9 - The information order, the Rebellion of 1857–9 and pacification

Summary

Anglo-Indian mythology interpreted the dramatic onset of the Rebellion of 1857 as an acute failure in intelligence-gathering and analysis. Sir John Kaye, self-appointed historian to the Company, remarked how rapidly, in a manner ‘almost electric’, the rebels and the Indian population disseminated information about British weakness and disasters, in his History of the Sepoy War. Kaye's remarks about the inwardness and speed of Indian communication were strikingly similar to those of Bishop Heber a generation before, though painted in darker colours. In common with most officials, he believed that Indian religion was an important domain of seditious communication. The Dharma Sabha of Calcutta, the ‘great organ of Brahminical reaction’, was matched among Muslims in intrigue by ‘venerable maulavis’ and servants of the declining Muslim courts of upper India, the ‘veritable messengers of evil’, who passed to and fro between the dissident ‘baboos’ of the Presidency and up-country nests of treason.

That the British were fighting blind in 1857, and had not been able to anticipate the storm of mutinies came as a bitter blow to Kaye. In The Administration of the East India Company; A History of Indian Progress, published in 1853, he had been sanguine about the expansion of colonial knowledge. During the eighteenth century the ‘study of books in India preceded the study of men’ and it was only in ‘very recent times that we have thought it worth while to know anything about the natives of India and to turn our knowledge to profitable account’. Now, the British were in possession of ‘remarkable intelligence’ about the Thugs and other criminal conspiracies. Colonial knowledge had defeated the embodied knowledge of criminal castes and had unlocked their secret languages.