The Role of South India in the Freedom Movement

The Sepoy Mutiny and South India

The Background

For more than 150 years the East India Company (John Company) had raised its own armed forces. The three administrative areas of India, the Presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal, each maintained their own army with its own commander-in-chief. The commander-in-Chief of Bengal was regarded as the senior officer of the three. These armies were paid for entirely out of the Company's Indian revenues and together were larger than the British Army itself. All the officers were British and trained at the Company's military academy in England. There were a few regiments of European infantry but the vast majority of the Company's soldiers were Indian troops. These sepoys, as they were called, came mostly from Oudh in what is now Uttar Pradesh. They were organised in numbered regiments and drilled British style. These regiments were officered by Europeans, with a stiffening of European NCOs.

Attached to this formidable force were Queen's regiments, actual units of the British Army lent by the Crown to the East India Company. In 1857 the total number of soldiers in India was 34,000 Europeans of all ranks and 257,000 sepoys.

The Causes

There had been a British presence in India for more than 200 years before the rising of 1857 took place. The British had started as merchants and their initial toeholds on the subcontinent had been perilously small. Over the years they had expanded, building larger trading stations and forts to protect them. Eventually, to ensure the stability that an uninterrupted flow of trade required, they had raised forces of their own and become an active power in the politics of 18th-century India. Clive, with his victory at Plassey, had ended French pretensions to an Indian empire and firmly established the British as one of the arbiters of India's fate. A generation later, Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) and his galloping guns had crushed the power of the Peshwas and Britain no longer had any serious rivals to its Indian domination. Sometimes by design, at other times almost by accident the area controlled by the British increased, until by 1857 everything from the borders of Afghanistan in the west to the jungles of Burma in the east, from the Himalayas of Nepal to the beaches of Ceylon were, if not directly under the Company's rule, very definitely in its pocket.

While the British were consolidating their position in India a sentiment of national awareness along with a feeling of revolt was developing among the Indian people. This was hastened by certain factors. First, there was the arrival of missionaries, which caused great unease among the Indian people. Evangelical Christians had little understanding of, or respect for, India's ancient faiths and the attitude of non-interference in religious affairs that prevailed in the 18th century had disappeared.

Secondly, on the political stage, the annexation of the state of Oudh by Lord Dalhousie and the Doctrine of Lapse, which decreed that the lands of any Indian ruler dying without a male heir would be forfeited to the Company, struck directly at the heart of India's

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traditional ways of life and were widely condemned and hated throughout the subcontinent.

Third, the economic exploitation of the Indian people by the British was slowly becoming evident even to the average Indian.

Before 1857, there was resistance to British rule and these may be classified into four types: peasant counter assaults, peaceful Satyagraha, armed mass tactics combining the town and the countryside and, lastly, sepoy mutinies.

Against this backdrop of Indian unease, tales of old prophecies began to circulate. There was talk of chappattis being secretly passed from regiment to regiment on the stations of the Grand Trunk Road, which led from Calcutta to Peshawar. People whispered of the old prophecy which stated that 100 years after the battle of Plassey, the rule of John Company would end. The battle of Plassey had been fought in 1757 and in the hundredth year after the battle it seemed everyone was awaiting a spark. When it came, it was in the shape of a new cartridge. The projectile for the new Enfield rifle was part of a self-contained paper cartridge that contained both ball and powder charge. It required only the end to be bitten off and the cartridge then rammed down the muzzle of the weapon. To facilitate this process the cartridge was heavily greased with animal fat. The Indian soldiers heard this and soon the news was passed around that the grease was a mixture of cow and pig fat. Biting such a cartridge would hurt the sentiments of the Hindus and the Muslims. The stage was set for a great tragedy to unfold.

The Spark

It began at Barrackpore at the end of March 1857. Mangal Pande, a young sepoy of the 34th Native Infantry, shot at his sergeant-major on the parade ground. When the British adjutant rode over, Pande shot the horse out from under him and as the officer tried to extricate himself Pande severely wounded him with a sword. Drawn by the commotion, the commanding officer of the station, General Hearshey galloped to the scene accompanied by his two sons. The sepoy panicked and instead of shooting at the general, turned his rifle on himself and pulled the trigger. He survived this suicide attempt and was later court-martialled and hanged. As a collective punishment the 34th Native Infantry was disbanded, its shameful fate being publicly proclaimed at every military station in British India. Pande achieved a certain kind of immortality and the 34th Native Infantry were regarded as martyrs.

