How Did The British Change Their Approach To Ruling India After 1857

Disaffection

Photograph showing reconstruction parade of Indian soldiers Any endeavor to explain the revolt of 1857 as traditional India's rejection of modernistic reform is far too crude. Impulses towards change before and then had been weak and uneven. In Bengal and in the due south, which had long been nether British rule, in that location were no revolts. In the areas that did rebel in 1857, the British seem to have succeeded in creating disaffection, and deposed noble Indians from their thrones, without every bit nonetheless attracting significant back up.

To be a soldier in the Bengal regular army had become an occupation to which high status was attached.

In the most recent British acquisition of all, the kingdom of Awadh (Oudh), annexed in 1856, not only had the ruler been deposed but many landowners had lost control over what they regarded as their estates. Taxes were high throughout the region, and at that place were few opportunities for the enterprising to brand a profit. Western influences were limited in the towns, but the showtime Christian missions had appeared there, and new colleges had opened, which seemed to be an unwelcome intrusion to many devout Hindus and Muslims. They too fed fears of a Christian offensive and of forced conversions.

Northern India had a long tradition of spasmodic disorder and resistance to government. These upheavals would probably have become more intense in the mid 19th century, but could accept been contained if the British had not alienated a group of people on whom their security depended. These people were the soldiers, or sepoys, of the Bengal army, whose mutiny eventually set off the 1857 rebellion.

The Bengal regular army was recruited not from Bengal itself but from northern India, especially from Awadh. To be a soldier in the Bengal regular army had become an occupation to which high status was attached. The sepoys saw themselves as an élite. Over many years the Bengal army had fought faithfully for the British, but on their ain terms. They would not become overseas and they required an elaborate train of military camp followers, and by 1857 the British loftier command was losing patience with this.

Supplies of more flexible soldiers who would not stand on their privileges were becoming available in Nepal and the Punjab, and the Bengal army was told it must modernise - by accepting obligations to serve outside India, and by using a new burglarize. The spark that ignited the soldiers' not bad fear - that their cherished status was to exist undermined - was the rumour apropos the apply of pig and cow fat, forbidden in the Muslim and Hindu religions respectively, as lubricant on the cartridges for the new rifles. Cantonment after cantonment rebelled. When the soldiers refused to acknowledge British say-so, the way was left open for disaffected princes and aristocrats, and for village and town people with grievances, to revolt aslope the soldiers.

A new majestic government

Photograph showing Indian cavalry at the coronation George VI in 1936 Indian cavalry at the coronation of George VI in 1936 © After the rebellion had been put downwards, the new royal government of India that replaced that of the East Republic of india Company promised that it had no intention of imposing 'our convictions on any of our subjects'. Information technology distanced itself farther from the Christian missionaries. A stop was put to the deposing of princes, and greater care was shown to the rights of landlords. The major role of the regular army was in hereafter to be drawn from so-called 'martial races'. The huge parades, or durbars, at which the new empress of Republic of india received the allegiance of the hierarchies of traditional India through her viceroy, seemed to symbolise the new conservatism of the regime.

To be a soldier in the Bengal army had become an occupation to which high condition was attached.

Yet beneath the trappings of conservatism, Indian order inverse much more rapidly in the 2nd half of the 19th century than it had done in the first. The British had much more to offer Indians. Imports of Western technology had been limited before the 1850s. Thereafter a great railway system was constructed - 28,000 miles of track being laid by 1904 - and major canal schemes were instituted that more doubled the area under irrigation in the terminal 20 years of the century. The railways, the vastly increased capacity of steamships, and the opening of the Suez Culvert linked Indian farmers with globe markets to a much greater degree. A pocket-size, merely significant, minority of them could profit from such opportunities to sell surplus crops and acquire boosted land. Some industries developed, notably Indian-owned material manufacturing in western India. The horrific scale of the famines of the 1880s and 1890s showed how express any economic growth had been, but the stagnation of the early 19th century had been broken.

Universities, colleges and schools proliferated in the towns and cities, near of them opened by Indian initiative. They did not produce replica English men and women, as Macaulay had hoped, only Indians who were able to utilize English in addition to their own languages, to primary imported technologies and methods of organisation and who were willing to prefer what they constitute attractive in British culture. The dominant intellectual movements cannot be chosen Westernisation. They were revival or reform movements in Hinduism and Islam, and were the development of cultures that found expression in Indian languages.

Within the constraints of a colonial order, a modern India was emerging by the end of the 19th century. British rule of course had an of import function in this process, but the country that was emerging fulfilled the aspirations of Indians, rather than colonial designs of what a modern India ought to be.