1857 In Our History

[(The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Great Indian Revolt of 1857 is being observed this month. Though the spark for the Revolt was lit by Mangal Pandey at Barrackpore earlier the same year, the Revolt actually began in May at Meerut: on May 6, 85 sepoys of the 3rd Bengal Cavalry at Meerut refused to use the cartridge, the cause of the rebellion—all of them were placed under arrest; on May 9 these sepoys were brought to a general punishment parade at the Meerut Parade Ground, sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment and stripped of their uniforms. When the 11th and 12th Native Cavalry of the Bengal Army assembled at the Parade Ground on May 10, they broke rank and turned on the Commanding Officer Colonel Finnis who was shot dead—this was the first incident of Revolt at Meerut; thereafter the sepoys liberated the imprisoned sepoys, attacked the European Cantonment and killed all the Europeans who could be found there. Then in conjunction with the Roorkee sepoys, called to Meerut following the uprising, they marched to Delhi where the first major incident took place on May 11 with the killing of Colonel Ripley.

We are carrying here excerpts from a seminal article “1857 In Our History” by the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of India, P.C. Joshi, whose birth centenary is being observed this year, to mark the occasion. This article was presented at a symposium held to observe the centenary of the 1857 Revolt in 1957; later it was published alongwith other articles presented at the symposium in book form (also edited by P.C. Joshi) by the People’s Publishing House, New Delhi. —Editor)]

The few contemporary Indians who wrote on 1857 did so for the British. The dominant British attitude is revealed in entitled, “The Bengali Press, How to Deal with It”, published on August 9, 1896, in Pioneer, a very influential British organ of the times:

We know how Englishmen within the memory of living men treated their own newspaper writers… If a gentle and graceful writer forgot himself so far as to call the Prince Regent ‘an Adonis of forty’ he got two years’ ‘hard’. If a clergyman praised the French Revolution and advocated Parliamentary reform and fair representation, he was condemned to work in iron manacles, to wade in sludge among the vilest criminals.

The writer advocated the infliction of the same punishment on an Indian who dared to write on the Indian Mutiny of 1857.1

Indians thus had no say in this controversy but our rebel ancestors with their heroic deeds and by shedding their warm blood had made their contribution more eloquent than words....

It is inspiring to recall here what Marx thought of the 1857 national uprising. As early as July 31, 1857, on the basis of Indian mail carrying Delhi news up to June 17, he concluded his unsigned newsletter to the New York Daily Tribune with these words:

By and by there will ooze out other facts able to convince even John Bull himself that what he considers military mutiny is in truth a national revolt.2

India’s historians may go on arguing and differing about the character of the 1857 revolt but the mass of the Indian people have already accepted it as the source-spring of our national movement. The hold of the 1857 heritage on national thought is so great that even Dr R. C. Majumdar concludes his study with the following words:

The outbreak of 1857 would surely go down in history as the first great and direct challenge to the British rule in India, on an extensive scale. As such it inspired the genuine national movement for the freedom of India from British yoke which started half a century later. The memory of 1857-58 sustained the later movement, infused courage into the hearts of its fighters, furnished a historical basis for the grim struggle, and gave it a moral stimulus, the value of which it is impossible to exaggerate. The memory of the revolt of 1857, distorted but hallowed with sanctity, perhaps did more damage to the cause of the British rule in India than the Revolt itself.3

The controversy whether the 1857-58 struggle was a sepoy revolt or a national uprising can be resolved only by squarely posing and truthfully analysing the character of the contestants on either side and the nature of the issues—political, economic and ideological—involved in this struggle. In short, a sound historical evaluation demands that who was fighting whom and for what be correctly stated....

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THE British conquest of India implied not only the imposition of alien rule but, something worse still, a pitiless destruction of the traditional Indian social order itself and disruption of its own normal development towards a new order. Marx was the only thinker of the period who studied this tragic phenomenon scientifically and formulated the role of British imperialism in India in such a correct manner that his conclusions were borne out by the subsequent researches of Indian scholarship and they helped Indian patriots to understand Indian reality better and give a progressive orientation to Indian national thought.

As early as 1853 when the Indian situation was being debated in the British Parliament on the occasion of the renewal of the East India Company’s Charter, Marx stated in an article entitled “British Rule in India”:
All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid and destructive as the successive action in Hindustan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu, and separates Hindustan ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history… It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian handloom and destroyed the spinning wheel…British steam and science uprooted over the whole surface of Hindustan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry.4 ...

After the conquest of Bengal and eventually throughout India, the method of enforced and unequal trade was used to loot India and this led to its economic ruination. R. P. Dutt states how the situation underwent a qualitative change after the British became the ruling class in India, how
methods of power could be increasingly used to weight the balance of exchange and secure the maximum goods for the minimum payment.5

By the end of 18th century and much more clearly by 1813-33, a shift had come over British policy towards India. After a period of primitive plunder and the systematic ruination of Indian trades and crafts, the British bourgeoisie, with the completion of their Industrial Revolution, began to use India as a dumping ground for its industrial manufactures and, above all, textiles. Marx noted this sharp shift, and, in one of his articles during 1853, wrote:

The whole character of trade was changed. Till 1813 India had been chiefly an exporting country while it now became an importing one; and in such quick progression, that already, in 1823, the rate of exchange, which had generally been two-sixth per rupee sunk down to two per rupee. India, the great workshop of cotton manufacture for the world, since immemorial times, became now inundated with English twists and cotton stuffs. After its own produce had been excluded from England, or only accepted on the most cruel terms, British manufactures were poured into it at a small or merely nominal duty, to the ruin of native cotton fabric once so celebrated.6

The policy of the East India Company also annihilated the independent merchant bourgeoisie as well as the artisans and craftsmen. Prof Ramkrishna Mukherjee describes the process in the following words:

Along with thus turning the Indian artisans ‘out of this ‘temporal’ world’, as Marx remarked caustically, proceeded the liquidation of the Indian merchant bourgeoisie. Monopolising Indian products for the English meant that the Indian merchants could no longer survive. Only those could maintain their profession who acquiesced in becoming underlings of the Company or of its servants engaged in private inland trade in India or of the private English merchants residing in India for the same purpose. Otherwise, they had to find a new source of livelihood. Not only were the Indian merchants prohibited from buying commodities directly from the producers which were monopolised by the English, but the agents of the Company and its servants forced such goods on the Indian merchants at a price higher than the prevailing one.7

By annihilating the independent merchant bourgeoisie, which to some extent also fulfilled the role of the manufacturing bourgeoisie, the monopolist East India Company destroyed that very important class in Indian economy which could be their rival.

