British India and the 'Great Rebellion'

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• 1. Imperial authority examined
• 2. A history in two halves
• 3. Before the rebellion
• 4. Disaffection
• 5. A new royal government
• 6. Find out more
• Print entire article

Imperial authority examined

In May 1857 soldiers of the Bengal army shot their British officers, and marched on Delhi. Their mutiny encouraged rebellion by considerable numbers of Indian civilians in a broad belt of northern and central India - roughly from Delhi in the west to Benares in the east. For some months the British presence in this area was reduced to beleaguered garrisons, until forces were able to launch offensives that had restored imperial authority by 1858.

'Shock inevitably stimulated much self-examination...'

British public opinion was profoundly shocked by the scale of the uprising and by the loss of life on both sides - involving the massacre by the rebels of captured Europeans, including women and children, and the indiscriminate killing of Indian soldiers and civilians by the avenging British armies. Shock inevitably stimulated much self-examination, out of which emerged an explanation of these terrible events; this explanation has exercised a powerful influence over opinion in Britain ever since.

Indians were assumed to have been a deeply conservative people whose traditions and ways of life had been disregarded by their British rulers. Reforms, new laws, new technology, even Christianity, had been forced upon them. They found these deeply offensive and were driven to resist them with violence.

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Published: 2002-06-01