Place · river city & rebellion site · India
Kanpur
The city on the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh, 83 kilometres from Lucknow, that was a major theatre of the 1857 uprising — the 25 June 1857 Satichaura Ghat massacre of 300 British soldiers, women and children by Nana Sahib's forces, and the 15 July Bibighar massacre of 73 British women and children in a two-storey bungalow, became among the most publicised atrocities of the uprising. Nana Sahib (Dhondu Pant), the adopted son of the last Peshwa Baji Rao II, led the Kanpur rebellion and disappeared into Nepal after the British recapture. Kanpur became British India's largest industrial city after the 1860s — leather, cotton mills, army boots — on contracts from the Cantonment and the railways. Modern Kanpur is Uttar Pradesh's industrial capital.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.450, 80.332
Connections (3)
- Historical routeLucknow Kathak gharana
Kanpur and Lucknow are eighty kilometres apart and both belong to the annexation of Awadh in 1856 and its consequences: Wajid Ali Shah's deposition dispersed the Lucknow court that had made Kathak what it is, and the resentment of that annexation is a large part of why both cities rose in 1857. This is a schematic link between two effects of one policy rather than a route anybody travelled.
- Site adjacencyKannauj
Kannauj and Kanpur are connected through the Ganga basin and the historic cultural landscape of central Uttar Pradesh. Kannauj was a major imperial and commercial centre during early medieval India, while Kanpur developed much later as an important riverine and industrial city. Both reflect successive phases of urbanisation along the Ganga and its tributary networks.
- Succession in timeJamshedpur
Kanpur after 1857 became one of the first large industrial cities in India — Elgin Mills, the Cawnpore Woollen Mills, leather and army boots — built on the cantonment contracts and the railhead that had made it a theatre of the uprising, and run on British capital. Jamshedpur, laid out from nothing forty years later by Jamsetji Tata's company, is the deliberate Indian answer to it: an industrial city planned and owned rather than accumulated, and the two together are most of what Indian heavy industry was before 1947.
On these journeys
- The Grand Trunk Road — Kabul to Chittagong
- First War of Independence, 1857
- The Gangā — Gomukh to the Sundarbans
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kanpur”. Parliamentary Papers and the Mutiny Narratives; Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt; William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal.
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