All twelve exercise questions from NCERT Themes in Indian History Part III, Chapter 10 “Rebels and the Raj”, in the English edition’s own wording, each with a model answer. The book splits them into five “Answer in 100-150 words” questions, four “Write a short essay (250-300 words)” questions, one map-work question and two project questions (choose one). After them come the twelve questions the chapter asks inside the text, beside its sources and pictures and in its Discuss boxes. Write your own answer first, then check it against this one.
The Hindi edition asks these same twelve questions in the same order and with the same content; its wording is its own, not a literal translation of the English. Students writing the paper in English should answer from this, the English edition’s own phrasing.
How to write: Questions 1-5 need four to six solid points each, in about 100-150 words. Questions 6-9 are short essays (250-300 words), so give them sub-headings and a closing line. Name a source wherever you can (the Azamgarh Proclamation, a sepoy arzi, Barker’s painting, and so on).
1 Answer in 100-150 words
Q. Why did the mutinous sepoys in many places turn to erstwhile rulers to provide leadership to the revolt?
Answer:
Rebels repeatedly turned to pre-British rulers for leadership, though acceptance was rarely eager on either side. In Delhi, sepoys pressured the old Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah, initially horrified, into blessing the revolt and accepting nominal leadership. In Kanpur, sepoys and townspeople gave Nana Sahib, successor to Peshwa Baji Rao II, little choice but to lead. In Jhansi, the Rani was pushed into leadership by popular pressure, as was Kunwar Singh, a zamindar of Arrah, Bihar. In Awadh, still raw from Nawab Wajid Ali Shah’s displacement, people rallied around his young son Birjis Qadr.
Leadership was not confined to royalty alone: local figures such as Shah Mal in the Barout region and Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah also led. But turning to erstwhile rulers gave the revolt a legitimacy and political weight far beyond the disobedience of a single cantonment, which is exactly why sepoys borrowed it repeatedly.
Q. Discuss the evidence that indicates planning and coordination on the part of the rebels.
Answer:
The similarity of pattern across cantonments, a signal (the evening gun or a bugle), then seizure of the bell of arms, plundering the treasury, and attacking government buildings, this same fixed sequence repeating itself again and again, points to real coordination rather than spontaneous chaos.
Direct correspondence between units is also on record: after the 7th Awadh Irregular Cavalry refused the new cartridges, they wrote to the 48th Native Infantry that they “had acted for the faith” and awaited the 48th’s orders. Panchayats of native officers, drawn from each regiment, met nightly in places like the Kanpur sepoy lines to decide collective action. The conversation between Sisten, a police inspector, and a Muslim tahsildar who later led the revolt at Bijnor, shows that plans travelled even through casual talk between strangers who recognised each other as sympathisers. Together, this is strong evidence that sepoys were the conscious makers of their own rebellion, not simply reacting at random.
Q. Discuss the extent to which religious beliefs shaped the events of 1857.
Answer:
Religious fear and belief played a central role in triggering the revolt. The rumour that the new Enfield cartridges were greased with cow and pig fat was a direct offence to both Hindu and Muslim religious practice. A wider rumour held that bone dust from cows and pigs was mixed into market flour, part of a supposed British plot to destroy Hindu and Muslim religion and force conversion to Christianity. These rumours took hold precisely because they matched real fears already built by decades of British “reform” (the ban on sati in 1829, permitting widow remarriage, English-medium education) and visible missionary activity.
Rebel proclamations were also deliberately couched in religious language: both the Azamgarh Proclamation and a surviving sepoy arzi speak of defending “faith” and treat Hindus and Muslims as equally threatened. Religious belief was therefore decisive in sparking the revolt, spreading it widely, and holding communal unity together through it.