Another aspect of this phenomenon is noted and analysed by K. M. Panikkar in the following words:

With the establishment of European trade centres in the main coastal areas of India, there had developed a powerful Indian capitalist class, closely associated with the foreign merchants, and deriving great profits from trade with them… The Marwari millionaires of Bengal have become the equivalent of the compradore classes of Shanghai of a later period …The emergence of this powerful class, whose economic interests were bound up with those of the foreign merchants and who had an inherited hatred of Muslim rule, was a factor of fundamental importance to the history of India and of Asia.8

These Indian agents of the Company and of the British merchants were called gomasthas and bannias and played the role of sub-agents of foreign capital and a pro-British role in the 1857 uprising.

How did intelligent Indians react to the above economic situation and policies?

It is useful to quote Allamah Fazle Haq of Khayrabad, an eminent Muslim scholar of the traditional school who took a leading part in the 1857 revolt and was transported for life:

Having seized power they (the British) decided to bring under their hold the various sections of the people by controlling eatables, by taking possession of the ears of corn and grain and giving the peasants and cultivators cash in lieu of their rights of farming. Their object was not to allow the poor men and villagers a free hand in buying and selling grains. By giving preference to their own people, they wanted to control the cheapening or raising of the rates so that the people of God might submit to their (Christian) policy of monopoly, and their dependence on them (Christians) for their requirements might force them to meet the purpose of the Christians and their supporters, and their desire and ambitions which they had in their hearts and the mischiefs and evils which they had concealed in their minds.9

In the above background, the appeal of the manifesto issued by Bahadur Shah on behalf of the insurgent centre at Delhi had its own significance. The manifesto appealed in the following words to the merchants:
It is plain that the infidel and treacherous British Government have monopolised the trade of all the fine and valuable merchandise such as indigo, cloth and other articles of shipping, leaving only the trade of trifles to the people and even in this they are not allowed their shares of the profits, which they secure by means of customs and stamp fees, etc., in money suits, so that the people have merely a trade in name. Besides this, the profit of the traders are taxed with postages, tolls, and subscriptions for schools, etc. Notwithstanding all these concessions, the merchants are liable to imprisonment and disgrace at the instance of complaint of a worthless man.
When the Badshahi Government is established all these aforesaid fraudulent practices shall be dispensed with and the trade of every article, without exception, both by land and water shall be opened to the native merchants of India who will have the benefit of the Government steam-vessels and steam carriages for the conveyance of their merchandise gratis; and merchants having no capital of their own shall be assisted from the public treasury. It is, therefore, the duty of every merchant to take part in the war, and aid the Badshahi Government with its men and money, either secretly or openly, as may be consistent with its position or interest and forswear its allegiance to the British Government.10...

The economic and political operation of the East India Company in India led to a systematic squeezing of our national wealth which has been described by India’s economic historians as the economic drain. Let us examine this as it existed on the eve of the 1857 revolt.

There was the so-called Indian Debt,
which was incurred by the Company in order to consolidate its position in India and to spread its influence further through expeditions and wars, and at the same time, paying high dividends to share-holders in England, tributes to the British Government since 1769 and bribes to the influential persons in England.11

R. C. Dutt makes the following comments as regards the genesis and mechanism of this Indian Debt:

A very popular error prevails in this country (England in 1903) that the whole Indian Debt represents British capital sunk in the development of India. It is shown in the body of this volume that this is not the genesis of the Public Debt of India. When the East India Company cessed to be the rulers of India in 1858, they had piled up an Indian Debt of 70 millions. They had in the meantime drawn a tribute from India, financially an unjust tribute, exceeding 150 million, not calculating interest. They had also charged India with the cost of Afghan wars, Chinese wars and other wars outside India. Equitably, therefore, India owed nothing at the close of the Company’s rule; her Public Debt was a myth; there was a considerable balance of over 108 millions in her favour out of the money that had been drawn from her.12

Montgomery Martin, an Englishman with sympathy for the Indian people, wrote as early as 1838:

This annual drain of £ 3,000,000 on British India amounted in 30 years at 12 per cent (the usual Indian rate) compound interest to the enormous sum of
£ 723,997,917 sterling; or, at a low rate, as $ 2,000,000 for 50 years, to £ 8,400,000,000 sterling! So constant and accumulating a drain even on England would have soon impoverished her; how severe then must be its effect on India, where the wages of a labourer is from 2d. to 3d. a day?13....

Prof Ramkrishna Mukherjee goes even further and states:

A total picture of this tribute from India is seen to be even greater than the figure mentioned by Martin in 1838. During the 24 years of the last phase of the Company’s rule, from 1834-35 to 1857-58, even though the years 1855, ’56 and ’57 showed a total import-surplus of £ 6,436,345—(not because the foreign rulers had changed their policy, but because some British capital flowed into India to build railway in order to prepare her for exploitation by British industrial capital),—the total tribute which was drained from India in the form of ‘home charges’ and ‘excess of Indian exports’ amounted to the colossal figure of
£ 151,830,989. This works out at a yearly average of £ 6,325,875, or roughly half the annual land revenue collections in this period!14

The above was the grim reality, grimmer than any ever witnessed in the whole course of India’s age-old historic development. As Marx stated,
there cannot, however, remain any doubt but the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than Hindustan had to suffer before.15

The British, under the East India Company’s rule disrupted the whole economic order of India, they turned the traditional land system topsy turvy, they smashed the trades and manufactures of the land and disrupted the relationship between these two sectors of the Indian economy, systematically drained the wealth of our country to their own, and destroyed the very springs of production of our economy. Every class of Indian society suffered at this new spoliator’s hands. The landlords were dispossessed and the peasants rendered paupers, the merchant bourgeoisie of India liquidated as an independent class and the artisans and craftsmen deprived of their productive professions. Such unprecedented destruction of a whole economic order and of every class within it could not but produce a great social upheaval and that was the national uprising of 1857. The all-destructive British policy produced a broad popular rebellion against its rule.

