, when a month shy of his eighty-second birthday he was deposed by the British and exiled to Rangoon in Burma. A Muslim, he was sympathetic to Hinduism and regarded as something of a mystic. He was also an Urdu poet, and a patron of poets. At his trial when the Mutiny was over, he protested that he had been contemptuously manipulated by the rebels, but the British authorities were not in an understanding mood.
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.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 60 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 50 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: because, just, may, since, unless, whereas, whether, who.
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