The Revolution of 1857 in Rajasthan

Where this sits

1857 in Rajasthan is a different revolt from the one taught in general modern-history notes, and the difference is the reason it is set so often.

There were no British troops in the province at all — six cantonments, about five thousand Indian soldiers and thirty British officers. A cantonment that mutinied was simply lost, and the British had to borrow the armies of the princely states to take one back. The risings came four months apart, and were defeated in sequence.

This chapter is built from the Board of Secondary Education, Rajasthan's textbook Freedom Movement and Gallantry Traditions of Rajasthan, whose foreword is by Professor B. M. Sharma, former Chairman of the Rajasthan Public Service Commission. A state board text on Rajasthan's freedom struggle convened by a former RPSC chairman is close to a statement of what the examining tradition treats as settled, which is why it is used here as the spine.

1. The setting: how the British came to be in a position to be rebelled against

Rajasthan's rulers did not invite the British in order to be ruled. They invited them to be rid of the Marathas, and that distinction explains everything that follows.

Maratha intervention in Rajasthan is described as opening the eyes of Jai Singh and other Rajput rulers, and Maratha pressure — money raids, tribute, interference in succession — pushed states into crisis. Between 1793 and 1813 the chaos in Jodhpur is attributed to feudal competition and struggle for succession, with both sides hiring soldiers for large sums until the state was in economic crisis.

The Laswadi victory is the hinge. The textbook puts it plainly: the defeat of the Marathas provided a golden opportunity of freedom for the Rajput rulers from Maratha subjugation — and the terms that followed converted that relief into subordination.

What the treaties actually did, and why it produced 1857

After 1818 the grievance is not one thing but five, and an answer that names only the greased cartridge has missed the chapter:

• Undue interference by the British in the administration of the states.
• Control over economic resources, and the annual tribute to be levied.
• A setback to the privileges of the feudal lords, who lost standing under the new arrangement.
• Intervention in social life — the British moved against female infanticide, slavery and sati, and the textbook records that these steps led people to understand that the British wanted to disintegrate the social structure of Rajasthan.
• Religious fear: in the Ajmer-Merwara region, suspicion of Christian missionary activity produced the belief that Hindus were to be forcibly converted.

Note who is unhappy in that list. The kings, the feudal lords and the general public — all three. That is the textbook's own summary, and it is the reason the revolt in Rajasthan takes such different forms in different states: the same treaty aggrieved a maharaja, a jagirdar and a peasant for three different reasons.

Two provocations are named specifically. When the British tried to depose Rajmata Bhatiyani of Jaipur, the people killed Captain Blake. In Kota, the British supported Jalim Singh against Maharao Kishore Singh, which provoked the Hada Rajputs to take up arms. Maharaja Man Singh of Jodhpur is named as a staunch opponent whose efforts spread discontent to other states.

The poets got there first

Before the soldiers, the poets. The textbook names Bankidas, Raghodas, Sandu Gangaji and Mahakavi Suryamalla Mishran as having contributed significantly to anti-British sentiment, condemning rulers who were devotees of British power and praising those who stood against it.

Suryamall Misran is already in this site's language and literature chapter as the author of the Vansh Bhaskar and Rajkavi of Bundi. The court poet of the language chapter and the anti-British poet of this one are the same man, and that is worth a sentence in a Mains answer about how Dingal literature functioned politically.

2. The six cantonments, which is the fact the whole chapter turns on

Read that table again, because it is the single most examinable thing on this page and it explains the entire military course of 1857 in Rajasthan. Five thousand Indian soldiers, no British troops at all, and thirty officers to hold them. The British position in Rajasthan was not a garrison; it was a supervisory staff — which is why a cantonment that mutinied was simply lost, and why the British had to borrow the armies of the princely states to take one back.

And the states were warned in advance. As soon as news of the Meerut rebellion reached the A.G.G. of Rajasthan, he sent instructions to the rulers of the princely states not to allow rebels in their states and to harshly suppress whoever opposed British power.

Which corps sat in which cantonment, and why only four of the six rose

The six cantonments did not hold six identical garrisons, and the difference decides which of them mutinied. The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Rajputana (1908) sets it out: Nasirabad was garrisoned by sepoys of the Company's own Bengal army, while four local contingents, raised and commanded by British officers but paid mainly from the revenues of particular states, were stationed at Deoli, Beawar, Erinpura and Kherwara.

The Gazetteer's own summary is the sentence to memorise: the Merwara Battalion and the Mewar Bhil Corps, recruited from the Mers and the Bhils, "were the only native troops in all Rajputana who stood by their British officers." Both were local corps raised from communities with no caste or regional tie to the Purbia sepoy of Awadh and the North-Western Provinces, and both had been raised to give those communities paid employment in place of raiding. The British were saved in Rajputana by the two regiments they had recruited from the people they had earlier been policing.

Two qualifications belong with that sentence, and the same Gazetteer supplies one of them. Its entry on Nasirabad records that "the Bombay Cavalry regiment protected the British residents and remained loyal throughout", which sits awkwardly with the claim that only two corps stood firm. And the Bhil companies of the Jodhpur Legion refused to join their own regiment's mutiny at Erinpura, and afterwards became the nucleus of the Erinpura Irregular Force. The safe formulation is that the two Rajputana local battalions held as units, while individual bodies elsewhere also stayed loyal.

Erinpura is the trap in this table. The cantonment is in Sirohi State, not in Marwar, although the Jodhpur Legion quartered there was a Marwar obligation: by the treaty of 1818 Jodhpur owed a contingent of 1,500 horse, the obligation was commuted in 1835 to an annual payment, and the Legion was raised in 1836 on the money. The name is not Indian. Captain Downing, its commandant, called the place Erinpura after the island of his birth.

3. Nasirabad, 28 May 1857 — where it began

The revolution in Rajasthan originated at Nasirabad. The textbook gives four reasons, and they are worth keeping separate because each is a different kind of grievance.

1. The 15th and 30th Bengal Native Infantry, Indian artillery troops and soldiers of the first Bombay Lancers were at Nasirabad. On hearing of Meerut, the soldiers of the 15th concluded that the artillery was being prepared for use against them.
2. A contingent of the 15th Bengal Native Infantry had long guarded the Ajmer armoury and was moved to Nasirabad out of suspicion — the soldiers understood that they were being mistrusted.
3. Monks and fakirs carried word from Bengal and Delhi into the markets and cantonments, preaching against the fat cartridges and the belief that the British meant to Christianise by deceit.
4. European troops and cannon were secretly called in to control Indian troops; when this was discovered, excitement spread through the army.

What happened on the day:

One detail deserves to be quoted rather than summarised. The textbook records that the rebels, having broken open the treasury and burnt the cantonment, did not shed a drop of blood apart from killing four British officers. That is a claim about the character of the rising, not merely its casualty count — and it is the sort of sentence an examiner builds a statement question on.

Ajmer, which is the reason the province did not go

The rebels of Nasirabad marched for Delhi past Ajmer, twelve miles away, and did not touch it. Every account of 1857 in Rajputana treats that as the decisive non-event of the year.

Ajmer-Merwara was the only British-administered territory in Rajputana, and its old fort held an arsenal large enough to supply every British soldier in the province, a siege train, and the treasury. Iltudus Thomas Prichard, a lieutenant of the 15th Native Infantry who was on the Nasirabad parade ground on 28 May and published his account in 1860, is blunt about the guard on it: nothing more than a company of sepoys. His judgement, written three years later, is the one the later gazetteers repeat. Had Ajmer fallen, "the Rajpootana states would have gone too", because the arsenal, the treasure and the prestige of holding one of the most famous cities in India would have brought one independent chief over, and the rest would have followed.

What actually saved it was a change of guard made days before the mutiny. Two companies of the 15th Native Infantry, one of them the same detachment that had long held the Ajmer armoury, were relieved in the fort by a detachment of the Merwara Battalion under Lieutenant Carnell, who marched up from Beawar so fast that no word of his movement went ahead of him. The two companies of the 15th returned to Nasirabad in time to mutiny with their comrades. General Lawrence's own report to the Government of India in 1858 attributes the preservation of Ajmer to Carnell's well-timed move and to the loyalty of the Mers. Prichard puts it in one line: in taking charge of the Ajmer fort from the sepoys of the 15th, the Mers saved Rajputana.

Lawrence then made a decision that looks like paralysis and was not. When the Neemuch brigade marched north through Rajputana in June, Captain Showers pressed him to strike at it. Lawrence refused, and wrote from Nasirabad on 16 June 1857: "However much I desire to strike a blow against the mutineers with the troops here, I do not feel myself justified in running any risk in the present state of national feeling, and the destruction of the mutineers is to me very secondary to the preservation of Ajmer." Two mutinous brigades were allowed to walk out of the province unmolested because the man responsible for it had decided he could afford to lose them and could not afford to lose Ajmer. That is the single sentence that explains why no British force intercepted either the Nasirabad or the Neemuch rebels.

