The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (43 page)

of everyday Indian society and culture, and the pernicious racism that

steadily permeated their Indian empire in the nineteenth century.

It is therefore not surprising that Indians of every social station

rejected this smothering, racially bounded subjecthood. As the educated and respectable classes attacked the inequities of British rule

in print, the Company had to impose press censorship in spite of

the utilitarians’ commitment to the free fl ow of ideas. The courts

also offered some relief from inequitable Company policies, which

explains the baboos’ reputation for litigiousness.

For common people, however, direct, often violent resistance was

the only option. Landed interests sometimes thwarted the Permanent

Settlement by using threats and intimidation to scare off the Calcutta merchants who considered buying up foreclosed
zamindaris
.

Local communities countered Christian proselytizing by ostracizing

and sometimes killing the small handful of converts won over by

the missionaries. The original Baptist mission station at Semaphore

Company

India 219

needed government protection to operate, and in the 1820s the Wesleyan Missionary Society shut down its operation in Calcutta after

one of its converts was murdered. There was actually very little that

British authorities could do about such incidents. As in most empires,

the Company’s ability to exert real authority in the countryside was

quite limited.

The peasant revolt also retained its potency during the fi nal

decades of the Company empire. British police offi cers developed a

fairly extensive rural surveillance system to uncover plots in their

infancy, but village headmen, Hindu and Muslim religious fi gures,

and discharged soldiers and militiamen still tapped into widespread

popular anger to organize uprisings. As a result, rebellions continued to fl are up in Bengal throughout the fi rst half of the nineteenth

century. None of these incidents were large enough to threaten the

imperial regime, but they demonstrated that the Company’s hold

on the Indian countryside remained tenuous despite its evolution

from a chartered commercial concern into a more conventional territorial empire.

Indeed, the precariousness of British imperial rule became all too

apparent when almost the entire Indian soldiery in Bengal rebelled en

masse in 1857.
Sepoys
had revolted periodically over issues ranging

from uniforms, beards, pay, and heavy campaigning since the EIC’s

army became a more conventional military formation in the 1770s.

In this case, the Company provoked the
sepoys
by requiring them to

serve overseas, cutting their pay and benefi ts, and lowering the status

and privileges of the military profession. This came at a time when

the revenue demands of the Permanent Settlement bit heavily, and

soldiers from Awadh were embittered by the EIC’s annexation of the

rest of their province.

The revolt began in May 1857 when three regiments at Meerut

executed their offi cers and marched on Delhi to restore the Mughal

emperor. It then spread quickly to neighboring garrisons. The smaller

armies of the Madras and Bombay presidencies were largely unaffected, but by the end of the year only about 8,000 troops of the

139,000-man Bengal army still obeyed British orders.39 As a result,

the EIC lost control of most of the Ganges River valley.

The mutiny of 1857 was unprecedented in its scope and threatened the very foundations of the Company empire. This breakdown

of imperial law and order gave local communities an opportunity to

220 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

reassert their autonomy as the unrest spread to the civilian population. Indian nationalists referred to this massive upheaval as the

“First War of Indian Independence,” but they were getting ahead of

themselves. In reality, unconnected and largely uncoordinated popular local and regional rebellions followed the mutiny at Meerut.

To be sure, the rebels shared a deep hatred of British imperial

rule. The communities that joined the revolt were in the regions that

faced the heaviest revenue demands and foreclosures as a result of the

Company’s reforms. Many also experienced considerable economic

and social instability resulting from agricultural commercialization

and the spread of private land tenure. But in other cases popular Muslim religious fi gures stirred up revolts by calling for a jihad against

Christian British rule. Finally, the Company’s practice of annexing

the kingdoms of rulers who did not produce a biological heir led some

princes to join the uprising.

A faction of the rebels looked backward in attempting to use the

elderly emperor Bahadur Shah to bring unity to the revolt, but others recognized that a century of British rule had effectively destroyed

the old Mughal order. Of these, some looked to the last Maratha king,

Nana Sahib, for leadership, while local leaders drew on the Company

itself in imaging a new postimperial world. The village
zamindar

Shah Mal set up a “hall of justice” in the local British irrigation offi cer’s bungalow, and the peasant leader Devi Singh created an elaborate village administrative system complete with a supreme court, a

board of revenue, magistrates, and a superintendent of police.40

While most outbreaks of unrest during the “mutiny” had distinctly local origins, they merged into an enormous challenge to the

Company empire, and it took more than a year for British forces to

regain control of the Ganges heartland. The rebels exposed the inherent weakness of the Company as an imperial power, but they were

too divided to win a decisive military victory. While they shared a

common desire to escape their subjecthood, they could not agree

on a vision for the postimperial order. Hindus distrusted Muslims,

while the Muslims themselves fell out along Sunni-Shi’a lines. Sikhs

had no interest in seeing a revival of the Mughal Empire, which

had oppressed them for centuries, and Indian princes looked at the

populist rural uprisings with alarm. Many Indians remained neutral

because they calculated correctly that British power was not broken,

which helps explain why
sepoys
in Bombay and Madras refused to

Company

India 221

join the mutiny. This allowed relief forces from the regular British

and presidential armies to defeat the last of the rebels in 1858.

