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.

The Rebellion made a deep mark in official and popular memory, haunting colonisers and inspiring the colonised. We hear it echo in British colonial repression and the racist fear that drove murderous events like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. We see its presence in the willingness of anticolonial activists to not only participate in mass direct actions, strikes, and marches, but to take up arms against the British repeatedly until independence/partition in 1947.

On a global scale, “1857”-as it is known-joins the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica, the Taiping Rebellion in China, ongoing Indigenous resistance in the United States, and the Fenian uprising in Ireland, as part of a global response of the colonised in the mid- and late-19th century, resisting a new and intensified phase of exploitation. As such, 1857 ought to be studied along with other upheavals of the period, including the 1848 revolutions in Europe and other popular responses to the scourge of…