The graphs to the left of and below map (a) reveal some interesting aspects of the economic history of the time. The period from 1834–39 to 1854–59 saw a steady and fairly steep rise in the value of foreign trade, with a considerable positive balance in all five-year periods; in the subsequent two five-year periods, however, there was a dramatic upsurge in exports caused almost entirely by the cotton boom occasioned by the Northern blockade of the American South and the general dis- ruption of the American Civil War, which cut Europe off from its principal source area for raw cotton. The boom came to an end after 1869, and a severe economic slump followed. While exports of raw cotton fell sharply, imports of cotton goods continued to rise, and with additional payments on invisible accounts (not covered by the data presented on imports and exports of raw materials) the accumulation of treasure that characterized the boom years began to drop. The stage thus was being set for Indian entrepreneurs to consider the advan- tages of establishing indigenous modern industries to reduce the country's dependence on British manufacturing.

The pie graph showing the sources of revenue for British India in 1856–57 is of interest for each of its three largest items. Land revenue provided roughly 56% of the total. One can appreciate, therefore, how central an issue the question of land revenue systems was to British administrators. The promi- nence this question has attained in writings on the economic history of India is altogether justified. Revenue from the sale of opium (a government monopoly), constituting nearly 16% of the total, serves as a reminder of the long-standing eco- nomic significance of that product and recalls the Opium War of 1839–42 occasioned by the Chinese attempts to restrict British merchants from importing Indian opium into China. The salt tax, long a means of spreading the burden of revenue to India's masses, reflects the working of another government monopoly, which in 1930 was to become, under Gandhi's lead- ership, a focus of mass protest against British rule.

Map (b) indicates the areas of British India over which different land revenue systems operated; the notes to the left explain each system and indicate the dates of its establishment. The nature of revenue assessment in the princely states was for the princes alone to decide, and there is no simple classifi- cation that can be applied to their systems. The amounts and per capita payment of land revenue to the government, by provinces, are shown by squares of varying size and tonal pat- terns. A high degree of inequity is apparent. But one must take note that what was turned over to the government under all but the raiyatwari system bore no necessary relationship to what the individual cultivator paid. This point is made clear in the note accompanying the map legend. Map (b) may prof- itably be compared with map (a) on plate VI.A.2, dealing with the revenue system of the Mughal Empire, which in many re- spects provided the model for British revenue administration. Similarly, map (c), showing the allocation of zamindari estates by caste in the region of Delhi in 1844, may be compared with a similar map for the time of Akbar, also presented on plate VI.A.2. The degree of flux in the distribution of the dominant landholding castes over the two and a half centuries separating the two maps is considerable.

Sources

General References

E. G. Balfour (1857); W. W. Hunter (1893); E. Thornton (1844), (1857); G. Watt (1889–96); H. Yule and A. C. Burnell (1903/1968).

Government Documents

Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, East India (1853), Statement . . . (1875); India, Census (1872).

Other Works

D. O. Allen (1856); V. Anstey (1952); B. H. Baden-Powell (1892), (1913); E. Behm (1859); G. C. M. Birdwood (1884); D. H. Buchanan (1934); G. Campbell (1853); E. K. Cook (1951); M. N. Das (1959); R. C. Dutt (1969); H. M. Elliot (1869); D. R. Gadgil (1971); A. G. F. E. James (1880); G. W. MacGeorge (1894); A. S. Pearse (1930); C. N. Vakil et al. (1931).

VII.B.3. The Revolt of 1857–59; Disposition of Indian Army Troops, 1857 and 1867

The mutiny of Indian soldiers (sipāhīs/sepoys) in the Ben- gal Army and the subsequent civil rebellion that swept north central India in 1857–59 constituted the most important single event in 19th-century South Asian history. "The Mutiny may be considered either as a military revolt, or as a bid for recov- ery of their property and privileges by dispossessed princes and landlords, or as an attempt to restore the Mogul Empire, or as a peasants' war" (Thompson and Garratt 1958, p. 436). It was all four of these things and has also been called a national war of independence. Each aspect, however, must be qualified and limited.

Plate VII.B.3 attempts to show data on the Revolt of 1857–59 without bias toward any of the above positions. Map (a) shows that, rather than being nationwide, almost all cantonment mu- tinies were in the northern areas where the Bengal Army served; the armies of the Bombay and Madras Presidencies were almost unaffected and indeed were used to put down the Revolt. A number of the princes of small states, including sev- eral outside the main area of the Mutiny, joined the rebellion; but the map shows that no major prince went against the Brit- ish. The areas of the recently annexed princely states of Oudh and Jhansi were centers of rebellion, as was Rohilkhand; but much of the newly acquired Punjab remained fairly quiet. On the borders of India, Afghanistan and Nepal remained aloof from the struggle. From the former the potential danger was great; but the king, who owed his crown to the British for their support in the first Afghan War, stood by the treaties of friend- ship to them and withstood the urgings of many of his subjects to capitalize on the disorder and recover Peshawar, which had been lost to the Sikhs in 1819 and absorbed by the British in 1849. Delhi was a focal point for many mutineers, and al- though the Revolt in many areas was in the name of the Mughal emperor, he himself seems not to have been involved as insti- gator or active leader. Documentation for a "peasants' war" is scarce; although it is clear that in Oudh and Jhansi peasant loyalty was to rebellious traditional overlords, it is not evident that peasants in all the areas marked as out of British control supported the rebellion.

