The 1857 Mutiny devastated Indian peasants through village raids rather than pitched battles

Evidence

J. C. Jha, “Indian Heritage in Trinidad, West Indies,” Caribbean Quarterly 19, no. 2 (June 1973): 30. “Conditions like these were part of the fabric of life but the Mutiny depressed them even further. Many of the Bengal army were Brahmins and Rajputs from Oudh and the North-West Provinces; the campaign ebbed and flowed over their homelands and battles were fought in districts which were centres for colonial emigration. Sharp fighting took place, for example, in Jaunpur, Mirzapur, Arrah, and Allahabad; the 17th Native Infantry had risen in Azamgarh in the first months of the troubles; and Cawnpore and Lucknow were bitterly besieged. But worse for the peasantry than pitched battles and the sieges of towns were the mopping-up raids and skirmishes in the villages; for them it was more like an episode in the Thirty Years’ War than a disciplined nineteenth-century campaign.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2317

Categorization

• XREF: Places Indian colonial experience in the same causal frame as the Black radical tradition’s relation to empire — part of the wider subaltern radicalism Robinson situates Black radicalism within.