"Does the Indian Mutiny have any lessons for today?" Topic

"It's probably helpful to start by asking what the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 was. For starters, it wasn't a mutiny.

Yes, everything kicked off at Meerut when Indian soldiers – known as Sepoys – refused musket drill using the new cartridges which, it had been claimed, were greased with both pig and beef fat. So they were mutineers. But, contrary to the way that we think about it now, the East India Company's army mutinied all the time. The refusals to obey orders were usually treated as localised difficulties and life moved on with no perceptible impact on the machinery of colonial government. This mutiny was different and to understand why, we need to look at the political background.

When the British first started to gain ascendancy in India they were regarded as just one of many political powers in the land. Many local rulers made alliances with them. Relations between the two communities were generally friendly. Intermarriage between British soldiers and Indian women was common and tacitly encouraged by the East India Company. European officers would join in Hindu ceremonies, piling their swords alongside the sepoys' muskets to be blessed by the holy man. British soldiers and administrators were fascinated by the country they had come to rule and adopted many local customs – as reflected in our 21st century English vocabulary and our most popular choice of Friday night eating…"
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Amicalement
Armand

The Mutiny certainly HAS lessons--all boiling down to you should not openly despise the people you rule and their ways--but there is zero chance of our present rulers learning that.

But with luck, I'll die before the explosion.

On the military side--move fast, strike hard and if you have doubts about loyalty, don't wait for conclusive evidence. Harsh lessons, but true.

Grease cartridges with trans-fats?

Yes resolve it like the British after the mutiny was ended. Put the enemy in front of a cannon and shoot it. Those guys did not cause any more revolts.

Burying Moslems in pigskins was also viewed as a deterrent back then.

Keep the Gurkhas on side

deleted…

Dude…!. (smile).

Amicalement
Armand

Tango, the French Foreign Legion used the same tactics in North Africa against the Moslems there.

Actually it learns me one thing for sure. Those that write history books should research just a bit more thoroughly.

The whole greased cartridge is a fallacy. Even if they would have been greased with cow or pig fat (which they weren't as they would have been supplied un-greased and the sepoys would have had to make up their own grease) they would never have touched a mouth. It's the other end that is bitten off! Duh!

Th reason I used 'would have' is because the native infantry regiments were never supplied with Enfield rifled muskets in the first place!

The reasons for the 'mutiny' are to be found elsewhere, with me personally thinking that resistance to greed and disdain were two of the more common 'triggers'

There was a huge change in attitude from the original European officer class, and that which increasingly became the norm after the Napoleonic wars. The christian conservatism, the missionary zeal and the imposition of the imported Mem Sahib increasingly built the inevitable bonfire.

Don't occupy a country that patently doesn't want to be occupied by you?

Blowing people out of cannons or burying them in pig fat most assuredly did not work as a deterrent to revolt. French North Africa was continuously in some level of revolt, and the British had to deal with insurrections and insurgencies in India post-Indian Mutiny.

Good Rule, Good Laws, and Good Manners are what deter revolts. All those thinking that extreme cruelty is the only way to deter revolts are evil sadists hiding their sick fetish behind "rational" thinking.

The best way to deter revolts in an occupied country is to not occupy that country

Oh dear, there's a lot of ill-informed b****x being spouted on here today, isn't there?

1) Cartridges – already dealt with, except to add that the British routinely used beeswax rather than any animal render. Incidentally, Hindu troops were told they were dipped in cow fat (also a lie).

2) "Blowing from the cannon's mouth" – actually an Indian form of punishment, possibly imported from China, dating back to at least 1500, a century before the British began trading in India and two centuries before they exercised any political control.

When the HEIC set up its armies, it tried to retain traditional Indian customs, including punishments; the use of cannon was also adopted because it was considered more humane than hanging……by the Indians. The first recorded use by the British was not until 1760, and it was last used in the Mutiny (and then only for about 5% of executions) and officially abolished some time in the 1860s when the Raj took over and established a pan-Indian army. Its use was continued, however, by several Indian princes who retained their own private forces, as well as non-Imperial states like Afghanistan, who last used it in 1930.

