Indian uprising

“ The neglect of the government,—fully occupied in suppressing the rebellion at the South,—and the immense frauds practised upon the simple natives, roused their indignation, and stirred up a hatred which culminated in the most terrible Indian massacre recorded in the annals of our country. ”

“ The raising of that flag, the booming of those guns, were the signal of the deathblow of the Indian mutiny. Over one hundred thousand rebels were still in arms against the British government, but the heart of the insurrection was gone. It was no longer a war, it was a rebellion. There was no longer a head, a center, or a common aim. Each body of mutineers fought for themselves—for life rather than for victory. ”

“ It is not usual with statesmen to propose the complete abolition of a system of government of which the practical operation is not condemned. It might therefore be generally inferred from the proposed measures, if carried into effect at the present time, that the East India Company having been intrusted with an important portion of the administration of India, have so abused their trust, as to have produced a sanguinary insurrection, and nearly lost India to the British empire ”

“ India swarms with depredators who war on the peaceful and industrious inhabitants—not merely individual thieves, but robber-tribes who infest certain provinces, directing their movements by the chances of war or of plunder. Instead of extirpating these ill-doers, as Asiatic sovereigns have sometimes attempted to do, the East India Company has been accustomed to capture and imprison them. Hence the jails are always full. At every important station we have several hundred, sometimes two or three thousand, such prisoners. The mutiny set loose these mischievous elements. ”

“ Almost every landowner had become a petty chieftain, with his fort, his guns, and his band of retainers. In no part of India, at no time during the mutiny, was the hostility of the villagers more strikingly shewn than in Oude: in other provinces the inhabitants of the villages often aided the British troops on the march; but when Havelock, Neill, and Outram were in Oude, every village on the road had to be conquered, as if held by an avowed enemy. It has been often said that the Indian outbreak was a revolt of soldiery, not a rebellion of a people ”

“ To precipitate a conflict by striking the Indians unnecessarily would in the unprotected condition of the settlers have been a crime, while to let the Indians escape to carry on in unbroken force an Indian warfare would have been worse. ”

“ When the time appears favourable, from the occurrence of misfortune to our arms, from rebellion in our provinces, or from mutiny in our troops, circular-letters and proclamations are dispersed over the country with a celerity almost incredible. Such documents are read with avidity. The contents in most cases are the same. The English are depicted as usurpers of low caste, and as tyrants who have sought India with no other view but that of degrading the inhabitants and of robbing them of their wealth, while they seek to subvert their usages and their religion. ”

“ Our power has been shewn by the suppression of that rebellion in the field; we desire to shew our mercy by pardoning the offences of those who have been thus misled, but who desire to return to the path of duty.
Already in one province, with a view to stop the further effusion of blood, and to hasten the pacification of our Indian dominions, our Viceroy and Governor-general has held out the expectation of pardon, on certain terms, to the great majority of those who in the late unhappy disturbances have been guilty of offences against our government ”

“ We have seen Hindustanis, Bundelas, Jâts, Mahrattas, Bheels, Rajpoots, and other tribes of India revolting against English authority; we have seen native princes and chiefs perplexed how to act between the suzerain power on the one hand, and the turbulent soldiery on the other; we have seen that soldiery, and the attendant rabble of marauders, influenced quite as much by love of plunder as by hate of the Company’s raj; we have seen British officers sorely wounded at heart by finding those men to be traitors whom they had trusted almost to the last hour ”

“ Nothing is more certain than that many of the insurgent bodies in India rose in arms on account of personal or local matters, bearing little relation to the great military revolt, or to the so-called national rebellion. ”

“ Nor will the full effect of this consideration be appreciated if it be not borne in mind that the Indian is intensely susceptible to severe punishment. His own wars are so bloodless, his skirmishing tactics so cowardly and resultless, that the savage fighting of the whites, their eagerness for close quarters, and their deadly earnestness when engaged hand to hand, impress him with a strange terror. ”

“ But the more deeply I studied the history of India, and went to impartial historians, like Seeley, for my information, the more I found out that a violent revolution was not needed. India had not been conquered by British arms, but by the employment of Indian mercenary troops under British direction. ”

“ Thousands of men in this part of India, who had become impoverished, almost houseless, during a year and a half of anarchy, had strong temptation to join the rebel leaders, from a hope of booty or plunder, irrespective of any national or patriotic motive. ”

“ The British conquest of India was not a military conquest in any sense of the term. They could not conquer India except by playing on the fears of some and the hopes of others, and by seeking and getting the help of Indians, both moral and material. The record is as black as it could be; but nothing succeeds like success, and all that is largely a forgotten page so far as the present generation of Indians is concerned. Only one feels disposed to smile when one hears of Indian nationalists being charged in British-Indian courts with attempting to subvert “the government established by law.” ”

“ For what are civilized and Christian nations now drenching their fields with blood?
It is said the Indian was cruel to the captive, and inflicted unspeakable tortures upon his enemy taken in battle. But, from what we know of them, it is not to be inferred that Indian chiefs were ever guilty of filling dungeons with innocent victims, or slaughtering hundreds and thousands of their own people, whose only sin was a quiet dissent from some religious dogma. Towards their enemies they were often relentless, and they had good reason to look upon white men as their enemies. ”

“ Contact with the warm-hearted people of India brings sympathy with them. From one cause or another—international rivalry and the weakness of the native Governments surrounding our original factories—we were driven into using force against them; and though a commonly accepted theory is that those who use force become brutal and tyrannical, much actual experience leads me to form a precisely opposite conclusion. There were no more sympathetic Anglo-Indian administrators than those of a century ago, who had been engaged in actual war with the people. ”