It was not quite quiet. On 9 August 1857 an outbreak in the Ajmer jail let fifty prisoners escape. Ajmer-Merwara's civil administration through the crisis was in the hands of Colonel Charles Dixon, who had run the district since 1836 and had founded Beawar, and who died at Beawar in 1857.

One correction to the casualty table above. The chapter prints the officers' names as the board textbook gives them. Prichard, who was standing in the line and watched it happen, names them as Major Spottiswood, mortally wounded and carried to his house, and Cornet Newbury, cut to pieces among the guns, with Lieutenant Lock and Captain Hardy wounded. "Colonel New Bari" is a garbled Cornet Newbury, and the difference matters, because a cornet is the most junior officer in a cavalry regiment and a colonel commands one.

4. Neemuch, 3 June 1857, and the route to Delhi

News from Nasirabad reached Neemuch, and on 3 June 1857 the soldiers there revolted, looting the camp and setting it on fire.

The road they took is the examinable part, because it maps who in Rajasthan helped them:

Neemuch → Shahpura → Nimbahera → Deoli → Tonk → Agra → Delhi

• At Shahpura, the ruler provided food and lodging to the rebels.
• At Nimbahera, the people gave them a big welcome.
• Along the way people welcomed the rebels at many places and their numbers increased significantly.

A ruler feeding the rebels is not a small fact. Section 11 lists the failure of Rajasthan's kings to support the revolt as the first cause of its collapse. Shahpura is the counter-example inside the same textbook, and a good answer names it.

What happened at Neemuch, in the words of the men who were there

Neemuch's officers saw it coming and tried to buy loyalty with an oath. Colonel Abbott paraded the brigade and told the men that their own native officers had sworn in his presence to stand firm. A trooper of the cavalry named Mahomed Ali Beg stepped out of the ranks and answered him: "What are our officers' oaths to us? Or even our own? Why should we keep our oaths to you who have broken your own? Have you not taken Oudh?"

That is the annexation of Awadh spoken aloud on a parade ground in Rajputana, by a trooper, to a colonel, days before the rising. It is the best evidence in the whole chapter that the grievance travelling with the Bengal army was political and not only religious, and it belongs in any answer that treats 1857 as more than a cartridge.

The rising came at midnight on 3 June. Every house in the station was fired at once. The mutineers spared their European officers and their families; the only people killed were the wife and children of a sergeant of artillery, named in one account as Sergeant Supple. The jail was opened, the prisoners released, and the treasury broken. Some of the freed prisoners came back and surrendered themselves to Captain Lloyd after the mutineers had left.

The plunder figure is not settled, and the divergence is worth carrying. Lawrence's own mutiny report to the Government of India gives Rs 1,31,900 taken from the treasuries. Captain C. L. Showers, who was on the ground as Political Agent of Mewar, gives Rs 1,77,000 from the civil treasury and the military chests, and Munshi Jwala Sahai, writing in 1902 from the Residency papers, gives Rs 1,76,000. The two larger figures agree with each other and the smaller one is the Agent's; the page prints all three rather than choose.

Where the Europeans went is the part that connects Neemuch to Mewar. About forty fugitives, women and children among them, reached Dungla, a village of Udaipur State roughly fifty miles from the capital, in the last stage of destitution, with cholera among them. Rao Bakht Singh of Bedla was charged with bringing them in and turned out palanquins for the women and the sick, pad elephants and horses for the officers, and carts and camels for the baggage. The Maharana lodged them in Jagmandir, the water palace on the island in Lake Pichola, came out in his state barge to see that they were comfortable, and gave each of the children two gold mohurs with his own hand. The island palace that had sheltered Prince Khurram from his father is the one that sheltered the Neemuch refugees from the Neemuch sepoys.

On the road north, two more places declare themselves. At Nimbahera, Mohi-ud-din Khan entertained the mutineers. At Deoli they plundered the cantonment and were joined by the Mehidpur cavalry; at Tonk they were welcomed and a large part of the population joined them; at Agra the Kota Contingent, which had come up from Deoli, joined them; and the whole body went on to Delhi, where its arrival is credited with the strength behind the rebel attacks on the British position on 14, 18 and 20 July.

Shahpura's second act is the one the aggregators miss. The Raja fed and lodged the rebels on their way north. Then the news of the fighting before Delhi arrived, and Shahpura closed the gates of its fort against Captain Showers and offered him neither the ceremonial reception nor supplies when he came through in pursuit. Helping the rebels was one decision; refusing the Political Agent a week later was a second, separate one.

On the recapture, the two dates that circulate are both defensible. The state troops did not retake Neemuch in a morning. The reoccupation ran over 6, 7 and 8 June, and the Bundi horse sent with Major Burton are recorded by Captain Lloyd, Superintendent of Neemuch, as entering the cantonment on 8 June. A three-day operation reported by different officers on different days is why one source says the 6th and another the 8th.

Which states' armies did it is also given three ways. Malleson names Mewar, Kota and Bundi; the Imperial Gazetteer names Kotah, Bundi and Jhalawar, holding Neemuch "for some six weeks"; the Government of Rajasthan's own 1957 study, following Trevor, names Kotah and Bundi. Kota and Bundi are in all three lists and are the safe answer; the third state is not settled.

The recapture, and how it was done. On the instruction of A.G.G. Lawrence, Captain Shovers reclaimed Neemuch on 8 June 1857 — with the help of the state armies of Kota, Bundi and Mewar. The British retook a cantonment using princely troops, which is section 2's arithmetic playing out exactly as it must.

5. Erinpura and Aauwa, 21 August 1857 — Thakur Kushal Singh

The Jagirdars of Marwar raised the flag of rebellion against the British, and this is the strand in which a Rajasthani noble, not a sepoy, leads.

21 August 1857 is the date of Mount Abu, not of Erinpura, and separating the two is the single most useful thing a candidate can do with this section.

In August a party of the Jodhpur Legion was at Anadra, at the foot of the pass leading up to Mount Abu, sent to hold in check the Thakur of Rowa, who was in rebellion against Sirohi State. Abu was the summer station of the Agent to the Governor-General, and held thirty-odd convalescent soldiers of H.M.'s 83rd, the officers' families, and General Lawrence's own wife and daughters.

The rank and file are named in the records and are worth carrying, because RPSC has asked for them: the Erinpura and Deesa mutineers came to Auwa under Risaldar Abdul Ali, Dafedar Moti Khan, Bardi Major Makhdum Baksh, Subedar Shital Prasad and Tilak Ram, and numbered about 600 cavalry and 1,400 infantry.

One man in that list changed the course of the revolt by being refused. Risaldar Abbas Ali had shielded Conolly and his sergeants at Erinpura, and afterwards wrote to Captain Monck Mason, Political Agent at Jodhpur, offering to desert with a large body of the cavalry and the guns if he and his men were pardoned and reinstated. Mason wanted to accept and could not, because the Government had forbidden all officers to make terms with rebels still in arms. Abbas Ali read the reply as a refusal and became an active leader of the rebel cause. The order that prevented a British officer from buying back a regiment cost that officer his life five weeks later.

Then the numbers. The Legion did not stand alone. The Government of Rajasthan's 1957 study, working from the Auwa records and the Residency files, names the men who came in: Shivnath Singh of Asop, Bishan Singh of Gular and Ajit Singh of Alaniyawas, with the thakurs of Lambiya, Banta, Banjawas, Bhivalia and Ruddawas, and, from Mewar, the jagirdars of Salumbar, Kotharia, Lasani, Rupnagar and Asind, who supplied Kushal Singh with money and provisions. The force that fought the British at Auwa came to more than five thousand, of whom over three thousand were Rajasthanis of Marwar and Mewar.

Read that composition before writing anything about 1857 in Rajasthan being a sepoy affair. Two thousand mutineers arrived; three thousand local men joined them.

Kushal Singh is the figure to fix, and the reason is in one line of the textbook: he was a powerful feudatory of Marwar and an opponent of both the British and the Maharaja of Jodhpur. His revolt is aimed at two masters at once, which is precisely the double subordination — colonial and feudal — that the book's own foreword says distinguishes Rajasthan's struggle from British India's.

Many feudatories of Mewar and Marwar are recorded as coming to Aauwa to assist him with their armies. Aauwa was later destroyed by the British, and Kushal Singh was left wandering.

5b. Bithora and Chelawas: the two battles Rajasthan actually fought

Everything above is a mutiny. This is a war, and it is the only part of 1857 in Rajasthan fought as set-piece battles between armies in the field.