Within Indian society, however, those productive forces and classes had not yet grown (in fact early British policy had itself destroyed their first off-shoots) that could lead this revolution to victory. The revolt of 1857 as also its failure were both historical inevitabilities. But it also was a historical necessity, for after it followed those modern developments..., from which emerged the modern national liberation movement of the Indian people and those new social forces which led it to victory.

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THE religious factor played a big part in the revolt in 1857. The British statesmen and chroniclers exaggerated and deliberately misinterpreted the role played by this factor to prove their thesis that the 1857 uprising was reactionary, revivalist and directed against the progressive reforms that they were introducing in Indian society. The early generation of English-educated Indian intellectuals swallowed this imperialist thesis uncritically because they themselves had suffered under the old reactionary religious influences. A true historical outlook demands that we do not forget the historical stage which Indian society had reached on the eve of 1857, the ideological values which would be normal to this society and the ideological forms in which the Indian people could formulate their aspirations....

It is abundantly clear... that the British rulers purely for their imperialist motives were out for some decades preceding 1857 to culturally denationalise India by the method of mass conversion to Christianity. This was seen as a menacing danger by the mass of Indians, irrespective of their viewpoint whether it was Sir Syed Ahmad Khan or Bahadur Shah, whether it was the enlightened Bengali intellectual in Calcutta or the Nana Saheb at Bithoor, by the mass of sepoys both Hindu and Muslim. Thus when the religious factor played a big role as it did in the struggle of 1857, it was as a part of the national factor. The mass of Indians took up arms to defend their own religions and they were fighting not only in defence of their religion but to defend their way of life and their nationhood. Of course, there were several reactionary features within Indian society but then the only healthy way to change them was through the struggle of the Indian people themselves.

This is not all. Our rebel ancestors used religion to advance the revolutionary struggle. They did not let religion stupefy them. But they used religion to get the strength to fight the Firinghis.

A proclamation was issued at Delhi with royal permission urging upon the Hindus and Muslims to unite in the struggle in the name of their respective religions.

To all Hindus and Mussalmans, citizens and servants of Hindustan, officers of the army now at Delhi and at Meerut send greetings:—it is well known that in these days all the English have entertained these evil designs—first, to destroy the religion of the whole Hindustani army and then to make the people by compulsion Christians. Therefore, we, solely on account of our religion, have combined with the people and have not spared alive one infidel, and have re-established the Delhi dynasty on these terms. Hundreds of guns and a large amount of treasure have fallen into our hands; therefore, it is fitting that whoever of the soldiers and people dislike turning Christians should unite with one heart, and, acting courageously, not leave the seed of these infidels remaining.16

When the struggle in Oudh after the fall of Lucknow was on the downgrade, and insurgents were heroically fighting defensive and mostly losing battles, the captured sepoys used to be asked by the British why they had joined the revolt. Their answer used to be:

The slaughter of the English is required by our religion. The end will be the destruction of the English and all the sepoys—and then, God knows!17

The Rajah of the Gond tribes was living as a pensioner of the British at Nagpur. He had turned a traditional Sanskrit sthotra recited in worshipping the devi into an anti-British hymn. The London Times of October 31, 1857 gives the translation of the prayer:
Shut the mouth of the slanderers and
Eat up backbiters, trample down the sinners,
You, “Satrusamgharika”
(name of Devi, ‘destroyer of enemy’)
Kill the British, exterminate them, Matchundee.
Let not the enemy escape, not the wives and children
Of such oh! Samgharika
Show favour to Shanker; support your slaves;
Listen to the cry of religion.
“Mathalka” eat up the unclean,
Make no delay,
Now devour them,
And that quickly,
Ghor-Mathalka.

During the siege of Delhi, British agents repeatedly tried to transform the joint Hindu- Muslim struggle into a fratricidal Hindu-Muslim civil war. Even as early as May 1857, British agents began inciting the Muslims against the Hindus in the name of jihad and the matter was brought before Bahadur Shah.

The king answered that such a jihad was quite impossible, and that such an idea an act of extreme folly, for the majority of the Purbeah soldiers were Hindus. Moreover, such an act could create internecine war, and the result would be deplorable. It was fitting that sympathy should exist among all classes… A deputation of Hindu officers arrived to complain of the war against Hindus being preached. The king replied: ‘The holy war is against the English; I have forbidden it against the Hindus.’18

Thus did our rebel ancestors use religion to organise and conduct a united revolutionary struggle against foreign domination. In the historic conditon of 1857, the ideological form of the struggle could not but assume religious forms. To expect anything else would be unrealistic and unscientific.

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THE British text books on Indian history contained only the story of the “atrocities of the mutineers,”—dishonouring of women, killing of children and so on. The reality, however, was the opposite. Again, the early generation of educated Indians like Savarkar and others began exposing from British sources themselves the story of unprecedented British atrocities against the Indian people. During the non-cooperation movement of the twenties, the British terror during 1857 was related to Jallianwallabagh to rouse the people to struggle more valiantly and unitedly than our ancestors had done during 1857. Thereafter came Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of the Medal which tried to put across the thesis that there were atrocities on both sides which are best forgotten.

The question of questions is: can the two sides be put on the same plane? Can the crimes committed by the enslavers of the people be equated with some mistakes and excesses committed by the fighters for freedom? The two cases are different....

If tales of Indian “terror” are largely mythical, British brutality got even Lord Canning worried. On December 24, 1857, the following Minute appears in the proceedings of the Governor-General-in-Council:

…the indiscriminate hanging, not only of persons of all shades of guilt, but of those whose guilt was at the least very doubtful, and the general burning and plunder of villages, whereby the innocent as well as the guilty, without regard to age or sex, were indiscriminately punished, and in some cases, sacrificed, had deeply exasperated large communities not otherwise hostile to the government; that the cessation of agriculture and consequent famine were impending; …And lastly, that the proceedings of the officers of the Government had given colour to the rumour…that the Government meditated a general bloody persecution of Mohammedans and Hindus.19...

In the History of the Siege of Delhi, written by an officer who served on active service, it is graphically described what the British officers did on the way from Ambala to Delhi.

