Any discussion of the reasons for the Indian Mutiny must be preceded by what the mutiny actually was. Although mutinies and riots were not uncommon in India at that time, they were usually largely uncoordinated. The mutiny of 1857, however, was different. There has been a greater convergence of various strands of resistance, an expansion of scale and a new level of intensity. My goal is to find out why this happened. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay The mutiny was started on 10 May 1857 in Meerut by the 11th Native Cavalry. The immediate problem was the greasy cartridges of the new rifle being introduced in India. Soldiers were expected to bite the end of the cartridge to release the powder with which to prime the rifle. As early as 1853 Colonel Tucker had suggested that the new fat might offend the religious feelings of the Sepoys, but this warning had gone unheeded. This kind of attitude was typical of the English who constantly underestimated the importance of Indian religion, and failure to do so would have disastrous consequences. a high-caste Sepoy who had offended him so much that you will soon lose your caste, until you have to bite into cartridges covered in the fat of pigs and cows. The news of this accident spread. Since it was against the Muslim and Hindu religion to come into contact with these meats, it would have been a disgrace for them to have to use these guns. However, what the Sepoys feared was not personal pollution, but social ostracism: they feared being excommunicated by their own people. Furthermore, the whole incident appeared more sinister to the Sepoys, who already suspected that the British were planning to marginalize them and convert them to Christianity. With this skepticism still widespread, Colonel Carmichael Smith ordered his regiment at Meerut to parade for shooting practice on 24 April 1857. He was aware that the situation was tense, but there were new instructions to open the cartridges with the fingers and not with teeth. However, the men refused to take practice cartridges even though they were of the old type, as they feared for their reputations. The men were summoned to court, disgraced during the parade and sentenced to imprisonment. The punishment took place on May 9, and the next day a bizarre riot broke out, quickly spreading to the infantry lines and native cavalry. The angry Sepoys freed their colleagues and continued to massacre the British residents. British officers were slow to react and by the next morning fifty Europeans and Eurasians were dead, including women and children. Indian shopkeepers were attacked and looted while the mutineers were on their way to Delhi to offer their services to the retired Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah. There were no troops in Delhi, but all the Christians and Europeans were driven out and murdered. Small abortive outbreaks subsequently occurred, but it was not until 21 May that serious problems erupted throughout Oudh and the north-western provinces. On 15 July, British women and children were brutally murdered in Allahabad and Colonel Neill ordered those responsible to be executed after having the room where the murders took place cleaned. The close contact they would have to make with blood was also another grave insult to the Indians. It was 1859 before the last remnants of the mutiny burned. As a result of the mutiny, anti-British sentiment in India greatly intensified, and the British government took permanent control of the territory fromEast India Company in an effort to try to prevent such an event from happening again. It would be possible to describe the events of the mutiny in much more detail, but here we must look at the deeper reasons behind it. The mutiny has been described as the country's first war of independence, because it was the first major demonstration of national feeling and action against the British presence. Early 20th century commentators, especially Indian ones, supported this view. For example, Marx describes the mutiny as a national uprising, but it is necessary to take into account the circumstances in which he came to this conclusion. Marx was writing for the New York Times and his interpretation could be seen to perpetuate the national sentiment in the United States that colonialism was wrong. Marx was trying to gain sympathy for the Indian people who he described as economically exploited by the harshness of British rule, from which America had fled, so if he had shown sympathies for the British colonists, then the American public would simply not consider Marx the same way. Therefore his circumstances may have greatly influenced his articles. Marx anticipated, or perhaps influenced the current Indian view of seeing it as the starting point of the independence movement, as Indian nationalists describe the mutiny as part of national evolution and, naturally, can be seen as inclined to emphasize the patriotic resistance of their ancestors. However, seeing it as a war of independence seems possible only in hindsight, or looking at it in terms of what it achieved in the years to come, as it could be that its memory helped and guided India to gain independence in 1847. And Stokes suggested that the mutiny momentarily revealed the structure of rural