150 Years Ago — The American Civil War and the “Indian Mutiny”

The 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War — a very bloody business — is being remembered by the NYT and a variety of other publications.

It turns out that another particularly bloody episode in Anglo American affairs was being ended 150 years ago.  Britain was finishing her mopping up operation after what Britons called the “Indian Mutiny”.

The Indian Mutiny and Britain’s response to it had profound effects on my antecedents, and on India, Britain, the world then, and the world today.  This post is a primer about those effects.

Britain’s immediate response to the rebellion of a small sub set of sepoys (Indian soldiers) in central India was to:

• Demonize all Indians
• Massacre directly tens of thousands of Muslim Indians in central India around Delhi, and cause the deaths of uncounted other Muslim Indians – probably in the region of hundreds of thousands.
• Expel or kill all Muslims in Delhi.  Delhi itself was ordered to be levelled and much of it was dynamited until a “stop order” was issued by a senior British officer.

Notes:

• Indians and a few non Indians are only now beginning to dig into Britain’s immediate post Mutiny activities.  Britain had drawn a discreet veil over the acts of her troops, and until now, there has been no academic market for research into such a touchy subject.  Certain subjects in all societies remain off bounds to researchers for a long time.  People just do not want to know.  Only during the last three decades or so, for instance,  has research into the British family fortunes made by trading in slaves and owning slave plantations become acceptable (BBC). Britain’s record during the immediate post “Mutiny” phase has been off bounds until about now.
• !9th century Indian Islam, particularly around Delhi, was a relatively gentle Sufi like “all encompassing” religion.  Delhi in 1850 was still a highly cultured, poetic and artistic society.   The British vengeance trail destroyed all that.  After their expulsion from Delhi, Muslims had a choice to make.  They could ally themselves with the victors and learn Western ways, or they could reject the barbarity of the West and retreat into the peace of academic and isolationist Islam.
• After the Mutiny, Britain realized her vulnerability.  She raced to build railways and communication systems for rapid troop movement, increased the ratio of British to Indian troops and walled off the living quarters of British “covenanted” civilian employees and British soldiers from the Indian sectors.  “Non permanent India resident” Britons began to live in separate “Cantonments”.

The results of Britain’s immediate post mutiny actions were:

Muslims:

• Most Indian Muslims opted to get into the western educational system and set about learning the ways of the west.  Aligarh University is a leading western style Muslim University in India today.  Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was the poster child for this kind of Muslim.   Despite his choice of a western life style, he like most Indian Muslims, never again trusted the British or the Hindus, or the Sikhs.   Hence Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir and the problems of these countries.
• However some Indian Muslims fled western society and set up Islamic centers of learning (madrassahs) where they set about going back to their fundamentalist Islamic roots.  The madrassah at Deoband, a town near Delhi,  became the mother ship  of these madrassahs.   Deoband is still the intellectual and spiritual center for a fundamentalist Islamic theology.    A “DEOBANDI” is another name for a TALIBAN of today.

Anglo Indians

Building railways and communication facilities for rapid movement of troops to potential trouble spots became a very high priority for the British government.   Staffing the now strategically important railways, post and telegraph, police, and customs facilities became a high level problem.   Clearly “Indians” could no longer be trusted.  Enter the “loyal” multilingual “permanent India  resident”,  the new “Anglo Indian”.  Educated Anglo Indians able to fill the roles of middle level skilled management positions like Engine Drivers, Boiler Makers and Station Masters came into their own.  Exclusively Anglo Indian “Railway Colonies” with primary schools and clubs along the lines of the British enclaves began to be constructed.

That was the environment which nurtured me.  That is why I grew up where I did.  It was a very happy and sheltered life for a child.

American “Hate the Muslim” Mythology

In one of my earlier posts I mentioned the similarities in  racist and religious mythology used by the British to justify The Raj, and the current anti Muslim drumbeat in the American press.

The current American stuff poisoning American media comes mostly from Republicans pandering to Fundamentalist Christians and Zionist Jews.  Below is an example of the Christian attack and some of the Republican presidential hopefuls who support them:

From TPM

“Bryan Fischer, the “Director of Issues Analysis” for the social conservative group the American Family Association, says that when it comes to Islam, the First Amendment is a privilege, not a right. “Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam,” Fischer wrote today.

“The First Amendment was written by the Founders to protect the free exercise of Christianity. They were making no effort to give special protections to Islam. Quite the contrary,” Fischer wrote on his Renew America blog.

He continued:

Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. While there certainly ought to be a presumption of religious liberty for non-Christian religious traditions in America, the Founders were not writing a suicide pact when they wrote the First Amendment.

Fischer took it a step further, calling Islam a “treasonous ideology” and adding that “from a constitutional point of view, Muslims have no First Amendment right to build mosques in America. They have that privilege at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked.”

From FDL

“Of course, constitutional originalists may have a hard time swallowing Fischer’s interpretation, given the contemporaneous documents available from the Founders’ own pens:

… [the Virginia Act’s] protection of opinion was meant to be universal … they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s [sic] protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.
– Thomas Jefferson, in his autobiography, in Writings..

Oh, and we need some denouncing, stat: Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, and Haley Barbour, likely presidential aspirants all, have appeared on Bryan Fischer’s radio show.”