Hundreds of Indians were condemned to be hanged before a court-martial in a short time, and they were most brutally and inhumanly tortured, while scaffolds were being erected for them. The hair on their heads were pulled by bunches, their bodies were pierced by bayonets and then they were made to do that to avoid which they would think nothing of death or torture—cows’ flesh was forced by spears and bayonets into the mouth of the poor and harmless Hindu villagers.20

How the sepoy and the civilian, the guilty and the innocent alike were butchered by the British victors after the capture of Lucknow is described below by one of them:

at the time of the capture of Lucknow—a season of indiscriminate massacre—such distinction was not made and the unfortunate who fell into the hands of our troops was made short work of—sepoy or Qudh villager it mattered not—no questions were asked; his skin was black, and did not that suffice? A piece of rope and the branch of a tree or a rifle bullet through his brain soon terminated the poor devil’s existence.21

What happened in the countryside, between Banaras, Allahabad and Kanpur during General Neill’s march through the area is described by Kaye and Malleson in the following words:

Volunteer hanging parties went out into the districts and amateur executioners were not wanting to the occasion. One gentleman boasted of the numbers he had finished off quite ‘in an artistic manner’, with mango trees for gibbets and elephants as drops, the victims of this wild justice being strung up, as though for past-time in ‘the form of a figure of 8’.22...

Pandit Nehru has rightly stated the problem of race mania as it faced our insurgent ancestors and faced us subsequently in the whole course of our struggle for freedom.

We in India have known racialism in all its forms ever since the commencement of British rule. The whole ideology of this rule was that of the Herrenvolk and the master race, and the structure of Government was based upon it; indeed the idea of a master race is inherent in imperialism. There was no subterfuge about it; it was proclaimed in unambiguous language by those in authority. More powerful than words was the practice that accompanied them, and generation after generation and year after year, India as a nation and Indians as individuals were subjected to insult, humiliation, and contemptuous treatment.23...

Our forefathers suffered and bled during 1857. Subsequent generations kept up the struggle and went on making the needed sacrifice. If after independence we forget our past experience and began to consider British imperialism as our new friend instead of our traditional foe, we will not be able to safeguard Indian independence nor discharge India’s duty towards the struggling colonial peoples in Asia and Africa...

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IN the broad historical perspective of India’s struggle against British domination what needs being stressed is not the limitation and narrowness of the 1857 uprising but its sweep, breadth and depth. The 1857 uprising stands sharply demarcated from all the earlier anti-British wars of resistance fought on Indian soil.

The first is the sheer vastness of the area covered by the 1857 uprising and the still wider sympathy and solidarity it commanded. It is admitted by all historians and chronicles, British and Indian alike, that the 1857 national insurrection was the biggest ever anti-British combine that had so far been massed in armed struggle against British authority in India.

The second is the qualitative difference between this and all other anti-British wars. In the earlier wars people of a single kingdom, which very often coincided with a specific nationality, fought single-handed. For example, the Bengalis alone fought at Plassey. The same in the Karnatak and the Mysore and the Maratha, the Sikh and the Sind wars. Earlier attempts at broader combinations had failed. But during 1857 people of various castes, tribes, nationalities, religions, who had lived under different kingdoms rose together to end the British rule. It was an unprecedented unity of the Indian people. Marx, the most far-sighted thinker of the age, duly noted this new phenomenon.

Before this there had been mutinies in the Indian army but the present revolt is distinguished by characteristic and fatal features. It is the first time that the sepoy regiments have murdered their European officers; that Musalmans and Hindus, renouncing their mutual antipathies, have combined against the common masters; that ‘disturbances, beginning with the Hindus, have actually ended in placing on the throne of Delhi a Mohammedan Emperor’; that the mutiny has not been confined to a few localities.24

As it is important to stress the above positive aspect of the 1857 national uprising, it is equally important to state its negative aspect and state which decisive areas and sections of the Indian people did not join the national uprising and how some were even led to supporting the British side. There were several factors involved but let us examine the main, the national factor.
The Gurkhas and the Sikhs played a decisive role on the side of the British. The Nepal war had been fought by the British with the help of the Hindustani Army. Rana Jung Bahadur, who was centralising Nepal under Ranashahi, was promised by the British a permanent subsidy and large tracts in Terai and he brought his Gurkha soldiers down, in the name of revenge, for subduing Oudh.

The Sikhs had their own historic memories against the Moghuls and after initial hesitation the British were able to recruit the unemployed soldiers of the Khalsa Army and the retainers of the Sikh princes and sardars.

From the Marathas the heir of the Peshwas had risen in revolt but the Maratha princes had their own rivalries and historic feuds both with the Nizam in the South and the Moghuls in the North.

The Rajputana princes had their own historic memories of earlier Moghul and later Maratha domination, besides their being under British grip now.

These historic memories from the past of our feudal disunity kept the people of large parts of the country paralysed and moved by their feudal self-interest the Indian princes helped the British usurpers. Nehru has put the whole position in very succinct words:

The revolt strained British rule to the utmost and it was ultimately suppressed with Indian help.25

As it is true that the 1857 revolution was the biggest national uprising against British rule, so it is equally true that the British were able to suppress it by using Indians against indians. Divide and rule was the traditional British policy and they used it with devastating effect during 1857....

The peasant was anti-British but his outlook was confined within his village, his political knowledge did not go beyond the affairs of the kingdom in which he lived under his traditional Raja.

The political-ideological leadership of the country was yet in the hands of the feudal ruling classes. They shared the general anti-British sentiment but they feared their feudal rivals more. They were a decaying class and their historic memories were only of the feudal past of disunity and civil wars and the vision of a united independent India could not dawn upon them.

Love of the country in those days meant love of one’s own homeland ruled by one’s traditional ruler. The conception of India as our common country had not yet emerged. Not only did the feudal historic memories come in the way but the material foundations for it, the railways, telegraph, a uniform system of modern education, etc., had not yet been laid but had only begun.

The conception of India as common motherland grew later and the great experience of 1857 rising helped it to grow. The London Times duly noted the rise of this new phenomenon.

