This is a timely publication, which coincides with the anniversary of the Uprising in 1857 and the achievement of Indian independence in 1947. The production of two other publications, Julian Spilsbury, The Indian Mutiny (2007), and D. S. Richards, Cawnpor and Lucknow (2007), and the milestone conference organized by the Centre of South Asian Studies in the University of Edinburgh in July 2007, illustrate the interest and variety of interpretation that the uprising continues to generate.
In the preface, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones describes her account of the 1857 uprising as ‘unconventional’. She sets out to produce ‘an alternative history’ which integrates military events with the breakdown and eventual restoration of civil administration through selected narratives of ‘ordinary people’, Indians and British, who were active or unwitting participants in the conflict. The study concludes that the Uprising ‘brought the world of the East India Company to an abrupt end in November 1858’. How successful is this highly selective modus in combining reportage of violence, pathos, hatred, and revenge within narrow contexts to provide a holistic interpretation of the uprising?
Llewellyn-Jones argues that whilst there was no overarching motive which united those who took part in the Uprising, there were a sufficient number of grievance groups, ranging from local rulers to sepoys, tradesmen, merchants, and agriculturalists who by early 1857 had become so alienated from their British governors, that ‘there was something in the Company's policy to annoy and alarm nearly everyone [in India]’. Her thesis is set out in six chapters. The first considers the political leaders and broad groupings that emerged as the disaffected drivers of the revolt. Individual histories are extracted from the official list of 400 participants together with eyewitness accounts. British reaction to the uprising is presented as one of blinkered arrogance, so out of touch with reality that the warnings of experienced officers were simply ignored. Whilst the sepoys and Indian officers expressed their anger at unresolved injustices and perceived threats to their caste and religion, displaced herdsmen and cultivator groups roamed at will exacting revenge on those who had prospered from British incursions into long-established agrarian systems. It is suggested that having ignited as a forest fire, the Uprising simply blew itself out for want of political leadership and military strategy.
The second chapter concentrates on one incident, the deaths of the British Political Agent and his two soldier sons, in the Residency of the small Rajput kingdom of Kota. Acknowledging that this micro history warrants no more than a footnote in other studies, Llewellyn–Jones argues that it illustrates the wide variety of motives that drew local elites into the conflict. The author might also have used this example to illustrate, as C. A. Bayly has shown in Empire and information (1996), that lack of good intelligence about British or insurgent successes could cause local leaders to swing violently between conflicting loyalties. The narrative also reveals the unexplained hostility between regimental officers and the Agent, as evidence of the dysfunction between those officers caught in the slow grind of regimental promotion, and those who, through patronage, achieved better paid appointments in the Political Department outside their regiment.
In the third chapter, entitled ‘The Great Wall of Lucknow’, Llwellyn-Jones examines the political consequences of the British annexation of Awadh and the removal of the Nawab and his court. She argues that the subsequent political vacuum enabled the most powerful consortium of rebel leaders to combine after the British recaptured Delhi. Helpfully avoiding a repeat of many other accounts of two relief attempts, the author provides graphic evidence of the transformation of the city into a fortress. But, in commenting on the slowness of the relieving Gurkhas because they were accompanied by their families, she misses the opportunity of a crucial comparison between regiments of the Madras army where this practice was common, and the disaffected Bengal sepoys whose Brahman families always remained in their villages suffering the economic hardships caused by British infrastructure works and revenue increases. Consequently, the southern ‘family’ regiments were better led by their British officers, who were more familiar with the language and culture of their sepoys.
The following two chapters present an excellent review of the role and function of Company prize agents in their extraction of official plunder and secondly, the brutal progress of retribution columns as they pacified the countryside to an extent that was curtailed to prevent long-term damage to the reconciliation process. The last chapter consists of a comprehensive survey of uprising memorials that are predominantly British, inspired by the close association of the author with the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia. In a wider discussion than allowed in this study, such epigraphic evidence could provide an original reference point from which to consider how the expatriate community of the East India Company saw itself, the Indians it controlled, and its relationship with the society in Britain it had left behind.
Nowhere does the cleavage between analysis and reportage appear more starkly than in Rosie Llewellyn-Jones's introduction. Here, she visits the thematic historiography of the Uprising and dismisses any single cause, assigning a few lines to different interpretations. Some authors are named, others are blanketed by collective anonymity; ‘the political historian’ says this, and ‘the economic historian’ says something else. Amongst this reductio one feels most sympathy for the memory of Eric Stokes who is singled out as ‘the Marxist historian’. This committed liberal Christian with a strong interest in agrarian systems has received more than his fair share of criticism from both Marxists and post-Marxists for his work in India and elsewhere.
In summary, it is not enough for Rosie Llewellyn-Jones to conclude that by the spring of 1857 the British had managed to alienate ‘almost everyone’ throughout India, and that as a consequence of the Uprising ‘the world of the East India Company was brought to an abrupt end’. In two fundamentals at least, British reliance on loyal Princely States, who controlled two-fifths of the area and one third of the population of India; and the escalating need to extract wealth, ensured that although the name ceased the continuity of imperial practice was more than sustained after 1858.
The Great Uprising is a meticulously researched compendium of case studies presented in a fluent narrative style that introduces new and detailed evidence; the revelation that West African ‘women warriors’ fought in the service of one dissident Raja is one example. Had these ‘untold stories’ been considered within recent historiography it would have enhanced their undoubted significance and our understanding of one of the most complex chapters in the relationship between India and its British rulers. This absence of strategic clarity is exemplified by the map of the principal area of the Uprising, which has been reduced in scale from the full page allocated within the text, making it hard and occasionally impossible to find place names as they occur in the narrative.
