1857 REVOLT

• Corruption was rampant in the Company's administration, particularly among the police, minor officials, and subordinate courts, which was a major source of dissatisfaction.
• Many historians believe that the current corruption levels in India result from the Company's control.
• Furthermore, the nature of British rule gave it a distant and alien appearance in the view of Indians: a form of absentee sovereignty.

3.4 Socio-religious causes

• The British administration's attitude toward the native Indian population had racial overtones and a superiority mentality.
• Indians viewed the activity of Christain missionaries in India who flew the British flag with distrust.
• A considerable segment of the populace saw initiatives at socio-religious change, such as the elimination of sati, support for window marriage, and women's education, as outsiders interfering in the social and religious spheres of Indian culture.
• These fears were exacerbated by the government's decision to tax mosque and temple lands and the passage of laws like the Religious Disabilities Act of 1856, which altered Hindu customs by declaring, for example, that a change of religion did not prevent a son from inheriting his 'heathen father's property.

4. Siege of Delhi

• The hard-fought recapture of Delhi by the British army was a decisive moment in the suppression of the 1857-58 Indian Mutiny against British rule. It extinguished Indian dreams of recreating the rule of the Mughal Empire. The rebellion lost its cohesion, allowing the British to defeat any remaining isolated pockets of resistance.
• After the capture of Delhi by rebels in May, the British were unable to launch a counterattack because their army was dispersed over vast distances. It took quite some time for the British to assemble an army, but in June, two columns were combined with a force of Ghurkas.
• The makeshift force managed to occupy a ridge overlooking the city but was not large enough to launch an assault, marking the beginning of the siege on June 8.
• Inside the city were more than 30,000 mutineers loyal to Bahadur Shah, who was holding court as the Mughal emperor.
• A large number of mutineers meant that the British force felt as though they were the ones under siege, and as the weeks wore on, the British began to suffer from outbreaks of cholera and dysentery.
• However, reinforcements slowly arrived from Punjab, including a siege train of thirty-two guns and 2,000 more men under the command of Brigadier General John Nicholson.
• By early September, the British had assembled a force of some 9,000, which consisted of 3,000 regular troops and 6,000 Sikhs, Punjabis, and Ghurkas. 
• The siege guns began firing on September 8, and by September 14, had made sufficiently large breaches in the walls to launch an attack.
• The assault was met with stiff resistance but by September 21, after a week of savage street-to-street fighting, Delhi was back under British control. Bahadur Shah was arrested and died in exile in Rangoon in 1862. He was the last of the Mughal Emperors.

5. An altered Landscape and culture in the city

• The post-revolt decades of the 1860s and 70s were also the time when much of the public works in Delhi were established by the British.
• The first public works stemmed as much from considerations of military exigency as commercial and civil administrative needs writes Gupta.
• The railway line, for instance, was built through the city rather than outside because it made for greater security in the case of another uprising. 
• New roads were built through the most densely populated parts of the city, much to the distress of the local inhabitants.
• In 1865, a general hospital was established in Chandni Chowk to replace the dispensary that existed there before 1857, and in 1867 the Sadar Bazar was inaugurated to formalize the shops that had sprung up to cater to the needs of the army.

7. Objectives of British

• The primary objective of the British in the period after 1857 was to wipe out the memory of the Mughals from Delhi.
• Thereafter begins a conscious commemoration of British sites of valor.
• Perhaps the most striking example of this was the four-tiered gothic-style monument, the Mutiny Memorial built by the British government on the Ridge where it continues to stand today.
• It listed out with statistics those who were killed in the revolt. It was only 25 years after the Independence of India that the government renamed this monument as Ajitgarh (place of the unvanquished) and erected a plaque, stating that the ‘enemy’ mentioned on the memorial were “immoral martyrs of Indian freedom.” 

For Prelims & Mains