Indian mutiny was 'war of religion'
Dalrymple found original documents (Photo: Raghu Rai/Magnum)
India celebrates the 150th anniversary next year of the Indian mutiny or "first war of independence", when Indian soldiers of the British army rebelled against their colonial masters.
Conventional history says native Hindu and Muslim soldiers, known as sepoys, revolted against the British East India Company over fears that gun cartridges were greased with animal fat forbidden by their religions.
Not so simple, says internationally acclaimed writer and historian William Dalrymple.
In the first of a series of BBC interviews with newsmakers in South Asia, he says his research for a book on the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar threw up startling revelations.
Why do you say that the 1857 mutiny was primarily a war of religion when it has been widely regarded as a rising against British economic policies?
"It is rather remarkable that all these papers in the National Archives have never been properly explored before"
William Dalrymple
Up to now most of the data used by historians exploring 1857 has come from British sources. In the research for my new book, The Last Mughal, my colleague Mahmoud Farooqi and I have used the 20,000 rebel documents in Urdu and Persian which survive from the sepoy camp and palace in Delhi, all of which we found in the National Archives. In the rebels' own papers, they refer over and again to their uprising being a war of religion. There were no doubt a multitude of private grievances, but it is now unambiguously clear that the rebels saw themselves as fighting a war to preserve their religion, and articulated it as such.
So was it less a rebellion against foreign domination as commonly believed?
The two are closely linked: but what the rebels most objected to in the foreign domination of their country was the way the British threatened their religions - the words din and dharma [the Urdu and Hindi words for religion] appear constantly in rebel proclamations, and were used as war cries by the combatants. They certainly appear far more regularly than secular declarations of the right to self-government or economic freedom, both of which are occasionally mentioned, but far less frequently than concerns over British intentions to impose Christianity on them.
An engraving of the Sepoy mutiny
Would you call it the first Indian jihad or holy war? The majority of sepoys who revolted were Hindu, weren't they?
India celebrates the 150th anniversary next year of the Indian mutiny or "first war of independence", when Indian soldiers of the British army rebelled against their colonial masters.
Conventional history says native Hindu and Muslim soldiers, known as sepoys, revolted against the British East India Company over fears that gun cartridges were greased with animal fat forbidden by their religions.
Not so simple, says internationally acclaimed writer and historian William Dalrymple.
In the first of a series of BBC interviews with newsmakers in South Asia, he says his research for a book on the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar threw up startling revelations.
Why do you say that the 1857 mutiny was primarily a war of religion when it has been widely regarded as a rising against British economic policies?
William Dalrymple
Up to now most of the data used by historians exploring 1857 has come from British sources. In the research for my new book, The Last Mughal, my colleague Mahmoud Farooqi and I have used the 20,000 rebel documents in Urdu and Persian which survive from the sepoy camp and palace in Delhi, all of which we found in the National Archives. In the rebels' own papers, they refer over and again to their uprising being a war of religion. There were no doubt a multitude of private grievances, but it is now unambiguously clear that the rebels saw themselves as fighting a war to preserve their religion, and articulated it as such.
So was it less a rebellion against foreign domination as commonly believed?
The two are closely linked: but what the rebels most objected to in the foreign domination of their country was the way the British threatened their religions - the words din and dharma [the Urdu and Hindi words for religion] appear constantly in rebel proclamations, and were used as war cries by the combatants. They certainly appear far more regularly than secular declarations of the right to self-government or economic freedom, both of which are occasionally mentioned, but far less frequently than concerns over British intentions to impose Christianity on them.
Would you call it the first Indian jihad or holy war? The majority of sepoys who revolted were Hindu, weren't they?