Robert Clive, the founder of the East India Company rule in India had been called back. He was made to appear before a parliamentary committee to answer the corruption charges against him. Robert Clive brazenly stated that he had done nothing wrong. What he amassed was forced upon him. If he wished he could have brought home shipload of jewels and gold.
Robert Clive bought an estate and a magnificent house in London hoping to get accepted in the high society of the city. But the society only gave a cold shoulder to him. Inspite of his wealth the high brows looked down upon him. In parties he was treated as an unwelcome guest or a gate crasher. It broke the heart of Robert Clive and he decided to return to India.
Meanwhile several Governor Generals had come to Hindustan to implement the hidden agenda of the East India Company which now considered itself the proper British ruler of the colonised Hindustan.
The irony was that sixty traders had come to Hindustan to trade, but now they had become traders of fate of poor Hindustanis. They started meddling in the internal political affairs of the princely states to win concessions for their company. Then, they realised that Hindustani rulers were petty minded and corrupt to the core. The East India Company assumed the role of the monkey judge and ate the whole roti pretending to balance the weight. In a short time it was directly ruling a large part of Hindustan and the rest was indirectly.
Although the entire power was in the hands of the local managers of the company and the Governor General appointed by it, the facade was that they were acting on behalf of the emperor of India, the last Mogul Bahadurshah Zafar, who resided in Delhi. The Emperor was the last remaining vestige of the pride and the self respect of the natives of Hindustan. His merely being there as the figure head gave great comfort to the natives. The coins minted and circulated by the East India Company also carried Bahadurshah’s picture to honour that fact.
But the whiteman’s ego could not tolerate that situation for long. He believed in his racial superiority. For a white man, Hindustanis were inferior barbarians and their emperor nothing more than a tribal voodoo chief. The whites had to put the message across.
So, in 1835 the company removed Bahadurshah Zafar’s picture from its coins to the shock of the natives. To further humiliate the Hindustanis by cutting the size of their beloved emperor a diktat was issued—‘After the death of the Emperor Bahadurshah Zafar, the Red Fort would be evacuated of his family. His heir won’t carry the title of ‘The Emperor’ and the privileges attached to it.”
These diktats turned Bahadurshah Zafar into a sworn enemy of the alien manipulators of the company. It further fuelled the anger of the native Hindustanis against the white rulers. Due to the destructive policies of the Company the masses were already driven to the limits of the desperation and frustrations. They were wishing for the divine destruction of the whites.
The Governor General, Lord Dulhousie in his tenure implemented a devilish plan. He brought several princely states under colonial rule by enforcing a diktat that no Indian ruler shall have the right to adopt heir to his throne without the permission of the East India Company. After the demise of the childless ruler his state was to be merged into colonial Hindustan of the East India Company. The Company now was posing as the representative of Britain and its people. And by implication it also represented the British parliament and the government in case of colonised Hindustan, that is India. The erstwhile traders were now British rulers.
His precedessor Lord Welesly had brought several states under the British rule through his cunning Assistance Pact. The non-adoption policy brought the states of Nagpur, Satara, Udaipur, Jaitpur, Saghat, Sambhalpur and Jhansi under British rule.
Governor General Dulhousie played another trick by trying to take away the pension benefits and titles of the deposed rulers. The Nawab of Karnataka, Raja of Tanjavur and Nana Saheb of Bithoor lost their purses and title. It made them sworn enemies of the British. The ruler of Avadh was charged with incompetence and mismanagement. The British deposed the ruler.
Under Assistance Pact the British were keeping an army near Hyderabad. Under the terms of the pact the Nawab was to bear the expenses of the army which he could not afford. So, British took away Barar areas of Hyderabad state as compensation.
The British granted the titles of the lands to Zamindars and estate owners. Now they could exploit tillers, small farmers and labourers as they liked. The tillers and labourers became virtual slaves. It further heightened the people’s anger against the aliens.
In other areas too British injustice was clearly visible. Indians were not appointed to high posts. Their qualifications and abilities were ignored. The British judicial system was unfair to the natives. It was very costly, complicated and time consuming. And it did not recognise the Indian traditions and the customs.
There was something going wrong for Indians in every field. Every one had reason to be angry at something and felt dissatisfied. Anti-British feeling was fast catching up on all levels.
The biggest woe of Indians was the economic plunder of India that had ruined the domestic small scale cottage crafts base which employed and sustained entire non-agricultural labour. The agricultural labourers and tillers also got impoverished. The British began to take Indian raw materials at almost throw away prices and brought back the manufactured goods from jute, cotton and metal ores to sell back to Indians at high prices. Thus, the natives were being fleeced twice in every deal. Jute and cotton growing farmers were being worked to bones for starvation wages. The Europeans, with the help of the British rulers had become jute and cotton farms and estate owners and the native farmers had been turned into their slaves. The frustration of the natives was understandable. The Indian local products were being taxed heavily to make them unprofitable business.
