The British government was now determined that none of the administrative errors of the past would ever be repeated. The supreme authority in India was to be the "Viceroy" Queen Victoria became the empress of India and, instead of the board of governors of the East India Company in London, a secretary of state for India who belonged to the British cabinet exercised decision-making and control over Indian affairs. As a result, Parliament transferred the right to rule India from the Company to the Crown on August 2, 1858. The British Parliament was less than convinced that mistakes on the part of the East India Company had not contributed to sparking the rebellion. It also exiled the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to Burma and killed his sons. Determined to teach: the rebelling Indians a lesson and to inspire enough fear to prevent another rebellion, it torched villages, capturing and executing rebels, some of whom were blown to bits from the mouths of cannons. The East India Company refused to acknowledge that the rebellion was in any way a result of its own: conduct, casting it instead as an unprovoked betrayal, on the part of ungrateful subjects. Both factors contributed to British success in regaining control over the rebellious regions. Furthermore, the middle-class intelligentsia as well as many Indian princes loyal to the British refused to participate in the movement, seriously weakening its potency. Despite widespread support for the rebellion among the peasantry and the artisanal classes, it was limited to northern and central India alone. Many similar rebellions in support of local rulers occurred in other parts of India, such as Jhansi and Gwalior in Northern India and the territories ruled by the Maratha chieftains of Central India.Īlthough the rebels of 1857 toppled British administration in many towns, the British army ultimately suppressed the uprising with great brutality. They marched on the capital, Delhi, to reinstate the old and decrepit Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, as their rightful and legitimate ruler. Led by the former elites of the Awadh court, the peasantry joined the sepoys and rose in protest against their colonial masters, attacking institutions representative of British rule, such as courts, police stations, and revenue offices. The peasants of Awadh now faced both financial hardship and the humiliation of having their king treated with indignity. In addition, the British Governor-General Lord Dalhousie had recently conquered Awadh, disre-garding his treaty obligations to its ruler, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. Under the British, peas-ants in places such as Awadh were forced to pay exorbitant taxes. The rebel sepoys were largely recruited from the peasantry in the princely state of Awadh in Northwestern India. While the issue of the greased cartridges triggered the rebellion, the causes for dissatisfaction with British rule went far deeper. This photograph, taken a few months after the British attack, shows the courtyard of the Sikander Bagh, the royal garden and summer estate of the Nawab of Oudh, littered with the skulls and bones of about two thousand Indian insurgents killed there. British troops rescued the British inhabitants of the city and took revenge on the local population. When the Indian Rebellion erupted in 1857, the rebels besieged the city of Lucknow, the capital of Oudh, for two months. Many officers were killed in the fracas that followed. This practice offended the religious sensibilities of both Hindus and Muslims, and on May 9, the sepoys violently re-volted against their British officers, who were caught unawares. In the summer of 1857, rumors spread in the military camps in the town of Meerut that the cartridges for the new English rifles used by Indian soldiers or "sepoys" were greased with cow and pig fat. Although distinctly local in character, the Rebellion of 1857 had dramatic global repercussions, fundamentally shaping the ways in which British colonies were henceforth viewed and governed by their colonial masters. Sparked off by a military mutiny, the rebellion spread through North India, nearly overthrowing the rule of the British East India Company. The Rebellion of 1857 was an event of immense significance, not just for modern South Asia but also for British colonialism in general.
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