British India

The War of 1857 and its consequences to 1876 (II)
Key issues
  • British India in 1857;
  • The course of the rebellion and reasons for its failure;
  • The consequences of the Uprising in India and internationally including impact on British attitudes and methods of rule.
1857 Aftermath

For many contemporaries, 1857 was seen as a turning point for empire – not only in India but globally. The abundant scholarship that has been written about these events has further reinforced the idea that the Uprising marked a profound change or shift in imperial government. But how far is this view borne out by events? This question will be considered in this section.
 
British popular perception
Perhaps the most profound way in which 1857 impacted colonial rule in India was its impact on British popular perception of Indian society, and the civilising mission more generally. Until the Uprising, it was argued that one of the main goals of government was to educate and enlighten Indian subjects to make them more like Europeans. Following natural law traditions and ideas of social contract, it was assumed that all societies began from the same basis and moved along the same trajectory of social development. It was thought that some societies (i.e. Europeans) ‘advanced’ more quickly than others. Members of these societies could thus teach ‘under-developed’ peoples how to modernise. 
 
Imperial anxiety and social difference
As already noted above, the violence of 1857 helped to undermine this idea. In Britain, many people felt that Indians had failed to recognise and accept their subordinate position vis-à-vis European society – on this basis they could condone the very brutal methods of retribution used by the Company to ‘punish’ Indian captives involved in the Uprising on the basis that this would help to re-instil the proper civilising order. 
 
Many people also felt very threatened and scared by the violence. Stories about what had happened during the Uprising were framed in terms of an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ narrative. From 1857 there was a stronger sense of difference between Indian and British society and, with this, an idea that the peoples of these societies did not necessarily share the same ‘path’ to modernity. From the middle of the nineteenth century we start to see a more rigid understanding of social, and increasingly racial, difference begin to emerge – in India, and other imperial contexts – as well as growing anxiety about how to manage that difference.  
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Internet Resources
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1858: Beginning of the Raj (BBC History).

Government of India Act, 1858 (21 & 22 Vict. c. 106) (a web archive).

Full text of the 1858 Proclamation (Briitsh Library).

Gandhi's response to the Proclamation (Gandhi’s Collected Works Vol. 3 online edition, p. 134.)

Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India (Open University).

​Report of the 'Proclamation of Queen Victoria as 'Empress of India.'  the Spectator (30 December 1876).

The Delhi Durbar and the Proclamation of Queen Victoria (a Library of Congress blog, with links to Library sources).


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These ideas played a role in what has long been seen as the most concrete impact of 1857, that is changes in the structure of the Indian state, and the shift to Crown rule. The period from 1858-1947 is known as the British Raj. As we saw, in our discussion of the reactions to 1857 above, that British politicians were highly critical of the East India Company and its handling of the Uprising. They argued that Company rule was corrupt and incompetent, but they did not criticise imperial rule itself. The decision to transfer all authority from the East India Company to the British Crown carried the implication that Crown rule would be different and better than Company rule. It was important for the Crown to show this was the case.

The transition to Crown Rule
One of the key ways in which Crown rule differed from Company rule was in terms of its structure. There had been concerns about how the East India Company was regulated. The 1858 Government of India Act set out a clear governmental framework. The post of Governor General in India was transformed into that of a Viceroy. A new cabinet post was created, the Secretary of State for India, who was responsible for Indian government – creating a direct line of responsibility from Calcutta to the British Parliament in London.
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As well as changing the structure of colonial rule Queen Victoria, in her new capacity as Empress of India (though this title was not officially bestowed on her until 1876), passed the 1858 Proclamation which professed a policy of ‘non-interference’in the customs and traditions of Indians. In many ways, this reflected the popular perception that the major ‘cause’ of the 1857 Uprising had been the Company’s disregard for Indian religious sensibilities, such as with the suspected use of beef and pig fat to grease their bullets. The Proclamation was seen as a promise not to repeat this kind of behaviour and, later on, some Indians, including Gandhi, argued that this provided a kind of Magna Carta for Indians, that secured their freedom of religious and cultural practices. But it also speaks to the growing view that Indian society was fundamentally different to British society and the idea that imperial rule required not uplift and social change but careful management of societies that could potentially remain ‘backward’ to European ones forever.
 
