Civil Uprisings and Mutinies before 1857: Notes

The Revolt of 1857 did not come out of a clear sky. For almost a century before it, the areas the East India Company took over saw a steady succession of armed risings: dispossessed chiefs and zamindars, ruined peasants and artisans, tribal communities losing their land to outsiders, religious preachers and, several times, the Company's own sepoys. Historians group them as the civil uprisings, the tribal revolts and the military mutinies before 1857. For an examiner they are a list of names, years, regions and leaders, and they are asked almost every year.

Why these uprisings happened

The causes repeat from Bengal to Malabar. The new land revenue systems, the Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal and the Ryotwari and Mahalwari settlements elsewhere, fixed high demands in cash and made the peasant's holding saleable, so a bad harvest meant the loss of land to a moneylender. The Company's annexations, from the subsidiary alliances of Lord Wellesley to Lord Dalhousie's doctrine of lapse, threw rulers, their soldiers and their court servants out of employment. Cheap machine-made cloth destroyed the weaver's livelihood. New forest and excise rules ended the tribal community's free use of forest and its liquor. Zamindars, moneylenders and the Company's own police and courts, all strange and distant, replaced older local arrangements. The risings that followed were local, led by old authorities, fought with traditional weapons, and backward-looking: the rebels wanted the former order restored, not a new one built.

The major civil uprisings

The Sanyasi and Fakir rebellion followed the Bengal famine of 1770 and the Company's restrictions on the wandering monks' pilgrimages and their right to collect alms; Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel Anandamath draws on it. The Paika rebellion broke out when the paikas, the hereditary militia of the Khurda raja, lost their rent-free jagir land and had to pay revenue in cash after the Company abolished the cowrie currency. In Travancore, Velu Thampi Dalawa's Kundara Proclamation of 1809 called the people to rise against the British resident.

The tribal revolts

Tribal communities rose because outsiders, whom they called dikus, took their land. The Kol uprising of 1831-32 in Chhotanagpur, led by Buddho Bhagat, answered the transfer of Kol land to non-tribal farmers and moneylenders. The Bhils of Khandesh rose repeatedly from 1817. The Khasi uprising of 1829-33 under U Tirot Sing resisted the British road being driven from the Brahmaputra valley to Sylhet through Khasi country. In Assam, Gomdhar Konwar led the Ahom revolt of 1828 against the Company's refusal to restore Ahom rule. The largest of all was the Santhal Hul of 1855-56 in the Damin-i-Koh, led by the brothers Sidhu and Kanhu with Chand and Bhairav; the Santhals declared the rule of the Company at an end and attacked zamindars, mahajans and police. It was crushed with heavy loss of life, but it forced the creation of the separate Santhal Parganas in 1855, with special rules barring the transfer of tribal land.

The religious and peasant movements

Three movements with a religious form carried peasant grievances. The Faraizi movement, founded by Haji Shariatullah in Faridpur and led after him by his son Dudu Mian, organised the Muslim peasants of eastern Bengal against the illegal cesses of Hindu zamindars and indigo planters. The Wahabi movement in India, shaped by Syed Ahmad Barelvi of Rae Bareli and drawing on the teachings of Shah Waliullah, had its Indian centre at Patna. The Pagal Panthis of the Mymensingh region, founded by Karam Shah and led by his son Tipu Shah, refused the zamindars' enhanced rents. The Moplah outbreaks of Malabar between 1836 and 1854 arose from the tenants' insecurity under the Janmi landlords.

The military mutinies

The Company's sepoys mutinied several times before 1857, always over service grievances that touched caste or pay. The Vellore Mutiny of 10 July 1806 was the earliest large one: new dress regulations, which forbade caste marks, beards and earrings and made sepoys wear a turban with a leather cockade, convinced the men that they were to be converted, and they seized the fort and raised Tipu Sultan's flag before Colonel Gillespie rode from Arcot and crushed the rising. At Barrackpore in 1824 the 47th Regiment of Native Infantry refused to march to Burma because crossing the sea meant loss of caste and no allowance had been given for carriage. The 34th Native Infantry mutinied in 1844 over the batta or field allowance for service in Sindh, and the 22nd Native Infantry in 1849. Each of these was a rehearsal for 1857.