Q. What were the measures taken to ensure unity among the rebels?
Answer:
Rebel proclamations, even those issued in the name of Muslim princes, deliberately addressed Hindu sentiment too, appealing to a shared pre-British Hindu-Muslim past under the Mughals. One proclamation issued under Bahadur Shah’s name called on people to fight “under the standards of both Muhammad and Mahavir.” The Azamgarh Proclamation addressed pundits and fakirs together as guardians of both the Hindu and Muslim religions, calling on both to join what was framed as a holy war.
Communal division was notably absent even where the British actively tried to manufacture it: at Bareilly in December 1857, the British spent Rs 50,000 to incite Hindus against Muslims, and failed. In addition, most rebel administrations were consciously modelled on the eighteenth-century Mughal court, a shared symbol that bound communities together rather than dividing them.
Q. What steps did the British take to quell the uprising?
Answer:
The British passed emergency Acts in May-June 1857 placing all of North India under martial law, letting even ordinary Britons try and punish suspected rebels, with rebellion carrying only one sentence: death. Recognising Delhi’s symbolic weight, they mounted a two-pronged attack from Calcutta and the largely peaceful Punjab, but did not retake the city until late September 1857, after heavy losses on both sides.
Reconquest of the Gangetic plain then had to happen village by village, since the countryside itself was hostile; Awadh was not controlled again until March 1858. Alongside military force, the British used political division: in large parts of present-day Uttar Pradesh, where big landholders and peasants had offered united resistance, they tried to break up that unity by promising to give back to the big landholders their estates; rebel landholders were dispossessed and the loyal rewarded. Executions were staged deliberately in the open as a public performance of terror aimed at deterring further revolt.
2 Short essays (250-300 words)
Q. Why was the revolt particularly widespread in Awadh? What prompted the peasants, taluqdars and zamindars to join the revolt?
Answer:
Governor General Lord Dalhousie called Awadh “a cherry that will drop into our mouth one day” in 1851; the kingdom was formally annexed in 1856, officially for misgovernment, though Nawab Wajid Ali Shah was in fact widely loved, and his exile threw the court’s musicians, dancers, poets, artisans and administrative staff out of work overnight.
Annexation dispossessed not only the Nawab but the region’s taluqdars too. The Summary Settlement of 1856 assumed taluqdars were mere interlopers with no legitimate stake in land, and their share of Awadh’s villages fell from 67 per cent to 38 per cent, hardest in southern Awadh. The British disarmed taluqdars and destroyed their forts. British officials expected settling directly with “real” cultivators would ease the peasant’s burden, but revenue demand instead rose 30 to 70 per cent in some areas, so peasants gained no relief either.
Losing the taluqdar also broke a whole social relationship: taluqdars extracted dues but, as local patrons, often eased demands in hardship, something the impersonal British system never offered. Where resistance in Awadh was fiercest and longest, taluqdars fought alongside their own peasants. Finally, most Bengal Army sepoys came from exactly this region, the “nursery of the Bengal Army”, so the cartridge rumour and rural land grievances flowed together in both directions between barracks and village. Nawab, taluqdar, peasant and sepoy grievances therefore all fed into one another, making Awadh’s revolt unusually deep and long.
Q. What did the rebels want? To what extent did the vision of different social groups differ?
Answer:
Because the British won, their accounts dominate the record; the rebels left few of their own, so reconstructing what they wanted is harder than reconstructing the official view. Still, sources like the Azamgarh Proclamation (25 August 1857) show demands were group-specific. To zamindars it promised that revenue under Badshahi government would stay light and their interests would be protected, with no more ruinous assessments or auctions. To merchants it promised an end to the British monopoly of the fine-goods trade. To public servants it promised respect, better pay and higher rank. To artisans, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths and shoemakers thrown out of work by English imports, it promised employment again in the service of kings and nobles. To pundits and fakirs, addressed as guardians of both the Hindu and Muslim religions, it framed the struggle as a holy war both were bound to join.
