THE REVOLT OF 1857

        In the early months of 1857, The Sepoys at Barrackpore exhibited the same rebellious spirit. On March 29, the Adjutant of the 34th Native Infantry was wondered by a sepoy on the parade ground which gave the sepoy movement a new turn, but there was a lull for a considerable period.

On May 10, the sepoys at Meerut rose in revolt and killed their British officers. A call was issued for a march to Delhi. The decision to ‘ March to Delhi’ was an event of outstanding importance because it invested the movement with a political purpose.

This step of turning to Delhi and proclaiming allegiance to the Mughal emperor, it appears, was a spontaneous reaction of the common soldier as it happened in the case of many other regiments similarly situate during the revolt of 1857.

For nearly four months. Delhi remained the centre of the revolt. A Delhi resided Bahadur Shah, the Mughal emperor, who gave the movement a traditional country-wide basis.

The political theory of the Revolt as reflected in this particular attitude of the sepoys tended to highlight the fact that Bahadur Shah was still regarded as a source of political authority.

Correspondingly, it implied that the source of the Company’s authority in India lay not in the Charters of the Kings of England nor in the Acts of the British Parliament, but in the farmans of the Mughal emperor.

The only legal title of the East India Company was to act as the Diwan or agent of the Mughal emperor. But by and large, the trading Company was fast becoming the potential ruler of the country. The British attitude became increasingly firm with the rapid extension of the Company’s territory in India.

Pressure was brought to bear upon Bahadur Shah in the form of an increased pension to surrender his imperial title in favour of an innocuous one, ‘King of Delhi’ but to no effect, Next the Company planned to end Mughal rule in Delhi and In 1849, Dalhousie actually proposed the removal of the house of Timur from Delhi for it was believed that the strength of the dynasty lay in its association with the city.

        What began as a fight for religion ended as a war of independence, for there is not the slightest doubt that the rebels wanted to get tide of the alien government and restore the old order of which the king of Delhi was the rightful representative.

        The most important thing about the Revolt of 1857 was that it was a conjunction of a spirit of disaffection of the earlier age and the anticipation of freedom which the initial successes of the military ‘mutinies’ tended to excite.

The famous Azamgarh proclamation which sets forth the views of the rebels in a convincing manner for the purpose of winning over the zamindars, merchants, public servants, and pundits and fakirs to their cause, proves the adequacy of the thesis of ‘Civil Disturbances’ of the earlier period and links up the mutiny and civil rebellion of 1857 in the eventual composition of a revolt.

The sepoys were fighting for their estates, the masses for fear of conversion to Christianity and the Muslims in particular for the restoration of their old sway. Yet all in their own way were fighting against their common enemy the British.