A lot of India was acquired by treaty and annexation; the only wars were fought against other empires, which – if nothing else – were considerably crueler and more arbitrary than the Raj. Let's not forget that India was ruled by foreigners – the Moghuls – long before the British arrived. Just not white foreigners (who always seem to get a free pass for some reason).

There are three distinct phases of British involvement in India:

1) The early HEIC phase, where British officials – both civil and military – behaved and lived like Indians.

2) The late HEIC phase, characterised by (Christian) missionary zeal, the arrival of British WAGS, and a consequent deterioration in the attitude of officials towards the native population.

3) The post-Mutiny period, where the Raj attempted to run India more efficiently and introduce a society similar to Britain (as it was at that time). By today's standards, it was unfair, and even racist, but it is worth remembering that it was the British authorities who destroyed the practices of suttee and thugee, came up with the famine relief formula still used by the Indian government today, and created a malaria inoculation programme which later became the blueprint for the WHO.

Hope that helps.

As far as I remember India was not a country before the British gave it up after WW2. First it was a bunch of countries, then it was an empire + a bunch of countries, then it was a bunch of colonies + a bunch of countries, then just one colony.
as far as the cause of the Mutiny, I believe the hardening of attitudes by the British Empire had an effect, but mostly it was that the British held the reigns too loosely. Too few European units and too many marginal officers meant once the chaos started they couldn't stop it. The EIC couldn't afford to keep the empire they ended up with.

Yes it does:
1) Do not let non-governmental, corporate organizations rule countries/colonies and control militaries when their sole goal is to maximize profits for shareholders and the crown.
2) When a uncooperative population rises up, crush it quickly, ruthlessly and as inhumanely as possible.
3) When the rebellion is conquered begin a systematic and widespread, decade-long programme of bloody reprisals against rebel and civilian populations across all of India which kills millions and displaces millions more.
4) Dehumanize the rebels so that mass murder is not only accepted but even encouraged by your own population and many of your elites – even persons of conscience.
5) When the dust has settled and the slaughter and privation have culled the population of millions, lie and deny that most of the slaughter and starvation didn't happen or only occurred due to a force majeure which was outside of your control.
6) Spend the next ninety years actively suppressing and stopping any indigenous scholars and statisticians from examining and challenging what the official narrative is. At the same time indoctrinate the local population with shame for their role in the revolt so that they don't want to talk about it or research it.
7) Above all, destroy population and labour statistics which could be used later to argue/prove that as many as 10 million people 'disappeared' between 1857 and 1867 due to death and internal displacement (leading to famine, epidemics and higher mortality).
8) Repeat this process as needed (say in 1943 through the truck and boat denial policies in war-time Bengal to stop the distribution of food to starving Bengalis; stop America and Canada from sending relief ships full of grain and finally pat yourselves on the back for developing the Bengal Formula to bring back some of the starving from the brink of death after millions of their countrymen have perished due to your denial policies). They were after all dangerously inclined to join the enemy, the blighters!

That's one possible set of lessons from the Sepoy Mutiny and the Indian Rebellion.

Tango, why did you have to post this? It will only end badly!

Cheers?
Rod Robertson.

So, Rod, what lesson(s) would you rather be learned?

Rod is only fair considering the Raj-loving going on on this site by nationalist-statists and authoritarian-imperialists.

Tango, why did you have to post this? It will only end badly!

I decided not to add my 2 cents … but the question does comes to mind …

"Rod … why did you post at all ? Knowing this subject would rapidly go South ? "

Rod is only fair considering the Raj-loving going on on this site by nationalist-statists and authoritarian-imperialists.

You mean we're not allowed to correct errors of fact? You should have said earlier…….

