by Jon Wilson
After the 1824 regulation, millions of stamped documents went into circulation. At points of friction, Indians resisted their use. Occasionally, stores of stamped paper were ransacked by rebels and criminals. The enforcement of stamp regulations was named as one of the grievances that contributed to the rebellion of 1857–8 that briefly eradicated British power in north India. In that period the distribution of stamped paper was read by insurgents as a sign of the infinite desire of the British state to penetrate and transform every corner of Indian social life. But before and after the great storm of rebellion the British imagined that the distribution of these small objects of imperial power marked their effective dominance of Indian society. It was seen as a sign of their power to limit fraud, for example. A document stamped and registered could not be easily copied or altered, or so it was thought. The circulation of stamped paper connected with a British idea of empire as a system of ordered government, which had replaced the supposedly chaotic and arbitrary systems of pre-British rule.
It is hard to say what kind of power this vast network of circulating paper actually exercised. Stamped paper did not reduce corruption; it merely created a new field for deception, as forgers tried to copy the stamps themselves. Officers had no use for the information they collected about the transactions they were trying to regulate. There was no way of ensuring transactions certified were not themselves coerced.
The neat registers kept in the Company’s officers allowed British officials to imagine they had created an effective, unitary structure of rule; they fostered a delusion of power. In fact, all stamped paper did was to force Indians to use paper money and write on paper emblazoned with the word ‘Government’; it did not imply submission to British rule. Cash payment could as easily be made to another state. The paper produced by the ‘native states’ that surrounded British-ruled territory used almost identical forms, yet many had a tense relationship with British power. In many places, the rebel governments of 1857 tried to keep up the Company’s stamp paper rules. The British governed by representing their power in an abstract, disembodied form, avoiding the need to ask for the consent of the people they ruled. But their very abstraction meant British institutions could be taken up and used to achieve very different purposes, sometimes to challenge British power.53
8
FEAR AND TREMBLING
In April 1857 fires broke out in the soldiers’ quarters at Lucknow, capital of the newly conquered province of Awadh. The bungalow of the regimental surgeon was torched. A second incendiary wave began at the beginning of the next month. On 2 May one regiment of Indian infantry protested against using rifle cartridges they believed were contaminated with pig and cow fat. Another regiment, the 48th Native Infantry, was ordered to fire on the rebels. The following night the huts of the 48th were set alight in retribution for their suppression of the demonstration. Sir Henry Lawrence had arrived two months before as Chief Commissioner of Awadh, and walked through the lines that night. The men were, he said, ‘very civil’ though downcast at the loss of their homes and property to the fire.
Eventually Lawrence came across an Indian artillery officer, a forty-something Brahmin ‘of excellent character’. The two men talked for an hour. Lawrence was surprised by ‘the dogged persistence’ with which the soldier argued the British government was trying to convert the natives to Christianity. The British had conquered India by fraud, defeating princes at Bharatpur, Punjab and Awadh, the officer said. They wanted to turn Indian soldiers into an obedient force that would do as they were commanded. European soldiers were too expensive. Instead, the British ‘wished to take Hindoos to sea to conquer the world’ and could only do that if Indians ate what Europeans ate and did what Europeans did. This, the soldier said, was ‘what everybody says’. Another soldier wondered if the aim of the British was ‘to join London to Bengal’. Lawrence said he had heard similar views for a long while.1
Two days later and 280 miles away Indian soldiers at the garrison of Meerut rose up and killed their British officers. They then marched forty miles to Delhi, where they enlisted the support of the city’s mob and Bahadur Shah Zafar, the 82-year-old Mughal sovereign. Until that moment the Mughal empire possessed theoretical sovereignty over the whole of India, but its practical force extended no further than the outer limits of Delhi’s Red Fort. Illuminated with the lustre of Zafar’s authority the 300 Meerut mutineers became the core of an insurrection that overturned the East India Company’s government throughout north India and restored some kind of Mughal power throughout the empire’s old heartland. Lucknow and the surrounding province fell to insurgents on 30 June. The city’s 2,000 British inhabitants barricaded themselves into a sixty-acre plot of land centred on the Lucknow residency, where they were besieged until 27 November. The city itself was only recaptured in March 1858. Henry Lawrence did not last anywhere near that long. He was killed by shellfire on 4 July.
Ever-present precariousness
The insurrection of 1857–8 is often seen as an abrupt punctuation in the history of British power in India. Early commentators compared it to a natural rather than a human catastrophe: 1857 was described as a forest fire, a crashing wave, a bursting storm. ‘Little, I am certain, did any man there’, a Collector from Bihar suggested, ‘dream of the wild storm about to burst over us.’
To begin with, Britons were not sure how to explain it, or even how to describe it. An immediate response was to describe each individual garrison’s revolt as a series of ‘mutinies’, but the insurrection as a whole was described with different words, sometimes as a rebellion or revolt, but more frequently simply a crisis or calamity. From the mid-1860s, Britons began to talk about the events of 1857 as ‘the mutiny’ and to attribute it to human causes.
