Chapter 12 The Colonial Period 451Indian peasants had no land, worked for wages kept artificially low in order to
keep wages high and prices low in England, and had to buy food with their low
wages. In this way, colonial economies were distorted by the growing imperial
system, artificially simplified to the production of primary products only.
Meanwhile, piece by piece, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, Britain gobbled up India. One means was the “doctrine of lapse.”
According to Hindu law, when a raja was about to die without an heir, he
could adopt a son, which would be treated like a first-born natural son. But in
1849 the British declared that “heirs and successors” in all treaties applied only
to natural sons. Otherwise, the princely state “reverted” to the Company. In
this way, state after state “reverted” to the Company—and many dispossessed
heirs were skulking around, biding their time.
A crisis was brewing, and it exploded in 1857. The Company’s private
army had grown to 40,000 troops—supplemented by 300,000 Indian sepoys.
The sepoys tended to be men of the upper castes. They were well trained by the
British and were overall intensely loyal, even though their commanders were
almost always British and the handful of Indian officers were never put in com-
mand over Indian troops. There had been a series of unpopular regulations,
such as requiring sepoys to accept service in Burma, which was “across the
Black Waters,” thereby causing pollution and outcasting. The triggering event,
however, was a new Enfield rifle that fired a bullet greased, it was believed, by a
mixture of cow and pig fat. The end of the cartridge had to be torn open with
the teeth, which meant both Hindu and Muslim soldiers were polluted by
using the new rifle.
The rebellion began in the garrison town of Meerut on May 10, 1857,
when sepoys turned on their officers, killed some of them, then headed for
Delhi. There they gathered under the window of Emperor Bahadur Shah in the
Red Fort, fired a 21-gun salute and declared him emperor of all Hindustan.
Europeans in Delhi were hunted down and killed. Between Meerut and Oudh,
most garrisons joined the rebellion, murdering English military and civilian
men, women, and children. The war raged throughout the hot summer, as the
sepoys, at first spontaneous and disorganized, were joined and led by Indian
princes like Nana Sahib of Oudh and the Rani of Jhansi. However, the rebel-
lion was limited to the central Ganges basin. Bengal and Bihar stayed loyal; so
did the Punjab, central India, and Madras. The telegraph system had just been
completed, so communication was reduced to minutes rather than days or
weeks in calling for reinforcements. Troops were summoned from Persia,
Madras, Ceylon, Rangoon, and even an expedition to China was intercepted at
Singapore and called back. By spring of 1858 England had reclaimed all the
territory, inflicting often brutal vengeance. Emperor Bahadur Shah was exiled
to Burma where he soon died, and the last 21 princes of the blood were
hanged, thus extinguishing the Mughal dynasty.
After these events, Britain passed the Government of India Act, transfer-
ring all rights and responsibilities of the East India Company to the Crown,