The major battles between troops under the British (com- posed of both British and Indian soldiers) and the troops of rebel soldiers and adherents of the rebellion are marked in two periods: by June of 1858 there was no question but that the Revolt would be crushed; yet the fighting continued for nearly another year. An Englishman noted: "Our magnificent force was capable of crushing anything, it could overtake noth- ing" (quoted in T. R. E. Holmes 1898, p. 553). The principal events related to the Revolt are indicated in the chronology, and those associated with particular places are keyed by num- ber to the map. The approximate area over which British ad- ministration was disrupted has been plotted from the relevant historical accounts. The precise limits of that area, however, are subject to individual differences of interpretation. Map (b) and the accompanying graph showing the numbers and dispo- sition of European and native troops and the location of mili- tary stations, before the outbreak of the Mutiny in 1857 and after the dust had had time to settle in 1867, shows how pro- foundly the revolt had changed the balance of forces in the army. The shift within the Bengal Presidency is particularly noteworthy.

The shock of the Revolt changed the course of Indian his- tory. The lives of both Indians and British were affected by the hate, pride, atrocities, heroism, loyalty, bravery, and racism that surfaced in 1857. The previously much-used "doctrine of lapse" that allowed the British takeover of states whose princes died without male issue was abandoned; social legislation was curbed; a sense of racial separateness grew; Muslims felt them- selves under suspicion of disloyalty. For the East India Com- pany, which had so long administered the government of India on behalf of the British crown, the Revolt was a death blow; on 1 November 1858 Queen Victoria, by proclamation, took on the direct government of British Indian territories. At the same time a wide-ranging clemency was tendered to the former rebels. In 1861, through the Indian Councils Act, an effort was formally begun to pay at least token heed to Indian opinion in the affairs of government.

There is a wealth of literature on the Revolt. It was said early in this century that no military revolt in the world's history has had so many chronicles as the Indian Mutiny. Since then, English, Indian, Pakistani, and recently American historians have added numerous volumes on the period. Three volumes, all published in India in the centennial year of 1957, illustrate the controversy the 1857 Revolt still excites. S. B. Chaudhuri comes nearest the idea of the Revolt as a national war of inde- pendence (a theory advanced by V. S. Savarkar in 1909 and supported by some British participants in the events of the Revolt) in his Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies. R. C. Majumdar denies widespread nationalist rebellion in The Se- poy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857. Surendra Nath Sen takes a middle position in his official history, titled simply Eigh- teen Fifty-Seven. In a doctoral dissertation Salahuddin Malik (1966) argues that the Revolt was essentially a Muslim upris- ing. Ainslie T. Embree has edited a volume on differing con- cepts of the Revolt (1963), and S. B. Chaudhuri has reexam- ined his own theory and those of others in Theories on the Indian Mutiny (1965). Eric Stokes has begun work on leaders and followers in the area of the Revolt (see E. R. Leach and S. N. Mukherjee 1970).

Standard British works dwell on the battles and the British commanders (see J. W. Kaye and G. B. Malleson 1897; G. W. Forrest 1904–12; and J. A. B. Palmer 1966). The Victoria Medal, given for meritorious service on the British side, indi- cates the foci of most British writing: the medallion was hung from one or more of five service bars: Central India, Lucknow, Relief of Lucknow, Defense of Lucknow, and Delhi. British memoirs as well as histories are legion. For a recent novel us- ing memoirs and letters, see J. G. Farrell on the map relating to English fiction—plate XIII.C.4—and see Richard Collier (1963) for a popular history based on manuscript bibliogra- phies. S. N. Sen evaluates the work of historians on the Revolt in C. H. Philips, ed. (1961).

A useful evaluation of the consequences of the Revolt may be found in Thomas R. Metcalf (1964). Haraprasad Chatto- padhyaya (1957) presents a social study and analysis of the Sepoy Mutiny, and I. H. Qureshi discusses the causes of the "War of Independence" chiefly from the Muslim side in vol- ume 2 of the Pakistan Historical Society's History of the Free- dom Movement.

Indian leadership and Indian memoirs of the Revolt are an ever-increasing new field of scholarship. See Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1873/1970) and (1972); Ahsanullah Khan (1958); K. Datta (1957–58); Ghalib (1970); P. C. Gupta (1963); A. M. Husain (1958); G. D. Khosla (1969); A. A. Rizvi and M. L. Bhargava (1957–60); J. G. Smyth (1966); and D. V. Tahmankar (1958).

On a popular level, the Revolt gave rise to a variety of lit- erature and folklore: novels, short stories, heroic poetry, bal- lads, and so forth. Figures such as Laxmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi, Nana Sahib, Tantia Tope, and lesser historical person- ages have been eulogized in these works as freedom fighters and had great symbolic significance during the nationalist movement.

A full review of sources for the history of the Revolt is avail- able in the annotated bibliography on The Revolt in India com- piled by Janice M. Ladendorf (1966).

Sources

Apart from the sources cited in the preceding text, see the following under Government Documents: Great Britain, Par- liament, House of Commons, Army (E. Indies) (1857–58), (1863), (1867); and Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Army (E. Indies), Select Committee on Army (In- dia and the Colonies) (1867).