The Indian Mutiny should be renamed the ‘First Indian War of Independence’, How far do you agree?
Before one can answer the question, was the Indian Mutiny a war of independence it would be best to define what a war of independence actually is. The oxford dictionary defines independence as “Free from outside control; not subject to another’s authority”. From this we can extrapolate that a war for independence would be a war to remove the authority currently governing India, the British, and to garner the ability to govern themselves, essentially freedom from those ruling them. This would imply that the revolt would be a unified nationalistic cause under a single leader or a group of leaders co-operating. However India’s mutiny lacks a clear cut leader or coherence between those who were proclaimed to be leading the rebellion. Lastly the mutiny was not on a national scale, only parts of the country revolted subsequently throwing the identification of the Indian mutiny as a war of independence into disarray.
One interpretation of the 1857 Indian Mutiny claims that the incident was a direct reaction to company insensitivities and the forceful imposition of British culture in preceding years, and was, clearly, by virtue of this, ‘a war of independence’. The first 50 years of the 19th century saw company rulers take an active foothold in attempting to liberalize Indian society with traditional, British Judeo-Christian values, to manufacture, in the words of Thomas Macauley, ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’. Widespread traditions such as Thuggee, infanticide and Suttee, which had always been viewed by colonialists as barbaric, were swiftly illegalised, whilst Protestant and western education systems grew in prominence. Whilst the British approach of Anglicisation had gained some support from