One of the great results that have flowed from the rebellion of 1857-58 has been to make inhabitants of every part of India acquainted with each other. We have seen the tide of war rolling from Nepal to the borders of Gujarat, from the deserts of Rajputana to the frontiers of the Nizam’s territories, the same men over-running the whole land of India and giving to their resistance, as it were, a national character. The paltry interests of isolated States, the ignorance which men of one petty principality have laboured under in considering the habits and customs of the other principality—all this has disappeared to make way for a more uniform appreciation of public events throughout India. We may assume that in the rebellion of 1857, no national spirit was roused, but we cannot deny that our efforts to put it down have sown the seeds of a new plant and thus laid the foundation for more energetic attempts on the part of the people in the course of future years.26

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WHAT was the aim of the insurgents, what sort of a political and social order did they seek to establish in India? A sound characterisation of the 1857 struggle depends upon the correct answer to the above problem. For it will help to decide whether it was reactionary or progressive.

It is amazing that there is virtual agreement on this question between not only British and some eminent Indian historians but also some foremost Indian political leaders.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru has stated his opinion thus:
Essentially it was a feudal outburst, headed by feudal chiefs and their followers and aided by the widespread anti-British sentiment… Not by fighting for a lost cause, the feudal order, would freedom come.27

Dr Majumdar’s conclusion is:
The miseries and bloodshed of 1857-58 were not the birthpangs of a freedom movement in India, but the dying groans of an obsolete aristocracy and centrifugal feudalism of the medieval age.28

Dr Sen, the official historian, improves upon and carries forward the Prime Minister’s characterisation:

The English Government had imperceptibly effected a social revolution. They had removed some of the disabilities of women, they had tried to establish the equality of men in the eye of the law, they had attempted to improve the lot of the peasant and the serf. The Mutiny leaders would have set the clock back, they would have done away with the new reforms, with the new order, and gone back to the good old days when a commoner could not expect equal justice with the noble, when the tenants were at the mercy of the talukdars, and when theft was punished with mutilation. In short they wanted a counter-revolution.29...

One can understand British statesmen and historians advancing the thesis of the Old Man vs. the New, of their own role being progressive and the insurgent cause reactionary, in sheer self-defence. But when Indian leaders and historians repeat the same old British thesis the least one can say is that they are mistaking the form for the substance. It is true that the 1857 uprising was led by Indian feudals (but not them alone!) and they were not the makers of events, nor sole masters of India’s destiny. There were other social forces of the common people in action during this struggle and they had brought new factors and ideas into play. It is a pity Drs Majumdar and Sen and Pandit Nehru have given no thought nor weight to them. If we study them carefully and seriously, the conclusion is inescapable that during the 1857 national uprising, the popular forces were active enough, healthy in their aspirations and clear-headed enough in their ideas to prevent a reactionary feudal restoration in India.

One of the great positive achievements of the 1857 uprising acclaimed with justified pride by the Indian national movement has been the noble attempt to forge, and sustained efforts to maintain, against British machinations, Hindu-Muslim unity for the successful conduct of the struggle.

Playing upon Hindu-Muslim differences had become so much a part of the flesh and blood of the British representatives in India that Lord Canning spontaneously began thinking, when the first signs of the storm burst during May 1857, whether the Hindus or Muslims were behind it? Kaye states the problem and the significance of the new situation facing the British rulers:
But, before the end of the month of April, it must have been apparent to Lord Canning, that nothing was to be hoped from that antagonism of Asiatic races which had even been regarded as the main element of our strength and safety. Mohammedans and Hindus were plainly united against us.30

The British officials, however, did not give up but persisted in the policy of stirring Hindu- Muslim dissensions. “I shall watch for the differences of feelings between the two communities,” wrote Sir Henry Lawrence from Lucknow to Lord Canning in May 1857. The communal antipathy, however, failed to develop; Aitchison ruefully admits:

In this instance, we could not play off the Mohammedaa against the Hindu.31

The insurgent leaders were fully aware of this disruptive British tactic. Allamah Fazle Haq, himself a Muslim revivalist, wrote:
They (the British) tried their utmost to break the revolutionary forces by their tricks and deceptive devices, make ineffective the power of the Mujahids and uproot them, and scatter and disrupt them…. No stone was left unturned by them in this respect.32

The insurgent leaders consciously laid great stress on Hindu-Muslim unity for the success of the struggle. Bahadur Shah, the sepoy leaders, the learned Ulema and Shastris issued proclamations and fatwas stressing that Hindu-Muslim unity was the call of the hour and the duty of all. In all areas liberated from British rule the first thing the insurgent leaders did was to ban cow-slaughter and enforce it. In the highest political and military organ of insurgent leadership Hindus and Muslims were represented in equal numbers.33 When Bahadur Shah found that he could not manage the affairs of state, he wrote to the Hindu Rajas of Jaipur, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Alwar that if
they would combine for the purpose (of annihilating the British) he would willingly resign the Imperial power into their hands.34

An insurgent Sikh regiment in Delhi served under a Muslim commander.35 Such instances can be multiplied....

There is another very important aspect of this problem. Hindu-Muslim unity was one of the important keys in deciding the fate of the issue. The British side knew it and tried their hardest and best to disrupt it. The Indian side also knew it and did their utmost to realise and maintain it. But this by itself would be a static statement of the problem. The better Hindu-Muslim unity was forged in the insurgent camp, the longer the struggle could last; the longer the struggle lasted, the more chances the popular forces got to come to the fore and the more the ideological-political influence of feudal forces became weakened; the more the feudal forces weakened the less chances were left of a feudal restoration. Such is the dialectics of all popular and national struggles. During the last phase of the struggle in 1857-58, the feudal forces stood thoroughly exposed and weakened. The popular forces were not yet powerful, conscious and organised enough to overwhelm them and carry on the struggle to victory. What actually took place was British victory and not feudal restoration. When the modern national movement began in the next generation, the glorious heritage of Hindu-Muslim unity was taken over from the 1857 struggle and the next two generations gave a more and more democratic programme to the conception of Hindu-Muslim united front against British domination.

The British side also learnt its lesson from this historic phenomenon. Forrest in his Introduction to State Papers, 1857-58, states:

Among the many lessons the Indian Mutiny conveys to the historian, none is of greater importance than the warning that it is possible to have a revolution in which Brahmins and Sudras, Hindus and Mohammedans could be united against us, and that it is not safe to suppose that the peace and stability of our dominions, in any great measure, depends on the continent being inhabited by different religious systems…. The mutiny reminds us that our dominions rest on a thin crust ever likely to be rent by titanic forces of social changes and religious revolutions.36...