Indian society and that it did not constitute a decisive, universal turning point in the history of British India. of the movement provided the strongest argument for the subsequent British claim that they had not been faced with a national war for independence at all, as if they had, then a greater proportion of the population would undoubtedly have been involved and therefore the 'mutiny could have turned out to be more effective. As it was the mutiny was limited to the geographical area. 70,000 Sepoys joined the revolt, but not at the same time, 30,000 remained loyal to Britain and 30,000 played no role. No class or caste community as such was entirely for or against the government. The mutiny has also been described as a nationalist uprising. Bose and Jalal describe the mutiny as instilling a great sense of patriotism if not nationalism, insofar as it had the shared goal of ending colonial rule. Legends of courage and slaughter were later smuggled into Indian nationalism. While delegates to India's first national congress ritually denounced the revolt as reactionary, by the time of the extremist movement of 1905-10, images of the Rhanis of Jhansi were seen decorating chariots during the Ramillela festival of northern Indian cities. describing the mutiny as nationalistic could be criticized for not taking into account the enormous diversity of strata of Indian society, be it religious, caste or geographical. Furthermore, Chamberlain states that there was no true national conscience above religious or social issues. In Marx and Imperialism it is suggested that only Hindustan, the Hindu-speaking areas of the Ganges valley, wanted an India, but even this was too large and diverse. a place, and his memories were also about morebelonging to an empire, rather than any national revolt against it. Furthermore, here too there was no debate on national issues to give political consciousness, and Marx can be criticized for overestimating the degree of national unity and underestimating the strength of religious decisions. The mutiny has often been criticized for being too much an insurrection of soldiers and too little of the nation. India knows far too little about itself as a nation for the mutiny to be classified in this sense. A third way the mutiny has been described is that of a post-pacification uprising. A simplistic description of this is that of a type of revolt that occurs after the end of pacification following a conquest. That is, once a country, in this case India, is defeated in a battle in which it has resisted a period of pacification by the victorious power following colonial rule. During this period various insurrections or revolts occur due to the policies of the colonial power which disturbed the indigenous social construction in the long term. This explanation would eliminate the need for a specific national unity in the strong sense of the term. In his account, Stokes offers a sophisticated economic analysis of the mutiny, while offering some concessions to caste analysis. Stokes sees the problem in the changing ownership of land under British colonial rule, which disadvantaged some. The British changed inheritance laws in 1856 to allow them to make greater territorial gains, such as banning inheritance of land by adopted children. This rule especially affected the Nawab of Awadh, which was the province where the mutiny broke out, who was unable to hand over the land to his adopted son upon death, and would see the land pass to the English. This therefore could be an example which could support Stokes' view that the mutiny was economically motivated. He emphasizes that he does not consider this mutiny a nationalistic act, that there was no social consciousness of shared norms and values ​​that led to a revolt against the English. When E Stokes began writing, post-pacification was a term given to agrarian unrest, and revolt was blamed on entire classes, such as wealthy peasants. Stokes gradually modifies these categories and sees the notion of caste group itself as appropriate basic units for the analysis of the riot. Stokes saw widespread distrust and antipathy towards the English for their weakening of religion. The English also imposed high land taxes and rents on peasants, and because of this it often diminished the political standing of landowners in their districts relative to neighboring clans. In this way they upset the natural balance of society. However, the clashes were not always anti-British. Conflicts that arose due to disparities between the more recently settled Afghans and the older Rajput lords erupted into local struggles over succession to British rule. The Afghans were labeled as rebels as they often moved first and were perceived as the greatest threat to British rule. In this sense, Brodkin suggests that the scale of the mutiny was actually exaggerated by the British, who labeled particular groups as rebellious or loyal without there being any evidence that they were. Furthermore, members of castes could be found on both sides during the revolt and most of the groups were multi-caste. Stokes suggests that the revolt was due to relative material deprivation, which could be considered to be due to British intervention. As can be seen, the debate about the nature and causes.