Question

discuss in brief the causes of 1857-58
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Answer 1

1. Political and Administrative Reasons:

The expansionist and annexationist policies of the British power in India made all the Indian rulers, big and small, Hindu and Muslim look with suspicion and develop hatred towards the British power in India. Naturally, this type of reaction is justified as the Indians are the losers and the British gainers. Tara Chand observes, “Each region became, after annexation, a scene of resistance and revolt, in which land holders and peasants were involved and in which the disbanded soldiers of the landlords, the ministers of religion and the dismissed dependents participated”, as a result of the British occupation by annexation.

2. Economic Causes:

Added to political and administrative distrust for the British East India Company, the economic policies of the British resulted in impoverishing all the segments of the Indian society except a handful of collaborators among the Indians. Owing to their colonial policies of economic exploitation, industry, trade commerce and agriculture languished and India became de-industrialized, impoverished and debt-ridden, while, William Bentinck himself admitted that by 1833-34 “The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India”.

3. Social and Religious Causes:

Added to thepolitical and administrative distrust and hatred, the economic exploitation, the social and religious discrimination of superiority complex viewing the Indians as racially inferior and culturally backward and their belief that God had created the white men to civilize the Indians and intol­erance of the idolatry of the Hindus by the Christian missionaries also created distrust between the natives and the British.

4. Military and Immediate Causes:

Besides the above political and administrative, economic, social and religious grievances, another major cause was the unrest of the sepoys in the army of the British. We are aware that the action of Mangal Pandey, a sepoy of Barrackpore near Calcutta on 29 March, 1857 led to the mutiny of sepoys in the beginning which precipitated the revolt of the people. Mangal Pandey’s action was not a spontaneous outburst against the British officer but it was a culmination of a simmering discontent brewing in the sepoys. Mangal Pandey was a represen­tative of the totality of the sepoys’ wrath against the British.

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