The 1857 uprising began with a rebellion by Indian troops, known as sepoys, who were employed in the service of the British East India Company. By the mid-19th century the East India Company had completed its territorial conquests and ruled the country and its hundreds of millions of inhabitants as a private fiefdom. In order to control its holdings, the company established an army of 200,000 South Asians officered by 40,000 British soldiers. "Order"--and profits for the company--were maintained through systematic terror and violence against the Indian population.

The issue sparking the revolt was the introduction by British forces of the new Enfield rifle. To load it the sepoys had to bite off the ends of cartridges that were lubricated with a mixture of lard from pigs and cows. The soldiers, both Muslims and Hindus, took this as an insult to their religious and cultural practices, which forbid oral contact with such types of meat.

After sepoy troops in Meerut refused to use the cartridges in April 1857, British authorities fettered and imposed long prison terms on them. In response, other sepoys rose up to free their imprisoned comrades. They shot their British officers May 10 and marched to Delhi, where there were no European troops. The revolt then also spread to the cities of Agra, Cawnpore, and Lucknow.

The rebellion grew to include more than just the relatively privileged Indian soldiers who began the fight. It encompassed peasants throughout northern India who were subjected to exorbitant taxes and torture at the hand of British colonial administrators. The sepoys were, in their origins, peasants with close ties to their kinspeople in the villages.

Writing in the Aug. 28, 1857, edition of the New York Daily Tribune, Marx stated, "The British rulers of India are by no means such mild and spotless benefactors of the Indian people as they would have the world believe." He cited the official Blue Books--entitled "East India (Torture) 1855–57"--presented before the House of Commons during sessions in 1856 and 1857 that document what Marx describes as "the universal existence of torture as a financial institution of British India." Officials on the scene used such methods to force the collection of taxes from the peasantry, for example.

Commenting on the onerous taxes imposed on the Indian people, Richard Collier writing in The Great Indian Mutiny stated, "A man could not travel 20 miles without paying toll at a river ferry, farmed out by the Company to private speculators. Land Tax, often demanded before the crop was raised, was made in quarterly installments...the annual rent for an acre of land was 3s[hillings], yet the produce of that acre rarely averaged 8s in value."

The rebellion took on the character of a national revolt against British colonial rule. In one of his many articles on the subject in 1857, Marx noted that the British, in creating a native army, had simultaneously organized the "first general center of resistance which the Indian people was ever possessed of." For the first time, soldiers of the Indian army, recruited from different communities, Hindus and Muslims, landlords and peasants, had come together in opposition to British rule.

In Cawnpore, Nana Sahib, the adopted son of Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa of the Maratha kingdom, joined the revolt. Earlier, British Lord Dalhousie had twice refused to recognize the Hindu nobleman's claim to this position in Indian society. Through the course of the fighting Sahib succeeded in reinstating himself as prince.

A hysterical campaign was whipped up by the British rulers that sought to demonize Sahib in order to justify their massive military assault on the Indian people in revolt.

Sir Colin Campbell, for example, the leader of the British forces during these battles, depicted the natives in revolt as the source of the violence and brutality in India. He wrote:

Never was devised a blacker scheme than that which Nena Sahib had planned. Our miserable countrymen were conducted faithfully enough to the boats--officers, men, women, and children. The men and officers were allowed to take their arms and ammunition with them, and were escorted by nearly the whole of the rebel army. It was about eight o'clock a.m. when all reached the riverside--a distance of a mile and a half. Those who embarked first pushed off from the shore; but others found it difficult to get their boats off the banks, as the rebels had placed them as high as possible. At this moment the report of three guns was heard from the Nena's camp. The mutineers suddenly levelled their muskets, guns opened from the banks, and the massacre commenced. Some of the boats were set on fire, volley upon volley was fired upon the poor fugitives, numbers of whom were killed on the spot.... A few boats crossed over the opposite bank, but there a regiment of native infantry (the 17th), just arrived from Azimghur, was waiting for them; and in their eagerness to slay the "Kaffirs," rode their horses belly deep into the river to meet the boats, and hack our unhappy country men and women to pieces."

However, the actions taken by the rebelling sepoys pale in comparison to the brutality and cruelty inflicted by the British forces, which were reinforced with additional troops from the United Kingdom. In a July 1853 article, Marx pointed out that "the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked."

In putting down the revolt begun by the sepoys, the British troops followed a policy of killing those they captured instead of taking prisoners. Hundreds of sepoys were tied to the mouth of cannons and then blasted to smithereens as British officers gave the order to fire. The British used this method as an example to others who might dare to oppose their rule, because of the religious belief that by blowing the body to pieces the victim lost all hope of entering paradise. One historical account says nearly all the sepoys were killed, and "many a British family saw its fortune made during the pacification of northern India," from the looting of homes and holy places.

Writing in a May 8, 1858, New York Daily Tribune article, Engels described the massacre carried out by the British as they retook the city of Lucknow. Crowds were mowed down under cannon fire, while others were executed by advancing British troops with their bayonets. "The 'British bayonet,'" noted Engels, "has done more execution in any of these onslaughts on panic-stricken natives than in all the wars of the English in Europe and America put together."

Upon taking Lucknow, the British troops plundered the place. "For twelve days and nights there was no British army at Lucknow--nothing but a lawless, drunken, brutal rabble, dissolved into bands of robbers, far more lawless, violent and greedy than the sepoys who had just been driven out of the place," stated Engels. "The sack of Lucknow in 1858 will remain an everlasting disgrace to the British military service."

Commenting on the "state of things in a civilized army in the 19th century," Engels noted, "If any other troops in the world had committed one-tenth of these excesses, how would the indignant British press brand them with infamy! But these are the deeds of the British army, and therefore we are told that such things are but the normal consequences of war.... The fact is there is no army in Europe or America with so much brutality as the British. Plundering, violence, massacre--things that everywhere else are strictly and completely banished--are a time-honoured privilege, a vested right of the British soldier."

Through military action taken in the latter part of 1857 and the first six months of 1858, British forces reestablished their control over all the cities and towns involved in the revolt. In response to the rebellion, the East India Company was abolished and India was put under direct rule of the British government. It would take another 90 years of struggle until the Indian workers and peasants would succeed--through a massive strike wave led by the working class--in throwing off the yoke of British rule and winning political independence in 1947.

In reviewing the history of British rule in India, noted Marx, "Dispassionate and thoughtful men may perhaps be led to ask whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects. And if the English could do these things in cold blood, is it surprising that the insurgent Hindus should be guilty, in the fury of revolt and conflict, of the crimes and cruelties alleged against them?"
 

José Martí, a leader of the struggle for Cuban independence from colonial rule, commented on the British rulers' attack on the sepoys in an 1883 letter. He condemned "the pretext that 'civilization'--the vulgar name given to the current state of the Europeans--should have a natural right to seize foreign land belonging to 'barbarism'--the name given by those coveting someone else's land to the current state of any people not from Europe or from European America. As though, head for head and heart for heart, those who have crushed Irishmen or who have killed sepoys by tying them to the mouth of a cannon, were worth more than one of those wise, loving, and self-sacrificing Arabs who, undaunted by defeat or intimidated by numbers, defend their homeland with faith in Allah, a lance in each hand and a pistol between their teeth." -- --B.W.  

 
 
Related article:
Marx on Britain's crushing of Indian revolt  
 
 
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