Sure one is. And he is nicely balancing that with other facts equally damning.

Kyoteblue:

Sorry to disagree but my post above is full of bias and I had an agenda – to challenge the generally accepted narrative of British rule in India. Britain did do some real good in India, but it also did great harm too. The above post focused on some of the harm but ignored the good intentionally to make a point. And there is the rub. All history is biased either intentionally or unwittingly, so there is no "real history".

History is a conversation, a debate or a bar-brawl and not a static monolith which remains unchanged. Only by challenging monolithic beliefs and conceptions can the conversation move forward and new understanding be had. This is what science does through the scientific method and the humanities could benefit from such an approach being more widely accepted. Deference to authority and orthodoxy stifle the conversation and can cause an historical fundamentalism to take root which can retard the process of re-understanding aspects of the past.

Cheers.
Rod Robertson.

Things must be slow on the Ultra Modern Board I guess.

Sure one is. And he is nicely balancing that with other facts equally damning.

Err, well, no they aren't actually "facts" as such. They are the hypothesis of one man with a book to sell – see a review here in The Guardian, August 2007: link – who has found some interesting anomalies, and concocted a sensational theory out of them when much more prosaic (but less commercially attractive) explanations were available.

I take Rod's point, and it is not one that I was intending to dispute (I was merely trying to do the same thing in reverse). However, none of his allegations based on the book have any basis in proven fact. For example, his first point is well made, but was (a) simply not understood in the 17th and 18th Centuries, and (b) governing the whole of India was not the intended purpose of the HEIC when it was set up. In fact, Great Britain did take this on board post-1859 and transferred control to a genuine government body. Surely his point?

Point 2) – would any previous Indian rulers (or indeed rulers anywhere else on earth at that time) have done anything different?

Point 3) has only ever been alleged in this one book – no other author, British or Indian, before or since, has come up with anything like these conclusions from the same evidence. In the dislocation that followed the Mutiny, two million undelivered letters – many of which would have been to/from Europeans – is hardly evidence of "tens of millions" being killed.

Point 4) – it is fair to argue that British newspapers went OTT in describing atrocities against British (not to mention Anglo-Indian, Christian Indian, and loyal Hindu/Muslim Indian) women and children, and civilian men. However, the reality is that these people were murdered, often en masse, and frequently after being offered protection and/or guarantees of safe passage by the rebels. It is worth noting how many former enemies of the British Army have ended up fighting alongside it – a lot of this is down to mutual respect and the fact that the British Army has generally observed the same level of behaviour as its enemies. Atrocity breeds atrocity; respect breeds respect – look at the Ghurkhas.

Point 5) – other historians, British and Indian, have denied this happened and that the book cited above has misinterpreted facts that have other, more plausible, explanations. If other, undocumented, outbreaks of rebellion occurred – and kept on occurring for another whole decade – the chance of their being no record of them is slim to nil. There were plenty of journalists at that time who would have reported on it, regardless of the political implications (look at Russell in the Crimean War). More importantly, the paucity of British troops in India would have required these extra uprisings to have been put down by loyal Indians.

Point 6) – there's no evidence that the British ever did any such thing. From the first years, the Raj attempted to include Indians at much higher levels of responsibility than any other Colonial power to that date. The 1st Lord Halifax (grandad of the one who opposed Churchill in 1940) created an entire education system, from universities down to village school level, to educate Indians, both in their own tongue and in the English language. Why would you do this whilst simultaneously killing "tens of millions" of them and including tens of thousands of them in the new civil service? Thousands of Indians, including the vast majority of nationalist leaders, finished their educations in England or in other parts of the Empire (eg South Africa). All five non-white British MPs in the 19th Century were Indian or part Indian, by the way.