Bithora, 8 September 1857

Maharaja Takht Singh sent the Jodhpur army against the rebels under his own commander Anar Singh, with Raj Mal, and entrenched it at Pali. Lieutenant Heathcote, Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General of the Rajputana Field Force, was attached to advise. The rebels would not attack an entrenched position, and the Jodhpur troops would not leave one, and the stalemate ran for days until General Lawrence lost patience and wrote to the Maharaja that his army was "dancing attendance on the rebels, like orderlies."

The letter had the effect Lawrence wanted and the outcome he did not. Anar Singh left his entrenchments, camped beside the rebels, and on the early morning of 8 September 1857 his camp was surprised. His men gave way. Anar Singh was killed at his guns with a handful of men who stayed with him; Heathcote had to mount and gallop from the field; the camp, the guns and the stores were taken. The Rajasthan government's account gives the engagement its local name, Beethora, and says the fighting lasted two days and ended in complete victory for the rebels.

Chelawas, 18 September 1857, and the death of a second Political Agent

Lawrence assembled what he could at Beawar: 150 men of H.M.'s 83rd, part of the Mairwara battalion, the 1st Bombay Lancers, two 12-pounders, three 6-pounders and two mortars. He reached Auwa on 18 September, reconnoitred in force, found a double line of defences, the inner of masonry and the outer of earthwork, both loopholed, and fell back on the village of Chelawas, about three and a half miles off, hoping to draw the garrison out.

Captain Monck Mason, Political Agent at Jodhpur, was riding to join him and never arrived. The Maharaja had begged him not to go and had sent his ministers down late in the evening to say so once more; Mason laughed at the idea of danger and said he would be back in a day or two. The ministers left saying, "Auwa is not so easily taken."

How he died is told four different ways by four contemporaries, and the differences are instructive rather than trivial.

Where all of them agree is that Lawrence was beaten. He stayed three days in front of Auwa, could not take it with the force he had, and fell back on Ajmer and Nasirabad. Showers, writing later, called it what it was: the highest military and political authority in Rajputana repulsed by a feudal chief and forced to retire altogether from the field, with the Political Agent lost on top of it.

And then the fact that this chapter's section 7 has to be corrected for. Mason's head was cut off and hung over the gateway of the Auwa fort. Showers records it, Jwala Sahai records it, and the Government of Rajasthan's 1957 study prints it and draws the inference that matters: the head of Captain Mason was hung at the gate of Auwa and the head of Anar Singh was not, which is why that study reads the rising as aimed at the British rather than at the Maharaja of Jodhpur, even though Kushal Singh had fought both.

Correction to section 7. This page previously said that Kota was the only rising in Rajasthan in which the British Political Agent was killed. That is wrong, and it is corrected here. Captain Monck Mason, Political Agent at Jodhpur, was killed at Chelawas on 18 September 1857, four weeks before Major Burton was killed at Kota on 15 October. Two Political Agents died in Rajasthan in 1857, and Kota is the second of the two, not the only one.

One more piece of nomenclature, because it is asked and because its basis is genuinely popular rather than official. Marwar's Holi songs about the fighting under the walls of Auwa describe it as a war between the Goras and the Kalas, the whites and the blacks. That is where the name "battle of blacks and whites" comes from: a folk song, not a despatch, and it should be attributed as such.

5c. The fall of Auwa, and what became of Kushal Singh

Not many days after Chelawas the alliance broke. The Thakur and the sepoys quarrelled, and instead of fighting they agreed to separate. The Thakur stayed at Auwa. The Legion marched for Delhi.

The Legion's end is the one part of Rajasthan's 1857 that was fought outside Rajasthan. Under Thakur Shivnath Singh of Asop, with Bishan Singh of Gular and Ajit Singh of Alaniyawas, the column beat the troops of the loyal Raja of Jaipur, reoccupied Rewari, and was met at Narnaul on 16 November 1857 by a column sent from Delhi under Colonel Gerrard. The rebels were completely defeated and the Jodhpur Legion ceased to exist. Gerrard was mortally shot at the moment the battle was won, and Captain Caulfield completed it. Shivnath Singh was afterwards besieged in the village of Barlu, forced to surrender, pardoned and kept at Jodhpur; the Gular and Alaniyawas thakurs lost their jagirs and settled in the Sikar country.

A date trap built into the sources themselves. Malleson's Rajputana chapter, and Jwala Sahai after him, both say the Legion was destroyed at Narnaul on 16 October. Malleson's own detailed account of the battle, in the same volume, dates it 16 November 1857: Gerrard marched from Delhi on 10 November, reached Rewari on the 13th and Narnaul on the 16th. 16 November is right, and two standard books print 16 October in their Rajputana chapters.

The siege of Auwa, January 1858. Reinforcements from Bombay began arriving in Rajputana in January, and Lawrence at once detached about eleven hundred men with guns under Colonel Holmes of the 12th Bombay Native Infantry against Auwa.

Auwa was not taken by assault. It was abandoned in a storm and then demolished. The Rajasthan government's account adds the parts the British despatches leave out: the village was plundered, the palace destroyed, temples were not spared, and the image of Mahakali was carried off to Ajmer, where it remains in the museum. Some of the fort guns went to the Jodhpur Darbar. The two versions of Kushal Singh's departure are given side by side in that same account and are not reconciled: the official version says he slipped away under cover of the storm to save himself; the family's version says he had gone into Mewar to raise more troops and left his brother Prithvi Singh of Lambiya in command.

What happened to him afterwards is fully documented and is the part our textbooks stop short of.

• He was outlawed, raided Marwar for years, and eventually settled quietly at Kotharia, a village in Mewar, under the protection of its Rawat.
• He wrote repeatedly to Major Taylor, Officiating Political Agent in Mewar, denying any hand in Mason's death and asking for his jagir back. Taylor's letter of 8 May 1860 demanded unconditional surrender first.
• He surrendered at Neemuch on 8 August 1860.
• The Governor-General in Council authorised Major Eden, the A.G.G. at Abu, to appoint a commission. The trial opened at Ajmer on two charges: that he had given asylum to Mason's murderers, and that from August 1857 to January 1858 he had led rebels against the British Government.
• The commission sat under Major Taylor, examined a large number of witnesses, and found the evidence did not warrant any sentence at all. By despatch No. 5562 of 10 November 1860 the Governor-General in Council confirmed the finding and granted an unconditional pardon.
• Punishment fell on the estates instead. Ten-sixteenths of the Auwa thikana was confiscated, including Balotra, Riyan, Gura Bishnoiyan, Fitkasni, Rajpuria and Jeemda, worth an annual rekh of Rs 24,400. Lambiya, Banta, Bhivalia, Ruddawas and others lost half their jagirs; Rupnagar lost fourteen villages, Gular six, Banjawas ten and a half, Asop two.
• Auwa itself was recovered by his son, Devi Singh, who attacked it with the help of the jagirdars of Pokaran, Kuchaman, Neemaj, Raipur, Ras, Khejarla and Chandawal and took it in V.S. 1925, that is 1868 or 1869.

The shape of that ending is the answer to the interview question. The man was tried and acquitted; his land was confiscated anyway. The paramount power could not prove he had led a rebellion and did not need to, because the punishment it actually cared about was administrative and required no verdict. The Rajasthan government's own study says plainly why the pardons came: these rebels were pardoned because they could not be crushed, and because they had made it impossible for the Jodhpur ruler to administer his state.

6. Mewar: the revolt that was talked down

Mewar is the state where the rising did not happen, and why it did not is more instructive than another battle.

Most of the feudatories of Mewar were against British power, and when news of Nasirabad reached Udaipur the troops of Mewar were almost ready to revolt. What prevented it was a combination the textbook names precisely: the wisdom of the Maharana and the harsh attitude of Captain Shovers.

• On 27 May 1857, on A.G.G. instructions, Maharana Swaroop Singh wrote to all his feudatories asking them to cooperate with British military action and follow the Political Agent, Captain Shovers.
• Shovers warned the opposing feudals that whoever tried to break the peace would be punished harshly.

Then the confrontation that shows how the system actually worked. Rawat Kesari Singh of Salumbar challenged the rights of the Maharana, demanding that his traditional rights be granted within eight days or he would install a rival of the Maharana on the throne of Chittor. Captain Shovers warned Kesari Singh that if he acted against the Maharana he would be expelled from Rajputana and deposed from his estate — and Kesari Singh was calmed by the threat.

Note who threatens whom. A British Political Agent protects a Rajput Maharana from a Rajput feudatory, using the power to depose. That is paramountcy doing what it was designed to do, and it explains why so many rulers stayed loyal in 1857: the treaties that subordinated them also secured them against their own nobles.

The textbook adds that both the Maharana and the Company feared the feudals of Mewar, so both were obliged to cooperate with each other. Fear of a common third party, not affection, is the cement.

