What the rebels wanted

Detail

The source problem — why rebel aims are hard to know

• The winners wrote the records. Almost all papers on 1857 are British: army reports, trial papers, letters of officials, memoirs of survivors. They tell us how the official mind worked. They do not tell us what rebels wanted.
• Example of that one-sided record: G. B. Malleson's The Indian Mutiny of 1857 — a British narrative of the revolt, now digitised in the Library of Congress collections. [4]
• Most rebels could not read or write. So they left very little in their own words. What survives is small:
• proclamations — public announcements made in the name of a ruler or leader,
• ishtahars — notices or notifications stuck up or read out in towns,

• arzis — petitions written by sepoys, asking for redress.

• For UPSC: this is a historiography (how history is written) point. Rebel voices must be read through documents that were kept, copied and often mocked by the enemy.

• The Azamgarh Proclamation is preserved and described as the "Manifesto of the 1857 Rebellion" in the Government of India's Indian Culture Portal archive. [3]

The Azamgarh Proclamation, 25 August 1857 — a group-by-group appeal

This is the single most useful rebel document. It does not speak to "the nation". It speaks to each social group in turn, naming its own hurt and promising its own relief.

• Zamindars (big landholders)
• Complaint: the British fixed exorbitant jumas (the total land revenue demand on an estate).
• If a zamindar could not pay, his estate was sold by auction.
• He was also dragged to the British courtroom, which he saw as public disgrace — a small official could summon and insult a man of rank.

• Promise: light assessments — a much lower, gentler revenue demand.

• Merchants and traders

• Complaint: the British had taken a monopoly (sole control) of the trade in indigo, cloth and other valuable goods, leaving Indian traders only petty items.

• Promise: free trade — Indian merchants would be allowed to trade in all goods.

• Public servants (Indians in government jobs)

• Complaint: low pay, no real influence or power, and all the high posts kept for Englishmen.

• Promise: respectable and higher posts under the new order.

• Artisans (craft workers)

• Complaint: English-made imports had ruined them — weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths named directly. Machine cloth from Britain beggared the handloom weaver.

• Promise: employment by the royal court and the nobility — the old system where kings and nobles bought the craftsman's work.

• Pundits and fakirs (Hindu and Muslim holy men)

• Described as the guardians of both faiths.

• Called to join a religious war — jihad/dharmayuddha language — because both religions were said to be in danger.

• Why this matters: the rebels understood that different groups had different grievances. Unity had to be built, group by group, not assumed.

The vision of unity — Hindus and Muslims together

• Proclamations were addressed to all castes and creeds, not one community.
• Even proclamations issued in the name of Muslim princes took care to address Hindu sentiments and Hindu interests.
• The core line: this was a war in which Hindus and Muslims had equally to lose or gain.
• The model offered was the Mughal past — a remembered time when the two communities lived and served together. The rebels were not inventing a new nation; they were pointing back to a shared older world.
• Bahadur Shah's proclamation called people to fight under the standards of both Muhammad and Mahavir — one call, two religious banners.
• The British tried to break this unity and failed. At Bareilly, in December 1857, the British spent Rs 50,000 to stir Hindus up against Muslims. It did not work.

• For UPSC this is the strongest single fact against the old colonial claim that 1857 was a purely "Muslim conspiracy" or a mere religious riot.

• The reconstituted centre of the revolt was itself Mughal: on 10 May 1857 sepoys from Meerut reached Delhi, the Delhi garrison joined them, and by the next nightfall the city and the fort were held and the aged titular Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II was proclaimed their leader — though he himself joined only under pressure and with resignation. [2]

Total rejection of firangi raj (foreign rule)

The proclamations reject British rule as a whole, not one bad law. Five strands:

• Political: annexations and broken treaties — Indian rulers were swallowed up and solemn promises torn up.
• Dalhousie's annexations alarmed the princes: Awadh (Avadh/Oudh) was taken from the Muslim ruling house, while the Marathas had lost Nagpur, Satara and Jhansi. [2]
• Awadh's annexation hit the army directly, because many sepoys came from Awadh — its takeover is regularly listed among the causes of 1857. [2]

• Nana Sahib turned rebel after the British refused to continue his adoptive father's pension; he led the revolt at Kanpur (Cawnpore). [2]

• Revenue: dispossession — landholders and peasants losing land through high demand, auctions and new records.