Yet a shared undercurrent bound every group together: rejection of everything associated with firangi raj and the imagined restoration of an eighteenth-century Mughal-style order, which is exactly why rebels tried to build alternative administrations in Delhi, Lucknow and Kanpur wherever British rule collapsed. In some places a more radical, egalitarian undertone also surfaced, burnt account books and ransacked moneylenders’ houses, but the proclamations themselves stayed focused on uniting everyone against the firangi rather than airing this more revolutionary impulse. The rebels’ vision was thus at once many-coloured, each group with its own grievance, and unified, in its common target.
Q. What do visual representations tell us about the revolt of 1857? How do historians analyse these representations?
Answer:
With so little rebel testimony surviving, historians have worked largely from British-produced material, letters, diaries, official mutiny records and, crucially, a large body of pictorial images that reveal as much about British emotion and self-image as about the events themselves. Thomas Jones Barker’s “Relief of Lucknow” (1859) commemorates Colin Campbell’s arrival with reinforcements, placing Campbell, Outram and Havelock centrally, well lit, with triumphant horses signalling restored British control, reassuring British viewers the crisis had passed.
Joseph Noel Paton’s “In Memoriam” (1859) shows English women and children huddled together, awaiting violence that is never shown, only suggested, which is exactly what made it so effective at provoking outrage; a contrasting genre showed Miss Wheeler fighting off rebels single-handedly in Kanpur, her survival framed as a defence of Christianity itself, with a Bible visible on the floor. As public anger grew, Punch’s “Justice” (12 September 1857) and “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger” sanctioned brutal reprisal as necessary justice, and the Illustrated London News’ Peshawar executions (3 October 1857) staged terror as public spectacle. Even calls for restraint were mocked: “The Clemency of Canning” (24 October 1857) ridiculed leniency itself.
Historians read these not as neutral records but as sources built to persuade a specific audience of a specific feeling, asking who made an image, for whom, and what emotion it was meant to provoke. Twentieth-century Indian nationalism later reclaimed 1857 just as purposefully, as the “First War of Independence”, with Rani Lakshmi Bai as its defining heroic image, proving every generation reshapes the past to its own needs.
Q. Examine any two sources presented in the chapter, choosing one visual and one text, and discuss how these represent the point of view of the victor and the vanquished.
Answer:
Take Thomas Jones Barker’s “Relief of Lucknow” (1859) as the visual source. It commemorates Colin Campbell’s arrival with reinforcements after Henry Lawrence’s death and Colonel Inglis’s prolonged defence. The composition places Campbell, Outram and Havelock centrally, well lit, surrounded by hand gestures leading the eye to them; the dead and wounded in the foreground signal past suffering, while triumphant horses in the middle ground signal restored control. This is squarely the victor’s point of view, reassuring British viewers that the crisis had passed and British power had prevailed.
Take the Azamgarh Proclamation (25 August 1857) as the textual source, issued while rebels were still fighting and had not yet been defeated. It portrays the British as the oppressor of every social group by name, zamindars, merchants, public servants, artisans, pundits and fakirs, and imagines an alternative, just Badshahi government that will resolve each group’s specific grievance. This is the confident point of view of the side that would ultimately be vanquished, written before the defeat, not after it.
Comparing the two also shows the imbalance in the record itself: as the chapter notes, few rebels had the opportunity of recording their version of events, and apart from a few proclamations and ishtahars, attempts to reconstruct 1857 depend heavily on what the British wrote and drew. The victor’s point of view therefore dominates the sources, which is why reconstructing the rebels’ perspective is difficult.
3 Map work
Q. On an outline map of India, mark Calcutta (Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai) and Madras (Chennai), three major centres of British power in 1857. Refer to Maps 1 and 2 and plot the areas where the revolt was most widespread. How close or far were these areas from the colonial cities?
This is a map exercise to do on an outline map; the answer is given here as a list.
Answer:
Mark the three colonial cities: Calcutta on the east coast, Bombay on the west coast and Madras on the south-east coast.