And here is Newt Gingrich again  from TPM

“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,” Gingrich said at a church in Texas, according to Politico. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

Gingrich made the remarks at the evangelical Cornerstone Church, which is led by Pastor John Hagee. Hagee who ….. condemns the Catholic Church as “the great whore” and suggests Hitler was sent by God to move Jews to Israel and hasten the apocalypse.

Gingrich converted to Catholicism in 2009.”

You can’t make this stuff up!

Blanchett and Roberts and Europeans In India

My parents great grandparents, Thomas Blanchett 1 the Huguenot English woolcropper, and Robert Roberts the Welshman,  (family tree of both here) came to India from Britain at the beginning of the 19th century.  They then settled in India.

At least they tried to.

Roberts died (was killed?) in Trichinopoly campaigning in South India in 1817.  He did get married and sired at least one child before he died.  That child died in the “Uprising” (Indian Mutiny) of 1857.

Blanchett, remarkably for a European in India, lived to a ripe old age.  He married twice, sired many children, retired in India, and set up a stone mason business.  I have seen his gravestone handiwork in the Agra cantonment cemetery.   He died in 1863.

What brought these men to India?

I plan to tease out the answer to that question over many posts.  This post is the first quickie.   The map below will locate many of the place names I talk about, and will probably become a staple of this blog.   Click for a larger image.

Map of most of The British Raj with many locations mentioned in this blog

Portuguese

In the 16th Century, a thousand years after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Portuguese became the first European nation to begin trading in the Indian Ocean.  They were in South India a few years before the  Moghuls appeared in the North.

The Portuguese set up their trading posts (“factor-ies”) throughout the coastal areas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, with their capital in Goa in South West India on the “Malabar Coast”.  By 1560 the Inquisition was in force in Goa.  By 1580 Goa was a sophisticated city with its own brand of Indo-Portuguese society.

Early in the development of Portuguese society in India, the Portuguese Admiral Albuquerque encouraged Portuguese soldiers to marry native (Muslim) women.  As an inducement to stable relationships, a bounty was paid to the family on the (Catholic) Baptism of their child. This structure met one of the primary goals of Portuguese exploration—saving heathen souls.  It also contributed to the stability of the Portuguese expatriates.

English, French, Dutch:

The English, French and Dutch East Indies Companies (EIC’s) became active in Far East trading in a meaningful way about a hundred and fifty years after the Portuguese. They too set up their posts throughout the Indian Ocean.

By the middle of the 17th century there were several thousand Portuguese and Indo Portuguese in India and a relatively small population of other Europeans.  At this time (1647) there were still only 90 British East India Company employees in India, all of them male.

The English and other European men arriving during the late 17th and 18th Century found a welcoming society of Indian, Indo Portuguese and a few other Indo European women.   Names like Baptist and Baptiste show the Portuguese influence in my own family tree.

Children of wealthier Britons, regardless of the mother’s nationality, often went back to their home country to complete their education and many sons of Indian mothers, or grandchildren of Indian grandmothers became successful in British and Indian society.  Lord Liverpool (Prime Minister of England 1812 – 1827) is typical of a large number of “Indo British” descendants.  Liverpool’s grandmother was Indian.

By the end of the 17^th century the English East India Company (EEIC) had established three major coastal trading posts in India — Fort St. George (Madras, now Chennai, on the South East Coast), Fort St William (Calcutta on the North East Coast), and Bombay Island on the West Coast).  These three sites were known as the Madras, Bengal and Bombay  “Presidencies” respectively, and all activities of the EEIC throughout Asia reported to one of these entities.

Each of these Presidencies reported back to EEIC headquarters in London.  Madras was the first and for a long time the most important of these Presidencies.  In 1670 the Madras European population consisted of about 300 English (all male),  3000 Portuguese, and a smattering of other Europeans.

As the activity level of these European “factories” increased, these small factory “towns” became surrounded by large populations of native artisans, sailors, soldiers, traders, and moneylenders. They also became havens for European adventurers, deserters and others who for one reason or another were not welcome in their home countries.  In 1744 a total of 250,000 people lived in Madras and the surrounding native town (Black Town).  In 1750 the population of London was about 700,000.

By the middle of  the 18th century the English and French EICs had eliminated much of the Portuguese and Dutch competition in India, although Portugal continued to have a vibrant community in Goa, and Holland controlled the “Spice Islands” now Indonesia.

England and France:

English and French rivalry in Europe in the 18th century spread to their respective trading entities all over the world, including North America and India.  In India this rivalry led to the formation of English and French East India Company armies commanded by Europeans leading Indian mercenaries.  These company armies, assisted by units of their respective “national” armies from Britain and France, fought each other and Indian armies for control of parts of India.    Ultimately (mid-late 18th century), the British triumphed — hence “British India”.

British Armies:

The first formal EEIC “company” army was formed under Major Stringer Lawrence in Madras in 1746; the Bengal EEIC army was formed eight years later in 1754. In the mid 18th century these EEIC armies consisted of a few hundred Europeans and a few thousand Indians.

The “Bengal Europeans” is the army Thomas Blanchett joined just over 60 years later, in 1818.  He spent most of his life in India at Chunar (see map above) and died in 1863.

Royal British soldiers (the British Army) sent out by the British government to assist the EEIC armies against the French, made their first appearance in India in Madras in 1748.

Robert Roberts went to India with the British Army nearly 60 years later in 1805 with the 53^rd Shropshire regiment.

Roberts died at Trichinopoly (see map above) campaigning in South India in 1817.