India and empire in 1857: events and analyses

One result of 1857 was the incorporation of India as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the second British Empire. When the revolt began, however, India was still ruled by the East India Company, which controlled the subcontinent through a thinly stretched network of bureaucrats and a large ‘native’ army. When the sepoys began to rebel, first at Meerut, in May 1857, and then at various cantonments across northern India, the small British enclaves quickly found themselves isolated, outnumbered, and under attack by ‘mobs’ composed of what would be described as ‘lumpen’ urban elements, ‘fanatical ghazis’, various ‘criminal tribes’, and runaway soldiers. Soon the newly installed telegraph lines carried stories of barbaric murders perpetrated against Europeans and Anglo-Indians and calls for massive retribution. Even in Calcutta and Madras, where larger British communities remained on the margins of the rebellion, daily life was disrupted for many months in 1857–58 and states of alarm arose and subsided according to the military reports received. Reinforcements were sent from elsewhere in the empire, but rebel movements were not finally quashed until 1859. During the long period of suppression, summary executions and wholesale firings of villages perceived to be rebel strongholds were frequent; such was the scale of suffering and devastation that the ‘Mutiny’ remains one of the most controversial episodes of the British Raj.Footnote ¹

The 150th anniversary of the ‘Uprising’ – one of the preferred Indian terms for this momentous event – in 2007, saw an explosion of new research, building on the work carried out since the 1980s by the ‘subaltern studies’ collective. This work has emphasized the grass-roots motivations and experiences of the revolt, from a variety of standpoints.Footnote ² The recent historical literature on these events has also been informed by the need to see the history of ‘home’ and of ‘colony’ as mutually constitutive.Footnote ³ Concerns remain, however, that metropolitan sources continue to be privileged over indigenous perspectives.Footnote ⁴ Meanwhile, the global impact of 1857 remains inadequately explored, despite several promising initiatives. Among these, Peter Putnis has shown how news of the events of 1857 in India travelled around the world, in the dawn of the new communications era, making it one of the first ‘global media events’.Footnote ⁵ During this era of the ‘Great Game’, Russia and Persia both received emissaries from the Indian rebels while, in Europe, Napoleon III’s propagandists did their best to spread doubts about Britain’s prospects.Footnote ⁶

Among the first to react outside India to news of the rebellion were the British settler populations in Indian Ocean colonies such as the Cape and Mauritius. They furnished troops, raised funds for the European victims of the revolt and offered a collective gasp of horror at the imagined spectacle of British women and children being cut down by revolting sepoys. The 1857 rebellion as experienced and debated in diverse colonies thus offered an opportunity for contemporaries to evaluate their place in the imperial world. The Governor of South Africa, Sir George Grey, believed that the crisis required individual colonies to ‘simultaneously stir themselves to meet the emergency … to increase [the empire’s] strength, unity, and stability’.Footnote ⁷ Jill Bender has noted that the Indian Mutiny ‘was the Cape’s moment to shine. The violence provided the colony with an opportunity to play an integral role in protecting the Empire’.Footnote ⁸

Others within the British Empire quickly came to view the uprising less as an ‘opportunity to protect’ than as an opportunity to profit. This was, after all, a world still dazzled by grandiose schemes of ‘systematic colonization’ – as evolved by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, enlarged upon by Jeremy Bentham, and enthusiastically supported by J. S. Mill – to ‘remove’ paupers from depressed damp climes to foster the economic progress of new, virgin settlements.Footnote ⁹ Within India itself, the great colonization debate pitted local zamindars (landowners) and British capitalists against the agents of the sugar colonies – mercantile houses in the great ports of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay who employed a host of intermediaries to entice away the landowner’s kamia (debt-bonded servant) from perpetual bondage, and the indigo planter’s migrant workers towards more distant but possibly more lucrative prospects. The East India Company’s officials were strictly enjoined towards a ‘benevolent neutrality’ in the matter, neither forbidding nor encouraging emigration, but instead, from 1842, attempting to oversee and regulate the health and safety of the thousands who annually made their way onto the ‘coolie ships’ heading for Mauritius, the Caribbean, and later Fiji and South Africa. This regulation sometimes extended to temporary bans on emigration to certain colonies.Footnote ¹⁰ In principle, however, many British Indian officials were increasingly supportive of emigration – strikingly so after 1857 – and tended to portray zamindari objections as feudal anachronisms designed to keep labour artificially cheap.Footnote ¹¹ If, indeed, the average official believed it was part of the ‘civilizing, modernizing mission’ of the British to give the Indians a kick-start into new lives in the sugar colonies, it is no surprise to find them supporting the notion of transporting rebel sepoys in order to transform them into imperial convict labour.

The disposal of disbanded and rebel sepoys: an imperial opportunity or an Indian problem?

With the mutiny just a few weeks old, British Indian officials began considering what to do with disarmed sepoys, particularly those who had shown no proclivity to join the original mutineers. Eager eyes elsewhere had also been scanning the news reports of the events in India and, virtually simultaneously with the preparation of memoranda by British officials in India, letters covering the same topic from a different angle began to arrive at the Colonial Office and at the East India Company’s London headquarters.

Neville Warren, agent of the Scinde (Sindh) railway was one of the first officials in India to look upon the disbanded sepoys as potential labourers. He suggested that

The Commissioner of Scinde considered this proposal worth the attention of Lord Elphinstone (the Governor of Bombay), and expanded it to include convicted mutineers, whom he thought should be temporarily transported to one of the Kooria Mooria islandsFootnote ¹³ as ‘they would hardly attempt escape to so inhospitable a coast as the neighbouring mainland, very few guards would be required and they might be fed from a Store Hulk moored at some distance’.Footnote ¹⁴ He proposed that ultimately such men could be placed under guard and employed on harbour works and fortifications within India itself or at another place where they would be useful – he suggested Aden.