Areas where the revolt was most widespread (from the chapter): the Gangetic valley of North India: Meerut and Delhi; Aligarh, Etawah, Mainpuri and Etah; Awadh with Lucknow; Kanpur and Bareilly; Jhansi; Arrah in Bihar; pargana Barout; and Singhbhum in Chotanagpur. The Punjab, by contrast, remained largely peaceful.
How close or far: these centres lay deep inland in North India, a long way from Bombay and Madras and at a considerable distance up the Ganga valley from Calcutta. This is why the British had to send one force from Calcutta into North India and another from the Punjab to reconquer Delhi, and why the reconquest of the Gangetic plain was slow and had to go village by village.
4 Projects (choose one)
Q. Read a biography of any one of the leaders of the revolt of 1857. Check the sources used by the biographer. Do these include government reports, newspaper accounts, stories in regional languages, visual material, anything else? Do all the sources say the same thing, or are there differences? Prepare a report on your findings.
Answer (approach for this project):
Choose a leader named in the chapter, for example Rani Lakshmi Bai, Nana Sahib, Kunwar Singh, Bahadur Shah, Shah Mal or Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah.
List the biographer’s sources under the headings the question gives: government reports, newspaper accounts, stories in regional languages, visual material, and anything else (letters, songs, proclamations).
Compare what they say. The chapter itself shows why they may differ: British accounts dismissed the rebels, while nationalist art and literature presented leaders such as the Rani of Jhansi as heroic figures. Note where the sources agree and where they differ, and suggest why.
Conclude by saying which sources you found most reliable for the leader’s own point of view, remembering that few rebels were able to record their version of events.
Q. See a film made on the revolt of 1857 and write about the way it represents the revolt. How does it depict the British, the rebels, and those who remained loyal to the British? What does it say about peasants, city dwellers, tribals, zamindars and taluqdars? What kind of a response does the film seek to evoke?
Answer (approach for this project):
Take notes under the question’s own headings: the British, the rebels, the loyalists; then peasants, city dwellers, tribals, zamindars and taluqdars.
Compare with the chapter. For example, does the film show the revolt only as a sepoy mutiny, or as a popular uprising in which peasants and taluqdars fought together, as in Awadh? Does it show leaders who were pushed into leadership by popular pressure, as the chapter describes for Bahadur Shah, Nana Sahib and the Rani of Jhansi?
Read the film as you would read the chapter’s images. Ask whose point of view it takes and what feeling it seeks to evoke (pride, anger, sympathy), just as British paintings sought to provoke revenge and nationalist imagery sought to inspire.
5 In-text questions
The questions the chapter asks inside the text, beside its sources and pictures and in its Discuss boxes, in the order the book prints them.
Q. Read the two reports and the descriptions of what was happening in Delhi provided in the chapter. Remember that newspaper reports often express the prejudices of the reporter. How did Delhi Urdu Akhbar view the actions of the people?
Answer: The Delhi Urdu Akhbar (14 June 1857) viewed the disruption with worry and disapproval. (i) It complains that vegetables and saag could not be found, that potatoes and arvi were stale and rotten because “farsighted” kunjras had stored them, and that produce from the city’s gardens was “earmarked for the select” while the poor and the middle class could “only lick their lips”. (ii) It complains that the water-carriers had stopped filling water, so that “poor Shurfas (gentility)” had to carry water themselves, and that the “halalkhors (righteous) have become haramkhors (corrupt)”, warning of decay, disease and an epidemic. Its sympathy lies with the respectable gentility and the middle class, and it blames the vegetable sellers, water-carriers and sweepers who had stopped their work. This reflects the prejudice of an upper-class urban reporter. The chapter shows the other side: ordinary people of Delhi had joined the sepoys, the rich were attacked and looted, and there was a general defiance of authority and hierarchy, which the paper saw only as a breakdown of order.
Q. What does this conversation suggest about the ways in which plans were communicated and discussed by the rebels? Why did the tahsildar regard Sisten as a potential rebel?
