The events of 1857—when thousands of peasants and soldiers revolted against the East India Company—were profoundly influential to India’s freedom fighters. It still appears as the “First War of Independence” in school textbooks.
But there is much more to 1857. As we’ll see, it was the last great hurrah of North India’s military labour market, which was nearly 400 years old. The revolution also involved the collapse of a peasant system that was even older; the cultivators and troops were confronted and failed by a post-Mughal landed gentry with a worldview at once modern and profoundly out-of-date.
The travelling adventurers of Purab
As early as 1000 CE, and possibly before, immigrant mercenaries made up significant proportions of armies deployed by South Asian States. For example, the lords of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka used mercenaries from present-day Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu; the Chola army had regiments such as the Kannadaka Kaduttalai and Malaiyan Orraicchevagar, the ‘Karnataka Strongheads’ and ‘Malayali Infantry’; the Rashtrakuta kings had access to contingents from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, and possibly Nepal. Even Mahmud of Ghazni had troops and officers from Punjab, Haryana, and even Karnataka.
In his magisterial work Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850, historian Dirk HA Kolff explored one thread of South Asia’s labour market—the military men called “Purbiyas” from the Purab region, corresponding to present-day eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In the 15th century, the Jaunpur Sultanate, which once ruled this region, collapsed, leaving its peasants unable to find employment as warriors.
Military service was extremely important to peasants—as Kolff puts it, it was part of a “survival kit” that guaranteed peasants access to liquid cash, which their families used to maintain their ownership of land. Young men from peasant families would go off to serve in wars, sending their incomes home. When they reached middle age, they returned to their villages to work on the farms, have children, and continue the cycle.
The solution that emerged was quite impressive. Taking up service with various ‘military entrepreneurs’ from landed families, warriors would adopt the temporary identity of ‘Afghan’ or ‘Purbiya Rajput’ (irrespective of their birth status) and fight in distant battlefields—such as Gujarat and Malwa. Military labour was a seller’s market, comprising armed men who chose the conditions of employment and abandoned employers who could not deliver salaries or victories. It was victories and good finances that granted Sher Shah Suri access to military labour, which, in turn, enabled him to defeat the Mughal ruler Humayun. When the Mughal State was firmly established by Akbar, a more regular system was set up. Military labour was directly recruited by the State and its officers—especially jemadars, older peasant warriors capable of bringing with them dozens of young recruits.
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Caste in EIC armies
When Mughal power declined in the 18th century, jemadars and warriors from Purab, now called ‘Baksariyas’ or ‘Buckserries’, smoothly transitioned to working for Nawabs and then for the East India Company (EIC). Jemadars dominated recruitment for the EIC in Bengal, generally hiring their own kin. The EIC, meanwhile, transformed North India by annexing royal courts, drying up military employment, and, by disarming peasants, drying up military labour.
What was left was an EIC Bengal army mostly of men from Purab, who gradually transformed their high military status into caste status. By 1842, the Bengal army had 28,000 men claiming to be Rajputs and 25,000 men claiming to be Brahmins. In 1851, Brigadier General John Jacob noted on recruitment: “By this system, a man is not to be chosen on account of his fitness to be a soldier, his willingness and strength, docility and courage, but because he is a twice-born worshipper of Vishnoo.” He also reported a case where a ‘low’ caste man was fired once his status was discovered by other soldiers.
However, the dynamics of military labour were not the same across South Asia. The EIC’s Bombay army had more eclectic recruits, with a large proportion of Dalit Mahars. It retained the old tradition of inclusive ‘military’ caste status that overrode caste by birth. As historian Philip Constable writes in The Marginalization of a Dalit Martial Race in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Western India, even the Dalit social reformer Jyotirao Phule sang of these Dalit military men as “Kshatriyas” resisting orthodoxy and invasion in his book Chatrapati Shivajiraje Bhosle Yancha. This was in stark contrast to the situation in the Baksariya-dominated Bengal army, where Kshatriya invariably meant “upper” caste. And in 1806, as historian Manu S Pillai writes, caste pride became a flashpoint in the Vellore Mutiny, which involved regiments of the Madras Native Infantry.
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Peasant mobilisation in 1857
Disarmament was one change brought by the EIC to the Gangetic countryside. Another, far more dangerous, was tax farming. As historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee writes in The Year of Blood: Essays on the Revolt of 1857, this reduced much of the Mughal and post-Mughal zamindar class, and brought in speculators such as bankers and merchants from the city into the countryside. Peasant-cultivators were beggared and turned into renters on their own land. And many of them had relatives who worked in the Bengal army. The North Indian peasants and soldiers of 1857 revolted in resentment for what was being done to their economic system just as much as their caste status. The latter was exemplified by rumours about animal fat in cartridges, forcible conversion to Christianity, and so on. As Mukherjee notes, a major target for their wrath were Banias, merchants, bank and tax buildings and record rooms, moneylenders, and so on.
But there are hints of something more. Historian Sabyasachi Dasgupta argues in The Rebel Army in 1857: At the Vanguard of the War of Independence or a Tyranny of Arms? that the Bengal army sepoys saw themselves as a new ruling class of sorts, not entirely peasant, not entirely zamindar. Taking decisions collectively, seeing their status as superior, and confident in their military skill, they might have sought a form of military dictatorship with the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II as a puppet. Their plans were relatively shortsighted and focused primarily on loot and status.
As a result, the sepoys did not have widespread support. The Azamgarh Proclamation, made in 1857 by a grandson of Bahadur Shah II, referred to the rebelling sepoys as “plunderers”. It asked merchants, artisans, officials, and zamindars to rally for the cause of restoring a loose Mughal sovereignty. Merchants were promised government-owned trains for goods. Officers who faced discrimination under the EIC, or lost employment due to the company’s dismantling of minor courts, were offered dignity and status. Artisans were promised employment by courts.
Although this was a more comprehensive plan than that of the sepoys, these were faint and sorry promises indeed, missing the profound transformations of the industrialised 19th century global economy. Merchants and capitalists had much more to gain by being part of British power. And almost half of all zamindars, terrified of revolting peasants and sepoys, lent support to the British. Finally, the EIC’s Indian officials overwhelmingly supported its ‘modernity’ despite facing racism; they, like merchants, had developed a taste of global advancements in education, economy, and science. Finally, the Bombay and Madras armies had little in common with the ‘upper’ caste Bengal army and did not share its grievances. So, without a clear coalition of interests, the 1857 revolt was doomed, and the British wreaked horrific vengeance upon the perpetrators and innocents across North India.
But neither the military labour of South Asia nor its intelligentsia were crushed. Although recruitment from the ancient Purab region was finally halted after 400 years, in subsequent decades South Asians emerged as the backbone of British power throughout much of the world. Soldiers from Punjab fought everywhere — from China to Africa to Europe. British-educated officials and their families set up the intellectual foundations of 20th-century nationalism, including the rewriting of 1857 as a national struggle. But all of these would create what 1857 did not have: A coalition of interests that stretched the length and breadth of South Asia, across caste, class, and sect, bringing our ancestors together to fight for a republic that represented and respected the rights of all its citizens, not just a few.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)