Historically, those rulers who were better equipped with cutting-edge technology of the day and were farsighted statesmen with a keen political acumen, they eventually triumphed in a war of attrition with the enemy. Thus, the Mohammedan invaders overran India and so did the Europeans later.
The British were masters of statecraft and outmanoeuvred the Indian rulers with more sophisticated planning, better organisation of forces and a more integrated approach to their political campaigns with a clear end-view that helped them emerge victorious in their protracted struggle for attaining political supremacy in India. On the contrary, the Indian rulers were busy fighting each other and could never effectively combine to thwart the perfidious designs of the invading alien armies or the even worse gradual conquest of our country from within by the British by playing one Indian ruler against another. The danger of losing national independence was not evident to too many indigenous rulers and those that did sense the danger could not muster sufficient support from their fellow Indian rulers to oust the European powers from Indian soil. When finally the slumber broke, India had been chained totally and had been so disarmed that for a long time any attempt to throw off the foreign yoke proved futile.
The one great resistance came in the wake of the revolt by the Indian sepoys which quickly spread throughout the country and assumed the shape of an all-Indian revolt. Verily has it been dubbed 'The First War of Indian Independence', although, the British who were ruthless in eventually suppressing it, spared no means to play it down as merely a 'Sepoy Mutiny' which to all intents and purposes was a blatant lie that they mischievously tried to perpetuate through historical chronicling.
But the rise of India against the English East India Company notwithstanding, the eventual failure of the revolution to evict the British from India must be ascribed to the lack of organisation of the entire uprising, its lack of ideology, planning, clear-cut objectives, a terrible lack of cohesion of the movement and a consequent lack of communication between the different sections of the revolutionary forces. But most significantly, the revolutionary outbreak was not a carefully planned execution with years of preparedness behind it but was rather a spontaneous expression of righteous anger against the increasingly oppressive colonisers in a sudden bid to evict them from the country.
But such an unplanned assault against an enemy with not inconsiderable means and measures at their disposal, while temporarily sustainable with quick victories and great gains, was bound to fail in the longer run, and so it happened. After initial reverses with terrible losses in material and man-power, the better equipped military machine of the Company hit back. The railways, that had recently been introduced in India and was at the disposal of the British, allowed faster communication and transference of arms and armament, men and materials, and this along with the disarray of the indigenous forces owing to slower communication and the lack of a centralised leadership which induced indecision and conflicting decisions, helped the Company regain control of the situation and eventual victory in the war.
What followed was a horrific tale of British barbarism as over a hundred thousand Indian soldiers were blown off the mouths of cannons, shot and hanged by the roadside trees for the natives to witness and be frightened into total submission. The rest of the prisoners were deported to the Andamans to serve there as slaves to the colonial masters and help build their future prisons for containing the dangerous revolutionaries who in times to come would dare challenge the British authority.
One more significant fallout of the failed uprising and one of momentous national consequence was that the British disarmed the princely states of India and limited their army to a token number of soldiers such that a future armed insurrection was impossible. The disarming of the country debilitated its martial power and made it entirely enslaved to the British Crown which in 1858 proclaimed its absolute authority over India by the Queen's Proclamation whereby it shed all commercial pretensions and exhibited its earnestness in evil for once by showing up its imperial fangs to the victim lying prostrate at its feet.
Unfinished and expanding ...
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo : Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi
No comments:
Post a Comment