The Revolt of 1857 in Uttar Pradesh: Centres and Leaders

No other province was as deeply involved in the revolt of 1857 as the tract that is now Uttar Pradesh. The mutiny broke out at Meerut, the rebel emperor was proclaimed at Delhi by troops who had marched from there, and the longest and hardest fighting of the next eighteen months took place at Kanpur, Lucknow, Jhansi, Bareilly and Faizabad. UPPSC, UP Police and UPSSSC papers ask this chapter as a set of pairs: the centre and the leader, the date and the place, and the British officer who put each rising down.

Why the discontent ran deep here

Three grievances met in this region. The annexation of Awadh in 1856 by Lord Dalhousie, on the plea of misgovernment, removed a kingdom with which thousands of sepoys had family ties and sent Nawab Wajid Ali Shah into exile at Calcutta; the summary land settlement that followed stripped many taluqdars of their estates and unsettled the peasants under them. The Doctrine of Lapse had already taken Jhansi in 1853 on the death of Raja Gangadhar Rao, refusing to recognise the adopted son of Rani Lakshmibai, and had refused Nana Saheb the pension and titles of his adoptive father, the last Peshwa Baji Rao II. On top of this came the army's own anger over the General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 and over the greased cartridge of the new Enfield rifle, which the sepoys believed was smeared with the fat of the cow and the pig.

How it began

The first spark came at Barrackpore in Bengal, where on 29 March 1857 Mangal Pandey of the 34th Native Infantry, a sepoy from Nagwa village in Ballia district of present Uttar Pradesh, attacked his officers; he was hanged on 8 April. The revolt proper began at Meerut on 10 May 1857, where the sepoys of the 3rd Light Cavalry rose, freed their imprisoned comrades and killed their officers. The next day they reached Delhi and proclaimed the aged Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar, as emperor of Hindustan, though the real military command at Delhi passed to General Bakht Khan, a subedar of artillery who came from Bareilly.

The centres and their leaders

Kanpur and Lucknow

At Kanpur the sepoys rose in June 1857 and turned to Nana Saheb, the adopted son of the last Peshwa, who was proclaimed Peshwa in his turn; his ablest commander was Tatya Tope and his adviser Azimullah Khan. The British garrison under Hugh Wheeler surrendered, and the killings at Satichaura Ghat and later at the Bibighar gave the British their excuse for the savage reprisals that followed when Havelock and then Colin Campbell retook the city. At Lucknow the sepoys rose at the end of May, and the leadership was taken by Begum Hazrat Mahal, a wife of the exiled Wajid Ali Shah, who had her young son Birjis Qadr proclaimed Nawab of Awadh. The British shut themselves into the Residency, where the Chief Commissioner Henry Lawrence was killed; Havelock and Outram relieved the place in part, and Colin Campbell finally recovered Lucknow in March 1858. The Begum withdrew into Nepal, where she died, refusing every British offer of a pension.

Jhansi, Bareilly and Awadh

Rani Lakshmibai, born Manikarnika, took charge at Jhansi when the revolt reached Bundelkhand. Sir Hugh Rose besieged the fort and took it in April 1858; the Rani broke out, joined Tatya Tope, seized Gwalior with him, and was killed in action on 17 June 1858 at Kotah ki Serai near Gwalior. Tatya Tope kept up a guerrilla war across Central India for almost a year before he was betrayed, captured and hanged in April 1859. At Bareilly the Rohilla leader Khan Bahadur Khan, grandson of Hafiz Rahmat Khan, set up his own government; in Awadh the Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah of Faizabad was the most formidable of the religious leaders of the revolt, and he was killed in June 1858 by the Raja of Powayn in Shahjahanpur district, who claimed the British reward. At Allahabad Liaquat Ali raised the standard and was put down by Colonel James Neill, who then marched on Kanpur; and in Azamgarh the Bihar leader Kunwar Singh fought the British on his way home.

What followed

The revolt was crushed by the middle of 1858, and its political result was the end of the East India Company. The Government of India Act of 1858 transferred the government of India to the Crown, created the office of Secretary of State for India with a Council, and turned the Governor General into the Viceroy. On 1 November 1858 Lord Canning read the Queen's Proclamation at Allahabad, which promised an end to annexation, respect for the treaties of the princes and for Indian religions, and an amnesty to all rebels except those guilty of murder. Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried and exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862, and the Mughal dynasty came to an end. Later writers judged the rising differently: V. D. Savarkar called it the First War of Indian Independence, R. C. Majumdar held that it was neither first nor national nor a war of independence, and S. N. Sen described it as a mutiny that became a revolt.