By then one explanation began to gain prominence. The insurrection, British writers argued, was sparked by British efforts to impose modern European practices and values. India began to be described as a traditional society which violently resisted the change overeager Britons had forced on it. This version of events spread particularly with John Kaye’s History of the Sepoy War, a work published in a series of volumes from 1864 onwards. Kaye argued that ‘it was the vehement self-assertion of the Englishman that produced this conflagration’. Indians, he argued, rose in resistance against English education, against British efforts to impose the rule of law, against modern forms of communication and the attempt to abolish ‘barbarous’ rituals such sati and to proselytize Christianity. Critical of the East India Company in many places, Kaye nonetheless excused the British from causing the mutiny because their actions were intended to do good. Such an interpretation has more or less prevailed in the 150 years since.2
Kaye’s story was an attempt to justify the great crisis by extolling the virtues of its cause. In fact, though, there is little evidence to suggest the East India Company attempted to transform Indian society before 1857; nor is there any evidence that Indians rose up against efforts at reform. Rather, insurgents like Sir Henry Lawrence’s artillery officer fought against the increasingly authoritarian way the British clung to power. The rebellion of 1857–8 was created by Britons’ fearful over-attention to dissent rather than their blithe efforts at reform.3
The 1857 rebellion was not a revolt against a confident regime intent on spreading capitalism, civilization and modernity throughout the world. It was an insurgency against an anxious regime’s counter-productive efforts to hold on to power. It was driven by the East India Company’s fearful effort to destroy any centres of authority in India that displayed the smallest flicker of independence, whether self-governing states, little kings, landholders or in its own army. It was led by the lower-middle-class men whose status and livelihood were most severely corroded by the tactics the British used to protect their rule. Uneven in its spread, the insurrection was concentrated in the regions of north India where the East India Company had recently imposed itself with greatest force but then left too little military manpower to hold onto its power.
A few British commentators understood the causes of the rebellion very well. The Protestant Irish doctor Montgomery Martin was one of them. Martin championed a vision of empire ruled by free trade and self-government rather than Britain’s monopolistic power. Serving in Ceylon, East Africa and Australia before working in Calcutta, Martin became friendly with the reformist circle around Rammohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore in Bengal. Informed by these liberal Indian connections, Martin’s account of the 1857 rebellion was critical of the way the East India Company exercised power in India. As he put it:
The constant preponderance of expenditure over income, and an ever-present precariousness, have been probably the chief reasons why the energies of the Anglo-Indian government have, of late years, been most mischievously directed to degrading kings, chiefs, nobles, gentry, priests and landholders of various degrees.
In Martin’s account, the mutiny was caused by the perennial British sense of danger in India, not self-confidence. Their anxiety, Martin argued, led them to act out of character in India. A people who developed a flexible form of government in their own country became rigid and paranoid in Asia. An elite which respected tradition in Britain had ‘rolled, by sheer brute force, an iron grinder over the face of Hindoo society’ in the subcontinent, intent on ‘crush[ing] every lineament into a disfigured mass’ in order to sustain ‘a small white oligarchy and an immense army of mercenary troops’. In fact, this description massively overstated the extent of British force before 1857, but it conveys a good sense of the kind of regime Indian insurgents thought they needed to challenge. It also explains why the violence was so brutal. Each side thought it was fighting for its survival.4
The idea of a homogeneous Indian peninsula
Montgomery Martin was also right about the effects of financial insecurity and political vulnerability on British policy. After the fiscal crises of the late 1820s, Governor-General Bentinck had reduced posts and salaries to create a short period of fiscal stability. But the cutbacks in spending together with the agricultural depression of the late 1830s weakened India’s economy, and shrank the Company’s income from land tax. Bentinck’s fiscal discipline was not followed by his successors, and spending on steamships and roads did not bring any financial return. From the late 1830s, the Company’s expenditure grew more quickly than its revenue, and debt was expanding once again. By 1846, the annual deficit of expenditure over income peaked at £2.58 million. In 1850 the total debt hit £50 million, more than twice the Company’s annual income, and the Company was forced to borrow at the relatively high rate of 5 per cent. The consequence was an effort to find additional sources of cash, and to do so by squeezing existing Indian hierarchies.5
Revenue and Expenditure, 1830–1874.6
The decade before 1857 saw an intensification of the British effort to extract revenue from rural India. Teams of surveyors were sent into territories to be settled, measuring every field and assessing how much they were due to pay. In north Indian villages two-thirds of the total produce of the land was supposed to be taken by the government. Trying to collect that money directly from villagers, British officers dismissed zamindars and other local lords as ‘a host of unproductives’. Many were dispossessed and pensioned off with sums far smaller than their previous income. Those who survived saw a serious cut in their living standards. The result was the suppression of a class of individuals who were occasionally rapacious, but usually essential to the flow of local resources needed to maintain the living standards of rural society.7