This event became the signal for a more widespread movement. Soon, Kanpur, Gwalior, Meerut and Delhi were involved in the uprising. Some of the leading figures in this movement were Nana Saheb and Tatya Tope. In Meerut a few weeks later, 85 troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry refused to obey orders to handle the new cartridges. They were arrested, court-martialled and sentenced to 10 years hard labour. At an appalling ceremony in front of the whole Meerut garrison, they were publicly humiliated: their uniforms were stripped from them; they were shackled with leg and arm irons and led off to imprisonment. The following day was a Sunday and as Britons prepared for church parade, Meerut exploded. Enraged sepoys broke open the town gaol and released their comrades. The cantonment was put to the torch and the sepoys moved down the main road to Delhi and the Palace of Bahadur Shah, the last of the Moghuls. Although initially the mutiny was spontaneous, it quickly became more organised and the sepoys even took over the cities of Delhi and Kanpur. However, by the winter of 1857 and the first six

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months of 1858, the British gradually retook everything they had lost; soon there were no large pockets of British lives to be saved and no serious possibility of British defeat. Massively reinforced from Britain, the armies which spread out over the north of India were vengeful and cruel, with a distinct taste for looting. They saw themselves as dispensers of divine justice and, given the frenzy of murder that had accompanied the start of the mutiny, felt their cruelties to be simply repayment in kind. There was little room for mercy in the hearts of the British troops. The Times called for the execution of every mutineer in India and in a debate at the Oxford Union, one speaker roused his audience by declaring: 'When every gibbet is red with blood, when the ground in front of every cannon is strewn with rags and flesh and shattered bone, then talk of mercy. Then you may find some to listen.'

In the early months of the British recovery, few sepoys were left alive after their positions were overrun. The British soldiers seemed to have made a collective decision not to take prisoners and most actions ended with a frenzied use of the bayonet. On the line of march whole villages were sometimes hanged for some real or imagined sympathy for the mutineers. Looting was endemic and neither the sanctity of holy places nor the rank of Indian aristocrats could prevent the wholesale theft of their possessions. Many a British family saw its fortune made during the pacification of northern India. Later, when prisoners started to be taken and trials held, those convicted of mutiny were lashed to the muzzles of cannon and had a roundshot fired through their bodies. It was a particularly cruel punishment with a religious dimension in that by blowing the body to pieces the victim lost all hope of entering paradise. Ultimately, the mutiny was severely crushed by the British. On 20 September 1857, the British recaptured Delhi, and in the following months, recaptured Kanpur and withstood a sepoy siege of Lucknow. The British victories were accompanied by widespread recrimination, and in many cases, unarmed sepoys were bayonetted, sewn up in the carcasses of pigs or cows, or fired from cannons. For more than a year the people of northern India trembled with fear as the British sated their thirst for revenge. It was called 'the Devil's Wind'.

And finally, in one of those ironical twists that the forces of history seem to revel in, the prophecy that a hundred years after the Battle of Plassey the rule of John Company will end actually came true. When the British desire for punishment and revenge was spent, they started to think about how future mutinies could be prevented. They realised that it was inappropriate for a land the size of India to be governed by a private company and instead introduced direct rule through the India Office, a British Department of State. A hundred years after Plassey the rule of the Honourable East India Company finally did come to an end.

Repercussions in South India

What were the repercussions of the Sepoy Mutiny in the south of India? There was apparently very little on the external plane.

A question that naturally comes to mind is: Why didn't the Madras Army join the Bengal Army? The Madras Regiment was the oldest Battalion in the Indian Army and was known as the 9th Battalion, formerly the Nair Brigade. It was raised in 1704 at Padmanabhapuram, as bodyguards for the Maharajah of Travancore; they were active in the Battle of Colachel in defeating the Dutch forces. In 1748, Major Stringer Lawrence,

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a veteran of action in Spain, Flanders and the Highlands, was hired by the East India Company to take charge of the defence of Cuddalore. He laid the foundations of what was to become the Indian Army. Training the levies to become a militia, the Madras Levies were formed into 'companies' and trained to become a disciplined and fine fighting force. In 1758, Lawrence raised the Madras Regiment, forming the several companies of Madras Levies into two battalions. The regiment has been through many campaigns with both the British Indian Army and the Indian Army. Many well-known British officers have commanded this regiment, Robert Clive being one of them. The regiment fought the Carnatic wars in South India.

