The Revolt of 1857
The causes, course, leadership, suppression and consequences of the 1857 Revolt, with the historiographical debate on its character.
The Long Fuse: Causes of the Revolt
The Revolt of 1857 was the culmination of a century of accumulating grievances under Company rule, not a sudden mutiny. Historians group its causes under five heads: political, economic, administrative, socio-religious and military.
Political causes centred on Lord Dalhousie's annexationist policy. The Doctrine of Lapse (applied 1848-1856) annexed Satara (1848), Jaitpur and Sambalpur (1849), Jhansi (1853) and Nagpur (1854) by refusing to recognise adopted heirs. Awadh was annexed in February 1856 on the pretext of maladministration, dispossessing the Nawab Wajid Ali Shah and alienating the taluqdars and the Bengal Army's high proportion of Awadh sepoys. The titular Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was told his successors must quit the Red Fort.
Economic causes included the destruction of indigenous handicrafts by free-trade imports, the drain of wealth, and oppressive land-revenue settlements—the Permanent Settlement (1793), the Ryotwari and the Mahalwari systems—which dispossessed peasants and zamindars through forced sales. The Inam Commission in the Bombay Deccan (1852) confiscated thousands of rent-free tenures.
Socio-religious causes included fears that the British intended mass conversion, inflamed by the activities of missionaries, the Religious Disabilities Act of 1850 (which let a Hindu convert to Christianity inherit ancestral property), and reforms such as the abolition of sati (1829) and the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act (1856).
The Immediate Spark
The immediate trigger was the introduction of the Enfield rifle, whose greased cartridges—rumoured to use cow and pig fat—had to be bitten open, offending both Hindu and Muslim sepoys. On 29 March 1857 Mangal Pandey of the 34th Native Infantry attacked his officers at Barrackpore and was executed on 8 April. The revolt proper erupted at Meerut on 10 May 1857, when sepoys of the 3rd Light Cavalry mutinied after 85 of their number were court-martialled and shackled for refusing the cartridges. The mutineers marched to Delhi and proclaimed Bahadur Shah Zafar the Emperor of Hindustan on 11 May 1857, giving the rising a symbolic apex and transforming a military mutiny into a wider political revolt.