What was the Indian Rebellion of 1857 ?

A number of British civilians in the city were able to flee, but many were slaughtered. And Delhi remained in rebel hands for months.

Cawnpore: A particularly horrific incident known as the Cawnpore Massacre occurred when British officers and civilians, leaving the city of Cawnpore (present day Kanpur) under a flag of surrender were attacked.

Cawnpore: A particularly horrific incident known as the Cawnpore Massacre occurred when British officers and civilians, leaving the city of Cawnpore (present day Kanpur) under a flag of surrender were attacked.

The British men were killed, and about 210 British women and children were taken prisoner.

A local leader, Nana Sahib, ordered their death. When sepoys, abiding by their military training, refused to kill the prisoners, butchers were recruited from local bazaars to do the killing

The women, children, and infants were murdered, and their bodies thrown into a well. When the British eventually took back Cawnpore and discovered the site of the massacre, it inflamed the troops and led to vicious acts of retribution.

Lucknow: At the town of Lucknow about 1,200 British officers and civilians fortified themselves against 20,000 mutineers in the summer of 1857. By late September British forces commanded by Sir Henry Havelock succeeded in breaking through.

However, Havelock's forces did not have the strength to evacuate the British at Lucknow, and were forced to join the besieged garrison. Another British column, led by Sir Colin Campbell, eventually fought through to Lucknow and were able to evacuate the women and children, and ultimately the entire garrison.

Fighting in some places continued well into 1858, but the British were ultimately able to establish control. As mutineers were captured, they were often killed on the spot. And many were executed in dramatic fashion.

Outraged by events such as the massacre of women and children at Cawnpore, some British officers believed that hanging mutineers was too humane.

In some cases they used an execution method of lashing a mutineer to the mouth of a cannon, and then firing the cannon and literally blasting the man to pieces. Sepoys were forced to watch such displays as it was believed it set an example of the horrific death that awaited mutineers.

The grotesque executions by cannon became even became widely known in America. Along with the previously mentioned illustration in Ballou's Pictorial, numerous American newspapers published accounts of the violence in India.

The East India Company had been active in India for nearly 250 years, but the violence of the 1857 uprising led to the British government dissolving the company and taking direct control of India.

Following the fighting of 1857–58, India was legally considered a colony of Britain, ruled by a viceroy. The uprising was officially declared over on July 8, 1859.

Legacy of the Uprising of 1857

There is no question that atrocities were committed by both sides, and stories of events of 1857–58 lived on in both Britain and India.

Books and articles about the bloody fighting and heroic deeds by British officers and men were published for decades in London.

Illustrations of events tended to reinforce Victorian notions of honor and bravery.

Any British plans to reform Indian society, which had been one of the underlying causes of the revolt, were essentially set aside. And religious conversion of the Indian population was no longer viewed as a practical goal.

Victoria added the title "Empress of India" to her royal title. And in 1877, outside Delhi, essentially in the spot where bloody fighting had taken place 20 years earlier, an event called the Imperial Assemblage was held.

In the 1870s the British government formalized its role as an imperial power. Queen Victoria, at the prompting of Benjamin Disraeli, announced to Parliament that her Indian subjects were "happy under My rule and loyal to My throne."

In an elaborate ceremony, Lord Lytton, the serving viceroy of India, honored a number of Indian princes. And Queen Victoria was officially proclaimed as Empress of India.

While British historians called it the Sepoy Mutiny, Indian historians named it the Revolt of 1857 or the First War of Indian Independence. The Revolt of 1857 had been preceded by a series of disturbances in different parts of the country from the late eighteenth century onwards.

The Sanyasi Rebellion in North Bengal and the Chunar rebellion in Bihar and Bengal broke out in the late eighteenth century.

There were several peasant uprisings in the mid- nineteenth century, the most important of which were those by the Moplah peasants of the Malabar and the Faraizi movement by Muslim peasants in Bengal.