BY KARL MARX  
The outrages committed by the revolted sepoys in India are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable--such as one is prepared to meet only in wars of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above all of religion; in one word, such as respectable England used to applaud when perpetrated by the Vendeans on the "Blues," by the Spanish guerrillas on the infidel Frenchmen, by Serbians on their German and Hungarian neighbours, by Croats on Viennese rebels, by Cavaignac's Garde Mobile or Bonaparte's Decembrists on the sons and daughters of proletarian France.¹ However infamous the conduct of the sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England's own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.

The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots, tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys, clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered by them. To find parallels to the sepoy atrocities, we need not, as some London papers pretend, fall back on the middle ages, nor even wander beyond the history of contemporary England. All we want is to study the first Chinese war,² an event, so to say, of yesterday. The English soldiery then committed abominations for the mere fun of it; their passions being neither sanctified by religious fanaticism nor exacerbated by hatred against an overbearing and conquering race, nor provoked by the stern resistance of a heroic enemy. The violations of women, the spittings of children, the roastings of whole villages, were then mere wanton sports, not recorded by mandarins, but by British officers themselves.  
 
Cruel treatment by British officers
Even at the present catastrophe it would be an unmitigated mistake to suppose that all the cruelty is on the side of the sepoys, and all the milk of human kindness flows on the side of the English. The letters of the British officers are redolent of malignity. An officer writing from Peshawar gives a description of the disarming of the 10th Irregular Cavalry for not charging the 55th Native Infantry when ordered to do so. He exults in the fact that they were not only disarmed, but stripped of their coats and boots, and after having received 12d. per man, were marched down to the riverside, and there embarked in boats and sent down the Indus, where the writer is delighted to expect every mother's son will have a chance of being drowned in the rapids. Another writer informs us that some inhabitants of Peshawar having caused a night alarm by exploding little mines of gunpowder in honour of a wedding (a national custom), the persons concerned were tied up next morning, and "received such a flogging as they will not easily forget."

News arrived from Pindee that three native chiefs were plotting. Sir John Lawrence replied by a message ordering a spy to attend to the meeting. On the spy's report, Sir John rent a second message, "Hang them." The chiefs were hanged. An officer in the civil service, from Allahabad, writes: "We have power of life and death in our hands, and we assure you we spare not." Another, from the same place: "Not a day passes but we string up from ten to fifteen of them (noncombatants)." One exulting officer writes: "Holmes is hanging them by the score, like a 'brick'." Another, in allusion to the summary hanging of a large body of the natives: "Then our fun commenced." A third: "We hold court-martials on horseback, and every nigger we meet with we either string up or shoot." From Benares we are informed that thirty zemindars were hanged on the mere suspicion of sympathizing with their own countrymen, and whole villages were burned down on the same plea. An officer from Benares, whose letter is printed in the London Times, says: "The European troops have become fiends when opposed to natives."  
 
'Outrages of natives exaggerated'
And then it should not be forgotten that while the cruelties of the English are related as acts of martial vigour, told simply, rapidly, without dwelling on disgusting details, the outrages of the natives, shocking as they are, are still deliberately exaggerated. For instance, the circumstantial account first appearing in The Times, and then going the round of the London press, of the atrocities perpetrated at Delhi and Meerut, from whom did it proceed? From a cowardly parson residing at Bangalore, Mysore, more than a thousand miles, as the bird flies, distant from the scene of action. Actual accounts of Delhi evince the imagination of an English parson to be capable of breeding greater horrors than even the wild fancy of a Hindu mutineer. The cutting of noses, breasts, etc., in one word, the horrid mutilations committed by the sepoys, are of course more revolting to European feeling than the throwing of red-hot shell on Canton dwellings by a Secretary of the Manchester Peace Society, or the roasting of Arabs pent up in a cave by a French Marshal,³ or the flaying alive of British soldiers by the cat-o'-nine-tails under drumhead court-martial, or any other of the philanthropical appliances used in British penitentiary colonies. Cruelty, like every other thing, has its fashion, changing according to time and place. Caesar, the accomplished scholar, candidly narrates how he ordered many thousand Gallic warriors⁴ to have their right hands cut off. Napoleon would have been ashamed to do this. He preferred dispatching his own French regiments, suspected of republicanism, to Santo Domingo, there to die of the blacks and the plague.

