To the end of time historians will probably differ as to what it was that caused the Indian Mutiny. Some have laid stress on considerations of general policy. Others have attributed the catastrophe to special acts of administration. The acts of administration were, however, but the sparks that exploded the forces of revolution, which had been slowly accumulating in the country. To understand the origin of the Indian Mutiny one must understand the administration of Lord Dalhousie, and fairly estimate the last acts of his viceregal career. Of these none had a more serious effect on the minds of the Native Courts than the annexation of Oudh. Inasmuch as Dalhousie was personally a strong opponent of annexation, the presumption is that the step, objectionable as it seems, was inevitable. Oudh was misgoverned by a vicious but feeble-minded Prince, and the people were tortured not only by his besotted tyranny, but by the exactions of a corrupt aristocracy. At the same time, the Kings of Oudh had long been trusty allies of the East India Company, who had borrowed money from them, protected them against their mutinous subjects, and used their territory as a recruiting ground for the Sepoy army. One-half of Oudh had been given to the Company, by the Treaty of 1801, on condition that a British army should be maintained in the country for the support of the reigning dynasty. Attempts had been made—notably by Lord
THE BARRACKS AT MEERUT.
Auckland—to evade this obligation, but they were made in vain. After the first Sikh war, Lord Hardinge had warned the King of Oudh that the Company could no longer tolerate misrule in his territory, and Dalhousie, in 1848, had sent Colonel Sleeman to reconstruct, if possible, its internal administration. The task was a hopeless one, and in 1851 Sleeman reported[328] that there was no choice but to assume the whole government of the kingdom. Dalhousie shrank from taking this step, and in 1854, when Sleeman resigned, Sir James Outram was appointed as his successor, and asked to report on the whole case. Outram, though a firm anti-annexationist, confirmed Sleeman’s statements. He admitted that the duty imposed on the Indian Government by the Treaty of 1801 rendered it necessary to have recourse to extreme measures. As a warm advocate for maintaining Native States so long as they had any vitality, it was, said Outram, painful and distressing to him to confess that in continuing to uphold the sovereign power of an effete and incapable dynasty we were inflicting infinite misery on 5,000,000 of people.[329] Unfortunately, the Treaty of 1801 had stipulated that all improvements in the administration of Oudh must be carried out by Native officers under British advice. It was impossible, therefore, to transfer the administration of Oudh to the servants of the Company, and equally impossible to expect reforms from the servants of the King. Lord Dalhousie’s notion was that the Treaty of 1801 should be “denounced”—that the King should be told he must either sign a fresh one, handing over the administration of his country to the Indian Government, or forego the protection of the British force, which stood between him and a revolution. Dalhousie ignored the fact that the withdrawal of our troops from Oudh logically involved the retrocession of that half of the kingdom which was given to us as payment for their services, and yet there can be little doubt that had his demand been pressed, the King of Oudh would have yielded. Dalhousie’s advisers differed in their views, and in the end the Court of Directors settled the matter by ordering the Governor-General to annex the country, depriving the King of revenues, rank, power, and authority, and allotting a suitable pension to him and his successors.[330] Dalhousie’s plan, on the other hand, was to assume the administration, but not to extinguish the dynasty of Oudh, and it was with reluctance that he carried out the policy of his masters. The country was annexed by Sir James Outram on the 7th of February, 1856, the King’s private property being confiscated and sold. These are the essential facts of the case, and it is easy to pass judgment on them. No Treaty conferred on the Company the shadow of a right to do more than secure for the people of Oudh good government. As it was quite possible to do that without destroying and degrading the dynasty, the seizure of Oudh was simply an act of rapine.[331] As the Kings of Oudh had been noted all over India for their staunch loyalty to the English in India, every Native prince regarded the annexation of Oudh as a menace to his throne. At every Native Court it was whispered that to be loyal to England was simply to invite ruin. Thus the last act of Dalhousie’s viceregal reign sowed the seeds of suspicion, distrust, and even hatred in the hearts of the Native dynasties.
