Indian Rebellion of 1857 (Great Indian Mutiny or Sepoy Rebellion)

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 begins as a mutiny of sepoys of British East India Company's army on the 10th of May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon erupts into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to the region of present-day Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, northern Madhya Pradesh or Saugor and Nerbudda Territories, Delhi, and Gurgaon.

The rebellion poses a considerable threat to Company power in that region, and it is contained only with the fall of Gwalior on 20 June 1858.

The rebellion is also known as India's First War of Independence, the Great Rebellion, the Indian Mutiny, the Revolt of 1857, and the Sepoy Mutiny.The rebels quickly capture large swaths of the Northwest Provinces and Oudh, including Delhi, where they install the Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, as Emperor of Hindustan.

The Company response comes rapidly as well: by September 1857, with help from fresh British reinforcements, Delhi has been retaken.

Nevertheless, it then takes the better part of 1858 for the rebellion to be completely suppressed in Oudh.Other regions of Company controlled India—Bengal province, the Bombay Presidency, and the Madras Presidency—remain largely calm.

In Punjab, only recently annexed by the East India Company, the Sikh princes support the Company to provide both soldiers and support.The large princely states, Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore, and Kashmir, as well as the smaller ones of Rajputana, by not joining the rebellion, serve, in the Governor-General Lord Canning's words, as "breakwaters in a storm" for the CompanyIn some regions, especially in Oudh, the rebellion takes on the attributes of a patriotic revolt against European presence; however, although the rebel leaders, especially the Rani of Jhansi, become folk heroes in the burgeoning nationalist movement in India half a century later, they themselves "generated no coherent ideology or programme on which to build a new order."

Still, the rebellion proves to be an important watershed in Indian history;[7] it led to the dissolution of the East India Company in 1858, and forces the British to reorganize the army, the financial system, and the administration in India.

India is hereafter governed directly from London—by the British government India Office and a cabinet level Secretary of State for India—in the new British Raj, a system of governance that is to last until 1947.