<em>1857 War of Independence or Clash of Civilizations? British Public Reactions</em>, by Salahuddin Malik

Reviewed by: 1857 War of Independence or Clash of Civilizations? British Public Reactions Thomas R. Metcalf (bio) 1857 War of Independence or Clash of Civilizations? British Public Reactions, by Salahuddin Malik; pp. xxviii + 288. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, £12.99, $30.00. The nature of the Indian uprising of 1857, the most serious direct challenge to the Raj in its two-hundred-year history, has provoked intense controversy from the day news of the fall of Delhi reached Britain in June 1857 up to the present. Salahuddin Malik’s volume is neither an interpretive history of the revolt itself nor an analysis of the contentious historiography the event has evoked over the years. Although he admits that his own views may “obtrude” on occasion (xiv), Malik does not try to ascertain whether the uprising should be understood as a “war of independence” (the title of a 1909 work by the Indian nationalist V. D. Savarkar), or as a “clash of civilizations.” Rather, Malik gives us a survey of contemporaneous British public opinion as it took shape during the tumultuous years of 1857 and 1858, identifying several schools of thought about the nature of the uprising and assessing each in turn. The first to emerge was, not surprisingly, the “military mutiny school” (16). The adherents of this view were those—above all, those in the East India Company and Lord Palmerston’s Whig government of the day—who sought to escape any responsibility for the revolt by minimizing the extent of disaffection with British rule. Within the press Malik singles out especially the Manchester Guardian, committed to India’s modernization, as insistently denying “any connection” between the actions of Lord Dalhousie as Governor-General and the subsequent uprising (39). Malik acknowledges, however, that within the military school there existed a number of variations; above all, some commentators admitted the possibility of an outside hand encouraging the mutinous sepoys. An “opposing school” depicted the uprising as a “socio-political rebellion or a revolution” (61). This school of thought, Malik argues, embraced a wide variety of Britons. Among them were the Conservative party, with Benjamin Disraeli as its spokesman; military officers; missionaries in India, most notably Alexander Duff; the Irish Nationalist party; and the Chartists led by Ernest Jones. Malik sees the unifying argument of this group in Disraeli’s well-known July 1857 statement to the House of Commons, that “the decline and fall of great empires are not affairs of greased cartridges. Such results are occasioned by adequate causes” (64). Little in the identification of these two schools is new or original. An extensive historiography, including even my own 1964 volume The Aftermath of Revolt: India 1857–1870, shows how such varied views were bound up with the interests of Britain’s political elite. Where Malik does break new ground is in his endeavor to demonstrate that for many Britons the uprising was initiated by a “Muslim conspiracy” (chapter 7), and then took the shape of a “Muslim rebellion” (chapter 8). Given the predominance of Hindu sepoys and aggrieved Hindu chieftains in the uprising, such assertions do little to explain the actual course of events. What they do, of course, is point toward Britain’s abiding anxiety at the “prospect of the crescent rising once again over the horizons of India” (138). Driven by our own contemporary anxieties with regard to Islam, Malik devotes his final chapter to asking how far British commentators in 1857 may have seen in the uprising a “worldwide jihad,” or even a “clash of civilizations” (150). Interestingly, most of the sizeable section of the British public to whom Malik attributes this view are Christian clergymen. How far such paranoid fears spread generally [End Page 131] through British society is not clear, but Malik is himself at pains to insist that the uprising was not a “worldwide movement among the followers of Islam against Christianity” (167). Any work that compiles and summarizes the views of a wide variety of individuals opens up the author to criticism on a number of grounds. What does it mean, for instance, to say that “an overwhelming section of the public in Britain felt convinced that it [the...

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