Even where they could not dispossess local lords, Company officers attacked other sources of mutual dependence between landholders and peasants. Privileged, low-rent forms of land tenure had long been essential to the management of rural society, allowing local figures to pay low rents or none at all and redistribute resources to the poor and lower middle class. Rent-free land allowed local leaders to fund institutions essential for the functioning of local society: schools, religious institutions, village officials. As historian David Washbrook argues, they provided a safety vent which allowed people to subsist in times of economic crisis, supporting India’s squeezed lower middle classes. But in the cash-strapped 1840s, the British saw these land grants as fraudulent devices which nefarious native elites used to undermine the Company’s power. Commissions and inquiries were set up to look into supposedly corrupt land claims, and taxes increased where the legitimacy of a claim to revenue-free land could not be proved.8
In western India a commission was set up to look into landholding around Dharwad, near Hubli, in the southern Maratha lands in 1843, and later extended to the whole of Bombay presidency. Thirty-five thousand plots of land were investigated by a tribunal of three European officers, sitting day after day making quick judgment about who owned what and how much they should pay in taxes. By 1847, 20,000 plots were declared to be held illegally. The government did not have the power to put these paper decisions into practice. Only 23,334 rupees was ordered for immediate resumption, half of the total sum identified as fraudulently lost to the public coffers. But the effect on local opinion was profound. By 1856, a visiting British officer found the district ‘in a very excitable and discontented frame of mind’ because of the commission’s work. The following year the landholders of Dharwad were still angry. Most stayed nominally loyal to the East India Company throughout the rebellion, but their submission was extracted by fear not affection, particularly by the presence of a detachment of European troops and the brutal, exemplary execution of a small number of men suspected of plotting insurrection. Outside Dharwad town the region was in open revolt, as bands of insurgent leaders toured the countryside enlisting soldiers in the rebel army. The first Indian commentator on the causes of the revolt argued that the resumption of revenue-free land was the insurrection’s greatest cause.9
The Company did not only attempt to dispossess potential challengers in British-ruled territory. It also affected the British attitude to ‘native states’ throughout South Asia. The conquests of the 1800s and 1810s had not completed the East India Company’s subordination of Indian territory. Well into the 1840s a third of India was still governed by sovereigns who retained their independence, but had to suffer the close attention of a British Resident, constantly looking out for any sign for conspiracies to undermine the Company’s power. Potentially disloyal regimes were dispossessed, and neighbouring land occupied. Punjab, Sindh and Awadh were the most prominent threats. British officers were particularly concerned when a monarch died, and the loyalty of the new incumbent could not be assured. They worried that the death of a prince without a natural heir gave groups of people opposed to British rule an opportunity to conspire. These moments offered the British the chance to remove the source of threat and consolidate their power. In 1834 the Court of Directors had allowed the Company in India to annex the territories of heirless rulers, a process accelerated after 1847 when a new, more aggressive Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, took charge. Dalhousie talked about ‘the idea of a homogeneous Indian peninsula’. He imagined the British would only be safe if they were the sole sovereign power. In the eight years he was in charge, Dalhousie annexed more than any other single Governor-General, a quarter of a million square miles.10
Maratha states were particularly vulnerable to the rigid application of what became known as ‘the doctrine of lapse’. The reduced regime of Satara was the last possession of the direct heirs of the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji. Given its historic prestige, the British always saw Satara as a centre of possible opposition. Reports about its raja manoeuvring against the Company had inspired John Malcolm’s fear of the collapse of British power in 1828, at the time of the Moro Raghunath case. Twenty years later the death of the last king of Satara was followed by a minor rebellion and the Company decided to take over, sending the king’s family into exile. The same thing happened at Jhansi five years later, when Raja Gangadhar Rao died childless. His wife, Rani Lakshmibhai, was given a pension of 60,000 rupees but evicted from her husband’s ancestral for
t along with the young boy she had adopted. Lakshmibhai became one of the most notable rebel leaders. As famous was Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the last Peshwa. Despite frantic lobbying in Calcutta and London Nana Sahib was denied a pension by the Company, and went on to lead the fight against the British in the northern city of Kanpur.
The same kind of paranoia drove the British desire to consolidate power on the frontiers of Company territory. The invasions of Sikh-ruled Punjab in the west and Burma in the east were promulgated by fears about neighbouring states plotting ferment in British-ruled lands. Tension grew in Punjab during the succession struggle that followed the death of the founder of the Sikh empire, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, in 1839. Conflict had broken out between Punjab’s Persian-speaking royal court and middle-class Punjabi-speaking soldiers who claimed to act on behalf of the collective body of armed Sikh men, the khalsa. The British thought the rise of the khalsa threatened their own territories. Sikh soldiers thought the British were planning to invade Punjab. The first Anglo-Sikh war of 1845–6 ended with British victory, the Sikh state’s partial dismemberment and growing resentment at British involvement in Punjab’s affairs. The second Anglo-Sikh war began when British officers were attacked by anxious troops in Multan. Company soldiers began to seize forts in Punjab, Sikh soldiers starting fighting in response and local chiefs supported heavily armed locals instead of an alien power. Dalhousie described what happened: ‘[t]he question was for us no longer one of policy or expediency, but one of national safety. Accordingly, the Government put forward its power.’ British power was asserted in a ‘struggle severe and anxious’, a short and brutal war in which few prisoners were taken on either side. Punjab became a British province in March 1849, and Dalhousie was promoted to the British peerage, from Earl to Marquess.11