But the whole policy of this great and vigorous ruler, by a curious irony of fate, had steadily prepared the minds of the Indian races for a revolution. Dalhousie had covered India with railways, canals, roads, and telegraphs. He had introduced a cheap postal system by which a letter from Peshawur to Cape Comorin, or from Assam to Kurrachee, was carried for three farthings—one-sixteenth of the old charge. He had reformed the Civil Service, he had improved education and prison discipline, he had passed laws that went to the root of family life, such as those permitting Hindoo widows to marry again, and relieving persons who changed their religion from forfeiture. As for his wars and his annexations, he had the “tyrant plea, necessity.” When leaving Calcutta he said mournfully, and with a trace of misgiving, as he looked back on his brilliant achievements, “I have played out my part, and while I feel that in my case the principal act in the drama of my life is ended, I shall be content if the curtain should now drop on my public career.” But the great work done by Dalhousie had not been done without friction between the paramount power and its subjects and vassals. It was, indeed, thought in England that Dalhousie handed India over to Lord Canning in a state of profound tranquillity. Yet, looking deeper than the surface, says an able writer on Indian history, “there were latent causes of uneasiness which largely pervaded the minds of the Native classes of all ranks and creeds.”[332] Dalhousie’s system of progressive education was detested by Hindoo and Moslem alike, because it undermined the whole fabric of their faith. The Moslem youth, it is true, did not frequent the English schools. But young Hindoos flocked to them with an eager thirst for knowledge, and they went to the missionary seminaries, where Christianity was taught, quite as freely as to State schools, where its teaching was prohibited. In their homes, they spoke of what they were taught to their parents, who regarded the whole system of English education as a diabolical device for corrupting the faith and morals of their children. This suspicion was strengthened and confirmed by the aggressive proselytism of the missionaries, to whose zeal one of the soundest and best informed of Native civilians has directly traced the origin of the Mutiny. The entire scheme of Dalhousie’s policy was based on the assumption that the Natives would greet with loyalty and gratitude the new era of progress that he ushered in. On the contrary, as Colonel Meadows Taylor says, “the material progress of India was unintelligible to the Natives in general. A few intelligent and educated persons might understand the use and scope of railways, telegraphs, steam-vessels, and recognise in them the direction of a great Government for the benefit of the people; but the ancient listless conservativism of the population at large was disturbed by them. ‘The English,’ it was said, ‘never did such things before, why do they do so now? These are but new devices for the domination of their will, and are aimed at the destruction of our national faith, caste, and customs. What was it all to come to? Was India to be like England? The earlier Company’s servants were simple but wise men, and we respected them; we understood them and they us; but the present men are not like them; we do not know them, nor they us.’ No one cared, perhaps, very much for such sentiments, and few—very few—English heard them; but they will not have been forgotten by those who did.”[333] The Directors of the East India Company had, prior to Dalhousie’s time, rigidly enforced on their servants a policy of benevolent neutrality to the religious beliefs and social prejudices of India. The government of the Company in its best days might have been bad. But it was successful because it was, on the whole, popular, and it was popular because it was intensely conservative. Ardent progressive officials were repressed, whereas under Dalhousie their passion for innovation had free scope and disastrous encouragement.
Nor was Oudh the only centre of Court intrigues against the British raj. The question of settling the position of the Royal Family of Delhi, the last representatives of the old Emperors of India, had been much debated in Dalhousie’s reign. When Lord Canning went to India, in 1856, it was again taken up, and a final decision given on the points raised. The heir-apparent, Prince Fukhr-ood-deen, who had agreed to evacuate the Palace, died on the 10th of July, 1856, and it was supposed he had been poisoned. The Queen, Zeenut Mahál, immediately began to intrigue for the purpose of procuring the recognition of her son as heir-apparent, and the King of Delhi petitioned the Government of India to this effect. But the petition could not have been granted without a breach of the Mohammedan law, and so Mirza Korash, the next in legal succession to Fukhr-ood-deen, was recognised as heir to the throne. But whereas, in the case of Fukhr-ood-deen, the recognition of the Government was the result of a compact or bargain between independent authorities, in the case of Mirza Korash it took the form of an Imperial decree, conferring rank and dignity on a vassal prince. The Royal Family of Delhi resented the whole arrangement. “Remembering the old relations between the Company and the Empire, the immense benefits originally conferred on them, and the admitted position of the Company as servants of the State, it was,” writes Colonel Taylor, “only natural they should now be accused of perfidy. The efforts and intrigues of the spirited Queen and several of the princes were now redoubled, locally as well as in foreign quarters; and India, especially the North-West Provinces, became filled with the most alarming rumours.”[334]
Along with these there spread extraordinary tales of the decaying power of England—tales which fawning courtiers poured into the willing ears of Native princes, and with which embittered malcontents regaled the Native servants of the Company. The sudden collapse of Palmerston’s militant policy in the Crimea and in Persia convinced every enemy of England in India that the omens were propitious for a revolt against English rule. It was also an untoward coincidence that the year 1857-58 was the Hindoo “Sumbut” 1914, and the centenary of Plassey. But when that crowning victory was won, the astrologers had declared that the raj, or rule, of the Company would last only for a century. Astrology so dominates Indian life, that the people have a trick of fulfilling, by their unconscious action, the prophecies of their soothsayers; and he who predicts a successful insurrection on a given date has himself furnished one of the strongest encouragements for its organisation. The Sumbut 1914, therefore, could not arrive without suggesting to the Indian mind that an opportunity for throwing off the yoke of England had come. One of the stereotyped ceremonies of New Year’s Day is the public recital of the almanack for the year in every Indian village. Hence, in 1857, every Hindoo villager was solemnly warned that wise men, who, a century ago, held infallible commune with the stars, foretold that in this fateful year the British raj must end.
