The Sepoy Mutiny Of 1857 Movement

The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, which the Indians refer as the First War of Independence, was the most violent and brutal incident in the history of British India. The incident not only posed the greatest threat to the British imperial rule in the subcontinent, but also forever altered the fate of the East India Company. Following the investigation of the rebellion, the British Parliament adopted the new ruling policies towards various perspectives in British India. The incident also rewrote the Indian history and immensely impacted on the development of Indian nationalism. The paper will introduce the incident of 1857 and discuss the reasons for the British to defeat the rebels and the impacts of the incident on both the British and the Indians.

First of all, to the Indians, the rebellion signified loss of hope to restore the old Mughal-Muslim India. Before the mutiny, the movements of restoring the old Indian Empire were well underway. Nonetheless, when the war came to an end, the ruling elites of the Mughal Empire finally realized that it was impossible to bring back the past glories of the Indian Empire. St. John states that munity “extinguished, of course, any lingering hope of restoring a pre-British Mughal-Muslim India. The Mughal dynasty itself was stripped of all recognition. The associated martial elites suffered a permanent loss of prestige as Indians of succeeding generations. Additionally, the consequence of the mutiny plowed the seeds of Indian nationalism into the minds of the Indian elites. In spite of the fact that some historians including Devji disagree on such a view, others do agree that the significance of the mutiny to the Indian nationalism. Duffett and others contend that the mutiny completely destroyed the fragile relations between the British and the Indians when the British made efforts to build a closer tie between the two groups with education and the liberation of the civil service. However, the educated Indians felt that the British were unable to establish a trust relationship after the mutiny. They believed that it was time for them to use a limited influence on political development and

Washbrook states that the mutiny changed the forms of governing and sovereignty in Colonial India. Until the mutiny, the British left “the status of their government in India on a curious theoretical footing, which cloaked effective practice behind convenient fictions.” The changes also psychologically impacted on the British until World War I. The British lost its control over the central Ganges Valley that caused an immense shock on the imperial system, which in turn led to the revaluation of its mission in India. The British restructured the military organization of both the British and the Indian armies as well. Under the recommendation of the Peel Commission, a special Parliamentary Committee charged to review the status of the Indian army, the British army decided a 1:2 ratio of British to Indian soldiers in Bengal. As a result, the number of the British soldiers in India was increased to 80,000 and the Bengal army was reduced by 65,000 to maintain the size of 110,000 soldiers. With the reduction, the Bengal army became a non-major force and was replaced by the sepoys raised from Punjab, Gurkha and Sikh during the