Point 7) – the reality is that the destruction of government buildings by the rebels, the confusion in the wake of the Mutiny, the hiatus in transferring control from the HEIC to the Raj, and building a new (and better) system, accounts for virtually all of this. Given that the overwhelming majority of the civil service was Indian (at most there were only 1,800 Europeans administering a nation of 300+ millions) it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve a cover-up of the proportions alleged.

Finally, point 8). The Assam Famine of 1943-45 is a difficult subject, because so much of the political background is simply never mentioned. For example, Churchill's opposition is well known; less well known is that he recanted a few days later (as recorded by Hansard). He was attempting to get Wavell to use reserves of food already present in India, and – as a result of the Government of India Act 1935 – under the control of predominantly Indian-run committees. It was inter-provincial (mainly Hindu-Muslim) antipathy that prevented excess food being sent to Assam – every other province in India had massive surplusses at that time.

In WW2, the Indian armed forces of the Raj numbered three million – the largest all-volunteer army in human history. Those opposed to them numbered 20-30,000 (mostly ex-PoWs of the Japanese – that must have been a hard decision!) and several hundred in Europe (again, mostly ex-PoWs). That no wartime nationalist was ever given a government post, or allowed to serve in a senior capacity in the post-independence armed forces, says a lot about how they were viewed privately, I would suggest.

"All history is biased either intentionally or unwittingly, so there is no "real history"."
I've seen this argument before and I think it is defeatist in nature. There is the absolute truth of what actually happened and why. This truth is obscured by time, inadequate records, lost evidence and the prejudices of the authors. What we have to do is wade through the available data and come up with our best guess of what the truth is; filling in the gaps with educated guesses and recognizing and compensating for prejudice and the habits of the time. It's difficult if not impossible to achieve the absolute truth, but that doesn't mean it's not there and definitely doesn't excuse us from striving for it.

I would just like to thank both sides for their thoughts and arguments. Both sides have stayed on point, gave support for their points of view and did not start attacking each other. I have found this debate helpful.

Often it's not the lack of data that is the issue, but the desires of political historians to build a narrative that suits their ideological viewpoint. Unusually for any social group, wargamers are actually pretty familiar with this process.
Any research historian worthy of the name does use a scientific approach, but – unfortunately – their efforts are as utterly drowned out by popular writers and TV programmes – which in fact often feature popular writers, even novelists as experts.

"Often it's not the lack of data that is the issue, but the desires of political historians to build a narrative that suits their ideological viewpoint."

Yeah that's true and to it you can add the lure of patronage. Speaking lies on behalf of power is a lot more lucrative than speaking truth to power.

I was recently most entertained to hear Mary Beard describe Boudicca as a terrorist. Top stuff! I nearly choked on my Simon Schama Shandy and Dan Snow Battle biscuit.

Some other sources to peruse:

Christopher Herbert. War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-691-13332-4.

Rosie Llewellyn-Jones. The Great Uprising in India, 1857–58: Untold Stories, Indian and British. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84383-304-8.

Kim A. Wagner. Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising. Oxford: Peter Lang Ltd/Oxford, 2010. ISBN 978-1-906165-27-7.

Shaswati Mazumdar. Insurgent Sepoys: Europe Views the Revolt of 1857. London: Routledge, 2011. ISBN 978-0-415-59799-9.

Cheers.
Rod Robertson.

Rod always posts long well constructed, well researched posts and this time with a Bibliography !

But as noted … "real history" is in the eyes of the beholder(s) … or the winner(s) of the conflict.

People can always be found to justify why things they'd consider intolerable are actually okay… provided its done to someone else.

Ever the way.

anyhow why should we extract lessons about today from the Indian Mutiny, and not let us say the successful and relatively bloodless Federal victory in the Sonderbund War in Switzerland?

Also the actual author of the piece makes conclusions closer to the good rules and government crowd (robert piepenbreak, me than the kill them cruelly crowd (RudyNelson)

@Murv: What happened is pretty easy to ascertain as absolute truth. Why it happened may not be so easy to ascertain.