The Indian Mutiny: 1857 (review)

The summer of 1857 was characterized by large-scale blood-letting, death and disaster in the subcontinent as the British raj was challenged by the sepoys. The irony lies in the fact that between 1746 and 1856, the Company's dominions had been expanded by these very same brown soldiers, the Indian soldiers in the East India Company's army. Saul David, a British historian, in the book under review focuses on the military aspects of the greatest mutiny of British India. The volume is a modified version of his Glasgow University Ph.D. dissertation.

Just after the 1857 catastrophe, British historians like John Kaye and much later G. B. Malleson emphasized the professional grievances of the Bengal Army sepoys to explain the origin of rebellion. The historiography of 1857 witnessed a full swing in the 1980s when the Subaltern School as represented by scholars like Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Tapti Roy entered the fray. The Subaltern School in pursuing the agenda of "history from below" puts the activities and mentality of the "faceless and nameless" mob in the limelight. However, 95 percent of the sources on the Mutiny are by the British. The adherents of the Subaltern approach are trying to redress this imbalance through the technique of "decoding" official reports by reading between the lines and using Post-Modernist tools. One characteristic of this brand of historiography is to emphasize the sepoy-peasant continuum.

The argument that the Bengal sepoy was not a professional combatant but a peasant in uniform, was first propounded by Eric Stokes. But, while Stokes tried to maintain a balance between military strategy and agrarian history, the Subaltern School went the whole hog for analyzing the Mutiny within the context of an agrarian paradigm. Now what has David to say anew?

David's original contribution is to advance a new interpretation of the sepoys' occupational grievances. Equipped with a wealth of evidence collected from the British officers' papers available in the National Army Museum and the Oriental and India Office Collection in the British Library, the author convincingly argues that limited career opportunities and inadequate financial rewards egged on the soldiers to rebel. In fact, their conduct during the Mutiny shows that they were willing to sell their services to the highest bidder in return for a share of political power and financial perquisites. The sepoys tried to legitimize their grievances within the garb of primordial ties like religious ideology, traditional caste bias, etc.

While the sepoys conducted set-piece battles against the Company's paltans, the armed retainers of the chieftains carried out low-intensity warfare. Till this date, we lack a decent military history of the rebels. Here David could have made a massive contribution with the enormous amount of archival data at his disposal. Nevertheless, due to the demands of narrative history, he fails to develop his military analysis in a critical manner.

David deserves credit for pointing out that the British victory was not inevitable till the reconquest of Delhi. So, his monograph, by linking causality with the role of chance, challenges the monopoly of the role of determinism in history writing. To conclude, David has written an interesting account of the Mutiny. He deserves our praise for his vast data collection. However, the very demand of chronological narration has forced him to eschew rigorous analysis.