Governor Elphinstone offered the opinion that disbanded sepoys would be better employed at Perim (an island near Yemen) ‘in building, levelling, and constructing reservoirs’. For those individuals convicted of a crime and sentenced to transportation, Elphinstone recommended

In making these suggestions, Elphinstone was clearly considering wider imperial interests, rather than a simple solution to a local Indian problem. He was no doubt conscious of the importance of Indian labour to the expanding cash-crop colonies, but he was unlikely at that stage to have been aware of the pressure building up in Britain for measures to effect the wholesale transportation of rebels from India to distant parts of the empire.

In September 1857, Henry Light, a former Governor of British Guiana (modern Guyana), was one of several individuals who sought to put the case for transportation of mutineers to provide labour for various imperial causes before the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Henry Labouchere. He wrote: ‘The present troubles in India afford an opportunity of reversing the conditions of product and labor … I now venture to suggest, with all submission a wholesale transportation of every mutineer.’ Written at a time when the ‘atrocities of Cawnpore’ were on all lips and when the British press and pulpits alike resounded with calls for vengeance, Light’s scheme was draconian. He suggested that their families should be forced to travel with them, and if the transportees, averse to plantation labour, should commit suicide, he proposed:

The India Board in London received similar proposals to transport mutineers from representatives of West India interests.Footnote ¹⁷ Henry Labouchere accordingly asked Sir Philip Wodehouse (Governor of British Guiana, 1854–61), who was in London in August 1857, to report on the question. The memorandum that Wodehouse drew up was strongly favourable. He argued that removing mutineers – not convicted criminals but those ‘against whom the fact of their having been in certain regiments at a certain time can be readily proved’ – to the West Indies, was a necessary act of punishment. He proposed that they should be sent as felons to the West Indies, although with their families, because ‘every man in these regiments has rendered himself liable to the heaviest punishment, if not for murder and robbery, at any rate for mutiny and desertion’.Footnote ¹⁸

The proponents of colonization schemes for Australia were equally quick to see the sepoy question as an opportunity. In November 1857, John Hutt, representing a group interested in the development of western Australia wrote directly from London to the various presidency governments in India, proposing that colony as a possible destination for perpetrators of ‘outrages’ during the mutiny, who would be sentenced to transportation.Footnote ¹⁹ Hutt’s letter explained that western Australia ‘offers peculiar advantages for the reception and safe keeping of this class of prisoners’. These advantages were described as follows:

Hutt qualified support for the transportation of mutineers with the proviso that only life transportees would be acceptable, and that the costs of the penal settlement should be met by the Indian government.

What was not addressed in Hutt’s correspondence from London was how the prospect of importing mutineers would have been received by residents of Australia. Certainly, Australians had, like other literate European populations across the empire, read sensationalist news reports about the mutiny in the summer and autumn of 1857. For example, one particularly lurid account, copied from the Ceylon Times, was published in the Melbourne Argus of 5 September 1857:

Colonial responses to events in India and rebel transportation projects

The reactions to the Indian mutiny of the government and colonists at the colonial settlement of Cape of Good Hope are relatively well documented, thanks to the publication of contemporary diaries and historical analysis of local press reports.Footnote ²² Indeed, news of the rebellion in India reached the Cape within a few weeks, largely because a steamer was quickly dispatched to Mauritius and from there to South Africa in search of European troop reinforcements.Footnote ²³ Analysis of reports in the local newspaper, the Cape Argus, reveal the extent to which family connections in India ensured the identification of the European settlers at the Cape with the victims of the mutineers.Footnote ²⁴

Captain Griffith Jenkins of the Indian Navy, who, as Barbarina Grey’s journal informs us, arrived in early August 1857 to elicit troops from Sir George Grey, pointed out to him that the Governor of Mauritius had already agreed to despatch troops from that island’s garrison, voluntarily reducing it to only 200 men.Footnote ²⁵ Grey quickly followed suit, sending troops and making plans to ensure the provision of reinforcements the following year.Footnote ²⁶ At the Cape, as elsewhere across the empire, news of a relief fund set up in England for the sufferers of the mutiny led to an outpouring of cash contributions, much as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami fund prompted a similar global response.Footnote ²⁷ The Cape Colony also offered more than 4,000 horses to British India.Footnote ²⁸ This prompted The Times of London to praise colonial responses to news of the mutiny, especially the ‘zeal and energy of the Governor and people’ at the Cape Colony.Footnote ²⁹

Reactions to the Mutiny seemed to show that the mid Victorian empire was united by a community of interest. On some levels, of course, this was true – the colonies were staffed and defended by men who shared a common education, history, and outlook. They also shared, in general, an unshakeable belief in their own superiority over the ‘natives’ in whose territories they sojourned – were they ‘kafirs’, ‘hottentots’, or ‘aboriginals’. Thus it was that, in diverse locations in the summer and autumn of 1857, men stepped forward and, through the columns of local newspapers, professed to know India and the ‘Bengal sepoys’, to pronounce even the rebels preferable to the ‘thievish, lazy, and drunken scoundrels’ in their own colonies, and to support plans to import them for labour. One such ‘spokesman’ was J. H. Van Renen, who described himself as a former captain in the Bengal army, and who reassured the Cape residents, from the columns of the Argus on 30 August 1857, that ‘From my knowledge of the Sepoy character, I have no hesitation in saying that they will be found most useful here, not only on the public works, but also in private service, considering that their cost is merely for food and clothing; and, of course, to be sent here at the expense of the Indian government.’ His plan was for the introduction of 3,000 to 5,000 rebels, to be first ‘employed at the harbour of refuge in Table Bay’, and then allotted to private individuals. So great was his enthusiasm that he published his correspondence with the local government at the Cape on the subject, which revealed that they, far from rejecting his proposals, already had the matter of transported sepoys ‘under consideration’.Footnote ³⁰