Answer: How plans were communicated: (i) secretly, in guarded and indirect language: “How does the work progress, brother?” and “If we have work in Awadh, your highness will know it” refer to the rebellion without naming it; (ii) through personal contacts between Indians, even those in government service, such as a tahsildar from Bijnor; (iii) across regions, since a man from Bijnor asks for news of Awadh, which shows that news and plans travelled between places; (iv) with a sense of central direction: “The direction of the business is in able hands.” The chapter adds that sepoys and their emissaries moved between stations and that panchayats of native officers met nightly in the Kanpur sepoy lines. Why Sisten seemed a rebel: Sisten, a native Christian police inspector, was dressed in Indian clothes and sitting cross-legged, and he was from Awadh, a centre of discontent. So the tahsildar took him for an Indian who shared the rebels’ grievances and was part of the “work” in Awadh.
Q. Read the section once more and explain the similarities and differences you notice in the ways in which leaders emerged during the revolt. For any two leaders, discuss why ordinary people were drawn to them.
Answer: Similarities: (i) rebels often turned to those who had been leaders before the British conquest: the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah, Nana Sahib (successor to Peshwa Baji Rao II), the Rani of Jhansi, Kunwar Singh of Arrah, and Birjis Qadr, son of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah; (ii) many of them were pushed into leadership by sepoys or by popular pressure: Bahadur Shah reacted first with horror and agreed only when sepoys entered the Red Fort; Nana Sahib was given “no choice”; the Rani and Kunwar Singh were forced by popular pressure.
Differences: not all leaders came from courts. Some were religious men, such as the fakir on an elephant at Meerut and the religious leaders and self-styled prophets of Lucknow; Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah was elected by the mutinous 22nd Native Infantry; some were local leaders who rose from among the people, such as Shah Mal, a Jat cultivator of pargana Barout, and Gonoo, a tribal cultivator of Singhbhum who led the Kol tribals; in Lucknow the people themselves hailed Birjis Qadr as their leader.
Why people were drawn to two leaders:
Shah Mal: he shared and voiced the villagers’ grievances: a high, inflexible revenue demand and the loss of land to traders and moneylenders. He moved from village to village at night, turned an English officer’s bungalow into a “hall of justice” to settle disputes, set up an effective intelligence network, and was locally acknowledged as the Raja; people felt that firangi raj was over and “their raj had come”.
Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah: he preached jehad from village to village, moving in a palanquin with drumbeaters (so he was called Danka Shah); many saw him as an inspired prophet; he fought bravely at the Battle of Chinhat where the British under Henry Lawrence were defeated; and many believed he was invincible and had magical powers.
Q. Read the entire section and discuss why people mourned the departure of Wajid Ali Shah.
Answer: (i) He was loved: the British wrongly assumed he was unpopular, but he was widely loved; when he was dethroned and exiled to Calcutta in 1856 on the plea of misgovernment, many followed him all the way to Kanpur singing songs of lament. (ii) A sense of grief and loss: an observer wrote that “The life was gone out of the body, and the body of this town had been left lifeless”, with every street, market and house wailing at separation from Jan-i-Alam; a folk song complained that “the honourable English came and took the country”; another said noble and peasant wept together. (iii) Material losses: the removal of the Nawab dissolved the court and its culture, so musicians, dancers, poets, artisans, cooks, retainers and administrative officials lost their livelihood. (iv) Resentment of annexation: Lord Dalhousie’s annexation was seen as a foreign takeover; the people of Awadh came to identify firangi raj with the end of their world.
Q. What does this excerpt tell you about the attitude of the taluqdars? Who did Hanwant Singh mean by the people of the land? What reason does Hanwant Singh give for the anger of the people?
