Conclusion and Epilogue: Strangers in the Land

Summary

BEFORE THE VELLORE mutiny occurred, William Bentinck, Governor of Madras, had concluded that the British were ‘strangers in the land’. This was an opinion he still held some twenty years later when he arrived in Bengal as Governor-General. He believed the people of India had not benefited from British rule and in 1829 wrote that Britain could expect no co-operation from Indians in times of emergency. Numerous Company servants had expressed similar views over the years. Despite a century of rule, and all the Company's efforts to conciliate Indian religious feelings, the Great Uprising made clear that the British were not only regarded as aliens in the Indian landscape but that Indians believed it had broken its ‘compact’ with them. In the breast-beating that occurred in Britain after the Uprising was put down, many indeed thought that the Company had given too much support to Christianity. Evangelicals, on the other hand argued that not enough support had been given.

The Company tried to cling on to its power. John Stuart Mill, who wrote the petition to Parliament requesting the continuance of Company rule, pointed out that:

In abstaining as they have done from all interference with any of the religious practices of the people of India, except such as are abhorrent to humanity, they have acted not only from their own conviction of what is just and expedient, but in accordance with the avowed intentions and express enactments of the legislature, framed ‘in order that regard should be had to the civil and religious usages of the Natives.’