An important lobby group for the West Indian planters was at work in London, endeavouring to ensure that those colonies would be speedily and well informed of the likely prospects of receiving transported mutineers. Stephen Cave, of the West India Committee, drafted a series of letters that were despatched to colonial governors in the autumn of 1857. To His Excellency William Walker, in British Guiana, Cave seemed to suggest that it was already agreed that the sugar colonies would receive transported mutineers, informing him that ‘the task of receiving and employing the exiles and of preventing their escape will necessarily fall upon the West Indies’. These individuals, he clarified, would consist of persons ‘whose offences have been most venial, who have in fact been led or forced away by others rather than active in the revolt’. Consequently, he wrote, ‘it is considered that … they should be regarded as exiles rather than convicts, and allowed to earn wages’. In response, he wished to be informed of the following: ‘How many Indians your colony is willing to take? What provision you can make for their reception, and what notice you will require?’Footnote ³¹ Identical letters were despatched to the other islands.Footnote ³²

Stephen Cave’s letters and the London debates were not, of course, the only news of the Indian uprising and its potential effects on the West Indies to reach the sugar islands – indeed the colonial press began to cover the story, and to consider local implications, from the summer of 1857 onwards.Footnote ³³ As at the Cape, the official response (in this case to the confident approaches of the West India Committee) was swift and supportive. In British Guiana, the governor drafted a minute for the Court of Policy in which he asserted ‘it is perhaps, impossible to over-estimate the importance to this colony of an adequate supply of manual labour’ and provided a summary of the proposal to receive and employ ‘defeated mutineers of the Indian army and others’. To this the collective members confidently replied that ‘a large influx of such labourers will be generally beneficial, and tend to the improvement and good of all’.Footnote ³⁴ It only remained to discuss the numbers that could be accommodated and the terms upon which they should be imported. The court opined that 30,000 transportees ‘might be safely and advantageously received into this colony with their wives and families’ on the understanding that their transportation would be paid by the East India Company, that they would be indentured to estates, that they would be paid wages at market rates, and that, if ‘misconducting themselves’, they should be liable to be employed as ‘convicts in penal gangs upon the public works of the colony’. Almost as an afterthought, the court also recommended that the ‘Colonial Garrison should be adequately strengthened with white troops’.

The small island of St Vincent responded later, since its governor was in England; but, when it did, the local legislature proved even more accommodating, offering to contribute to the cost of emigration of rebels’ families, and to the strengthening of the local garrison, if needed. St Vincent, the Colonial Office was informed, could ‘readily take a couple of thousand men, always supposing that they are of a class from which a reasonable amount of labor may be obtained’.Footnote ³⁵ Jamaica also sought to claim a ‘share’ of the transported sepoys, as did the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of Grenada.Footnote ³⁶

Trinidad had its own lobbyist in London. He wrote directly to the Secretary of State from there, reporting that ‘many of the Trinidad proprietors are desirous that the question of sending some of these people to that colony should receive the consideration of Her Majesty’s Government’. He asserted that the colony could take ‘ten thousand of them at once’, on terms that were even more attractive: ‘arrangements might be made between the authorities of India and Trinidad whereby the Indian Treasury should, out of the proceeds of their labor, be reimbursed the entire cost of their transport’.Footnote ³⁷ The Governor of Trinidad, meantime, was conveying to the Colonial Office ‘private intelligence’ to the effect that ‘the Court of Directors of the East India Company has received with some degree of favour’ the proposition to deport ‘mutinous sepoys’ to the West Indies. The Immigration committee of the Legislative Council had voted, by the end of October 1857, to operate the scheme as a ten-year indenture and, in ‘their zeal for the cause’, had agreed to fund passage costs to an amount of £5 per person. To avoid any law and order problems, it was resolved that those deported should be selected ‘from different regiments, or from the inhabitants of different parts of the country. On their arrival here they would be distributed in small allotments on different estates throughout the colony’.Footnote ³⁸ Private and sometimes anonymous West Indians also supported transportation. On 8 August 1857, ‘Guianensis’ pointed out the ‘inestimable service’ that the sepoys might provide for the colony, which could ‘readily receive and employ ten thousand’.Footnote ³⁹