Inside the disintegrating feudal order that was India of those days, new currents of democratic thought and practice were arising; they were not yet powerful enough to break the old feudal ideological bonds and overwhelm British authority; they were menacing enough to make the real Indian feudals seek a new lease of life as a gift from the British after beseeching due forgiveness for having joined the insurgent cause.

The destruction of the ancient land system in India and the law on the alienation of land stirred the whole countryside into action against the government whose policies had made the old rural classes, from the zamindars to the peasants, lose their lands to the new section of merchants, moneylenders and the Company’s own officials, and which had played havoc with the their life. The large-scale peasant participation in the 1857 uprising gave it a solid mass basis and the character of a popular revolt. The Indian peasants fulfilled their patriotic duty during 1857.

Peasants joined as volunteers with the insurgent forces and, though without military training, fought so heroically and well as to draw tributes from the British themselves... At the battle of Miaganj, between Lucknow and Kanpur, the British had to face an Indian insurgent forces of 8000, of whom not more than a thousand were sepoys.37 At Sultanpur, another battle was fought by the insurgents with 25,000 soldiers, 1,100 cavalry and 25 guns and of these only five thousand were rebel sepoys!38 After the fall of Delhi, the British concentrated upon Lucknow. As the British massed all their strength against Lucknow so from the villagers of Oudh came armed, peasant volunteers for the last ditch defence of their capital city. In the words of Charles Ball,
The whole country was swarming with armed vagabonds hastening to Lucknow to meet their common doom and die in the last grand struggle with the Firangis.39

After the fall of Bareilly and Lucknow, the insurgents fought on and adopted guerilla tactics. Its pattern is contained in Khan Bahadur Khan‘s General Order:

Do not attempt to meet the regular columns of the infidels because they are superior to you in discipline, bandobast and have big guns but watch their movements, guard all the ghats on the rivers, intercept their communications, stop their supplies, cut their dak and posts and keep constantly hanging about their camps, give them (the Firinghis) no rest!40

Commenting on the above, Russell wrote in his Diary:

This general order bears marks of sagacity and points out the most formidable war we would encounter.41

The heavy responsibility for carrying into practice the above line of action and aiding the scattered insurgent forces to prolong the anti-British war of resistance fell on the mass of the peasantry. All contemporary British chronicles of the story of this war in Rohilkhand, Bundelkhand, Oudh and Bihar contain numerous stories of how the Indian peasantry loyally and devotedly carried out the behests of the insurgent high command. Let us take only one example:

Even when the cause of the mutincers seemed to be failing, they testified no good will, but withheld the information we wanted and often misled us.42

In a national uprising that has failed, the role and contribution of any class can best be estimated by the amount of sacrifice it makes. Measured in these terms, the peasantry is at the top of the roll of honour of the 1857 uprising. Holmes states:

The number of armed men, who succumbed in Oudh, was about 150,000, of whom at least 35,000 were sepoys.43 ...

The rural population as a whole rose against the new land system imposed over their heads by the British rulers. Secondly, that the pattern of struggle was to eliminate the new landlords created under the British regime, destroy their records, hound them out of villages and seize their lands and attack all the symbols of British authority especially the kutchery (law-court), the tehsil (revenue office) and the thana (the police outpost). Thirdly, the base of the struggle was the mass of the peasantry and the rural poor while the leadership was in the hands of the landlords dispossessed under the British laws. Fourthly, this pattern of struggle fitted into the general pattern of the 1857 national uprising, the class struggle in the countryside was directed not against the landlords as a whole but only against a section of them, those who had been newly created by the British under their laws and acted as their loyal political supporters, that is, it was subordinated to the broad need of national unity against the foreign usurper.

Talmiz Khaldun’s thesis that during this uprising “The Indian peasantry was fighting desperately to free itself of foreign as well as feudal bondage” and that “the mutiny ended as a peasant war against indigenous landlordism and foreign imperialism” is thus an exaggeration. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Indian peasantry during this struggle decisively burst through the feudal bonds either politically or economically to transform a broad-based national uprising into a peasant war. On the other hand all the evidence that is known is to the contrary....

The Indian peasants made a compromise with the traditional landlords in the interests of the common struggle but the landlords became terrified by this alliance when they saw it in the living form of a revolutionary popular struggle. Gubbins, who had wide personal experience of Oudh and other Eastern districts, states:

Much allowance should, no doubt, be made in considering the conduct of the Indian gentry at this crisis, on account of their want of power to resist the armed and organised enemy which had suddenly risen against us. The enemy always treated with the utmost severity those among their countrymen who were esteemed to be friends of the British cause. Neither their lives nor their property were safe. Fear, therefore, no doubt entered largely into the natives which induced many to desert us.44

Narrow class interest and fear of the “armed and organised” masses, whom the British rightly called “the enemy,” ultimately led the Indian feudal gentry to desert the revolutionary struggle and seek terms with the foreign rulers. The situation led to feudal treachery and suppressoin of the national uprising, and not to the strengthening of feudalism in the minds and the later movement of the Indian peasantry and the people.

Dr R.C. Majumdar himself quotes the Supreme Government “Narrative of Events” issued on September 12, 1857:

In consequence of the general nature of the rebellion and the impossibility of identifying the majority of the rebels, the Magistrate recommended the wholesale burning and destruction of all villages proved to have sent men to take active part in the rebellion.45

This is how the British understood the peasant contribution to the 1857 uprising. Could there be a restoration for the feudal order in India on the shoulders of such a peasantry?

---

The 1857 uprising is a historic landmark. It marks the end of a whole historic phase and the beginning of a new one. On the British side it finished the Company’s rule and led to direct government under the British Crown. The period of rule of the merchant monopolists of the East India Company ended and the dominance of the industrial bourgeoisie of Britain in the affairs of India began. On the Indian side, the revolt failed but the Indian people got that experience which enabled them to build the modern Indian national movement on new foundations and with new ideas, and the lessons of 1857 proved inestimable. Both sides drew and applied their lessons from the 1857 experience in the subsequent period. The British were the victors, they went into action soon; we were the vanquished, we took longer.

