Public and Private Tragedies:
Voices of the Indian Mutiny
A war of religion
What we have found in the Mutiny Papers has remarkable resonance with the political situation today.
For the Indians, the Rising was overwhelmingly a war of religion, looked upon as a defensive action against the rapid inroads that missionaries and Christianity were making in India, as well as a more generalised fight for freedom from foreign domination. And as far as the Indian participants of the Rising articulated their motives, they were, above all, resisting a move by the East India Company to impose Christianity and Christian laws on India – something many evangelical Englishmen were indeed contemplating.
Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down immediately
Infidels and Christians
As the sepoys told Bahadur Shah Zafar on 11 May 1857, ‘We have joined hands to protect our religion and our faith.’ Later they stood in the Chandni Chowk, the main street of Old Delhi, and asked people: ‘Brothers: are you with those of the faith?’ British men and women who had converted to Islam – and there were a surprising number of them in Delhi – were not hurt, but Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down immediately.
It is highly significant that the Urdu sources usually refer to the British not as Angrez (the English) or as goras (whites) or even feringhees (foreigners), but instead almost always as kafirs (infidels) and Nasrani (Christians).
Mujahedin, ghazis and jihadis
Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, a flag of jihad was raised at the principal mosque in Delhi, and many of the insurgents described themselves as mujahedin, ghazis and jihadis. Indeed, by the end of the siege, after a significant proportion of the sepoys had melted away, unpaid, hungry and dispirited, the jihadis in Delhi eventually comprised about a quarter of the total fighting force. They included a regiment of ‘suicide ghazis’ from Gwalior who had vowed never to eat again and to fight until they met death ‘for those who have come to die have no need for food.’ One of the causes of unrest was, according to one Delhi source, the fact that ‘the British had closed the madrasas.’
These are words that had no resonance to the historians of the 1960s. Now, sadly, in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, we understand them all too well, and words such as jihad scream out of the dusty pages of the source manuscripts, demanding attention.
The Last Mughal, part of William Dalrymple’s Mughal Quartet, was published by Bloomsbury in October 2006. His last book, White Mughals, won the Wolfson Prize for History.