The ‘wobble’: rebel influxes and colonial concerns

Planter- and capitalist-dominated local colonial legislatures were not the only voices in this emerging global debate. Not all white settlers valued the prospect of cheap labour over that of security, even in the West Indies. While the colonial legislatures (dominated by planter interests) were keen to support proposals to transport mutineers, they were obliged to report dissenting opinions. One member of the St Vincent council duly recorded his opposition to the proposed immigration of mutineers, stating ‘I have no hope that a cruel, infuriated and expatriated soldiery can be brought to become a peaceful industrious and contented peasantry – coerced into habits of labour they may be – but only by force of arms, or by converting the colony into a penal settlement’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Many more protests were articulated in colonial newspapers. In British Guiana, the editor of The Creole criticized those who ‘would not give a fig for the security of the country’, while a lively exchange of letters ensued in the columns of The Colonist between ‘An Inhabitant’ who supported importing mutineers and ‘A Briton’ who did not.Footnote ⁴¹ Discussions of the issue in the British press were keenly followed in Mauritius, and a debate ensued over a scheme to import rebels as convicts to the island. In this colony, the debate was given added piquancy by the presence of a large French settler class, and the divide over the rebel question followed the usual lines of friction between their press organs – Le Cernéen and Le Mauricien – and the English-language Commercial Gazette. An editorial in the latter, proposing that some rebel sepoys would be welcome in Mauritius for repairing the roads, was lambasted by the editor of the Cernéen, who contended that, while the 140,000-strong Indian immigrant population then on the island was generally considered ‘gentle and malleable’, they could be ‘easily radicalized; the lambs could from one day to another be transformed into ferocious beasts’.Footnote ⁴² The editor also noted, with particular interest, an article that appeared in The Times in Britain, considering the benefits of exporting the rebels not to British colonies but to French colonies such as Réunion (the island neighbour of Mauritius), which already had a substantial Indian population.Footnote ⁴³

At the Cape, Van Renen’s enthusiasm for importing rebels to be engaged on public works was not shared by most white settlers. Once the question of receiving mutineers at the Cape had been raised by him in the Cape Argus, other colonists soon expressed opposition to any such measures, objecting violently to importing ‘ten thousand sepoy cut-throats’. When the correspondence on this issue between Sir George Grey and the Colonial Secretary was publicly aired, Grey and his ‘precocious, but happily abortive, arrangement to bring about the cutting of the colonial throat’ were strongly condemned.Footnote ⁴⁴

In the Straits Settlements, which had already received many Indian convicts, residents raised the strongest apprehensions about importing any mutineers.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, as early as summer 1857, fears were being expressed about the possibility of copycat risings among the existing 3,000-strong Indian convict population, exacerbated by ‘the discovery that Khurruck Singh, a Sikh political prisoner (then on parole), was engaged in treasonable correspondence with the convicts’, who, the local press noted, were ‘mostly natives of Bengal, akin to the wretches belonging to the Sepoy regiments, whose barbarities have shocked the whole civilised world.’ Singh was shipped to Penang, but this sparked a panic among European residents there, while those in Singapore continued to be ‘on the alert’, fearing a possible rising during the Muharram, when convicts were allowed to participate in processions.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, when it was learnt that the Indian government was contemplating transporting mutineer sepoys, the European residents took steps to ensure that they should not be the recipients. A memorial was drawn up, in which signatories expressed their ‘feelings of deep regret and alarm’ at the arrival of further ‘criminals’ of this kind.Footnote ⁴⁷ This memorial was despatched to India in October 1857, along with a strongly worded minute from the Governor of the Straits Settlements himself, who opposed sending men ‘naturally entertaining the most deadly sentiments of hatred and revenge against us [and] to whom death would prove a release from the miseries they will endure here … To keep such men under control requires an amount of physical force not at our disposal.’Footnote ⁴⁸ The governor hoped that the memorial would be favourably considered by the Governor General of India, on the grounds that ‘these quiet, peaceable Agricultural Stations’ should not be subjected to ‘the dangers arising from the presence of large numbers of men lately in arms against us, dangers the very idea and apprehension of which will interfere most materially with the prospects and progress of these Settlements’. He pointed out that, while the convict system had suited Singapore in its infancy, it was no longer suitable for a colonial city with annual trade figures of £10 million, a harbour crowded with shipping, and ‘a large population earnestly engaged in Mercantile and Tradal pursuits’.Footnote ⁴⁹

A number of mutineers were shipped to Penang during 1857, leading to further remonstrations from the Governor of the Straits Settlements, who reiterated his arguments ‘against the transportation to these Settlements of men trained and disciplined as Soldiers, accustomed to act in a body, and having even their Native Officers with them … there is no further room for additional convicts at Penang’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Superintendent of Convicts also told the Indian authorities of ‘the great danger that exists of contamination of mind to the rest of the convict body, by the introduction into their midst, of such a poisonous material as so large a body of mutinous and seditious Sepoys – men too who are far more intelligent and full of intrigue than the ordinary run of Convicts’.Footnote ⁵¹

The concerns expressed in colonial newspapers reflected a growing belief that the Indian government was actively seeking a means of disposing of its vast and now refractory sepoy army. Certainly, records of correspondence between the Colonial Office and the East India Company’s Board of Directors in London in late 1857 seem to indicate that the West India lobbyists had successfully laid claim to receive these disbanded corps, or even the convicted rebels. On 17 December 1857, the Court of Directors of the East India Company informed the India Board that

On receipt of this letter, the India Board contacted the Secretary of State for the Colonies and asked ‘whether Mr Labouchere thinks it advisable to introduce any bill into Parliament for the purpose of giving this additional supply of labor to certain of Her Majesty’s Colonies’. The reply, dated 4 January 1858, came back that the British government had ‘no objection to the introduction of a bill for the removal of natives convicted of having been concerned in the mutiny in India to certain of the British colonies’.Footnote ⁵³ The stage was set for the transportation of convicted mutineers. It remained to be decided, however, where they would be sent. Certainly, cash-crop colonies, both old and new, were vying to derive benefit from the unpaid labour of transported mutineer sepoys. And whereas the experienced hacks in the West Indies were aware that it would show poor taste ‘to obtrude our speculations upon the grief and bitter indignation of the English nation’ so that ‘the mere semblance of turning the East Indian disaster to advantage should of course be avoided’, upstart colonies such as the miniscule Seychelles, then scarcely developed, had fewer inhibitions. There, in July 1858, Charles Telfair, a newly appointed magistrate, enthused about the ‘perfectly new country like what Australia was [sic] some years ago. It requires labor to regenerate it – new faces – even the rebels of India – to instill [sic] new life, energy and industry’.Footnote ⁵⁴