From their experience of the 1857 uprising the British rulers sharply changed their policy towards the Indian feudal elements, and discarding the old policy of attacking their interests, they adopted a new policy of reconciling them as the main social base of their rule in India. The Indian people from their experience of the Indian feudals drew the lesson for the next phase of their movement that their anti-British struggle to be successful must also be an anti-feudal struggle. Those who were so far regarded by the Indian people as their traditional leaders were now rightly considered as betrayers of the 1857 uprising and the Indian puppets of the British power.

As regards the Indian princess, the policy of annexations was given up. Queen Victoria in her Proclamation promised them:

We shall respect the rights, dignity and honour of native pricess as our own.
Very candidly Lord Canning in his Minute of April 30 noted:
The safety of our rule is increased and not diminished by the maintenance of native chiefs well affected to us.

How the Indian national movement understood the post-1857 British policy towards the princes is best reflected in Nehru’s Discovery of India where he states that the retention of the native states was designed to disrupt the unity of India,46 Indian princes playing the role of Britain’s fifth column in India.47....

The Army was reorganised after the sepoy mutiny, which had set the country aflame. The proportion of British troops was increased and they were primarily used as an “army of occupation” to maintain internal security while the Indian troops were organised and trained for service abroad to subjugate Asian and African territories for British imperialism. The artillery was taken away from the Indian hands. All higher appointments were reserved for the British, an Indian could not even get the King’s Commission nor get employment in the Army headquarters except as a clerk in non-military work. The Indian regiments were reorganised on the principle of divide and rule and recruitment confined to the so-called martial races.

But in the long run nothing availed the British. The memory of the sepoys’ role during 1857 never died not only in the memory of the Indian people but also of the Indian armed forces. As the modern national movement grew, it could not leave the Indian Army, however “reorganised”, untouched. During the 1930 national struggle, the Garhwali soldiers refused to fire at the Indian demonstrators at Peshawar. During the post-war national upsurge after a series of “mutinies” in the Indian Army and Air Force, the Royal Indian Navy revolted on February 18, 1946 and the next day the British Prime Minister announced the dispatch of the Cabinet Mission to India and negotiations for the independence of India began.

The Indian administrative machine was reorganised as a colossal bureaucratic machine with Indians employed only in subordinate positions, all real power and responsibility resting in British hands. The Queen’s Proclamation had promised that there would be no racial discrimination against the Indians in employment in government services. The reality, however, was different...

After 1857, politically, even Sir Syed Ahmad Khan had suggested that Indians should be included in the Legislative Council to keep the government in touch, with the people. In 1861 the Indian Councils Act provided for the inclusion for legislative purposes of non-official members. In 1862, three Indians were so nominated. These legislatures, in which real power remained with the exclusive British Executive, were used by patriotic Indian statesmen as tribunes of the Indian people and to unmask British policies and thus aid the growth of the national movement. The British tactic of divide and rule, however, succeeded in another way. The institution of separate electorates for the Muslims was the first expression of the poisonous two-nation theory which ultimately resulted in the partition of the country at the very time of gaining independence.

The British Government, which claimed credit for early social reform measures like banning of sati, widow remarriage, etc., after the experience of 1857 and its subsequent alliance with the Indian feudal reaction became the opponent of all progressive social measures.

Hindu law was largely custom and as customs change, the law also was applied in a different way. Indeed there was no provision of Hindu Law which could not be changed by customs. The British replaced this elastic customary law by judicial decisions based on the old texts and these decisions became precedents which had to be rigidly followed… Change could only come by positive legislation but the British Government, which was the legislating authority, had no wish to antagonise the conservative elements on whose support it counted. When later some legislative powers were given to the partially elected assemblies, every attempt to promote social reform legislation was frowned upon by the authorities and sternly discouraged.48

The British Government thus became the defender of social reaction in India, after 1857!

The British overlords had created an English educated Indian middle-class to get cheap and efficient and denationalised Indian cadres for the lower essential rungs of their administration.

Educated natives took no part in the sepoy mutiny: despite the charges to the contrary, they heartily disapproved of the revolt and showed themselves faithful and loyal to the British authorities throughout the course of that crisis.49

The above is not wholly true. Dr Sen states: Even this small minority (of modern educated Indians) were not unanimous in the support of the Government. An educated Hindu of Bengal complained of ‘a hundred years of unmitigated active tyranny unrelieved by any trait of generosity’.

“A century and more of intercourse between each other,” he adds, “has not made the Hindus and the Englishman friends or even peaceful fellow subjects.”50

Calcutta was the biggest centre of these modern educated Indians. They were at the time themselves concentrating upon the struggle against Hindu orthodoxy and the religious terms in which the cause of the insurgents was clothed repelled them. Because of their historic origin and the limitations of their political experience they wrongly identified progress with British rule. They were not, however, “faithful and loyal” in the sense Earl Granville imagined them to be, servile to the British rulers. This was proved in the very next year after the 1857-58 uprising was suppressed when the Bengali intelligentsia stirred the whole of Bengal in solidarity with the Indigo Revolt, with the peasants of Bengal and Bihar who were victims of unimaginable oppression and exploitation of the British planters. Again it was Surendranath Banerji who took the initiative to run an all-India campaign against lowering the age for the ICS, which patently went against the Indian candidates. Then came the campaigns regarding the IIbert Bill and racial discrimination in courts and the Vernacular Press Act and so on. As the new intelligentsia saw more and more of India under the British Crown all their illusions about Queen Victoria’s 1858 Proclamation being the Magna Carta of Indian liberties gradually evaporated and they began to agitate for political reforms. In 1882 the Grand Old Man of Indian nationalism, Dababhai Naoroji, wrote:
Hindus, Mohammedans and Parsees alike are asking whether the British rule is to be a blessing or a curse...This is no longer a secret, or a state of things not quite open to those of our rulers who would see.51...

Even before 1857,
From India a policy of imperial expansion was planned and the British Government of India was set on the perilous road of conquest and annexation in the East for the benefit of Britain, but of course at the cost of the Indian tax-payer.52

Thus Malacca and Singapore were occupied, Burma conquered, Nepal and Afghan wars conducted and the Persian war managed.

The age of the Empire, based on India, began after 1857. India now became in fact no less than in name a British possession. The Indian Empire was at this time a continental order, a political structure based on India, and extending its authority from Aden to Hongkong.53

In this period, Afghanistan and Persia were made virtual British protectorates, expeditions and missions were sent to Sinkiang and Tibet in the North and the British position in South-East Asia and China consolidated.