Answer: Attitude of the taluqdars: they felt deeply wronged by the British, who had driven out their king and taken away estates that had been in their families “from time immemorial”. They had submitted for a time, and Hanwant Singh, the Raja of Kalakankar, still behaved honourably and saved a British officer. But they now saw the revolt as their chance and were ready to march at the head of their retainers to Lucknow to drive the British out. Their loyalty lay with the Nawab and with their own lands, not with the British. “The people of the land”: the ordinary people of Awadh, the peasants, villagers and sepoys (most sepoys of the Bengal Army came from Awadh’s villages) who had risen against the British. Reason for the anger: the British had driven out their King and, by sending officers to examine titles to estates, had taken away lands “at one blow”.
Q. Find out whether people in your state participated in the revolt of 1857. If they did, find out why they did so. If they did not, try and explain this.
Answer: This is a research task; use the chapter as a guide. If your state took part (for example Uttar Pradesh: Meerut, Lucknow, Kanpur, Bareilly, Awadh and pargana Barout; Bihar: Arrah under Kunwar Singh; Jharkhand: Singhbhum under Gonoo and the Kol tribals; Jhansi under the Rani; Delhi), look for the reasons the chapter gives: annexation of states like Awadh and Jhansi; the land revenue settlements that dispossessed taluqdars and over-assessed peasants; the greased cartridges and fears for caste and religion; the sepoys’ grievances over pay, leave and racial abuse; and the close link between sepoys and their villages. If your state did not take part, find out why: the chapter notes, for example, that the Punjab was largely peaceful; possible reasons could be that the region’s soldiers were not part of the Bengal Army that mutinied, that its rulers stayed loyal to the British, that it had not suffered a recent annexation or revenue settlement of the same kind, or that news and organisation did not reach it. Support your answer with local sources such as district gazetteers or museum records.
Q. What are the issues against British rule highlighted in this proclamation? Read the section on each social group carefully. Notice the language in which the proclamation is formulated and the variety of sentiments it appeals to.
Answer: Issues, group by group:
(i) Zemindars: exorbitant jumas (revenue demands); estates put up for public auction for arrears; respectable zemindars summoned to court, arrested and jailed on the suit of a common ryot, a maid servant or a slave; costly stamps and court expenses; annual taxes for schools, hospitals and roads.
(ii) Merchants: the British monopolised the trade in fine and valuable goods such as indigo and cloth, leaving only “trifles”; profits taxed with postages, tolls and subscriptions; merchants liable to imprisonment on the complaint of “a worthless man”.
(iii) Public servants: little respect, low pay and no influence, with all high posts given to Englishmen.
(iv) Artisans: English goods had thrown weavers, cotton dressers, carpenters, blacksmiths and shoemakers out of work and reduced them to beggary.
(v) Pundits and fakirs: the Europeans were enemies of both the Hindu and Muslim religions.
Language and sentiments: the British are called “infidel and treacherous” and the struggle an “Indian crusade” and a “holy war”, appealing to religion; it addresses Hindus and Muslims together, appealing to unity; it promises each group a better life under the “Badshahi” government (light jumas, open trade, salaries of 200-300 rupees, employment for artisans), appealing to self-interest; it speaks of dignity and honour; it uses prophecy (“the calculation of the astrologers, pundits”) that the English will lose their footing; and it warns that those who let this “golden opportunity” slip “will have to repent”.
Q. Compare the reasons for the mutiny as stated in the arzi with those mentioned by the taluqdar (Source 3).
Answer: (The taluqdar’s statement is that of Hanwant Singh, the Raja of Kalakankar, printed on p. 269.)
Reasons in the sepoys’ arzi: religion and faith above all: new cartridges mixed with the fat of cows and pigs and atta mixed with powdered bones; the jailing in irons of 84 troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry who refused to bite the cartridges, meant to frighten the rest; and a sense of betrayal, since their forefathers and they had served the British loyally and helped them conquer every place. “If the religion of a Hindoo or Mussalman is lost, what remains in the world?”
Reasons given by the taluqdar: political and economic: the British drove out the King (the annexation of Awadh) and took away his family’s ancestral lands by examining titles to estates.
Comparison: both feel the British repaid loyalty or submission with injustice, and both justify rising against them. But the sepoys stress the threat to their faith, while the taluqdar stresses the loss of his ruler and his land.