It seems that, all over the empire, schemes to import rebel sepoys were exercising the minds of local British officials and settlers. Why then did the British Indian government choose to send migrants to the Andaman Islands rather than meeting the requests of so many of their confreres in the broader imperial setting?

The Andaman proposition

If lobbyists for the sugar islands saw rebel transportees as a chance to acquire cheap labour, officials within India also viewed the question of sepoy punishment as an opportunity: both to provide a long-term solution to the question of where to locate a future penal settlement and to solve the problem of a refractory community not far from its borders.

By the mid 1850s, several acts of piracy affecting the Indian ocean trade, coupled with instances of ‘outrages’ committed against shipwrecked sailors by natives of the Andamans, had made the directors of the East India Company desirous of bringing the islands under some form of control,Footnote ⁵⁵ and a plan to survey them was devised. However, the cost and uncertainty of establishing the necessary penal infrastructure on the archipelago was a subject of some dispute. In March 1856, Canning declared himself decidedly against the idea, minuting: ‘We are in no need of a new penal settlement, planted in an unsubdued climate, with all its first risks, and a sure expenditure of life and money’.Footnote ⁵⁶

By May 1857, widespread mutiny in the Indian army had broken out and, as the trickle of rebel transportees threatened to lead to a flood, resolving where they and other convicts should be sent became an urgent matter. In October 1857, F. J. Mouat, a British inspector of prisons in India, opined,

Mouat was evidently motivated chiefly by a desire to isolate the mutineers, rather than to use their labour for maximum imperial gain.

By December 1857, officials in India had decided to prohibit further ‘transportation of mutineers, deserters and rebels to the Straits Settlements’. The governor there was informed, ‘it is in contemplation to establish a Penal Settlement for all India on the Andaman Islands’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In fact, the decision was taken very shortly thereafter in favour of the Andamans over the West Indies because, on the Indian government learning that the government of Bombay was making arrangements to ship a contingent of Punjabi convicts newly arrived from Karachi to the Straits, a telegram was sent on 12 January 1858, saying that ‘the Mutineer and Rebel Convicts must not be sent to the Straits. They may be sent at once direct to the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal’.Footnote ⁵⁹ A few days later, Mr Hutt, representing the interests of Australian planters, was also informed that it had been decided to send transportees to the Andamans.Footnote ⁶⁰

Turning to the question of what to do with the disarmed sepoys who were committing ‘no outward and visible act of mutiny or disobedience’, officials in Fort William continued to debate quiet dispersal versus complete banishment. The President in Council favoured their discharge, believing that they would ‘soon merge into the ordinary mass of the population’.Footnote ⁶¹ J. P. Grant also favoured a ‘quiet’ solution, explaining,

However, another official, B. Peacock, warned against simple disbandment and dispersal of the native regiments, contending that to ‘set loose all over the country from 16 to 20,000 disaffected men, trained to arms and without the means of gaining an honest livelihood would be most dangerous’. He suggested that they should instead be sent to the West Indies, under terms very similar to those offered to indentured labourers, believing it ‘justifiable to remove them from this country where their presence would be dangerous to society and would be likely to impede the restoration of peace and tranquillity’. He opined that, after ten years in the West Indies, their return would be gradual, and their characters sufficiently ‘altered’. Peacock also proposed that, if it was impossible to send them directly to the West Indies, they could go to the Andamans ‘in the first instance’ and ‘allow such of them to emigrate therefrom to the West Indies as could induce their families to accompany them’.Footnote ⁶²

J. P. Grant responded to anxieties about discharged sepoys by asserting that there was no evidence that they had been ‘banding together to commit outrages’. He was, however, concerned about the prospect of mass forced emigration: ‘I fear if we were to transport 20,000 men who have committed no offence our reputation for fairness and justice which has been no immaterial element of strength to us even in the late terrible times, would hardly survive’. For Grant, it seemed, the prestige of the empire and the need to uphold ‘fair play’ outweighed narrow economic and political considerations. Another of his objections focussed on batches of sepoys already sent to fight elsewhere. He noted that ‘It would be inconsistent with the line taken in sending some of these disarmed regiments to fight Her Majesty’s battles in China’.Footnote ⁶³ Certainly, Grant was correct that the native regiments sent there – to replace European troops diverted to India after the mutiny broke out – were not treated as convicts; they were armed and played their part in British operations in that country, afterwards returning to India.