Two scenes from Mewar the textbook leaves out

The first fixes a date the aggregators quote without a source. Captain C. L. Showers was returning to Udaipur from a conference with the A.G.G. at Abu when the news from Meerut and Delhi arrived, and expected to reach the capital late on the night of 28 May, waiving the ceremonial reception to save time. The Maharana would not allow it, on the reasoning that omitting the usual honours at such a moment would be read by the ill-disposed as a deliberate slight to the Government. He sent an officer to stop Showers for the night at the castle of Bedla, so that the Political Agent could make his public entry into Udaipur the following morning, 29 May 1857, and be received with more than the usual state.

Showers was publicly hooted on the way to the palace. He records it himself. Both things happened on the same morning: the Maharana staged a demonstration of respect, and the city staged a demonstration of contempt, and the second is the reason the first was thought necessary.

The second is the best-known story in Mewar's 1857 and turns on a rumour our chapter does not carry. The greased cartridge was not the only thing said to be defiling. The Mewar troops at Neemuch were told that human bone-dust had been mixed into the flour issued to them, and on that report they were ready to turn against the British. Arjun Singh Sahiwala saved the situation by making a chapati from the same flour and eating it in front of them. Two grievances, two substances, one method of contamination: an answer that names only the cartridge has told half the story of what the sepoy believed was being done to his caste.

7. Kota, 15 October 1857 — the killing of Major Burton

Kota is the most serious rising in Rajasthan, and the second of the two in which a British Political Agent was killed. Captain Monck Mason, Political Agent at Jodhpur, had been killed at Chelawas four weeks earlier, on 18 September 1857. An earlier version of this page called Kota the only such case, which was wrong.

The cause was an intelligence failure. Political Agent Major Burton advised the Kota Maharao that certain officers were disloyal and anti-British, and demanded they be handed over for punishment. The officers named were Jaidayal, Ratanlal and Jiyalal. That advice leaked to the Maharao's army and its officers, who resolved to take revenge.

The nine-condition treaty is the detail worth carrying into an interview. The rebels did not merely defeat the Political Agent; they compelled the ruler to put his name to a document accepting responsibility for the killing. That is an attempt to make the state itself a rebel, retrospectively and on paper — and it tells you the rebels understood exactly where legitimacy lay.

The textbook is also honest about what the six months were like, and this page will not soften it: the revolutionaries looted and set fire to government warehouses, bungalows, shops and weapons stores, looted the district treasuries, and created a fierce terror among the people of the city, while apparently enjoying the support of most officials of the princely state.

Who led Kota, who else died, and what it cost the Maharao

The rising at Kota had names, and the textbook's account does not give them. Lawrence's own report to the Government of India names the principal leaders as Lala Jai Dayal and Risaldar Mehrab Khan, and adds the motive in the case of the first: Jai Dayal had been a vakil in attendance on the Political Agent, and Major Burton had procured his removal. Mehrab Khan came from Karauli. Jai Dayal's brother Har Dayal was in it, as was a son of Israr Ali, an officer who had served the Maharao well in the past.

That changes the shape of section 7. Jaidayal is not merely one of three officers Burton wanted punished. He is the man Burton had already had dismissed once, and he is the man who then led the rising and ran the state. The Maharao had refused to act against him earlier even when the Political Agent pressed for it, because he was conscious of the strength of feeling in his own troops.

The dead at the Residency were five, not three. Before the mob reached Burton it killed Dr Sadler, the Agency surgeon, and Mr Saviell, the doctor of the city dispensary, who lived in a house in the Residency grounds. Burton and his two sons, aged twenty-one and sixteen, held the roof of the house for four hours with one servant, a camel-driver, who alone escaped. Burton offered to surrender if his sons' lives were spared; the young men refused, and all three were killed when the mob brought up scaling ladders.

Burton's head was cut off, paraded through the town, and then fired from a gun. The Maharao had the three bodies buried the same evening.

Karauli's relief is more than "military aid obtained". The Maharao, imprisoned in his palace, got messages out to two relatives by marriage, the Maharana of Udaipur and the Maharaja of Karauli. To Udaipur he asked that his Maharani, a daughter of that house, be taken to safety, since the privacy of the Kota zenana was no longer secure. The Maharana was willing and Captain Showers advised against it, on the ground that the Rani could only travel with a large Kota retinue whose mixing with Udaipur people would spread the disaffection. Karauli's Maharaja Madan Pal sent 800 men, followed by a reinforcement of 1,500, and those troops drove the rebels out of the quarter of the town containing the palace and held it until Roberts arrived.

And the punishment, which is the examinable consequence.

Innocent, and punished; the penalty attached to the office and was lifted from the next holder of it. That is what paramountcy looked like when it was displeased with a ruler it had no charge to bring against, and it is the sharpest single illustration in this chapter of what the treaties of 1818 actually meant.

One last correction to the relief. The officer who came up from Nasirabad with 5,500 men is Major-General H. G. Roberts of the Bombay army, not "Major H. G. Robertus"; he marched on the 10th, encamped on the north bank of the Chambal opposite Kota on 22 March 1858, crossed on the 27th, opened a heavy fire on the 29th and carried the rebel position on the 30th. General Lawrence handed over the military command to him and reverted to his civil and political functions, accompanying the force as A.G.G.

Whether the people of Kota suffered under the six months is genuinely disputed, and the disagreement is between an eyewitness authority and an archival one. Lawrence's own report, and Malleson after him, say the inhabitants were reduced by pillage and other excesses to extreme misery. The Government of Rajasthan's 1957 study went to the Kota fort records and reached the opposite conclusion: the rebels attacked government stores almost exclusively, only three private shops in the city were plundered, the civil population was left alone, and the district officers at Aton, Sakatpur, Kaithon, Awan, Jaloda, Kotra and Kharoli sided with them. A British political officer describing a rebel-held city and a state archivist reading its own records disagree about whether the city was terrorised, and the page carries both.

8. Tonk, Bharatpur, and the other states

Tonk. The Nawab's army revolted under Mir Alam Khan. The Nawab was with the British; his army invited the Neemuch rebels to Tonk and with their help besieged the Nawab's own fort. He could not intimidate the soldiers into submission.

Bharatpur. Lying close to Agra and Mathura, Bharatpur was unsettled throughout. After the Mathura rebellion the Bharatpur army began to rise. The Maharaja advised the Political Agent, Major Morrison, to leave Bharatpur — fearing that his presence would draw the Neemuch rebels — and Morrison left. The Gurjar and Mewati people of Bharatpur openly participated. When British power in neighbouring Agra was confined to the Red Fort, the people of Bharatpur believed British rule in India was ending.

A ruler advising the British agent to leave for his own safety is neither loyalty nor rebellion, and Bharatpur is the clearest case of the third position most Rajasthan states actually occupied.

Bharatpur, with dates

Bharatpur was the second rising in Rajasthan, not a vague later disturbance. After the outbreak at Mathura, the Bharatpur troops revolted at Hodal on 31 May 1857, three days after Nasirabad and three days before Neemuch. The Bharatpur artillerymen pointed guns at the group of Englishmen in camp, the tents and bungalows were fired and property plundered. Captain Nixon volunteered to lead the state's troops and Alwar sent 2,500 men to co-operate with him, but two companies of the Bharatpur troops mutinied at Mathura and the Alwar contingent was either bribed or overawed into doing nothing.

Major Morrison did not simply take the Maharaja's advice and go. He left under orders from Mr Colvin, the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces at Agra, given at the wish of the chiefs, who feared that the presence of a British officer would draw the Neemuch mutineers onto Bharatpur. Morrison was later sent to Jodhpur as officiating Political Agent after Monck Mason was killed, which is how the same officer appears in two states in one year.

Dholpur, where a second ruler lost control of his own state

Kota was not the only Rajasthan state whose ruler spent months as a prisoner of his own rebellion.

• Early in October 1857 a combined insurgent force of 4,000 to 5,000 men from Gwalior and Indore entered Dholpur.
• The Rana's army deserted him, and so did some of his chief officers, who joined the rebels.
• His authority was set at nought, his property plundered and the district put under exactions. Surrounded and threatened, the Rana was forced to agree to the rebels' demands.
• It was with Dholpur's guns that the rebels attacked Agra.
• His authority remained in abeyance until December 1857, and order was restored only when the ruler of Patiala sent 2,000 Sikh soldiers and four guns.

Two states, Kota and Dholpur, were run by their rebels for months while their rulers were counted among the loyal. Section 11's first cause of failure needs that qualification: some of those rulers were loyal in the sense that they wanted the British to win, and powerless in the sense that they could not deliver anything at all.

What the loyal states actually did, and what they were paid

"Supported the British" hides very different actions and very different bills.

Bikaner is the superlative to know and it survives checking. Jwala Sahai states it flatly: Sardar Singh was the only one of all the princes of Rajputana who left his capital and went to the border of his state in person, and the sanad granting him the Tibi villages uses the same words, that the Maharaja "came out in person". He could afford the gesture, and the reasoning is worth an answer: his own territory was desert, no invader had ever crossed it, and the mutineers' road ran the other way, towards Delhi.