Taken as a whole, the events of 1857 stand as one of the largest

popular anti-imperial uprisings in the history of empire. The mass

slave insurrections of the later Roman Republic were probably larger

and bloodier, but Spartacus and his men were not conventional imperial subjects. In later eras, neither the Umayyads nor the Spaniards

ever had to contend with mass violent unrest on the scale of the Indian

Mutiny. For good reason, the scope and ferocity of the rebellion terrifi ed the tiny British minority in India. Bringing to life the deepest fears of all empire builders, the rebels slaughtered their imperial

masters and Indian auxiliaries whenever they could fi nd them. The

Meerut
sepoys
murdered every Indian Christian in Delhi, and the

followers of Nana Sahib massacred more than two hundred British

men, women, and children at Kanpur after the offi cers of the garrison

surrendered to spare their families a prolonged siege.

Newspaper reports of the rebels cutting down European women

and children with clubs and bayonets enraged the British public and

appeared to confi rm the worst imperial stereotypes of Indian barbarism. Although later investigations revealed that the women at Kanpur had been murdered but not raped, the idea that Nana Sahib’s men

had violently crossed the boundaries of subjecthood by putting their

hands on virtuous and vulnerable “white” women ensured an equally

violent and brutal British response to the mutiny. Relief forces killed

suspected rebels on sight. Armed with the legal authority to impose

summary punishment without the due process of law, they cut down

civilians at will and forced accused Muslim and Hindu mutineers to

defi le themselves by eating pork or beef before blowing them out of

cannons. There are no accurate estimates for the resulting Indian loss

of life, but the fi gures must surely run to the tens of thousands if not

hundreds of thousands.

Equally troubling for a “civilized” imperial power, British commanders motivated their European and Indian troops to rush to the

defense of besieged garrisons by promising them loot. But the imperial troops often did not bother to distinguish friend from foe during

the chaos of the mutiny. A junior British offi cer candidly described

what happened after the recapture of Delhi: “Sometimes [the British

prize agent] fi nds a rich old nigger in his house, and he immediately

takes him into a little room and puts a pistol to his head and tells him

222 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

that he will shoot him if he doesn’t tell him where the treasure is

upon which the nigger takes him to some part of the house and tells

him to dig, and then we sometimes fi nd 10,000 or 100,000 Rupees

hid.”41 In acknowledging that “our object is to make an example and

terrify others,” the governor of the Punjab admitted that more than

a simple desire for revenge drove these brutal tactics. In punishing

entire communities and classes for their mass defi ance of imperial

authority, British empire builders sought desperately to rebuild the

boundaries of subjecthood that had tottered and then collapsed during the anarchy of 1857.

The vicious retribution that Britain visited upon its rebellious

subjects did indeed restore its authority in India for another nine

decades, but the uprising demonstrated that the East India Company had outlived its usefulness as a proxy imperial power. It took

thirty-six million pounds and more than eleven thousand military casualties for the metropolitan government to regain control of Bengal. This enormous commitment of men and material

resources exposed the hidden costs of empire and raised diffi cult

questions about the overall value of India to Britain. Although it

took decades for most Britons to feel remorse for the bloody conduct of their soldiers, it was clear enough in 1858 that their representatives in Indian had not behaved as benevolent and humane

imperial rulers.

As tempers cooled, it was an open question whether the moral toll

of empire was worth the cost. The metropolitan government, however,

never considered withdrawing from South Asia as it faced increased

political and economic competition from around the world. The captive Indian market became the world’s largest recipient of Britain’s

exports by the end of the nineteenth century and was a major supplier of cotton to its textile mills. With overall British exports declining in the face of competition from newly industrialized powers, the

international sale of Indian raw materials helped balance Britain’s

trade defi cit with Europe and the United States. Furthermore, railway construction after the mutiny helped make India second only

to Canada as a primary recipient of imperial investment. India also

provided high salaries and generous retirement benefi ts for British

civil servants, and Indian taxpayers funded the reconstituted Indian

army, which remained an important prop of British imperial power

throughout the world.

Company

India 223

The full scope of these economic and strategic realities was not

fully apparent in 1858, but the British government understood that

quitting India was not an option. Instead, Prime Minister Palmerston

set out once again to “reform” the Indian empire. The fi rst step was

to restore its moral veneer after the brutal realities of imperial governance and control were laid bare for all to see in the aftermath of

the mutiny. Just as parliamentary investigations of Clive and Hastings helped wipe away the embarrassment of the nabobs’ blatantly

venial and corrupt empire building, metropolitan observers of every

political stripe agreed that their nineteenth-century successors were

to blame for the 1857 uprising.

Concluding that the utilitarians’ modernist meddling and the

evangelicals’ proselytizing had provoked the fanatical and irrational Indian majority, Tory conservatives blamed the rebellion on the

reformist lobby. They were particularly dismissive of Macaulay’s educated auxiliaries, who failed to persuade their superstitious kinsmen

to embrace British rule. Certain that Indians were not ready to live

in the modern world, the conservatives cited reports that the
sepoys

rebelled in response to rumors that the cartridges for their new LeeEnfi eld rifl es were greased with pork and beef fat, thereby defi ling

Hindu and Muslims soldiers who had to rip open the paper casings

with their teeth. Few stopped to consider that the Indian soldiery’s

supposed religious prejudices and superstition did not prevent them

from using those same rifl es and cartridges against the British. Liberals, on the other hand, still believed that empires could be instruments of reform, but they joined the attack on the EIC by accusing

Company offi cials of blocking progress and inciting the mutiny by

failing to properly safeguard Indian property rights under the Permanent Settlement.