Ultimately, the more moderate perspective of Grant and like-minded colleagues prevailed, and attention turned to amnesty and quiet dispersal, rather than mass transportation. Hundreds rather than the projected tens of thousands of ex-mutineers were ultimately transported, though the exact figure is unclear. Many were eventually repatriated to India, some with new families, and even new wealth.Footnote ⁶⁴

The London-based directors of the East India Company – who had forwarded various proposals from parties seeking labourers – were accordingly informed

Consequently, in March 1858, the Commissioners for the Affairs of India were requested to inform Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Colonies that ‘Imperial Legislation in regard to the transportation of convicts from India to any of Her Majesty’s colonies, is at present unnecessary’.Footnote ⁶⁶ So ended the flurry of activity on the part of various territories in the British Empire to either secure or avoid the arrival of transportees. The Board of Directors in London latched on to the Andamans scheme with little hesitation, no doubt aided by the prospect of further territorial expansion, since they noted, ‘by taking possession of the Andaman Islands, we ipso facto take possession of the Cocos which are its geographical dependencies’.Footnote ⁶⁷

The events of 1857, had certainly served, in the view of Indian officials, to greatly enhance the value of the Andaman Islands as a ‘convenient place for the reception of convicts’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Andaman proposition had fulfilled a dual role: not only did it provide a solution to an ongoing question of where to send Indian convicts but it also offered an opportunity to subdue a ‘nest of pirates’ in the Bay of Bengal. The reaction in the sugar colonies was muted. ‘A Briton’, writing in the columns of a Guianese newspaper in September 1857, had never felt that a West Indian solution was likely. He believed that ‘The British Government will not be inclined to deal so leniently with so rebellious a set of murderous miscreants, but will leave them to the tender mercies of Sir Colin Campbell and his gallant band of British soldiers’. By early 1858, the Bengal Hurkaru’s take on the rumours of the likely final destination of rebel transportees was being digested in the Caribbean: ‘We hear that … the Andamanese only kill and eat their prisoners … If this is true the reproach of measures being either insufficient or too late cannot be applied to this as it will be both a timely and a sufficient retribution’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The editor of the Port of Spain Gazette lamented that West Indian ‘immigration prospects are indeed very problematical’. It was feared that

These extraordinary statements raise a series of questions that have so far escaped the attention of ‘mutiny historians’. Did disruption in the rebel heartlands of northern India lead to widespread ‘pauperism’? Where did all the likely ‘strays and fugitives’ who escaped internal repression end up? Which, if any, of the labour-hungry territories clamouring to receive convicts benefited from the traumatic events surrounding the Uprising?

Mutiny and migration: a conspiracy of silence?

Much remains to be elucidated about the impact of the months of disruption (years in the parts of Bihar that were not ‘pacified’ until 1860) on Indian villagers and townspeople in the regions affected by the mutiny, but some anecdotal evidence is available. During the course of the uprising and its suppression, months of plunder, looting, and reprisal burnings took an inevitable toll. To the suffering these events engendered among ordinary residents may be added the effects of the uprooting and impoverishing of the families of thousands of men hitherto gainfully employed in military service for the British. Reports trickling into the Indian government in 1858 and 1859 described the disbanded sepoys as being ‘in a state of desperation’ and destitution. The populous district of Shahabad, in Patna, Bihar, had furnished a particularly large contingent of sepoys to the Bengal army and, being also associated with a rebel force that had proved especially difficult to dislodge, was singled out in terms of the acuity of post mutiny distress in evidence.Footnote ⁷¹

Imperial sugar planters and their lobbyists were adept at identifying crisis in India and seeking to profit from it. To give just one example, immediately before the mutiny, the rebellion of the Santhals (a tribal group in India) had attracted the attention of the ‘Mauritius Association’ – a London-based lobby group. Their Chairman, Mr Guthrie, had the ear of the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In June 1857, he apprised Labouchere that the Santhals were ‘labouring now under extreme destitution’ and urged an emigration scheme that would bring them wealth and enable returning migrants to ‘relieve their own people of the schroffs [moneylenders] who have driven them to rebellion and their present abject state of misery’. The Secretary of State, in turn, urged the attention of the Indian government to the matter.Footnote ⁷² Thus, as soon as the extent of the 1857 uprising became known in Britain and her colonial world, the planter interests were speculating on the ‘possibility of great distress becoming prevalent in Bengal before long, and of large numbers of people being found without the means of subsistence’. As usual, the emigration agents at the Presidency ports were depicted in the guise of ‘aid-givers’ who could help to ‘relieve’ famine ‘by providing passages to the West Indies’. It must be noted that the anxiety of planter interests to provide succour to the impoverished masses of India was not unrelated to the unprecedentedly high sugar prices then prevailing.Footnote ⁷³

The fact that the hike in the market value of sugar coincided with an uprising and economic dislocation in India led to an extraordinary surge in migration in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Of these, the vast majority went to Mauritius (in the 1858–59 season alone, 21,273 emigrants embarked from India to Mauritius and 5,158 to the West Indies).Footnote ⁷⁴ The dramatic increase in migration attracted the attention of the Governor General of India. Noting that the monthly figure of migrants leaving Calcutta to emigrate to Mauritius had risen from an average of 700 to double that number in 1858, and to three times as many in the first half of 1859, he requested his colleagues in Bengal to investigate the causes for the increase. The response indicated that a greater demand from the colony, coinciding with the disturbances associated with the mutiny, ‘led the rural population, and more particularly that in Shahabad, to emigrate in much greater numbers than in former years’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The regional breakdown of the figures was striking: in 1857–58, of 9,864 adults who embarked for Mauritius, 2,229 came from Shahabad, and 1,658 from Ghazipur. In 1858–59, of 20,166 adults who emigrated, 5,522 came from Shahabad, and 2,921 from Ghazipur.