Bundi is the fourth position, and it is not loyalty, rebellion or Bharatpur's evasion. Bundi did the minimum and was marked down for it. Jwala Sahai, writing to defend the princes, argues the judgement was unfair: Bundi was a small state, sending a hundred horse when many could spare none was better than nothing, and its gates were shut against Tatya Tope. His explanation of the misconception is that Ram Singh was an old Sanskrit pandit, conservative and averse to every western innovation, and that his resistance to reform was read as disloyalty. That is a distinction a good answer can use: the British measured loyalty partly by willingness to modernise.

9. Salumbar and Kothariya: shelter as a form of resistance

Two major feudatories of Mewar — Rawat Kesari Singh of Salumbar and Rawat Jodh Singh of Kothariya — took inspiration from Thakur Kushal Singh of Aauwa.

The textbook is careful, and so is this page: the feudatories of Mewar did not openly participate in the revolution. What they did was give shelter — to the revolutionary leaders who opposed the British, to the jagirdars who fought them, and to the families of the rebels.

• Rawat Kesari Singh of Salumbar helped Thakur Kushal Singh of Aauwa with the support of nearby jagirdars, and openly opposed the treaty the Maharana of Udaipur had with the Company. A.G.G. Lawrence pressed the Maharana to act against him; the Maharana could not muster the courage to do so.
• When Aauwa was destroyed and Kushal Singh was wandering in a state of darkness, Rawat Jodh Singh of Kothariya embraced him and sheltered him.
• Jodh Singh also sheltered Peshwa Nana Saheb and his family at Kothariya, providing them every comfort. Treat this one with care. It is what the board textbook says, and it is the form an examiner will use, but the Government of Rajasthan's own 1957 study declines to accept it for want of documentary evidence, resting as it does on statements collected locally. What that study does document at Kotharia is the shelter of Kushal Singh, and a letter to Rawat Jodh Singh from Peshwa Pandu Rang asking him to help the mutineers.

Nana Saheb sheltered in a Mewar thikana is the fact most likely to be missed and most likely to be asked.

9b. Three men the military narrative leaves out

The sections above are cantonments and states. These three are neither, and the board's chapter on revolutionaries carries them.

Amarchand Banthia (1793-1858) of Bikaner was the first person from Rajasthan hanged by the British in this struggle. He was a businessman at Gwalior, and he was hanged for proposing to give all his wealth to Tatya Tope. He did not fight; he offered money, and was hanged for it.

Dungji and Jawaharji, a Thakur uncle and nephew of Bathoth-Patoda in Sikar, robbed the rich to fund the struggle, helped the poor with the proceeds, and looted British cantonments several times. Dungji — once a commandant of the Shekhawati Brigade — was betrayed at dinner by his own brother-in-law, Bhairu Singh, and jailed in the fort of Agra. Lothooji Nitharwal (1804-1855) of Ringus, with Baloo Nai, Sankhu Luhar and Karna Mina, entered Agra disguised as a marriage procession and freed him. He was retaken at Kakimadi of Girdara in Jaisalmer — by the Jodhpur army, by deceit — handed to the British, handed back, and died in the fort of Jodhpur.

Two things in that paragraph belong in an answer. The rescue party was a Nai, a Luhar, a Mina and a Jat — 1857 in Shekhawati had a cross-caste social base, whatever the states did. And Dungji was taken first by his brother-in-law and then by the Jodhpur army, and only then by the British. The princely states were not bystanders; they were the instrument — which is section 11's first cause of failure, seen from underneath.

9c. Tatya Tope in Rajasthan, 1858 and 1859

The revolt in Rajasthan ends twice. The cantonments were finished by March 1858. Then, from June 1858, the war came back into the province from outside, in the person of Tatya Tope, and it is in this second phase that the shelter given by Salumbar and Kotharia stops being a local matter.

He came in after defeat, not in strength. Beaten by Napier at Jaora Alipur on 22 June 1858 near Gwalior, he crossed into Rajputana. What follows is a pursuit, not a campaign, and the dates come from the Political Agents' own letters to the A.G.G.

Two things in that table are worth an answer rather than a bullet. The first is Salumbar. A Mewar first-class noble supplied the most wanted man in India twice in three days, in December 1858, more than a year after the risings were over, and was never brought to book for it. The second is Bikaner. The one ruler who had gone out of his state in person to fight for the British in 1857 is the same ruler who, in January 1859, took in six hundred of Tatya Tope's men and got them pardoned. The Government of Rajasthan's account singles that out as the one act by any of Rajasthan's eighteen princes that went the other way.

What he came for, he did not get. He was given a warm reception at Salumbar, Shahpura and Tonk and could not convert it into an army, because the British columns never let him stand still long enough to recruit. Rajasthan gave Tatya Tope hospitality and no soldiers, which is the same verdict section 11 passes on 1857 in the province as a whole.

10. How it ended

• Till August 1858 the rebellion was successfully crushed all over India.
• In November 1858 the East India Company handed over the rule of India to the British Crown.
• Queen Victoria assured protection of the rights and privileges of all the kings of India — a proclamation welcomed by the Udaipur Maharana, who organised a grand feast in honour of the British.

That feast is the chapter's closing irony and belongs in an essay. The same Maharana whose feudatories sheltered the rebels celebrates the guarantee of his own rights — because the Crown's promise was precisely what the rulers had been fighting the rebels to protect.

11. Why it failed, in the textbook's own six points

1. The kings of Rajasthan inclined towards the British. The rulers of Jaipur, Alwar, Bharatpur, Dhaulpur, Karauli, Sirohi, Tonk, Bikaner, Dungarpur, Banswara and Pratapgarh supported the British. Bahadur Shah and the local rebels invited the Rajasthani kings to lead the freedom battle, and even after this they supported the British.
2. The rebels lacked mutual unity and contact. Because the risings came at different times — Kota, Nasirabad, Bharatpur, Dholpur, Tonk — the British could deal with them one by one.
3. The kings of Marwar, Mewar and Jaipur gave no support to Tatya Tope.
4. No organisation or unity among the eighteen princely states. When the Maharana of Mewar was approached for leadership, instead of providing it he handed over all the correspondence papers of the rulers to the British authorities.
5. No central organisation, no leadership, no contact among the rebels. They had the spirit of sacrifice but neither the military skill nor the training of British soldiers, and faced a shortage of money, logistics and weapons.
6. The British suppressed the revolution elsewhere by June 1858 and, having regained most of North India, turned their full power on Rajasthan.

Point 2 is the one to build an answer around. The staggering of the risings — 28 May, 3 June, 21 August, 15 October — is not a list of dates; it is the explanation. Nasirabad had been retaken four months before Kota rose. A revolt that arrives in sequence can be defeated in sequence, and the six-cantonment arithmetic of section 2 meant the British needed only enough force to handle one at a time.

And what followed

• After the failure, the princely states of Rajasthan went under British patronage.
• The British Crown continued the treaties made by the Company in all the princely states.
• The traditional structure began to change: the spread of modern education, the birth of a new middle class, the appointment of people to administrative services, and the seeking of cooperation from the Vaishya community, who were given important posts and patronage — due to which the importance of Rajputs declined, and the kings and jagirdars became completely dependent on the British.

That last sequence is the bridge to the rest of this unit. The new middle class and the administrative recruitment described here are the soil in which the Praja Mandal movements grow sixty years later. 1857 fails, and the failure creates the class that finishes the job.

12. The two tables the examiner sets

Reproduced from the textbook, which prints the first heading as "Princely rules during 1987 Revolation in Rajasthan" — the 1987 is a misprint for 1857.

Rulers of the states during the 1857 Revolution

The trap is built in. Kota and Bundi both have a Ram Singh. Jaipur's is Ram Singh II. Three Ram Singhs in one table, and an option only has to move one of them.

British Political Agents during the 1857 Revolution

Two of these six appear in the narrative and are the ones to know cold. Burton is killed at Kota with his two sons. Morrison is asked to leave Bharatpur and goes, on Colvin's orders.

Correction: the Udaipur and Jaipur rows in the printed table are transposed, and the narrative is right. The board textbook's table gives Udaipur — Eadan and Jaipur — Showers Ore, while its own narrative has Shovers handling Mewar. This page previously carried the conflict unresolved. It is resolved here against the table. Contemporary and official sources are consistent: Captain C. L. Showers was Political Agent of Mewar, resident at Udaipur, and Eden was Political Agent at Jaipur, who marched with 5,000 Jaipur troops into Mathura and Gurgaon in July 1857 and was later officiating A.G.G. at Mount Abu. "Showers Ore" is a scanning garble of the initials C. L. Showers.