The infamous mutilations committed by the sepoys remind one of the practices of the Christian Byzantine Empire, or the prescriptions of Emperor Charles V's⁵ criminal law, or the English punishments for high treason, as still recorded by Judge Blackstone.⁶ With Hindus, whom their religion has made virtuosi in the art of self-torturing, these tortures inflicted on the enemies of their race and creed appear quite natural, and must appear still more so to the English, who, only some years since, still used to draw revenues from the Juggernaut festivals, protecting and assisting the bloody rites of a religion of cruelty.

The frantic roars of the "bloody old Times," as Cobbett used to call it--its playing the part of a furious character in one of Mozart's operas, who indulges in most melodious strains in the idea of first hanging his enemy, then roasting him, then quartering him, then spitting him, and then flaying him alive⁷--its tearing the passion of revenge to tatters and to rags--all this would appear but silly if under the pathos of tragedy there were not distinctly perceptible the tricks of comedy. The London Times overdoes its part, not only from panic. It supplies comedy with a subject even missed by Molière, the Tartuffe of Revenge. What it simply wants is to write up the funds and to screen the Government. As Delhi has not, like the walls of Jericho,⁸ fallen before mere puffs of wind, John Bull is to be steeped in cries for revenge up to his very ears, to make him forget that his Government is responsible for the mischief hatched and the colossal dimensions it had been allowed to assume.
 

1. In the Vendée (a province in western France) the French royalists utilised the backward peasantry to engineer a counter-revolutionary revolt in 1793. It was crushed by the republican army, whose soldiers were known as the "Blues".

The Spanish guerrillas--participants of the guerrilla war during the national-liberation struggle of the Spanish people against the French invaders in 1808-14. The peasantry, which stubbornly resisted the conquerors, was the principal motive force behind the guerrilla.

The Serbian and Croat troops took part in crushing the revolutionary movement in Hungary and Austria during the revolution of 1848-49. The Garde mobile was established by a French Government decree of February 25, 1848, to suppress the revolutionary masses. Its detachments, chiefly composed of de-classed elements, were used to quell the uprising of Paris workers in June 1848. General Cavaignac, being the Minister of War, personally commanded the massacre of the workers.

Decembrists--a secret Bonapartist society founded in 1849. Consisted predominantly of de-classed elements, political adventurers, militarists, etc. Its members facilitated the election of Louis Bonaparte as President of the French Republic on December 10, 1848 (whence the name of the society), and took part in the coup d'état of December 2, 1851, which led to Louis Bonaparte being proclaimed Emperor of France as Napoleon III in 1852. They were active organisers of mass repressions of republicans and particularly of participants of the 1848 revolution.

2. The author refers to the First Opium War (1839-42)--Britain's aggressive war against China, which marked the beginning of China's semi-colonial status. The destruction in Canton by the Chinese authorities of opium stocks belonging to foreign merchants served as a pretext for the war. Taking advantage of the defeat suffered by backward feudal China, the British colonialists saddled it with the predacious Nanking Treaty (August 29, 1842), which opened five Chinese ports (Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai) to British trade, transferred the island of Hong Kong into Britain's "eternal possession," and stimulated a tremendous war contribution by China. Under a supplementary protocol of 1843 China was also made to grant foreigners extraterritorial rights.

3. The author refers to the barbarous bombardment of Canton on orders of the British superintendent in China, John Bowring, in which nearly 5,000 houses were destroyed in the city suburbs. The bombardment was a prologue to the Second Opium War of 1856-58.

Peace Society--a bourgeois pacifist organisation founded in 1816 in London by the Quakers. The society enjoyed vigorous support from the Free Traders, who thought that given peace Britain would through Free Trade make better use of its industrial superiority and thus achieve economic, and political supremacy.

During the suppression of the uprising in Algeria in 1845, General Pé1issier, later Marshal of France, ordered the asphyxiation by the smoke of camp-fires of a thousand Arab rebels hiding in mountain caves.

4. The author refers to Gaius Julius Caesar's Commentarii de bello Gallico. The fact here cited is from Book 8, written by Caesar's former legate and friend A. Hirtius, who continued his notes on the Gallic War.

5. Marx alludes to the criminal code of Charles V (Constitutio criminalis Carolina) adopted by the Reichstag at Regensburg in 1532. The code was known for its extreme severity.

6. W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vols. I-IV, First Edition, London, 1765-69.

7. Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Act 111, Scene 6, aria by Osmin.

8. According to the biblical tale, the Israelites destroyed the walls of Jericho with the blast of their trumpets.
 
 
Related article:
Sepoy rebellion was a national uprising against British rule  
 
 
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