The 1857 Rebellion in Colonial India

A brief, anti-imperialist history of the rebellion and its significance

First published at Rebel News (Ireland) on November 12, 2020.

The 1857 Rebellion against British rule in Colonial India hasn’t always received the attention it deserves, despite being one of the most important uprisings of the 19th century. Pranav Jani argues it’s high time we changed that.

The 1857 Rebellion, sparked by mutinous Indian soldiers of the British East India Company army and fuelled by peasant and elite uprisings in the countryside, was one of the most widespread, sustained, and dramatic uprisings in the history of the British Empire. Until its final sparks were extinguished in early 1859 by the brutal counter-insurgency armies of European and Indian loyalists, the ghadar (“uprising”) showed that the mighty British were not invincible.

100 years after the British East India Company’s victory at the Battle of Palashi (“Plassey”), rebels drove out British authorities and European civilians from cities and towns across present-day northern and central India for months on end, espousing Muslim-Hindu unity and imagining the end of British rule.