Carry both forms into the exam. The board table is what an examiner drawing on a state text will have in front of him, and the corrected list is what the record supports. If an option pairs Mewar with Showers, it is right; if it pairs Udaipur with Eden, the source of the question is the board table.

One correction to the rulers' table as well. Alwar's Vinay Singh, whose name also appears as Banni Singh, died in August 1857, in the middle of the year the table describes, and was succeeded by his twelve-year-old son Sheodan Singh. The table is right for the year and wrong by the autumn.

12b. Who wrote what, which is its own question

Book-and-author pairs are set on this topic more often than any other single fact type, and the four that matter are all real books a candidate can look up.

Prichard is the satisfying one. He is both a character in section 3 and the author of the first book about it, and he left the army after 1858 in disgust at his own regiment's mutiny.

13. Statement-based questions: the fault lines

Type A — Place and date

Type B — Who did what

Type C — Numbers

Type A — Place and date, additional rows

Type B — Who did what, additional rows

Type C — Numbers, additional rows

14. Writing this in Mains

Lead with the arithmetic, not the chronology. Six cantonments, five thousand Indian soldiers, no British troops and thirty officers. Every subsequent fact follows from it: why a mutinous cantonment was simply lost, why the British retook Neemuch with Kota, Bundi and Mewar's armies, and why Kota stayed in rebel hands for six months until 5,500 men came up from Nasirabad.

Then make the argument the textbook itself makes. The grievance after 1818 was not one grievance. Rulers resented interference and tribute; feudal lords resented the loss of privilege; ordinary people resented intervention in social life and the fear of conversion. A rising with three different constituencies and no central organisation produces exactly what happened — four separate revolts, four months apart, defeated in sequence.

Do not present the rulers' loyalty as simple cowardice. Section 6 shows the mechanism: a British Political Agent threatened to depose a Rajput feudatory in order to protect a Rajput Maharana. The treaties that subordinated the rulers also secured them against their own nobles, and a ruler weighing rebellion was weighing the loss of that protection. Explaining loyalty is a better answer than condemning it.

Close on the consequence, because it is the bridge. The failure brought modern education, administrative recruitment and a new middle class, and the decline of Rajput primacy. The class created by the defeat of 1857 is the class that builds the Praja Mandals.

15. Nowadays

Covering 1 January to 27 August 2026. This section is updated every month until Prelims and Mains. Everything in it is dated, because a current-affairs fact without a date is worse than no fact at all.

1857 is a closed record, and almost nothing in this window touches it. What follows is the one development that does, and then the more useful half of this section, which is what has not changed.

Rajputana princely-state records exhibited at Jaipur (17 to 19 March 2026). The Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner, under the Department of Art and Culture, showed records of the Rajputana states at Jawahar Kala Kendra during the Rajasthan Diwas fortnight, and records of the 1857 revolt were among the material displayed, alongside letters of Mirza Raja Jai Singh and a 1727 parwana of Sawai Jai Singh. Reports disagree on who inaugurated it, a preview naming Chief Secretary V. Srinivas and the follow-up naming Deputy Chief Minister Diya Kumari; both may have attended. The point for this chapter is narrower than the event: the Rajputana Residency Records and the state archives at Bikaner are where this chapter's evidence actually lives, and they are the same holdings Khadgawat worked from in 1957.

What has not changed, and this is the part to read. No date, battle, casualty or verdict in this chapter was revised in this window. Bithora remains 8 September 1857 and Chelawas 18 September 1857. Two Political Agents, Monck Mason and Burton, were killed in Rajasthan in 1857, and no new evidence bears on either death. Kushal Singh's unconditional pardon of 10 November 1860 stands as the state's own records report it. No fresh archival publication, commemoration or renaming altered the account above between 1 January and 27 August 2026.

Important for RAS

Prelims Focus

• Six cantonments — Nasirabad, Neemuch, Deoli, Beawar, Erinpura, Khairwada; about 5,000 soldiers, no British soldiers, 30 British officers
• Nasirabad, 28 May 1857 — the origin; 15th Battalion Native Infantry; Major Spottiswood and Colonel New Bari killed, Lieutenant Lock and Captain Hardy injured; officials fled to Beawar; rebels reached Delhi on 18 June 1857
• Neemuch, 3 June 1857 — route Shahpura → Nimbahera → Deoli → Tonk → Agra → Delhi; Shahpura's ruler fed and lodged the rebels; retaken 8 June 1857 by Captain Shovers on A.G.G. Lawrence's instruction, using the armies of Kota, Bundi and Mewar
• Erinpura, 21 August 1857 — Jodhpur contingent; joined by Thakur Kushal Singh of Aauwa (Pali), opponent of both the British and the Maharaja of Jodhpur
• Cantonment to corps — Nasirabad 15th and 30th BNI, Neemuch 72nd BNI + 7th Gwalior Contingent, Deoli Kota Contingent, Erinpura Jodhpur Legion, Beawar Merwara Battalion, Kherwara Mewar Bhil Corps. The Merwara Battalion and the Mewar Bhil Corps did not mutiny; Erinpura is in Sirohi State and was named by Captain Downing after the island of his birth
• Ajmer — the only British-administered territory in Rajputana; the Merwara Battalion under Lieutenant Carnell took over the fort days before the outbreak; jail break 9 August 1857, fifty prisoners; Colonel Dixon ran Ajmer-Merwara and died at Beawar in 1857; Lawrence, 16 June 1857: "the destruction of the mutineers is to me very secondary to the preservation of Ajmer"
• Neemuch — Colonel Abbott's oath parade; Mahomed Ali Beg's answer, "Have you not taken Oudh?"; refugees sheltered at Dungla, escorted by Rao Bakht Singh of Bedla, lodged in Jagmandir
• Abu, 21 August 1857 — Jodhpur Legion party from Anadra attacks the barracks; Alexander Lawrence, the A.G.G.'s son, wounded; Erinpura rises 22 August, the Abu party joins it 23 August; Lieutenant Conolly carried off and released
• Bithora, 8 September 1857 — rebels destroy the Jodhpur army; Anar Singh killed
• Chelawas, 18 September 1857 — General Lawrence repulsed; Captain Monck Mason, Political Agent, Jodhpur, killed and his head hung over the Auwa fort gate; called in Marwar's Holi songs the war of Goras and Kalas
• Auwa's fall — Colonel Holmes, invested 19–20 January 1858, garrison slipped away in a storm, fort blown up, Mahakali image taken to Ajmer
• Kushal Singh's end — surrendered at Neemuch, 8 August 1860; tried at Ajmer before a commission under Major Taylor; unconditional pardon, 10 November 1860; ten-sixteenths of the Auwa thikana confiscated; Auwa retaken by his son Devi Singh in V.S. 1925
• Narnaul, 16 November 1857 — the Jodhpur Legion destroyed under Thakur Shivnath Singh of Asop; Colonel Gerrard killed
• Kota's leaders — Lala Jai Dayal, a vakil Burton had had removed, and Risaldar Mehrab Khan of Karauli; Dr Sadler and Mr Saviell killed before Burton; Burton's head paraded and fired from a gun; Karauli sent 800 + 1,500; salute cut 17 → 13, restored to his successor in 1866
• Bikaner — Sardar Singh, the only Rajputana prince who left his state in person, at Bahadran near Sirsa and Hissar; Tibi pargana, 41 villages, from 1 May 1861; sheltered 600 of Tatya Tope's men after Sikar, 21 January 1859
• Jaipur got Kot Kasim; Karauli and Tonk had salutes raised 15 → 17; Tonk got Nimbahera back; Bundi was marked down for indifference and cut off for a year
• Tatya Tope in Rajasthan — Jaora Alipur 22 June 1858 → Bundi shuts its gates → Bhilwara 8 August → Jhalrapatan and Jhalawar, September → Banswara 9 December, Salumbar 11 December → Dausa (Showers and Honner) → Sikar, 21 January 1859 (Holmes) → betrayed by Man Singh, hanged at Sipri 18 April 1859
• Books — The Mutinies in Rajpootana (Prichard, 1860), A Missing Chapter of the Indian Mutiny (Showers), The Loyal Rajputana (Jwala Sahai, 1902), Rajasthan's Role in the Struggle of 1857 (Khadgawat, Government of Rajasthan, 1957), Majha Pravas (Vishnubhat Godse)
• Kota, 15 October 1857 — Major Burton and his two sons killed; officers he demanded were Jaidayal, Ratanlal, Jiyalal; Maharao imprisoned in his own palace and forced to sign a nine-condition treaty; rebels held Kota about six months; 22 March 1858 Major Robertus with 5,500 soldiers from Nasirabad at the Chambal; Jaidayal blown from a cannon
• Tonk — Mir Alam Khan; the army besieged its own Nawab's fort
• Bharatpur — Maharaja advised Major Morrison to leave; Gurjar and Mewati people participated
• Mewar — 27 May 1857, Maharana Swaroop Singh circulars his feudatories to cooperate; Captain Shovers threatens Rawat Kesari Singh of Salumbar with expulsion from Rajputana
• Shelter — Rawat Jodh Singh of Kothariya sheltered Kushal Singh and Peshwa Nana Saheb
• End — crushed by August 1858; November 1858 Crown takes over; Queen Victoria's assurance welcomed by the Udaipur Maharana with a feast
• Poets of anti-British sentiment — Bankidas, Raghodas, Sandu Gangaji, Suryamalla Mishran
• Amarchand Banthia (1793-1858), Bikaner — the first person from Rajasthan hanged by the British in 1857; a businessman at Gwalior, hanged for offering his wealth to Tatya Tope
• Dungji and Jawaharji, Sikar — uncle and nephew of Bathoth-Patoda; Dungji betrayed by brother-in-law Bhairu Singh, jailed at Agra, freed by Lothooji Nitharwal and companions disguised as a marriage procession, retaken by the Jodhpur army by deceit at Kakimadi of Girdara, and died in the fort of Jodhpur
• 1776 Prithvi Singh of Jaipur approaches the Governor General · November 1803 Lord Lake defeats Scindia at Laswadi · 1818 treaties

