1857 and the Freedom Struggle in Madhya Pradesh

The land that is now Madhya Pradesh was, in 1857, a patchwork of British cantonments and princely states: the Holkar state of Indore, the Scindia state of Gwalior, Bhopal under its Begum, the Bundela and Baghel chiefs of the north and east, and the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories under direct British rule. When the sepoys rose, the rulers mostly stayed with the Company and their soldiers mostly did not, and that split is what makes the chapter examinable. MPPSC, MPESB, SSC and railway papers ask for the centre, the leader and the date, so learn this chapter as a map: Neemuch, Mhow, Jabalpur, Ramgarh, Gwalior and Shivpuri.

The revolt reaches central India

The first rising in the region was at Neemuch on 3 June 1857, where the sepoys burnt the cantonment and marched towards Delhi. The Gwalior Contingent, a force paid for by the Scindia state but officered by the British, mutinied in the middle of June and went on to fight at Kanpur, where it proved the best trained body in the rebel armies. On 1 July 1857 the troops of the Holkar state and the Bhil levies attacked the British Residency at Indore. The Resident, Colonel Henry Durand, fled to Sehore, Saadat Khan led the attack, and the same day the great cantonment of Mhow went over. Risings followed through the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories at Sagar, Damoh and Rahatgarh.

Jabalpur, Mandla and the Narmada valley

At Jabalpur the 52nd Native Infantry mutinied in September 1857. The British had already arrested Raja Shankar Shah, head of the Gond house of Garha-Mandla, and his son Raghunath Shah for verses calling on people to rise, and both were blown from the mouths of cannon on 18 September 1857. That execution is the fact most often asked from this section. In the same tract Rani Avantibai Lodhi, who governed the small estate of Ramgarh in Mandla after her husband died, refused the Company court of wards placed over her state, armed her villagers and met the British at Kheri. Driven into the hills, she took her own life in 1858 rather than surrender, and the state remembers her as Veerangana Avantibai.

Gwalior, Tatya Tope and Rani Lakshmibai

The last campaign of the revolt was fought on this soil. Sir Hugh Rose brought his Central India Field Force up from Mhow, took Rahatgarh and Garhakota, relieved Sagar, forced the Madanpur pass and captured Jhansi in April 1858. Tatya Tope, Rao Sahib and Rani Lakshmibai then seized Gwalior in June 1858 when the Scindia army went over to them, and Nana Sahib was proclaimed Peshwa in the city. Rani Lakshmibai fell fighting at Kotah-ki-Serai near Gwalior on 18 June 1858, and Rose retook the fort within days. Tatya Tope kept a guerrilla war alive for ten months across Guna, Rajgarh and the Chambal ravines, was betrayed in the Paron forest and was hanged at Shivpuri on 18 April 1859. In the Nimar tract the Bhil leader Tantya Bhil carried armed resistance into the next generation and was hanged in 1889.

The centres at a glance

The national movement in Madhya Pradesh

After 1857 the fight moved to the Congress and to the princely states own movements. The flag satyagraha of 1923 at Jabalpur and Nagpur, in which volunteers insisted on carrying the national flag past government buildings, was the first mass campaign here. Civil disobedience took the shape of the Jungle Satyagraha of 1930 against the forest laws, whose best known centre was Ghoradongri in Betul, and the police firing on a Congress gathering at Charan Paduka in Chhatarpur in 1931 is called the Jallianwala Bagh of Bundelkhand. Chandra Shekhar Azad, born at Bhavra in the Alirajpur area in 1906, took the revolutionary road instead and died at Allahabad in 1931. The poet Makhanlal Chaturvedi of Babai edited Karmaveer and went to prison, and Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, whose poem on the Rani of Jhansi every student knows, worked and was jailed at Jabalpur. Quit India in 1942 closed courts and schools at Jabalpur, Chhindwara and Hoshangabad, and the merger movements of the princely states carried the struggle on to 1949.