“ If we cannot govern India in that way, we ought to give up the country and come away.’
When parliament met for the usual session, in February, a question was put by the Earl of Ellenborough, concerning the policy intended to be pursued towards the rebels. Adverting to a rumour of some very wholesale series of military executions in Central India, he said: ‘Without questioning the justice of the sentence in that particular case, he doubted if capital punishment was so efficacious as a severe flogging. The natives were not afraid of death, but shrank from corporal pain. ”

“ Fraud, oppression and violence, have characterized our intercourse with the Indians, and it is in vain to hope for any amelioration of their savage condition, so long as an intercourse of this kind is permitted. In the very nature of things, the plan of civilizing the Indians, by forming a confederacy of them, beyond the limits of the United States, will prove unsuccessful, unless they are surrounded by a cordon of military posts, and the whites are stayed, by physical force, from entering their territories for any purpose whatever. ”

“ Many have raised the cry that to rebel is a great sin. But what is rebellion? Is there anything in India to rebel against? Can a Feringhee be recognized as the King of India, whose very touch, whose mere shadow compels Hindus to purify themselves?
These are merely Western Robbers looting India.... Extirpate them, ye good sons of India, wherever you find them, without mercy, and with them their spies and secret agents. Last year 19 lakhs of men died of fever, smallpox, cholera, plague, and other diseases in Bengal alone. ”

“ Another ground of violent outcry against the Indians is their barbarity to the vanquished. This had its origin partly in policy and partly in superstition. The tribes, though sometimes called nations, were never so formidable in their numbers but that the loss of several warriors was sensibly felt; this was particularly the case when they had been frequently engaged in warfare; and many an instance occurs in Indian history where a tribe that had long been formidable to its neighbors has been broken up and driven away by the capture and massacre of its principal fighting-men. ”

“ There are constant attempts to encroach upon it, constant attempts, under various pretexts, to locate upon it, and occasional attempts to exasperate the Indians into the commission of some overt act which will justify, or at least palliate, retaliation, and thus give an excuse for plunging the country into another Indian war, the end of which, they well know, would be the expulsion of the Indians from the coveted tract. ”

“ It is upon men thus exposed, without hope of escape or chance of resistance, that the first wrath of a general Indian war would break. No note of recall would avert their doom. Long before friendly runners could reach them, the war-whoop would be in their ears; and alone, unfriended, undefended, unaided, they would perish, as hundreds and thousands of our countrymen have perished, at the hands of the infuriated savages. ”

“ It had been accompanied by an unexpected display of military organisation among the revolted sepoys. It had incited many ambitious chieftains to try their chance for an increase of power. It had been encouraged and extended by the long delay in the conquest of Delhi. It had further received a certain glow of triumph from the extraordinary events at Lucknow, which left the rebels perfect masters of the city at the end of the year. It had been permitted to grow to unwonted magnitude by the extreme slowness with which British troops arrived at Indian ports. ”

“ No one will be astonished that a war ensued which cost the government thirty million dollars, and carried conflagration and death to the border settlements. During the spring and summer of 1865, no less than eight thousand troops were withdrawn from the effective force engaged in suppressing the Rebellion, to meet this Indian war. The result of the year's campaign satisfied all reasonable men that war with Indians was useless and expensive. ”

“ Undoubtedly the Indians have had a great many provocations, but, so far as restraint through fear is concerned, they have been subjected to very little of this very necessary discipline. Large bands of armed Indians have been able to keep brave but small detachments of United States troops within small camps or forts, to isolate them and taunt them for days in succession, to steal cattle, murder settlers, desolate the country, all because they had contempt for an army which was so small that it never could oppose more than a handful to any Indian raid which might suddenly be made. ”

“ These are but fear massacres out of scores, whose history, if written, would prove as clearly as do these, that, in the long contest between white men and Indians, the Indian has not always been the aggressor, and that treachery and cruelty are by no means exclusively Indian traits. ”

“ The towns-people and the surrounding villagers were perpetually affected by rumours that the mutinous 5th cavalry were coming, or the mutinous 8th infantry, or the Ramgurh mutineers, or those from Dinapoor. For, it must be borne in mind, we are now treating of a part of India inhabited chiefly by Bengalees, a race too timid to supply many fighting rebels—too fond of quiet industry willingly to belt on the sword or shoulder the matchlock. They may or may not have loved the British; if not, they would rather intrigue than fight against them. ”

“ There is at this time no semblance of authority for the punishment of any crime which one Indian may commit against another, nor any mode of procedure, recognized by treaty or statute, for the regulation of matters between the government and the several tribes. So far as the law is concerned, complete anarchy exists in Indian affairs ”

“ Whatever grievances the hundred and seventy millions of human beings in that wonderful country may have had to bear; whatever complaints may have been justifiable on their parts against their native princes or the British government; and whatever may have been the feelings of those native princes towards the British—all of which matters will have to be considered in later chapters of this work—still it remains incontestable that the outbreak was a military revolt rather than a national rebellion. ”

“ In so far as this movement is directed to the immediate subversion of British rule, we need not exaggerate its importance, unless the British Empire were involved in serious complications elsewhere which might encourage the seditious elements in India to break out into open rebellion. We are too often, in fact, inclined to underrate the strength of the foundations upon which our rule rests. ”

“ Though social reform has been checked, it has not been altogether arrested, nor can it be arrested so long as British rule, by the mere fact of its existence, maintains the ascendency of Western ideals. Happily there are still plenty of educated Indians who realize that the liberation of Indian society from the trammels which are of its own making is much more urgent than its enfranchisement from an alien yoke. ”