The uprising began at Meerut on 10 May 1857, when sepoys of the East India Company’s Bengal army mutinied, marched to Delhi and proclaimed the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as their sovereign. It spread across northern and central India over the following weeks, drawing together sepoys with displaced rulers, landlords and peasant communities.
Its causes were multiple and they differed by region. For the sepoys there were grievances over pay, promotion and the conditions of overseas service; the immediate trigger was the introduction of the Enfield rifle, whose cartridges were greased and had to be bitten, amid a widely held belief that the grease contained animal fat. For rulers such as Nana Sahib at Kanpur, Begum Hazrat Mahal at Lucknow and Rani Lakshmibai at Jhansi, the Company’s doctrine of lapse and its annexations had removed pensions and titles. For peasants and artisans, the dislocations of Company revenue settlement and the collapse of older patronage networks were the substance of the grievance.
Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow and Jhansi became the principal theatres. Delhi was retaken in September 1857 after a siege; Lucknow fell in March 1858; Jhansi in April. Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried and exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862. Fighting continued into 1858 and in some districts into 1859, and the suppression was carried out with heavy loss of life on all sides, much of it civilian.
Its most durable consequence was institutional. The Government of India Act 1858 abolished the East India Company and transferred India to the direct rule of the British Crown, with a secretary of state in London and a viceroy in Calcutta. The army was reorganised to reduce reliance on the Bengal army, and the Crown committed itself — in the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 — to non-interference in religious matters and to respecting the rights of princely rulers, who became pillars of the new order rather than targets of annexation.
In Indian historiography the events of 1857–58 are read both as a failed rebellion and as an early, broad-based assertion against colonial rule. Whether it should be called a mutiny, a revolt or a war of independence has been argued over since the nineteenth century, and the answer usually reveals more about the period of the writer than about 1857.