“The continental involved a subordinate participation of India”54 as policemen, traders and usurers, and coolies in the plantations of Britain’s growing colonies. Indian resources and manpower were thus used not only to conquer but maintain and run Britain’s colonial Empire.

This, however, was only one side of the picture. As part of winning foreign support for the Indian uprising Azimullah Khan, Nana’s representative, is reported to have built contacts with Russia and Turkey. Rango Bapuji, the Satara representative, is also reported to have worked with Azimullah. Bahadur Shah’s court claimed Persian support. All this was in the old principle that Britain’s enemies are our friends. But Britain was the colossus of that period, and the feudal ruling circles of these countries could never be in any hurry to come to the aid of the Indian revolt. They could at best exploit it and await its outcome.

This was, however, not the attitude of democratic circles in these and other countries... there was in all democratic circles of the civilised world great sympathy for the Indian uprising. Great and historic is the significance of the Chartist leaders’ solidarity with the Indian national uprising. Modern British labour movement dates its birth from the Chartists. Modern Indian national movement dates its birth from the 1857 uprising. What a new fraternal vision emerges from the memory that the British proletariat and the Indian people have stood together ever since the beginning of their respective movements. The Chinese date the birth of their modern anti-imperialist national movement from the Taiping uprising as we date ours from the 1857 uprising. The Chinese paper (presented at the symposium on the centenary of the 1857 Revolt) documents the hitherto unknown story that the Chinese people responded sympathetically to the 1857 uprising and the Indian sepoys deserted to the Taipings and fought shoulder to shoulder with them against the common enemy. Marx noted the new phenomenon that the revolt in the Anglo-Indian army has coincided with a general disaffection exhibited against supremacy by the Great Asiatic nations, the revolt of the Bengal Army being, beyond doubt, intimately connected with the Persian and Chinese wars.55

Thus the great national uprising of 1857 laid the foundation for the worldwide democratic solidarity with the Indian struggle in its next phase and our new national movement built itself on healthy internationalist traditions. For example, in the twenties, the Indian national movement vigorously opposed the imperialist policies in the Middle East and expressed solidarity with the Egyptian struggle under Zaglul Pasha, in the thirties it expressed practical solidarity with the Chinese people’s struggle against the Japanese invaders and the worldwide anti-fascist movement and so on. It was thus no accident that after the achievement of independence India emerged as a great world power championing the cause of world peace and the liberation of all subject nations....n

[*NOTES

1. Major B.D. Basn, Rise of The Christian Power in India, (1931), p. 953.

2. Marx, unsigned article, “The Indian Question”, New York Daily Tribune, August 14, 1857.

3. Quoted by R.C. Majumdar, The Sepoy Mutiny and Revolt of 1857, p. 278.

4. Marx, “The British Rule in India”, New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853.

5. R.P. Dutt, India Today, p. 98.

6. Marx, “The East India Company—Its History and Results”, New York Daily Tribune, July 11, 1853.

7. Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company, p. 174.

8. K.M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance, p. 99.

9. Allamah Fazle Haq of Khayrabad, “The Story of the War of Independence 1857-58”, Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, vol. V, pt. 1, January 1957, p. 29.

10. National Herald, May 10, 1957.

11. Mukherjee, op. cit., p. 223.

12. R.C. Dutt, The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age, p. xv.

13. Montgomeny Martin, Eastern India, Introduction to vol. I.

14. Mukherjee, op. cit., pp. 224-25.

15. Marx, “The British Rule in India”, New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853.

16. Majumdar, op. cit., p. 229.

17. Charles Ball, Indian Mutiny, vol. II. p. 242.

18. Sir T. Metcalfe, Two Narratives of the Mutiny at Delhi, pp. 98-99.

19. Quoted by Edward Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal, pp. 73-74.
20. Quoted by Savarkar, Indian War of Independence, p. 134.

21. Majendie, Up Among the Pandies, pp. 195-96.

22. Kaye & Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, vol. II, p. 281.

23. Nehru, Discovery of India, p. 281.

24. Marx, unsigned article, New York Daily Tribune, July 15, 1857.
25. Nehru, op. cit., p. 279.

26. Quoted by Savarkar, op. cit., pp. 534-35.

27. Nehru, op. cit., p. 279.

28. Majumdar, op. cit., p. 241.

29. S.N. Sen, Eighteen Fifty Seven, pp. 412-13.

30. John Williams Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War, vol. I, p. 565.

31. Quoted by Asoka Mehta, The Great Rebellion, p. 42.

32. Fazle Haq, op. cit., p. 33.

33. Vide Talmiz Khaldun’s paper “The Great Rebellion” presented at the symposium held on the occasion of the centenary of the 1857 Revolt.

34. Metcalfe, op. cit., p. 220.

35. Ibid., Jeewanlal’s Diary, under date 26 August.

36. G.W. Forrest, op. cit., vol. II, p. 150.

37. On October 5, 1858. See Col. G.B. Malleson, Indian Mutiny of 1857, Vol. III, p. 287.

38. On February 3, 1858. See Ibid., vol. II, p. 334.

39. Ball, op. cit., vol. II, p. 241.

40. Quoted by Asoka Mehta, op. cit., pp. 51-52. Also Savarkar, op. cit., p. 444.

41. W.H. Russell, My Diary in India in the Year 1858-59, p. 276.

42. M.R. Gubbins, An Account of the Mutinies in Oudh, p. 53.

43. T.R. Holmes, History of the Seopy War, p. 506.

44. Gubbins, op. cit., p. 58.

45. Majumdar, op. cit., p. 217.
46. Nehru, op. cit., p. 284.
47. Ibid., p. 268.
48. Nehru, op. cit., p. 285.
49. Earl Granville, February 19, 1858, in the House of Lords in reply to the charges of the President of the Board of Control, Lord Ellenborough. Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, CXL VIII, 1858, pp. 1728-29.

50. Quoted by Sen, op. cit., p. 29.

51. Dadabhai Naoroji, “The Condition of India”. Correspondence with the Secretary of State for India, Journal of the East India Affairs, XIV, 1882, pp. 171-172.

52. K. N. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance, p. 105.

53. Ibid., pp. 162-163.

54. Ibid., pp. 164-165.

55. Marx, unsigned article, New York Herald Tribune, July 15, 1857.
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