Any discussion of the reasons for the Indian Mutiny must be preceded by what the Mutiny actually was. Although mutinies and revolts were not uncommon in India at this time, they were generally uncoordinated. The mutiny of 1857, however, was different. There has been a major convergence of various resistance currents here, as well as an expansion of scale and a new level of intensity. My goal is to find out why this is so. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The mutiny was started on May 10, 1857 in Meerut by the 11th Native Cavalry. The immediate problem was the greased cartridges of the new rifle that was being used in India. Soldiers had to bite the end of the cartridge to release the powder with which to prime the rifle. It had been suggested as early as 1853 by Colonel Tucker that the new grease might offend the religious feelings of the Sepoys, but this warning went unheeded. This type of attitude was typical of the British who consistently underestimated the importance of Indian religion, and failure to do so here would have disastrous consequences. In January 1857, a worker at the Dum Dum arsenal near Calcutta, a low-caste Hindu, taunted a high-caste sepoy who had offended him that you will soon lose your caste if you have to bite covered cartridges pork and cow fat. News of this incident spread. As it was against the Muslim and Hindu religions to come into contact with these meats, it would have been a shame for them to have to use these guns. However, it was not personal pollution that the Sepoys feared but social ostracism, they feared being excommunicated by their own people. Moreover, the whole incident seemed more sinister to the Sepoys, who already suspected that the British intended to banish them and convert them to Christianity. With this skepticism still present, Colonel Carmichael Smith ordered his Meerut regiment to march for firing practice on April 24, 1857. He was aware that the situation was tense, but there were new instructions to open the cartridges with the fingers and not with the teeth. However, the men refused to take practice cartridges even if they were of the old type, because they feared for their reputation. The men were summoned to court, disgraced in parade and sentenced to imprisonment. The punishment took place on May 9, and the next day a bizarre disorder broke out and quickly spread to the infantry lines and the native cavalry. The angry sepoys freed their colleagues and massacred the British residents. British officers were slow to react and by the next morning fifty Europeans and Eurasians were dead, including women and children. Indian traders were attacked and looted as the mutineers traveled to Delhi with the aim of offering their services to the retired Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah. There were no troops in Delhi, but all Christians and Europeans were hunted down and murdered. There were then small aborted epidemics, but it was not until May 21 that serious unrest broke out throughout Oudh and the North-West provinces. On July 15 in Allahabad, British women and children were brutally murdered and Colonel Neill ordered those responsible executed after being forced to clean the room in which the murders took place. The close contact they would have to make with blood was also another grave insult to the Indians. It was in 1859 that the last vestiges ofthe mutiny died down. Following the mutiny, anti-British sentiment in India increased significantly and the British government took permanent control of the East India Company's territory in an attempt to try to prevent such an event. does not reproduce. It would be possible to describe the events of the mutiny in much more detail, but here we must examine the deeper reasons for this mutiny. The mutiny has been described as the country's first war of independence, as it was the first major manifestation of national feeling and action against the British presence. Commentators at the beginning of the 20th century, particularly Indian ones, adopted this point of view. For example, Marx describes the mutiny as a national uprising, but the circumstances in which he reached this conclusion must be taken into consideration. Marx was writing for the New York Times, and his interpretation could be seen as perpetuating America's national sentiment that colonialism was bad. Marx was trying to gain sympathy for the Indian people whom he described as being economically exploited by the harshness of British rule, from which America itself had escaped. So, if he had shown sympathy for the British colonists, then the American public simply would not have viewed Marx in the same way. Thus, his circumstances may have greatly influenced his articles. Marx anticipated, or perhaps influenced, the current Indian view that this is the starting point of the independence movement, in the same way that Indian nationalists describe the mutiny as part of national evolution and may well sure be seem inclined to emphasize the patriotic resistance of their ancestors. However, viewing it as a war of independence only seems possible in hindsight, or viewing it in terms of what it accomplished in the years to come, as might be the case. that his memory helped and guided India to achieve its independence in 1847. E. Stokes suggested that the mutiny momentarily revealed the structure of Indian rural society and was not a universal turning point in the history of British India. of the movement provided the strongest argument to support the British's later claim that they had not faced a war of national independence at all, for if they had, then a larger percentage of the population would undoubtedly have been involved and the mutiny might therefore have been more effective. As it stood, the mutiny was limited to the geographical area. 70,000 Sepoys joined the revolt, but not simultaneously, 30,000 remained loyal to Britain and 30,000 played no role. No community class or caste as such was entirely for or against the government. The mutiny has also been described as a nationalist uprising. Bose and Jalal describe the mutiny as being imbued with a major sense of patriotism, even nationalism, as it had the common goal of ending colonial rule. Legends of bravery and slaughter were then surreptitiously introduced into Indian nationalism. While delegates to the first Indian National Congress ritually denounced the revolt as reactionary, by the time of the extremist movement of 1905–1910, images of the Rhani of Jhansi decorated floats during the Ramillila festival in cities across northern India. Calling the mutiny nationalist could be criticized for failing to take into account the enormous diversity of strata of Indian society, whether religious, caste or geography. InFurthermore, Chamberlain states that there was no real national conscience above religious or social issues. In Marx and Imperialism, it is suggested that only Hindustan, the Hindu-speaking regions of the Ganges Valley, wanted an India, but that too was too large and diverse. a place, and its memories too were more those of a part of an empire than of any national uprising against them. Moreover, even here there was no debate on national issues to provide political awareness, and Marx can be criticized for overestimating the degree of national unity and underestimating the force of religious decisions. The mutiny has often been criticized for being too much an insurrection of soldiers, too little an insurrection of a nation. India really knows too little about itself as a nation for the mutiny to be classified in this sense. The way the mutiny has been described is as a post-pacification revolt. A simplistic description of this is that of a type of revolt that occurs after the end of pacification resulting from conquest. That is, once a country, in this case India, is defeated in a battle in which it has resisted a period of pacification by the victorious power that follows colonial rule. During this period, various outbreaks or revolts occurred due to the policies of the colonial power which disrupted indigenous social construction in the long term. This explanation would eliminate the need for any specific national unity in the strong sense of the term. In his account, E Stokes offers a sophisticated economic analysis of the mutiny while offering some concessions to the caste analysis. Stokes sees the problem as changes in land ownership under British colonial rule, which were to the disadvantage of some. The British changed inheritance laws in 1856 to allow them to make more territorial gains, for example by prohibiting the inheritance of land to adopted children. This rule particularly affected the Nawab of Awadh which was the province where the mutiny broke out, who was unable to pass on his lands to his adopted son upon his death and would have seen the lands pass to the British. This could then be an example that could support Stokes' view that the mutiny was economically motivated. He emphasizes that he does not consider that this mutiny was nationalist, that there was no social awareness of shared norms and values, which resulted in an uprising against the British. When E Stokes began writing, post pacification was a term given to agrarian unrest, and revolt was attributed to whole classes, such as rich peasants. Stokes gradually modifies these categories and sees the notion of caste groups in themselves as appropriate basic units for the analysis of revolt. Stokes found widespread distrust and dislike of the British for their attack on religion. The British also imposed high land taxes and rents on the peasantry, which often diminished the political position of landowners in their districts relative to neighboring clans. Thus, they disrupted the natural balance of society. However, the clashes were not always anti-British. Conflicts arising from the disparities between the more recently settled Afgans and the former Rajput overlords erupted into local struggles for succession to British rule. The Afghans were labeled rebels because they often moved first and were seen as the greatest threat to British rule. In this sense, Brodkin suggests that the scale of the mutiny was in fact exaggerated by.