Revolt of 1857 - Nature

Introduction The Revolt of 1857, commonly called as the Sepoy Revolt, was the first organised revolt against British rule in India. It was the culmination of the manifold grievances that Indians had against the East India Companys rule. It was to a great extent a popular revolt led by exiled princes and displaced landlords. The revolt was largely confined to North and Central India. The revolt failed due to various reasons, including lack of organised planning on the part of the rebels and superior strength of the British. The transfer of the Indian administration from the English East India Company to British Crown was the important result of the Revolt. The revolt has been hailed as the watershed or the great divide in the colonial history of British India. Nature The nature and character of this revolt remained a controversial subject both among the contemporary British writers and the present ones. Historians have written treatises full of complex arguments on this subject. The historiography of the revolt is as old as the event itself. Almost all the earlier books and accounts of these events of 1857 were written by Englishmen. They have dubbed Indians as traitors and mutineers while they have praised the role of the Englishmen. The Indians did not dare to write anything because during the period immediately following the revolt, great atrocities were committed by the British and the Indians were crushed brutally. Ever since the publication of the book First War of Independence by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1909, the nature and character of the revolt has been debated among the nationalists and historians. The main strands of debates on the nature of the revolt of 1857 can be understood by four main questions. The first question is Was it merely a sepoy mutiny or a civil rebellion The more dominant contemporary official interpretation of the revolt of 1857 was that it was primarily a sepoy mutiny, the civil unrest being a secondary phenomenon, which happened

Bibliography: From Plassey to Partition A History of Modern India Shekhar Bandyopadhyay Pratiyogita Darpan- March 2009 Modern Indian History - Mohammad Tarique