Interview and Mains Angles

• Thirty British officers held a province of twenty-odd states. What does that ratio say about how paramountcy actually worked, and about why it survived 1857?

• The British retook Neemuch using the armies of Kota, Bundi and Mewar. Is a rebellion suppressed by Indian troops a failure of the rebellion or of the states?

• Kushal Singh of Aauwa rebelled against the British and against his own Maharaja. Does the phrase "freedom struggle" fit a revolt against two masters, or does it flatten something?

• The rebels of Kota forced their Maharao to sign a document accepting responsibility for killing the Political Agent. What were they trying to achieve that killing him had not already achieved?

• The failure of 1857 produced modern education, administrative recruitment and a new middle class in Rajasthan. Can a defeat be said to have caused the movement that eventually succeeded?

• The Maharana of Udaipur held a feast for Queen Victoria's proclamation. Was that collaboration, or the rational act of a ruler whose rights had just been guaranteed?

• The Government of India found the Maharao of Kota innocent of foreknowledge and cut his salute anyway, then restored it to his successor. What is being punished when a penalty is attached to an office rather than to a man?

• Kushal Singh of Auwa was tried at Ajmer, acquitted, and pardoned unconditionally, and ten-sixteenths of his estate was confiscated regardless. Does that make the trial a formality, or was the trial doing something the confiscation could not?

• Two local battalions raised from the Mers and the Bhils were the only native troops in Rajputana that did not break. What does that say about the way the Bengal army was recruited?

• Sardar Singh of Bikaner went out of his state in person to fight rebels in 1857 and got six hundred of Tatya Tope's men pardoned in 1859. Is that inconsistency, or the same calculation in two different conditions?

• Malleson gives Narnaul as 16 October in one chapter and 16 November in another; Jwala Sahai repeats the error. How much of what we call the record of 1857 is a chain of copies?

Practice

• Practice: The Revolution of 1857 in Rajasthan — 64 questions built from this chapter: 57 MCQs, 4 assertion-reason and 3 match-the-following, plus flashcards and one-liners.

More in This Series

• Political and Social Conditions, 18th–19th Centuries — the treaties of 1818 and the order 1857 rebelled against
• Peasant and Tribal Movements — what the new middle class built
• Praja Mandal Movements — the movement 1857's failure made possible
• Caution for Readers — the claims that are genuinely unsettled

Aggregator Watch

Unresolved claims from this box are collected, with what was checked, on the Caution for Readers page.

Sources & Verification

Written on 21 August 2026.

The source of this chapter is stated up front because it is unusual for this site. The chapter is built from Freedom Movement and Gallantry Traditions of Rajasthan, published by the Board of Secondary Education, Rajasthan, Ajmer, and prescribed for its Class 9 course, subject code 79. Its foreword is by Professor B. M. Sharma, former Chairman of the Rajasthan Public Service Commission, Ajmer. A state board textbook is a secondary source, not a primary one — but a board text on Rajasthan's freedom struggle convened by a former RPSC chairman tells you what the examining tradition treats as settled, which is a different and, for this purpose, more useful thing than an archival record.

Everything above is from that text, including: the six cantonments and their strength; the 1776, 1803, Laswadi and 1818 sequence; the five post-1818 grievances; the naming of Bankidas, Raghodas, Sandu Gangaji and Suryamalla Mishran; the four causes and the events at Nasirabad on 28 May 1857; the Neemuch rising of 3 June 1857, its route and its recapture on 8 June 1857; the Erinpura rising of 21 August 1857 and Thakur Kushal Singh of Aauwa; the Mewar circular of 27 May 1857 and the Salumbar confrontation; the Kota rising of 15 October 1857 with Major Burton, the nine conditions, the six months, and 22 March 1858; Tonk under Mir Alam Khan; Bharatpur and Major Morrison; Kothariya's shelter of Nana Saheb; the two tables of rulers and Political Agents; and the six causes of failure and the consequences.

Two misprints in the source are carried openly rather than silently fixed. The table heading reads "Princely rules during 1987 Revolation in Rajasthan", where 1987 is plainly 1857; and the Erinpura rising is dated 21 August 1957, plainly 1857. Both are noted where they occur. A textbook's typographical slip is not a historical claim, but a page that quietly corrects its source without saying so leaves a reader unable to check it.

Officer names are given as the textbook prints them — New Bari, Mac Mason, Eadan, Showers Ore, Robertus — with the familiar anglicised forms listed in the Aggregator Watch. The board text is what an examiner is likely to have drawn from, so its spellings are the ones a candidate will meet in an option.

One internal contradiction is reported and not resolved. The narrative names Captain Shovers as the Political Agent who handled Mewar, while the table of Political Agents gives Udaipur — Eadan. Both statements are in the same book. This page carries the table as printed and the narrative as written, and says so here.

Flagged rather than asserted: (a) anglicised officer names; (b) the Shovers-versus-Eadan conflict for Udaipur; (c) casualty totals beyond those the textbook states; (d) the content of the nine conditions beyond the one given; (e) Tatya Tope's movements in Rajasthan; and (f) dates for the disturbances in Dholpur, Alwar, Jaipur and Karauli.

Added on 27 August 2026, with the source for each.

1. The cantonment-to-corps table, the two loyal local battalions, and Erinpura being in Sirohi State. Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Rajputana, Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 1908, History chapter (pp. 22–23) and the entries for Erinpura, Kherwara, Deoli and Nasirabad. archive.org/details/dli.ministry.08251 — HTTP 200. The Bhil companies of the Jodhpur Legion, and the Rowa detachment, also from The Rajputana Gazetteer, Vol. III, Calcutta, 1880, Appendix on Erinpura. archive.org/details/wbsl.15442 — HTTP 200.

2. The conflict inside the 1908 Gazetteer between its statement that only two corps stood firm and its own Nasirabad entry saying the Bombay Cavalry remained loyal throughout: both passages are in the volume cited at (1) and are printed here side by side rather than reconciled.

3. Ajmer, the Merwara Battalion's relief of the fort under Lieutenant Carnell, the arsenal, and the officers killed at Nasirabad including Cornet Newbury. Iltudus Thomas Prichard, The Mutinies in Rajpootana, John W. Parker and Son, London, 1860, chapters II–III. archive.org/details/mutiniesinrajpoo00pric — HTTP 200. Prichard was a lieutenant of the 15th Native Infantry present on the Nasirabad parade ground on 28 May 1857, which is why his rank for Newbury is preferred to the board text's.

4. Lawrence's 16 June 1857 letter, the Ajmer jail break of 9 August, Colonel Abbott's oath parade, Mahomed Ali Beg's reply, the Neemuch treasury figures, the reoccupation over 6–8 June, Shahpura closing its gates against Showers, and Mohi-ud-din Khan of Nimbahera. Nathu Ram Khadgawat, Rajasthan's Role in the Struggle of 1857, General Administration Department, Government of Rajasthan, 1957, pp. 21–27, quoting Showers, Trevor and the Residency Records. archive.org/details/dli.ernet.51570 — HTTP 200.

5. Dungla, Rao Bakht Singh of Bedla, Jagmandir, the two gold mohurs, Showers's arrival at Udaipur on 28–29 May, and Bundi's hundred horse entering Neemuch on 8 June. Munshi Jwala Sahai, The Loyal Rajputana, 1902, sections on Nimach, Udaipur and Bundi. archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.54095 — HTTP 200.

