preview

How Should The Indian Mutiny B Essay

Better Essays

HOW SHOULD THE INDIAN MUTINY BE CHARACTERISED? SHOULD IT BE SEEN AS A POST PACIFICATION REVOLT, A NATIONALIST UPRISING, OR AS A WAR OF INDEPENDENCE?

Any discussion on the reasons behind the Indian mutiny needs to be preceded by what the mutiny actually was. While mutinies and revolts were not uncommon in India at this time, they were usually largely uncoordinated. The mutiny of 1857 however, was different. Here was a major convergence of various strands of resistance, and an expansion of scale and new level of intensity . It is my purpose to discover why this was.

The Mutiny was initiated on the 10th May 1857 at Meerut by the XI native cavalry. The immediate issue was the greased cartridges of the new rifle which was being brought …show more content…

Angry Sepoys freed their colleagues and went on to massacre British residents. British officers were slow to react and by the next morning fifty Europeans and Eurasians were dead, including women and children. Indian shopkeepers were attacked and looted while the mutineers were on their way to Delhi with the purpose of offering their services to the pensioned Mogul emperor, Bahadur Shah.

There were no troops in Delhi, but all Christians and Europeans were hunted out and murdered. There were small abortive outbreaks afterwards, but it wasn’t until the 21st May that serious trouble broke out all over Oudh and the North West provinces. On the 15th July at Allahabad, British women and children were brutally murdered, and Colonel Neill ordered that those responsible should be executed after being made to clean the room in which the murders had taken place. The close contact they would have to make with the blood was also another serious insult to the Indians.

It was 1859 before the last remnants of the Mutiny burnt out. As a result of the mutiny anti British feeling in India was greatly intensified , and the British government took permanent control of the territory from the East India company in an attempt to try and stop such an occurrence happening again. It would be possible to describe the events of the mutiny in much more detail, but here we need to

Get Access