Thereafter, the British annexed the Indian subcontinent, largely with the help of the sepoys of the Madras Regiment. The coming of the British rule led to a complete reorganisation in the British Indian Army.

The Reaction in the South

However, it is not that the south was entirely silent. There were a few ruffles that, fortunately for the British, did not turn out to be the heralds of the forthcoming storms. An article in People's Democracy claims that as many as 1,044 sepoys of the Madras Army were court-martialled for being sympathetic to the struggle and gives several instances of minor eruptions that took place in various towns of Tamil Nadu.

A book published in 1859 - The History of the Indian Revolt and Expeditions to Persia, China and Japan, written by George Todd - narrates this incident: 'The 8th Cavalry was ordered to march from Bangalore to Madras and then embark for Calcutta. On arriving at a place about 25 miles from Madras on August 17 1857, the men put forward a claim for the rates of pay, and pension which existed before 1837. Such a claim put forward at such a moment was perplexing to the officers. They obtained the consent of the government to make conciliatory offers to the men. After a further march of 13 miles, the troopers again stopped and declared that they would not wage "war against their countrymen". This being an act of insubordination, two guns and some artillerymen were promptly brought forward; the 8th Cavalry was unhorsed and disarmed. The affair caused great excitement in Madras.'

A letter written in 1858 from Nagpur, speaking of the Madras sepoys stationed at Kampti, states: 'The sympathies of the Madras sepoys were entirely with the insurrectionary movement, and if they had got a tempting opportunity they would have joined it. They only want a beginning to be made, and a rallying point of some sort. We must never suppose that the Madras men are different from those of Bengal.' One of the reasons why not even a single of the many fuses of the rebellion was lit in the south is given in the above letter. There was no rallying point. They felt no loyalty towards the tottering emperor in Delhi. But there is another, weightier reason.

The Quarterly Review of 1858 (volume 103) says this in a tone that typifies the unsurpassed arrogance - and ignorance - of the Englishmen: 'That the sepoys of the Madras Army have not revolted is simply because the Tamil races to which they belong have no literature, no traditions, or none worthy of the name, no pride of ancestry, no country in fact and no caste.'

This statement is totally untrue. The principal reason why the Madras Army and the Tamils in it did not revolt was caste.

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While Muslims in the cavalry of the Madras Army outnumbered Hindus by 7:1, the infantry had considerably more Hindus. For any revolt to succeed, the infantry's support was needed. What was the caste composition of the Madras Army's infantry?

This is what an 1845 book - Travels in India, by Leopold von Orlich - says: 'The Hindoo sepoy of the Madras Army is still more alien to the great body of the Hindoo people than the sepoys of Bengal; he is generally of a low caste, born and brought up in the field.'

This statement brings to the fore the horrendous realities of rural Tamil Nadu in the 19^th century. These are explained succinctly by another author, Henry Mead, in his book The Sepoy Revolt: Its Causes and Consequences (1857): 'In the Southern Presidency the families of the men always accompany them, a custom which, however inconvenient in general affords an almost certain guarantee for the fidelity of men. Their sons, when they grow up, hang about the lines and officer's quarters, pick up a modicum of English and by the time they arrive at manhood, or the age at which they are permitted to be taken on the strength of the corps, they have been thoroughly identified with it.'

The book does not speak of the women of the families. But it is clear that only men who had absolutely nothing to hold on to at the place where their ancestors once lived would even contemplate allowing their women and children to follow them wherever they went. They must have been abysmally poor, without land, without hope. The Madras Army provided succour to them. Obviously, they had no reason to revolt.

 Yet we should not be misled by the outer appearances. The psychological impact of the Sepoy Mutiny was great. A gradual sense of revolt was awakening among both the educated class and the working and toiling masses. It needed a field of expression and that was provided by the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885.

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