6. The Abu–Erinpura sequence of 19, 21, 22 and 23 August 1857, Alexander Lawrence's wound, Lieutenant Conolly, Risaldar Abbas Ali's rejected offer, and the composition of the Jodhpur Legion. G. B. Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, 1857–1858, Vol. I (= Kaye's and Malleson's History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, Vol. IV), chapter on George St Patrick Lawrence in Rajputana, pp. 388–397. archive.org/details/historyofindianm04kayeuoft — HTTP 200. The 23 August arrival at Erinpura is stated in the Rajputana Gazetteer, Vol. III, 1880, cited at (1), which also supplies the Rowa expedition the Anadra company had been sent on.

7. Bithora, 8 September 1857, and the "dancing attendance on the rebels, like orderlies" letter: Malleson, cited at (6), pp. 394–396, and Khadgawat, cited at (4), p. 50, which gives the local name Beethora and the commanders Anar Singh and Raj Mal.

8. Chelawas, 18 September 1857, the five accounts of Mason's death, and his head at the Auwa gate. Malleson at (6), pp. 396–397; Prichard at (3), chapter XIII, whose narrative fixes the news reaching Jodhpur on 19 September; Khadgawat at (4), pp. 39, 43 and 50, citing Captain Showers, A Missing Chapter of the Indian Mutiny, pp. 107–108, Munshi Jwala Sahai, Loyal Rajputana, p. 285, Trevor, A Chapter on the Indian Mutiny, p. 11, and the narrative supplied by Thakur Nahar Singh of Auwa. The Goras and Kalas naming is from the Marwar Holi songs recorded by Khadgawat at p. 39.

9. The correction that two Political Agents were killed in Rajasthan in 1857, not one, follows directly from (8) and is stated openly in the body rather than patched in silently.

10. The named Marwar and Mewar supporters of Kushal Singh, the strength of the Auwa force, and the Erinpura leaders Abdul Ali, Moti Khan, Makhdum Baksh, Shital Prasad and Tilak Ram. Khadgawat at (4), pp. 49–51, from the Auwa Thakur's narrative and Captain Nixon's report of 14 December 1859.

11. Narnaul, 16 November 1857, and the destruction of the Jodhpur Legion. Malleson at (6), pp. 76–82, whose detailed account fixes the date; the same volume's Rajputana chapter, p. 397, prints "16 October", and Jwala Sahai at (5) repeats it. Both are noted in the body as a documented trap. Shivnath Singh's surrender at Barlu is from Nixon's report in Khadgawat at (4), pp. 40 and 176.

12. The fall of Auwa, the guns and powder found, the demolition, and the two versions of Kushal Singh's departure. Malleson at (6), pp. 400–401, from Sir George Lawrence's Forty-three Years in India; Khadgawat at (4), pp. 51–52, with its own footnote correcting the Auwa family's 30,000 to Trevor's 1,800 men and 14 guns. The Mahakali image in the Ajmer museum is from Khadgawat, p. 52.

13. Kushal Singh's surrender on 8 August 1860, the trial at Ajmer, the Taylor commission, the pardon of 10 November 1860 by despatch No. 5562, and the confiscations. Khadgawat at (4), pp. 46 and 174–176, summarising File No. 84, Jodhpur Old, Vols I and II, Residency Records, National Archives, New Delhi.

14. The bone-dust rumour and Arjun Singh Sahiwala's chapati. Khadgawat at (4), p. 25, citing Showers, pp. 84–85, Veer Vinod, and the Autobiography of Sahiwala Arjun Singh, pp. 65–81; repeated at p. 75 from Jwala Sahai.

15. Jai Dayal and Mehrab Khan as the leaders of the Kota rising, and Jai Dayal's earlier removal at Burton's instance. Khadgawat at (4), p. 174, summarising General Lawrence's mutiny report; and p. 64 for Mehrab Khan's Karauli origin and Har Dayal.

16. Dr Sadler and Mr Saviell, the sons aged 21 and 16, the four-hour defence, and Burton's head paraded and fired from a gun. Jwala Sahai at (5), pp. 321–323; Malleson at (6), pp. 398–399, quoting Sir George Lawrence, Reminiscences of Forty-three Years' Service in India.

17. Karauli's 800 and 1,500 men, the Maharani's proposed removal to Udaipur and Showers's objection. Jwala Sahai at (5), pp. 323–324, and Khadgawat at (4), pp. 62–63.

18. The Kota salute reduced from 17 to 13 guns, the finding of innocence coupled with failure of duty, and the restoration of 17 guns to Maharao Chhatar Sal in 1866. Jwala Sahai at (5), p. 325; the reduction is independently in Malleson at (6), p. 399.

19. Major-General H. G. Roberts, the march from Nasirabad, 22 March 1858 on the Chambal, and the operations of 25–30 March. Malleson at (6), pp. 401–403; Khadgawat at (4), pp. 63–64.

20. The disagreement about whether Kota's civil population was plundered. Lawrence and Malleson at (6), p. 402; against them, Khadgawat at (4), pp. 65–66, from Basta No. 69, Room 17, Old Records, Fort, Kotah, which names the only three shops plundered.

21. Bharatpur's rising at Hodal on 31 May 1857 and Morrison's departure on Mr Colvin's orders. Khadgawat at (4), pp. 26 and 72–73, citing Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War, Vol. III, p. 241 and Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1860, Paper No. 77.

22. Dholpur under rebel control from October to December 1857 and the Patiala relief. Khadgawat at (4), pp. 73–74, from Parliamentary Papers, Paper No. 77, p. 127, paras 109 ff.

23. Jaipur's rebels tried by the state, Eden's march to Mathura and Gurgaon and the attempt on his life on 20 July, and Rawal Sheo Singh's advice. Khadgawat at (4), pp. 74 and 173, from the same Parliamentary Paper and from Lawrence's report. Kot Kasim, Rs 50,000 a year, granted at the Agra darbar from Jwala Sahai at (5), p. 267.

24. Karauli's rewards and Tonk's restored Nimbahera pargana, with both salutes raised from 15 to 17 guns. Jwala Sahai at (5), pp. 318 and 329.

25. Sardar Singh of Bikaner as the only prince who left his state in person, Bahadran, Dr Coleridge at Rajgarh, the Skinner family reaching Bikaner on 15 June 1857, and the text of the Tibi sanad. Jwala Sahai at (5), pp. 290–293. Independently corroborated by the Imperial Gazetteer at (1), Bikaner State: "co-operating against the rebels of Hansi and Hissar, and as a reward received in 1861 a grant of the Tibi pargana, consisting of forty-one villages of Sirsa District."

26. Bundi judged indifferent, intercourse broken for a year, and Jwala Sahai's defence of Ram Singh. Jwala Sahai at (5), pp. 319–321.

27. Alwar's Banni Singh, also called Vinay Singh, dying in August 1857 and being succeeded by Sheodan Singh. The Rajputana Gazetteer, Vol. III, 1880, Ulwur chapter, at (1).

28. The Tatya Tope table. Khadgawat at (4), pp. 81–85, working from File No. 32, Mutiny 1858, Vol. I, Residency Records, National Archives, including Showers's letters of 4 and 8 August 1858 and the A.G.G.'s letter of 3 September 1858; the Sikar rout of 21 January 1859 and the 600 who fled to Bikaner from Jwala Sahai at (5), p. 292.

29. The correction of the Political Agents' table: Showers at Udaipur, Eden at Jaipur. Jwala Sahai at (5), which names "Captain C. L. Showers, the Political Agent" at Udaipur and Major Burton, the Political Agent of Kota, in the same passage; Khadgawat at (4), pp. 173–175, where Eden marches with the Jaipur troops and is later Officiating A.G.G. at Mount Abu; and Malleson at (6), which names Monck-Mason as political agent at Jodhpur. The board textbook's table is the outlier and its narrative is right.

30. The book-and-author table. Prichard at (3); Khadgawat at (4), whose own footnotes are the source for the exact title of Showers, A Missing Chapter of the Indian Mutiny; Jwala Sahai at (5); and Vishnubhat Godse, Majha Pravas, Chitra Shala Publications, Pune — archive.org/details/YFNg_majha-pravas-by-vishnu-bhat-godase-marathi-chitra-shala-publications-pune — HTTP 200.

31. The Nana Saheb correction. Khadgawat at (4), p. 78, states that no documentary evidence has been produced for Nana Sahib's presence at Kotharia, that the claim rests on statements collected locally from two named informants, and that "that of Nana Sahib cannot be relied upon unless otherwise some corroborative evidence is cited." What is documented is Kotharia's shelter of Kushal Singh and a letter to Rawat Jodh Singh from Peshwa Pandu Rang asking him to help the mutineers. This page previously carried the Nana Saheb shelter as settled fact and now does not.

32. The Holmes attribution. Checked against the full text of T. Rice Holmes, A History of the Indian Mutiny, 1898 — archive.org/details/historyofindian00holm — HTTP 200. The phrase does not occur in the sense claimed, and is listed in the Aggregator Watch rather than the body.