How the 1857 sepoy rebellion challenged East India Company rule

Historian Ian Barrow described it as one of the great ironies of the East India Company's history: its Indian empire was effectively won by Indian troops. From the siege of Seringapatam to the battle of Assaye and the conquest of the Punjab, the army was made up overwhelmingly of indigenous sepoys in red coats.

The loyalty of these soldiers to their British paymasters was not unconditional. When their religion and customs came under pressure, the Company found itself facing the very sepoys it had recruited, armed and trained.

That changed with the 1813 Charter Act, which ended the Company's trade monopoly and expanded the rights of Christian missionaries, feeding Muslim and Hindu unease. In 1856 a new law required sepoys to serve overseas, although caste rules forbade Hindu warriors from crossing the sea without costly purification rituals.

The same year the Company annexed its client kingdom of Awadh. Over 75,000 Bengal Army sepoys had been recruited from Awadh and saw the deposition of their ruling dynasty as a betrayal. Policy after policy widened the gap between British officers and their soldiers.

On 24 April, Lieutenant Colonel George Carmichael-Smyth of the 3rd Bengal Light Infantry assembled his unit to drill with the new rifle. The sepoys, mostly Muslims, refused the cartridges. The offenders were put in irons and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment with hard labour.

On 10 May the remaining garrison opened fire on its European officers and broke into the barracks jail to free the imprisoned comrades. The mutineers poured into the streets of Meerut, torching colonial bungalows and killing Europeans they encountered. Other garrisons across the region soon took up arms against their commanders.

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the 82-year-old Mughal emperor, lived a quiet life composing Urdu poetry under Company supervision in Delhi. When rebel sepoys overwhelmed the small British corps in the city, they appealed to him to lead them, since his name and lineage gave their struggle legitimacy.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was the largest uprising ever fought against British rule. At its onset only around 40,000 British lived among a subcontinent of over 200 million people. Despite this, the rebellion was put down, and British rule in India continued for nearly another century.

The main reason lies in regionalism and disunity. Much of the subcontinent stayed on the sidelines or aided the colonisers, including most sepoy regiments in the Bombay and Madras armies. The Gurkhas of Nepal fought as mercenaries for the British, and the Sikhs of the Punjab sided with their new occupiers because the rebels had elevated the Mughal emperor as figurehead.

Hundreds of local dynasties split along the lines of who had been protected or dispossessed by the Company. The uprising was not an attempt to create a unified Indian nation, but an overlap of differing social, religious and economic interests lacking ideological cohesion.

The few European regiments in India were quickly overwhelmed at the start of the uprising, but reinforcements were rapidly redirected from Britain's other possessions and conflicts in Crimea, Persia, South Africa, Australia and China. The rebels had few allies and no centralised military leadership.

The British had a sophisticated military bureaucracy and near-unlimited resources, which they used with ruthless efficiency to recover the crown jewel of their empire.

Commander-in-Chief George Anson set out from Ambala with about 3,000 men toward Delhi, where most mutineers had gathered, but died of cholera days later. Command passed to Sir Henry Barnard, who scattered a rebel army three times his size at Badli-ki-Serai. The rebels were well trained but lacked senior leadership and were disadvantaged by their older rifles.

As the garrison waded toward the boats on the Ganges, they were ambushed and cut down, along with many of their wives and children. The 206 surviving women and children were taken hostage and held in a cramped bungalow.

Nana Sahib ordered the hostages executed as he retreated before General Henry Havelock's advance. When Havelock's column reoccupied Kanpur on 17 July, they found no women and children to rescue, only their corpses.

The British reprisal was savage. Civilians who had taken no part in the conflict were indiscriminately slaughtered. Hindus were forced to swallow beef at gunpoint, Muslims were force-fed pork, sewn into pigskins and hanged, and Indian men and women were tortured and mutilated. British forces rallied around the war cry 'Remember Cawnpore!' for the rest of the rebellion.

Brigadier-General Henry Lawrence drove out sepoy units he suspected of mutiny and retreated into the British Residency at Lucknow with 855 British redcoats, 712 loyalist sepoys, and hundreds of women and children. By the end of July, over 30,000 rebels occupied the city and surrounded the Residency.

Havelock's brigade of Sikhs and Highlanders fought into Lucknow by 25 September, but their combined numbers were too few to drive the rebels from the city. A second relief column of 5,000 men under new Commander-in-Chief Colin Campbell arrived in November.

Campbell's forces dislodged the decentralised mutineers from key positions across the city. The civilians in the Residency were evacuated, and by March 1858 Lucknow was back in British hands.

Rebel pockets in central India fought on, led by Tantia Topi and the Rani of Jhansi, but these isolated insurgencies were eventually brought into submission. Over 6,000 British citizens in India died during the rebellion.

The narrator adds that this profit-driven imperialism continued, and in many ways still does today.