The inference is clear: a region that was closely linked to heavy recruitment of sepoys was also sending emigrants in massive numbers to Mauritius. Yet it seems that no investigation was made at the time, either in Calcutta or in Mauritius, to check whether fugitive rebels were among the number. This was not for want of experienced colonial officials to undertake such enquiries. On the contrary, many of the senior police and magistrates serving in Mauritius at this time were former Indian army officers.Footnote ⁷⁶ Instead, it is noteworthy that high-ranking officials took steps to discredit any notion that sepoys might have had a commonality of interest with the legions of ‘coolies’ departing for or already settled in the sugar colonies. Attempting to dispel any apprehension in Mauritius that ‘our Indian laborers … may become inoculated with the mutinous spirit which has broken out in the native army of Bengal’, the governor of the island penned a minute in July 1857 in which he sought to distinguish between the ‘mutineers’ and the ‘immigrants’:

Was the governor’s complacency really grounded in a stereotypical impression that the ‘coolie’ migrant had little in common with the revolutionary sepoy, or was there, in effect, a conspiracy of silence operating at the heart of the empire – one that would resolve at one and the same time the question of the refractory, untrustworthy ‘Bengal sepoy’ and the clamour for inexpensive, sugared tea in the drawing rooms of the ruling and middle classes of Britain?

The failure of the British officials at the ports of departure, and those who supervised reception and allotment to sugar estates and other employers on arrival, to investigate the status of Indian migrants in the years immediately following the mutiny renders it difficult to investigate the subject today. However, there is some anecdotal evidence from unofficial sources. For example, following the arrival of the Bucephalus from Calcutta in March 1858, a brief report appeared in the colonial press in British Guiana. Entitled ‘The sepoys are come’ the article reported: ‘Among the Coolie Immigrants recently arrived from Calcutta in the Bucephalus, are several Sepoys, who have fled from India. They say that they were ordered to shoot their white officers, but that rather than do so, they ran away, and emigrated. One of the female immigrants was servant to a lady who was massacred at Cawnpore.’Footnote ⁷⁸ A separate, official report of the arrival of the same ship, merely limits itself to remarking upon the low mortality during the voyage, which is attributed to the ‘superior class of emigrants embarked at Calcutta’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Only when serious incidents occurred – such as an alleged mutiny on board the Clasmerden taking Indian migrants to Guiana, which forced the ship to divert its course – did official sources report evidence of ‘sepoy’ involvement.Footnote ⁸⁰

In the absence of official documentation recording the fates of the many who slipped away from the scene of rebellion, much can nevertheless be gleaned from the stories of those who do occasionally or accidentally resurface in the written British archive. We know from a petition of Kunchun Sing, for example, who complained that he had been ‘unjustly ejected from his native village in Ranchee, Chota Nagpore, and his lands given to another simply upon rumour that his father had joined the mutineers’, that he had resettled himself in Calcutta.Footnote ⁸¹ A written protest made by the commissioner of police in that city in March 1861 reveals a further intriguing dimension to the mutiny story. He complained that almost 300 convicts brought back from the Andaman Islands on two ships had been ‘turned loose in Calcutta’, considering it an ‘an improper course to send them adrift without any communication with me on the subject’.Footnote ⁸² It is likely that some of the many displaced persons who wound up in Calcutta in the aftermath of the mutiny may have found a much-needed meal and a welcome in one of the emigration depots that lined the Hughli river and that employed scores of persons precisely to scour the bazaars and streets for such individuals. Certainly, at the time of planning the ‘Andaman solution’, officials had discussed the possibility that the transportees might emigrate after serving out their sentences. Moreover, when arrangements were put in place to encourage the families of transportees to join them at the penal settlement of Port Blair on the Andamans, it was the ‘coolie emigration agent’ at Calcutta who was placed in charge of conducting ‘the family emigration of convicts’ in 1858. Five hundred transportees wrote letters to their families but, of these, the vast majority failed to be reunited because the family members either could not be found (some having left the district) or refused to go. One woman, named as Mussamut Oomeda, alias Sudhni, consented to travel to Port Blair, and it was the Mauritius emigration agent who was asked to arrange her conveyance from her home to his depot and onwards to the Andamans. Another woman – Mussamut Nuthee – and her son reached the Mauritius emigration depot but then, according to the agent, ‘refused to proceed’. They reportedly remained at Calcutta.Footnote ⁸³ It is therefore not so extraordinary to find, in the Mauritius depot at Varanasi, a Punjabi Muslim who had been a convict at the Andamans, waiting to emigrate, later in the century.Footnote ⁸⁴ For those who cared to investigate, there would have been many more such cases. Few, however, wanted to look closely at the connection between migrants and mutineers, at least not until much later.

Recasting the ‘rebel sepoy’ and the ‘coolie migrant’

The intertwined yet hitherto separate stories of the ‘rebel sepoy’ and the ‘coolie migrant’ are complex, and have not been successfully engaged within a mutiny historiography that remains resolutely ‘Indocentric’ and generally elite-bound. The arrogance of imperial rule helped to ensure that the sepoy migrant mutineer was not considered an object of undue anxiety; but it was the greed of colonial capitalists that kept the existence of any itinerant sepoys carefully under wraps. Ultimately, however, the global popular narrative of fiendish sepoys did seep into the colonial consciousness, and coloured impressions of plantation workers during subsequent moments of crisis.