Princely States
Queen Victoria was also careful to reward those Indian Princes who had remained loyal during the uprising, securing their privy purses and promising that, unlike the expansionist Company state, the new government would not challenge their territorial control. The so-called ‘Princely States’comprised one third of the territory of British India. While nominally autonomous, the Princely States were essentially puppet states that had to recognise British suzerainty and cede control over critical aspects of military, foreign and economic policy to the Raj. ​
British Indian Army
Another key structural shift to follow from 1858 involved the organisation of the British Indian Army. Prior to the Uprising, British soldiers comprised about 1/6thof the Army. This was now restructured to ensure that there was a high European to Indian ratio, this never fell short of 1:2 until WWI. New recruitment policiessought to ensure all regiments contained a mix of caste and community groups, to try to prevent a situation in which soldiers would be likely to join together and fire on their British commanding officers. Reorganised on this basis, the British Indian Army was used to protect British imperial interests around the globe. Britain used Indian troops to intervene in Sudan in 1896, during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, during the Boer War in South Africa during 1899-1902.  It used them in Egypt in 1882, in Afghanistan in the 1870s, for the final conquest of Burma in the 1880s, in the Persian Gulf especially in Iran, Bahrain, Kuwait, Muscat and Aden in the first decade of the twentieth century. The costs of all these military expenditures were borne by Indian tax payers.  
Internet Resources
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National Army Museum has excellent visual collections on Indian Armies, Indian Art and Black Asian British Army.
Together with changing attitudes to social difference, changes in army recruitment policy provided fertile ground for the development of pseudoscientific theories about the martial races of India. Prior to 1857, a large number of troops in the Company’s Army had been drawn from upper caste communities in eastern and northern India. In the decades before the Uprising, the Company had begun to diversify its recruitment. From around 1815 onwards, it recruited men from the Gurkha community, at the north of the subcontinent. After the annexation of Punjab in 1849 many Sikhs were encouraged to join the Army. One of the factors that is thought to have influenced the Uprising was precisely this shift in the army’s labour base: many soldiers from Brahmin and upper-caste communities in north and eastern India felt their professional opportunities (and the career prospects of family members) to be threatened by the fact that the Company was beginning to hire from other communities. Many of the solders involved in the Uprising were from these backgrounds, while Punjabi and Gurkha troops remained loyal to their British officers. These latter soldiers were rewarded with tracts of irrigated farmland in Punjab. Regiments formed from Bengali and other upper caste north Indian communities were largely disbanded. This shift in recruitment was justified in racial terms: it was argued that Bengalis were too effeminate to fight. Sikh men and those from Punjab were now recast as natural warriors, as martial races.
Internet Resources
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​Privy Council Papers (Exeter University). 
Legal System
Another important change that followed from 1857 was the restructuring of the Indian legal system. From 1772, the Company had tried to maintain and work within the Mughal legal structure. In 1862, the existing system was abolished and replaced with three provincial High Courts, in the capitals of the three Presidency regions of Bengal, Bombay and Madras. A hierarchy of lower courts reported to the High Courts, and litigants had the right to take appeals from these courts to the Privy Council in London. Over the coming decades, other High Courts were added to this framework, operating in the non-Presidency regions, such as the Allahabad High Court of the United Provinces. In 1864, the use of Indian legal experts in the courts was also abandoned. These figures were replaced by legal texts and glossaries of Hindu and Muslim law, most of which had been compiled by European scholars. In this sense, Indian religious identities and practices became increasingly codified.
How far did these changes represent a real schism with the practices of the East India Company state? Clearly the institutions of the British Raj looked very different to, and were much more clearly demarcated than, those of the Company state. Yet, the principal aim of these changes (to give the British Parliament tighter control over the government of India) reflected a process that had started long before this, from the passage of the Regulating Act of 1773 onwards. To some extent, therefore, the transfer of power to the Crown can be seen as the culmination of long running trends, rather than a break with past practice.
 
On the other hand, the restructuring of the state that followed 1857 enabled a very different kind of governmental practice to take shape. The British Raj was, above all, more systematically bureaucratic in its outlook. The imperial hierarchy on which its institutions were built required it to produce reams of paperwork on a daily basis, as local collectors reported to senior officers, who reported to officers in the Presidency capitals, who reported to seniors in Calcutta, and later Delhi, who reported to MPs in London. ‘Knowing’ the country became a central project for this new imperial age.  Comprehensive census operations counted and sorted the population by ethnic group, sect, gender, age, location, custom, caste.  This information was processed and disseminated in publications such as H.H. Risley, Castes and Tribes of Bengal and the Imperial Gazetteers. The first Census was taken in 1871 and took place every ten years after that. There was an increasing systematisation of ‘caste’ as officials attempted to document, with a supposed scientific precision, the different natural characteristics of castes, races, tribes and sects. ‘Characteristic specimens’ could demonstrate precisely the physiognomy, dress and manners of the community, their marriage practices, occupational practices. The first major production of these images was in The People of India published by the Government of India in 1868 in eight volumes.
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Internet Resources
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The Imperial Gazetteer of India (26 vols). New edition. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1908-1931 [v. 1, 1909] (Digital South Asia Library).

H. H. Risley, Castes and Tribes of Bengal, vol 1 and vol 2.

The full set of Census of India can be found from the British Library. Online documents for reports 1871-1901: Census of India Reports from 1871 to 1901 (La Trobe University).
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The people of India (8 vols), 1868-1875.
​South Asian American Digital Archive is an on-going project documenting and sharing stories of South Asian communities in US, including archival materials as early as 1680.
In some ways, these developments were similar to those taking place in other societies around the same time, including in Europe: the growth of state power, the desire to categorise and ‘discipline’ the population. The distinctly racialised framework of colonial rule, and the emphasis on British and Indian ‘difference’ was certainly different however.
Yet, in spite of this focus on racial difference, the growth of colonial power could not have happened without the cooperation of some sections of Indian society. One thing you always hear about colonialism is that at any one time there were very few Europeans in India. This remained the case, even with the restructuring after 1857. In 1911, the peak of imperial power, British residents in India numbered only 185,000, which was less than 1% of Britain’s population, and only 0.06% of India’s. So how did so few people manage to reshape society and public perception? British people did not work alone. Through patronage and co-optation, colonial officials drew Indians into the ranks of imperial power. Some of these Indians were elites, such as the Native Princes, some were not, such as the Punjabi soldiers who entered the ranks of the British Indian Army in growing numbers.
​The expansion of state administration also created new job opportunities. While all senior ranks were held by British officials, growing numbers of Indians took up jobs as government clerks, as lawyers and administrators. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was men from precisely these social ranks that began to call for greater Indian representation in the colonial state and to make new arguments about the place of the ‘Indian nation’ in the British Empire and more globally. 
Internet Resources

The Tagore family of Bengal was one such 'colonial elite' family in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its notable members include Satyendranath, the first Indian to join the Indian Civil Service; and his younger brother Rabindranath, the first Nobel laureate from Asia.  

​Header image: James Baillie Fraser, View of Esplanade Row, from the Chouringhee Road, 1826. 13690 (SOAS art account number), SOAS Library.