Q. What do you think are the major problems faced by historians in reconstructing the point of view of the rebels?
Answer: (i) Few rebel records: the repression of the rebels also silenced their voice, and few had a chance to record their version. (ii) Illiteracy: most rebels were sepoys and ordinary people who were not literate. (iii) Limited sources: only a few proclamations, ishtahars, letters and arzis survive. (iv) Dependence on British records: reconstructions depend heavily on what the British wrote: official reports, letters, diaries, memos and histories, which reveal the minds of officials but say little about what the rebels wanted, and which dismissed the rebels as ungrateful and barbaric. (v) Biased images and reports: British newspapers and pictures narrated the rebels’ violence in gory detail to provoke revenge. (vi) Proclamations hide differences: they aimed to unite all groups, so the alternative, more egalitarian visions seen in the rebels’ actions (burning account books, attacking moneylenders) were never written down.
Q. What, according to this account, were the problems faced by the British in dealing with these villagers?
Answer: (i) The villagers of Oude (Awadh) were pressing down on the British line of communication from the North, threatening their movement and supplies. (ii) They were “nearly intangible to Europeans”, melting away before them and collecting again, so the British could not pin them down and defeat them in open battle. (iii) They were very large in number and had a number of guns. (iv) Because they were ordinary villagers, the whole countryside was hostile: the chapter adds that the British had to reconquer the area village by village, and Forsyth estimated that three-fourths of the adult male population of Awadh was in rebellion.
Q. What idea is the picture projecting? What is being expressed through the images of the lion and the tiger? What do the figures of the woman and the child depict?
Answer: The Punch cartoon “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger” (1857) projects the idea that British revenge on the rebels was just and necessary. The lion, Britain’s national symbol, leaps on the tiger with great force, showing British power, righteousness and determination to punish. The tiger stands for the “Bengal” rebels (the sepoys of the Bengal Army), shown as a savage beast that has attacked the innocent. The woman and the child lying under the tiger depict the English women and children who were victims of the rebels, as in the Kanpur massacre; their presence is meant to provoke anger and justify vengeance. Like other images of the time, it helped create a mood in which brutal repression was seen as both necessary and just.
Q. Examine the elements in each of the visuals in this section and discuss how they allow you to identify the perspective of the artist.
Answer: The perspective shows in who is placed at the centre, who is shown as hero or villain, the use of light, gestures, symbols and captions.
(1) “Relief of Lucknow” (Barker, 1859): Campbell, Outram and Havelock at the centre on well-lit ground, gestures leading the eye to them, the dead and injured in the foreground and triumphant horses: a British artist celebrating the saviours and reassuring the British public that British power was restored.
(2) “In Memoriam” (Paton, 1859): English women and children huddled helplessly, the rebels invisible but suggested as brutish, and rescue forces arriving: meant to provoke anger and fury in Britain.
(3) Miss Wheeler (Fig. 10.12): a woman bravely killing four burly sepoys, with the Bible on the floor: the rebels demonised and the struggle shown as one to save the honour of Christianity.
(4) “Justice” (Punch, Fig. 10.13): an allegorical female figure with sword and shield, face full of rage, trampling sepoys while Indian women and children cower: demands for retribution.
(5) “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger” (Fig. 10.14): vengeance shown as just.
(6) Executions in Peshawar (Illustrated London News, Figs. 10.15, 10.16): rebels blown from guns and hanged in the open before rows of soldiers: punishment staged as a performance of terror to warn others.
(7) “The Clemency of Canning” (Punch, Fig. 10.17): Canning as a looming father figure protecting a sepoy whose weapons drip with blood: mocking Canning’s plea for leniency.
(8) Rani Lakshmi Bai (Figs. 10.3, 10.18): in battle armour, sword in hand, riding a horse: a nationalist perspective presenting the revolt as the First War of Independence and the Rani as a symbol of resistance to injustice and alien rule.