The manner in which the barbaric sepoy was recast in various less evil guises by those who sought to import his labour in the immediate aftermath of 1857 is startling, especially when compared to the lurid press accounts of the ‘Mutiny’ at this time. As early as 8 August 1857, ‘Guianensis’ was arguing in the Royal Gazette of British Guiana that the sepoys, ‘though exceedingly guilty, yet are uncontaminated by ordinary crime, and may be considered more as political offenders’. The letter also suggested that eventually the mutineer migrants would ‘shake off their caste prejudices and become good citizens’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Van Renen asserted in the Cape Argus that the Bengal sepoys had ‘gone mad’ through fear of being converted into Christians, and opined that ‘most of the murders of women and children at Meerut and Delhi were perpetrated by the Budmashes in the bazaars’. He looked forward to an idyllic pastoral future:

‘An Inhabitant’ asserted in the columns of another newspaper in British Guiana that the colonists had no more to fear from rebel sepoys than the residents of Australia who lived with European convicts in their midst: ‘The Sepoy convict in British Guiana would be like the European convict in New South Wales, a conquered, broken, altered individual’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The editor of a Trinidadian newspaper was sure that when the ‘misguided sepoys’ found that ‘industry and quiet are sure roads to competence and independence they will pursue them’.Footnote ⁸⁸

In seeking to convince its compatriots of the benefits of mutineer immigration, The Colonist reminded its readers in British Guiana that the Indian population on the island already included ‘many dismissed Sepoys, who did not leave their regiments on account of good conduct’.Footnote ⁸⁹ However the colonial press debate, which largely reflected the divergent concerns of local interest groups, was given a new twist in Mauritius, where an editorial in Le Cernéen raised the question of what might be the views of the local Indian population on the mutiny. The article stated:

The colonial governments in Mauritius, the Cape, and elsewhere had responded favourably to the need for troops and, indeed, left themselves with a depleted force in so doing. However, not everyone in those colonies with sizeable Indian populations imported under the indenture system as plantation labourers was as inured to the possibility of copycat risings in their own territories as were the senior officials and planter lobbyists. The author of a letter to The Creole newspaper in Guiana asked his fellow settlers: ‘What would be the feeling on many an estate now, if the coolies were as well acquainted with the recent transactions in India as the manager is? Would there not be a feeling of the greatest uneasiness lest they should attempt to imitate the deeds of their countrymen?’Footnote ⁹¹ The prospect of further immigrants from India disturbed ‘Quietus’, whose letter to the same newspaper contended:

Over succeeding years, whenever riots erupted on the sugar estates, the spectre of 1857 returned to haunt the columns of the colonial press. In 1869, following a number of incidents in British Guiana, a local correspondent reminded readers ‘on most of the Estates in this Colony, there are between 300 and 400 immigrants, … many of whom are sepoys, who even now remember with satisfaction and glory the parts they bore in the memorable tragedies of Cawnpore and Delhi’.Footnote ⁹³ A letter in the New Era newspaper in Trinidad offered up a stark warning to colonists there: ‘the day is not far off when these Coolies … will break out in open rebellion, and reproduce here the barbarities of the great chief, Nana Sahib, in British India a few years ago’.Footnote ⁹⁴

The presence of sepoys among rioters on estates was a regular aspect of reports on a number of serious incidents that occurred in Guiana well into the early 1870s. Investigations into the incidents generally revealed few salient facts about these individuals.Footnote ⁹⁵ Indeed, it would not have been surprising to find sepoys among the estate workforce in the various plantation colonies. The emigration of ex-sepoys was recorded among documented cases of migrants from the inception of the indenture system.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Rajput migrants from overpopulated and impoverished districts such as Shahabad furnished not only recruits for the Bengal army but also entire families for the sugar plantations of Mauritius, British Guiana, and elsewhere.Footnote ⁹⁷ The challenge for the historian is to look beyond evolving stereotypes, in which barbaric sepoys are recast as malleable plantation fodder and where estate workers rioting against poor conditions and low wages are transformed into legions of Nana Sahibs waiting to massacre the white denizens of the sugar colonies. The subaltern mutiny narrative remains largely unwritten, its traces obscured by an archive founded on notions of racial superiority and subdividing its colonized subjects into immutable caste-bound categories. Further research is needed to recover the life histories of villagers and town-dwellers whose lives were rocked by the tumult of 1857 and who were uprooted and began again in the bulging empire of mid Victorian Britain.

Conclusion

Analysis of the impact of a single dramatic event such as the Indian Uprising around the empire enables us to assess the relative influence of local interests over empire-wide concerns. It also reveals how evolving stereotypes are shared or diluted as a result of questions of distance, prejudice, and simple expediency. Did their paramount interest in labour importation cause Australian capitalists and Mauritian administrators simply to ignore the real or perceived threat of Indian copycat risings that might occur in existing or projected populations of labourers/sepoys? Were British settlers in Singapore more interested in raising the status of their adopted home from that of penal settlement to thriving port city than in protecting themselves from mutinous sepoy convicts? Whatever the real significance or underlying truth of colonial responses to the question of mutiny and transportation, superficial expressions of sympathy with British India’s horror and rage at the onset of the rebellion were soon overshadowed by parochial and regional concerns. The British Empire has been seen as representing a monolithic face to the mutineers in 1857 – in fact, it was governed by very localized interests and imperatives. Colonial officials commonly deluded themselves with essentialist ideas about their ‘local’ people in a particular place, loyalty and immobility being combined as virtues among ‘their’ subject populations. Faced with the prospect of numerous turbulent Indians, however, there was very little commonality of purpose among British officials abroad. In the long run, those territories that profited most from the establishment of post-1857 migrant streams were probably those where there was the least agreement upon issues of ‘policy’, and where migration of (and investment in) indigenous hands ultimately gained the upper hand.