Journey
First War of Independence, 1857
A mutiny of the Bengal army that became, in a few places, a war — and in those places was fought for a restoration rather than a republic. It ran from May 1857 to mid-1858, ended the East India Company and the Mughal dynasty together, and replaced them both with the Crown.
Stops (9)
- Barrackpore · Barrackpore, March 1857 — the first shot
Mangal Pandey of the 34th Native Infantry attacked his officers on the parade ground and was hanged with the regiment disbanded — six weeks before Meerut. The greased cartridge rumour was the immediate cause, but the annexation of Awadh the previous year had already unsettled an army recruited heavily from it.
- Meerut · Meerut, 10 May 1857 — the rising
Eighty-five sowars were sentenced to ten years' hard labour for refusing the cartridges and stripped of their uniforms in front of the garrison. The next evening the cantonment rose, killed its officers, opened the jail and rode for Delhi through the night — forty miles, with no pursuit sent after them.
- Bahādur Shāh Zafar · Bahādur Shāh Zafar — the reluctant emperor
A poet of eighty-two with a Company pension and authority over little beyond the fort, proclaimed emperor of Hindustan by sepoys who needed a name. It turned a mutiny into a restoration and him into a defendant; he was tried in his own audience hall and exiled to Rangoon.
- Kashmere Gate · Delhi — the siege and the storm
The rebels held Delhi from May to September and the British held a ridge north of it, both sides too weak to finish the other until a siege train arrived. The assault came in through Kashmere Gate on 14 September, and the killing and plunder that followed emptied the city for months.
- Kanpur · Kanpur, June–July 1857
Wheeler's entrenchment surrendered to Nana Sahib on terms and the garrison was shot at the river; the surviving women and children were killed at the Bibighar two weeks later as Havelock's column approached. Reprisals at Kanpur set the pattern for the rest of the campaign, and the two massacres have shaped how the whole rising is remembered.
- The Residency, Lucknow · Lucknow — the Residency, July to November
The compound held out for nearly five months against the Awadh forces and the mutinous garrison, relieved twice before it could be evacuated; about two thousand of three thousand inside died. Begum Hazrat Mahal ran the rebel government of Awadh through it and never surrendered, withdrawing to Nepal in 1859.
- Jhansi Fort · Jhansi, March–April 1858
Lakshmibai's state had been annexed under the doctrine of lapse when her adopted heir was refused recognition. Rose's siege took the fort after a relief force was beaten off; the sack that followed killed several thousand. She got out at night, on a horse, and rode for Kalpi.
- Gwalior Fort · Gwalior, June 1858 — the end
The last campaign: Lakshmibai, Tatya Tope and Rao Sahib took Gwalior's fortress from a Scindia who had stayed loyal, held it for two weeks, and lost it. Lakshmibai was killed in the fighting, in a cavalry uniform. Tatya Tope kept a guerrilla war going for another ten months before he was betrayed and hanged.
- Rangoon / Yangon · Rangoon — the exile
Zafar was tried in the Red Fort in 1858 and shipped to Rangoon with his wife and two sons, where he lived four years in a compound behind the garrison and was buried in a grave deliberately left unmarked. It was found again in 1991. The Mughal dynasty ends in a British cantonment in Burma.