The Peasant Armed: The Indian Rebellion of 1857

275 Pages·1986·5.16 MB·English

by  Eric Stokes

The Peasant Armed
The Indian Revolt of 1857
ERIC STOKES
Edited by
C. A. BAYLY
CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD
1986
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP
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- Estate of the late Eric Stokes 1986
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Stokes, Eric
The peasant armed: the Indian revolt of 1857.
I. India—History—Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-1858
I. Title II. Bav/v,
954.03 17 DS478
ISBN 0-19-821570 3
Library oj Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Stokes, Eric.
The peasant armed.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
I. India—History—Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-1858.
2. Peasant uprisings—India. I. Bav/v, ('.A. (Christopher
A/anf II. Title.
DS478.S85 1986 954.03'! 85-2 IMS
ISB V 0-19-821570 3
Set bv DMB ( Tvpeseliing), Oxford
Printed in Great Britain
ai the University Printing House. Oxfoid
hv David Stanford
Printer to the University
EDITOR'S PREFACE
Eric Stokes’s original scheme for The Peasant Armed included
three chapters for which no draft material exists. These were to
be studies of the revolt in ‘the Lower Doab' (i.e. Fatehpur and
Allahabad districts), ‘Oudh and the eastern districts’ (i.e. the tracts
covered by the Chief Commissioner of Oudh, the Commissioner of
Benares and Western Bihar in the later nineteenth century), and
central India. His detailed treatment of the social origins of the
revolt would therefore have extended to all regions where mutiny
was complemented by civil rebellion in 1857. Stokes does not ap­
pear to have projected any separate treatment of regions where the
military alone revolted, such as a number of Punjab stations, or
areas where there was a good deal of elite or popular discontent
which did not break into open rebellion, as in Hyderabad or parts
of the Maratha territories. The work would also have culminated
with a lengthy essay on colonial revolt in general, but, sadly, he had
not begun to write the conclusion at the time of his death in 1981.
The direction of Stokes’s thought on the various regions can be
partially inferred from The Peasant and the Raj (Cambridge,
1978). The introduction to this work and chapter 5—on ‘traditional
resistance movements*—deal briefly with Oudh and the Lower
Doab, while chapter 11 has contextual material for central India. In
addition, Stokes supervised nearly fifty undergraduate seminar
papers for a Cambridge special subject on the rebellion in the late
1960s. These give further indications of his ideas for the missing
chapters and I have suggested how he might have proceeded in my
concluding note to this volume.
The lack of Eric Stokes’s own conclusions is, nevertheless, a
severe problem. I have tried to fill the gap by including here a
seminar paper for the South Asian Institute of Heidelberg Univer­
sity completed in 1978 and entitled The Roots of Peasant Violence
in the 1857 Rebellion’. In no way can this stand as a conclusion.
But it does relate to one of the major issues with which he grappled,
the relation between elite and mass protest, besides dealing with an
area of the north Indian plains (the middle and lower Doab) not
covered in the extant chapters.
vi Editor’s Preface
A further difficulty is that chapter 3 of The Peasant Armed is
unfinished. It was to be a general treatment of the north Indian
agrarian economy and the British Raj, bringing up to date some of
the material presented in chapter 2 of The Peasant and the Raj
(‘The first century of British colonial rule in India’) and his chapter
in the Cambridge Economic History of India (Cambridge, 1982).
The chapter would presumably have gone on to deal with the lower
strata of the peasantry, agricultural labourers, and possibly towns­
men and artisans. Parts of this chapter have proved exceptionally
difficult to reconstruct as they were in very rough draft. But it
seemed essential to include them, as Eric Stokes’s understanding of
the society of the old peasant elite of north India—the Rajput and
Brahmin village-controllers—is central to his whole analysis of the
revolt.
Finally, it should be mentioned that nearly half of the references
and footnotes were incomplete and impossible to trace in manu­
script notes. Stokes was a very careful scholar and the quotations
are almost certainly correct. But it has proved impossible to track
their source down in several instances. Rather than omit all refer­
ence material in such cases, I have included as much as can be
recovered so that any future research worker will at least know
where to start looking.
Inevitably The Peasant Armed is an unbalanced book. The con­
nection between the military mutiny, so interestingly treated in the
first two chapters, and the detailed social analysis which exists
thereafter is implicit rather than explicit. This makes the book
difficult for the non-specialist to follow. But the interest and
sophistication of this work made its publication imperative, even in
an incomplete form.
St Catharine’s College, Cambridge C. A. BAYLY
July 1985
CONTENTS
List of Maps ix
Abbreviations xi
Select Glossary of Indian Words xiii
Introduction 1
The Military Dimension: British Strategy and Tactics 17
The Military Dimension: the Sepoy Rebels 49
The Peasant World and British Administration 100
Rebellion in the Countryside: the Delhi Region and
Haryana 119
Rebellion in the Meerut District 143
Rebellion in the Muzaffarnagar District 176
Rebellion in the Saharanpur District 199
Conclusion. The Nature and Roots of Peasant
Violence in 1857 214
Editor’s Concluding Note. Eric Stokes and the
Uprising of 1857 226
List of Sources and Bibliography 245
Index 253

LIST OF MAPS
1. Northern India 18
2. The siege of Delhi 1857 72
3. The Meerut District 144
4. Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar Districts 200
5. The Agra Region 215

ABBREVIATIONS
C.-in-C. Commander-in-Chief
DG District Gazetteer
Gaz. E. T. Atkinson (ed.), Statistical Accounts of the
North-Western Provinces, Allahabad, 1874-84
G.-G. in C Governor-General in Council
Gof I Government of India
FSUP S. A. Rizvi and M. I. Bhargava (eds.), Freedom
Struggle in Uttar Pradesh, 6 vols., Lucknow, 1957-
61.
HM Her Majesty’s . . .
IESHR Indian Economic and Social History Review
IOL India Office Library and Records, London
LC Light Cavalry
Lt.-Gov. Lieutenant-Governor
Milit. Progs. Military Proceedings
NE Narrative of Events Regarding the Mutiny in 1857-58
and the Restoration of Authority, Calcutta, 1881
NI Native Infantry
NWP North-Western Provinces
PGR Punjab Government Records: Mutiny Records—
Correspondence, vol. vii, Lahore, 1911
Pol. Progs. Political Proceedings
PP Parliamentary Papers
Rev. Progs. Revenue Proceedings
SR District Settlement Report
TNN C. T. Metcalfe (ed.), Two Native Narratives of the
Mutiny of Delhi, Westminster, 1898
UP United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (later Uttar
Pradesh)