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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2011
The upheavals of 1857 in India left a heightened conviction among the British rulers of what many had long believed, that the loyalty of their subjects could never be relied upon. Even after 1857 the British fear of sedition was stimulated at irregular intervals by such events as the Wahhabi trials of the eighteen sixties and the Kuka uprisings of 1869–72. British responses to nationalist challenges for decades to come were conditioned by the resulting insecurity, and nowhere was this more dramatically reinforced than in Bombay Presidency in the late eighteen seventies.
British rule in Maharashtra had been erected on the ruins of the Maratha confederation. The legacy of independent Hindu rule lived on after 1818, although civil disturbances in following years sometimes bore little relation to the change of rulers. Spasmodically from 1818 to 1857 a series of minor revolts broke out in the countryside and towns, all of which fell into traditional patterns. All were strictly local in scope, whether mutinies of sepoys against English officers or tribal and low-caste riots against village moneylenders.
1 Hambly, G. R. G., “Unrest in Northern India During the Vice-Royalty of Lord Mayo, 1869–72,” Journal of the Royal Central Asiatic Society, XLVIII (January 1961), 41–52, probes the extent of popular discontent at the timeGoogle Scholar.
2 See the account in Jacob, George, Western India Before and During the Mutinies (London, 1871)Google Scholar.
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11 Details of Ranade's early career are outlined in Mankar, G. A., A Sketch of the Life and Worlds of the Late Mr. Justice M. G. Ranade (Bombay, 1902), I, 40–45Google Scholar.
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13 Kulkarni, pp. 490–91.
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15 Minute of November 26, 1878, quoted by Ravenscroft in his Minute of July II, 1880, Government of India, Home Department, Judicial A Proceedings, August 1880, Nos. 203–05.
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19 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay, 1885), XVIII, 309Google Scholar.
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21 “Letters to Government on the Deccan Dacoities,” April 25, 1879, JPSS, II (July 1879), 70Google Scholar.
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26 Government of India, Reports on the Native Papers Published in the Bombay Presidency, April and May 1879, passim.
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30 Temple to Lytton, July 3, 1879, Temple Papers, European MSS, F86/5. This letter and its continuation on July 9 have been published by Hambly, G. R. G., “Mahratta Nationalism Before Tilak: Two unpublished letters of Sir Richard Temple on the state of the Bombay Deccan, 1879,” Journal of the Royal Central Asiatic Society, IL (April 1962), 144–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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47 Westropp to Hart, Secretary to the Government of Bombay, June 4, 1880, Bombay Government, Judicial Department Proceedings, 1880, No. 797. Henceforth referred to as Bombay JD 1880.
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52 Ashburner, Minute of June 15, 1880, GOI 1880.
53 Ravenscroft, Minute of June 16, 1880, GOI 1880.
54 Ravenscroft, Minute of July II, 1880, GO1 1880.
55 Quoted, ibid.
56 Fergusson, Minute of July 23, 1880, GOI 1880.
57 Fergusson's summary of the controversy, August 2, 1880, GOI 1880.
58 C. Gonne, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bombay, to C. Grant, Officiating Secretary to the Government of India, September 15, 1880, Bombay JD 1880.
59 Bombay Government, Judicial Proceedings, 1880, p. 1257.
60 Bombay Government, Judicial Department, 1881, Vol. XV, No. 71.
61 “An Appeal to the Electors of Great Britain,” March 19, 1880, JPSS, II (April 1880), 132Google Scholar.
