"The Great Fear of 1857" by Kim A. Wagner

Above: "The Great Fear of 1857" Kim A. Wagner - 246 Pages (second image shows Drums at the Residency in Lucknow, 12 December 2019).

Resulting from heavy handed trade requirements and growing Christian missionizing, there grew an unease amongst the peoples of North India that the EIC threatened their way of life and their religious beliefs.

I completed reading this book today. I purchased the book via Amazon prior to our visit to Lucknow to enhance my understanding of the Indian Uprising/Mutiny. The Lucknow Residency has iconic status in mainly British accounts of the 1857 Indian Mutiny/Uprising.

In May 1857 Indian soldiers of the British East India Company (EIC) Calcutta/Bengal Presidency army turned against their British Officers in Meerut, a military post forty miles east of Delhi. In seeming uncoordinated fashion, the rebellion spread first to Delhi, where the mutineers, after routing the British, managed to get the EIC puppet Moghul emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to embrace their cause, to multiple locations throughout the north Indian Gangetic Plain. The revolt was not India wide as relations between soldiers and their officers in the EIC Bombay and Madras Presidencies remained stable.

Over the course of the rebellion, thousands, soldiers and civilians, died on both sides. Reprisals were brutal on both sides often involving wanton slaughter of women and children. Drawing from primary sources... letters... interviews etc., Wagner describes in compelling, sometimes grisly, detail the violent acts - well outside the conventions of modern warfare - of both sides. Conflict lasted for seventeen months whereupon EIC troops regained control.

The EIC was an English joint-stock company chartered in 1601 by Queen Elizabeth. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with Mughal India and the East Indies, and later with Qing China. The company ended up seizing control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent, colonized parts of Southeast Asia, and colonized Hong Kong after a war with Qing China.

In the 18th Century India was a polyglot of princely states, lands controlled by the Mughals, and lands directly under the control of the British (Bengal). To accommodate trade throughout the sub continent, the EIC had to cut individual trade deals not only with the Moghuls in the north, but with the rulers, or heads of each principality.

The EIC was well organized. They set up three Presidencies...geographic trading Divisions, in each of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. The Governor General ran the whole operation from Calcutta . Each of the three Presidencies had autonomy to accomplish trading deals in their respective geographies.

The EIC's power grew over the years to assume quasi nation/state power and influence. By the turn of the Nineteenth Century, each of the three EIC Presidencies had its own standing army made up of British and Indian soldiers.

In the early Nineteenth Century the EIC filled the power vacuum on the Gangetic Plain left by the waning influence of the Mughals. The resident Nawabs (Mogul administrators from Persia) entered into treaty and trade agreements with the increasingly influential EIC to include, paid for by the Nawabs, an extensive Residency in Lucknow for a EIC functionary and numerous hangers on.

Christian missionaries came to India protected under the umbrella of the EIC.

Resulting from heavy handed trade requirements and growing Christian missionizing, there grew an unease amongst the peoples of North India that the EIC threatened their way of life and their religious beliefs. Wagner's book presents a detailed narrative of the panics and rumors which moved Indians to take up arms.

It took the introduction of a new Enfield rifle to Indian soldiers of the EIC to trigger open revolt. Rumors began to spread in military units in Northern India that the paper cartridges, holding ball and powder, to be issued with the new, muzzle loading, Enfield rifle were laced with animal fat...pig, offensive to Muslim soldiers and bovine, off limits to Hindu soldiers. Since the cartridges were to be opened using the teeth, soldiers feared that the British were trying to get them to violate their own religious tenets by consuming forbidden animal product. The Brits solved the problem by allowing the soldiers to grease their own cartridges, but, the atmosphere of distrust worsened.

The book deals primarily with the underlying causes of the Uprising/Mutiny. The narrative describes the events leading to the initial outbreak of fighting in Meerut and the take-over of Delhi and the recruitment of the last Mughal Sultan, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to head its cause. Little is discussed about the events thereafter, the denouement, as it were, including the siege of the Lucknow Residency. Since we visited the Residency on 12 December 2019, I'll say a little about it in this review.

Famously, three thousand Europeans and their Indian loyalists were besieged in the Lucknow EIC Residency during the uprising. Only one thousand had survived when the Residency was retaken by EIC troops five months later.

J.G. Farrell's Booker Prize winning novel, "The Seige of Krishnapur," which I read earlier in 2019 in preparation for today's visit, is a fictional account of the seige of the EIC Residency in Lucknow.

As I toured the Lucknow Residency on 12 December 2019, I was able to correlate the layout with the events described in the novel.

After the Uprising, the British government took over control of India from the EIC.

Wagner points out that throughout the next ninety years of British colonial control of India, Britain was haunted by the specter of the Uprising, fearing recurrence. The Brits responded by increasing the ratio of British soldiers in every unit. They turned to fill the ranks of the army with higher proportions of loyalists, such as Gurkhas and Sikhs.

The Amritsar Massacre, in 1919 (we visited Jallianwala Bagh, site of the Amritsar Massacre, on 03 December 2019) no doubt resulted from a feeling by the Brits that they needed to be "heavy handed" in their dealings with restive demonstrators protesting colonial rule, fearing a repeat of the 1857 Uprising.

"The Great Fear of 1857" provides an excellent foundation for understanding the causes of the Indian Uprising. The book gives insight into the resiliency of culture and how misunderstanding of cultural differences can lead to conflict. Knowing about the Mutiny/Uprising is essential for anyone seeking to understand the totality and overall significance of the British colonial experience in India.