Hindustan was poor, ignorant, illiterate or the most backward society. The life was being ruled here by customs, traditions, blind faiths and orthodox thinking. Whatever the British did was being looked upon as a part of some dark conspiracy. To be fair the British did try to introduce some reforms in good faith in principle to deal with evil customs and illiteracy. The people could not believe that the aliens who were working for India’s economic ruin could even think of doing any good to them. So, even the good measures taken by the British was easily being painted in black.
The British banned Sati custom, child marriages, polygamy and some other evil customs. Widow remarriages was allowed. In the native orthodox society the remarriage of the widows was unthinkable. Infact they were grossly mistreated with a sadistic pleasure. The natives did not like banning of the age old customs their mindset was built upon. The orthodox mobs incited the people by telling them that the alien British wanted to destroy all the native values.
When the British rulers opened up schools to educate the Indian children through English medium to inject modern thinking it was dubbed as an attempt to force Western culture on Indians at the cost of the Indian values. When the British introduced Post & Telegraph services and Railways the people were made to believe that the measure was to speed up communications and transportation to facilitate the faster destruction of the Indian economy.
The Christian missionaries had also arrived in India in large numbers overtly to spread the education and covertly to convert the Hindu and Muslim barbarians into Christians. But upon arriving in India some of the fair minded missionaries realised that Indians only needed education and encouragement to work their own reforms. The rest of the missionaries carried on with their propagandist agenda. The rulers were aiding and abetting the missionaries who were using bribe too as the means of conversion. In 1850, the British rulers passed a law according to which any Indian converting to Christianity would retain his right over the ancestral property.
The growing anti-British feeling was not limited to the Rajas and Nawabs only, it was spreading fast among all sections of the Indian society. Even the army was no exception. The natives in it were suffering from the discriminatory treatment. The Indians were not promoted to the higher ranks. Indian ranks were paid far less salary and perks compared to their white counterparts. There always was resentment about it in the native ranks.
The Indian sepoys also received harsh treatment from the white officers and were even subjected to invectives in many cases. The whites truly believed that Indians were of lowly inferior race. The British Indian army also recruited the native members of the lower castes little realising that the caste system was deeply ingrained in the minds of Hindus. The religion, customs and traditions were the way of Indian life. The prejudices were hard to go away. During drills or parades the upper caste sepoys resented this because on the social level a upper caste could scold or beat an lower caste for touching him. But in the military parade ground a Brahmin sepoy was made to stand next to an untouchable sepoy. That created revulsion in the mind of an upper caste sepoy which reflected in his growing resentment against the British.
This gave strength to the theory that the British were trying to destroy Hindu traditions in whatever way they could. Mangal Pandey had also had some experience of it. But his anger remained subdued because of the stronger influence on him of the association with the whites. He would feel the heat once he went on leave to his native village.
The orthodox Hindu mind was made to believe that the crossing of the seas was such a sin that it destroyed their religion. But the British used to send their sepoys abroad to fight their overseas wars. It was another reason for resentment against British amongst the sepoys. Thus, the overseas military campaigns of the British angered the Indian sepoys. They were sent to Afghanistan and Cremea to fight for the interests of the whites.
When the British took over Avadh they dismissed the entire army of the deposed Nawab. All those soldiers became unemployed. Naturally they were full of hatred against the British and would join any formation or force geared to raise a banner of rebellion against the colonial rulers.
The deposed rulers of the land sensed the anger against the British that was sweeping the country. They came together and plans began to be hatched to overthrow the alien rulers. In the thick of the things were Nana Saheb, Tatya Tope, Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi, Kunwar Singh etc. They were joined by these forces that wanted the British driven out of Hindustan to gain independence.
The rebellion plotters contacted the Mogul Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and persuaded him to lead the battle against the alien enemy. All the kings, Rajas, Nawabs and pro-independence zamindars were sounded about the impending uprising. Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, his queen Zeenat Mahal, the begum of the Avadh Nawab, Hazrat Mahal and a Bihar Zamindar named Kunwar Singh got together with others and formed a secret organisation to fan the anti-British flames throughout the land.
The folk artists, singers, songsters, nomadic banjaras, the dance troupes, nautanki parties, the professional dance girls, preachers, Katha Vachaks, sadhus, ascetics, muth monks, bhajan groups and kawwali bands joined the rebellion effort.
They did a great job of spreading the anti-British message throughout the land. The song and dance groups sang anti-British songs in the fairs and staged plays depicting the miseries of the natives under the alien rule. The folk poets challenged the pride and the self respect of the Rajas, Nawabs and Zamindars who had not yet joined the rebel ranks.
Silently an explosive situation was building up. ‘Roti’ and ‘Kamal’ (Lotus flower) had been made as the symbols of the uprising by the planning group. The message of Roti and Kamal reached all the corners of the land. The spies of the rebel forces were cleverly taking around the messages using various disguises.
The uprising was to be triggered on a single day throughout the land to catch the British enemy by surprise and to overwhelm them by the magnitude of it. The day was fixed for 31 May, 1857.
But an unforeseen event advanced the D. Day.