• Economic: foreign commerce ruining artisans and weavers.
• Religious and social: a deep fear that the British planned to destroy caste and religion — through missionaries, new laws, and army practices.

• A trigger of this fear in the army: the new Enfield rifle cartridge, greased with a mixture of pig and cow fat, which the soldier had to bite open — offensive to Muslim and Hindu sepoys alike, and a number refused it. [2]

• So the fight was for four things at once: livelihood, faith, honour and identity.

A glimpse of an egalitarian alternative — but only a glimpse

• On the ground, rebels did things the proclamations never promised:
• attacks on city elites — the rich and the well-placed inside towns,

• burning of moneylenders' account books — destroying the written record of debt.

• This looks like the start of a more equal (egalitarian) social order — wiping out debt and humbling the rich.

• But it was never put into words in the proclamations. Those documents wanted the unity of all groups, including zamindars and merchants — so they could not attack the rich. Rebel action went further than rebel text.
• Exam framing: the revolt had an anti-colonial aim that was clearly stated, and a faint anti-feudal / social edge that was never stated.

Building an alternative power — rebel administration

• At Delhi, Lucknow and Kanpur, the rebels did not only fight; they set up governments.
• These were modelled on the eighteenth-century Mughal world — the political order the rebels actually knew:
• appointments to offices,
• revenue collection to raise money,
• payment of troops,

• a chain of command — who reports to whom.

• Their main purpose was war. Every arrangement was geared to fighting the British, not to long-term reform.

• The longest-lasting rebel administration was in Awadh. The Lucknow court was still planning counter-attacks into early 1858.
• What this shows: the rebels had a positive programme, not just anger. Their imagined future was a restored pre-British political order, not a modern nation-state.
• The British had to break these centres one by one; down-country operations turned on the relief of Lucknow, where Sir Henry Havelock fought through Kanpur to the Lucknow residency on 25 September 1857 and was then himself besieged there. [2]

Prelims Hooks

• Azamgarh Proclamation — dated 25 August 1857; preserved as the "Manifesto of the 1857 Rebellion" on the Indian Culture Portal. [3]
• Ishtahar = notification/notice; arzi = petition (sepoys' petitions are a rare rebel source).
• The Azamgarh Proclamation promised light assessments to zamindars and free trade to merchants.
• Artisans named in the proclamation as ruined by English imports: weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths.
• Bahadur Shah's proclamation invoked the standards of both Muhammad and Mahavir.
• At Bareilly in December 1857, the British spent Rs 50,000 to incite Hindus against Muslims — and failed.
• Rebel administrations on the eighteenth-century Mughal model were set up at Delhi, Lucknow and Kanpur; the longest-lasting was in Awadh, planning counter-attacks into early 1858.
• Nana Sahib rebelled after the British stopped his adoptive father's pension; he led the revolt at Kanpur. [2]
• Delhi was seized and Bahadur Shah II proclaimed leader on 10–11 May 1857, one day after the Meerut sepoys marched in. [2]
• Havelock reached the Lucknow residency on 25 September 1857 and was besieged there in turn. [2]

Mains Points

• The archive shapes the argument. Because rebels left only a handful of proclamations, ishtahars and arzis, while the British left mountains of paper, any claim that "the rebels had no aims" may be a fact about the records, not about the rebels. Use this to attack the old colonial reading of 1857 as a purely military mutiny.
• 1857 was a coalition, not a single class movement. The Azamgarh Proclamation's section-by-section appeal — zamindars, merchants, public servants, artisans, holy men — shows leaders consciously stitching together groups with separate grievances under one enemy, firangi raj. That explains both its breadth and its fragility.
• Religion as a unifier, not a divider. Proclamations issued by Muslim princes addressed Hindu sentiment; Bahadur Shah invoked two religious standards; the Rs 50,000 Bareilly effort failed. 1857 shows a pre-modern, composite unity grounded in the remembered Mughal order — different from modern secular nationalism but genuinely cross-communal.
• Aims vs. actions — the missing social revolution. Burning moneylenders' account books and attacking city elites hint at an egalitarian impulse, yet the proclamations never demand social levelling, because they needed zamindars and merchants on side. Good material for the debate on whether 1857 was restorative (bringing back old rulers) or transformative.