Indian Antiquary Vol 52

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 323

NOVEMBER, 1928)
IN THE CENTURY BEFORE THE MUTINY
307
IN THE CENTURY BEFORE THE MUTINY.
By SR RICHARD C. TEMPLE, Br. I have lately had reason to go fully into the story of the Mutiny of the Bengal Army, 1857-1859, and have been impressed by two facts : Firstly, that it was in its essentials a mutiny of an army against its employers and not a rebellion of a people against its rulers, though local malcontent notables did succeed in making it one in restricted areas; Secondly, that its roots went back to the very dawn of the existence of the Army. The well-known story of the greased cartridges with its consequences was merely a symptom of a deeply rooted disease. The object of this paper is to indicate briefly what the history of the disease appears to be. I begin the enquiry, therefore, with the foundation that eventually grew to be the Honorable East India Company.
In 1600 Queen Elizabeth, while Akbar the Great was still alive, granted a charter to the East India Company of Merchants to trade in India and establish local factories for the purpose. Chartered traders and merchants the British in India remained, as one mercantile body among many others of varying length of life-Portuguese and Spanish, French, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Austrian (i.e., Flemish). None of the European nations represented by these bodies attempted to set up a rule in the country except the Portuguese and Spanish, who created a coastwise empire from Gombroon on the Persian Gulf to Malacca on the Malay Coast, to say nothing of the Malay Archipelago. But the Dutch, English and French had destroyed the power of Portugal in India by the eighteenth century, and as regards the native powers they had never attempted to establish a rule on Indian soil for themselves. The East India Companies quarrelled and fought with each other and at times with local Indian rulers, but were always of little consequence politically until about 1750, when the rivalry had dwindled down to a straggle for supremacy between the English and the French. By that date the European trading companies had acquired from native Indian rulers real estate, avtonomy for their settlements, and trading privileges. Their friendship and goodwill, too, had become desirable to local and even imperial potentates. But that was all, for we may except the isolated instance of the British Naval expedition against Aurangzeb in 1685, which was unsuccessful at the time, though it enabled Job Charnock to found Calcutta. Autonomy involved self-defence, and troops and forts of a sort were maintained to that end by the mercantile companies, but they neither held nor sought for the means to possess politically either power or influence. It was left to the Frenchmen Dupleix, de Lally and de Bussy to seek both in order to oust their British rivals from India. The opportunity for attaining their desire lay in the political conditions then existing in that country.
It is now necessary to turn for a while to the general history of modern India. After the effective establishment of Muslim rule at Delhi by an alien from southern Afghanistan, Muhammad Ghori (Shahabu'ddin), in 1193, a great number of dynasties, Hindu and Muhammadan, arose and fell in various parts, some of them temporarily powerful and of large extent. At this period the principal dynasties were Muhammadan, ruling usually from Delhi. One of them, that of the Lodi Afghans of Delhi, became involved in an ordinary family fight for the accession, and application was made by one of the parties concerned to Babur, then Mughal ruler of Kabul, to intervene. This enabled that great and ambitious prince to establish himself in Delhi and Agra and found in 1529 a great kingdom, which subsequently, through the genius of his grandson Akbar the Great, became the Mughal Empire of India. Under Akbar and his immediate descendants, Jahangir, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb, this Empire over-shadowed everything up till the death of the last n 1707. While the Mughal Empire was still a mighty living force, there had sprung up in the Deccan a series of Muhammadan kingdom of great importance at the time, now known, first as the Bahmani, and then as the Five Shahi kingdoms. Their combined territories stretched from