Who was the leader in the uprising of 1857 in Kanpur ?

Question

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Correct — option (3), Nanasaheb. The uprising of 1857 threw up a different leader in each centre, and the standard table pairs Kanpur with Nana Saheb. He was Dhondu Pant, the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, and he lived at Bithur near Kanpur on the strength of his father's arrangement with the Company. When Baji Rao II died in 1851 the Company refused to continue the pension to an adopted son, and Nana Saheb's petitions — including a mission to London — failed. That grievance is why Kanpur had a ready-made claimant when its sepoys rose in early June 1857: the mutinous regiments turned to him, and he was proclaimed Peshwa. Under his leadership the rebels besieged the entrenchment where General Hugh Wheeler had gathered the European garrison and their families, and the siege ended in the two episodes that fixed Kanpur in British memory — the killings at Satichaura Ghat in late June as the garrison was evacuating under a promise of safe passage by river, and the killing of the surviving women and children at the Bibighar in mid-July as British relief columns approached. Kanpur was retaken by Havelock's force in July 1857 and became the site of exemplary reprisals. Nana Saheb was never captured; after the collapse of the rebellion in the Ganga valley he disappeared, and the general belief is that he escaped towards Nepal. The other three names in the option list are all genuine 1857 figures, and one of them fought at Kanpur itself, so the question is really asking whether the candidate knows who was proclaimed the leader there rather than who was present.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Tatya Tope is the most defensible wrong answer on the page, because he really did command at Kanpur — as Nana Saheb's general. Ramchandra Pandurang Tope was Nana Saheb's close associate at Bithur and led his forces in the field, including the attempt to retake Kanpur later in 1857. But he was the commander, not the leader in whose name the revolt at Kanpur was raised; the sepoys proclaimed Nana Saheb as Peshwa. Tatya Tope's own reputation rests on what he did afterwards — his march to join Rani Lakshmibai, the seizure of Gwalior in June 1858, and the long guerrilla campaign in central India that ended with his capture and execution in April 1859.  (b) Azimullah Khan was Nana Saheb's diwan and political adviser, and he is the reason the Kanpur grievance was so sharply articulated: he was sent to England to press Nana Saheb's claim to the Peshwa's pension before the Company's directors, and returned unsuccessful and embittered. He is a genuine and important Kanpur figure, and is often credited with the diplomacy and correspondence of the rising there. But he acted for Nana Saheb, not in his own name, and no account presents him as the leader of the Kanpur uprising — the distinction between the adviser and the proclaimed leader is exactly what this option tests.  (d) Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah of Faizabad belongs to a different centre of the revolt. He was one of the outstanding leaders of the rising in Awadh, prominent in the fighting around Lucknow, and he was among the very few rebel commanders the British acknowledged as a serious military mind; he was killed in June 1858. Placing him in an option list about Kanpur tests whether the candidate has the 1857 centres mapped — Delhi under Bahadur Shah Zafar with Bakht Khan commanding, Lucknow under Begum Hazrat Mahal with the Maulvi of Faizabad, Jhansi under Rani Lakshmibai, Bareilly under Khan Bahadur Khan, Bihar under Kunwar Singh, and Kanpur under Nana Saheb.

Concept: The revolt of 1857 had no single command, and its leadership in each centre came from a person with a specific pre-existing grievance against Company policy — which is why the centres can be learnt as a table rather than memorised as a list of names. Kanpur is the clearest case of a leader supplied by the pension question: the refusal to continue Baji Rao II's pension to his adopted son gave Nana Saheb both a claim and a reason. Jhansi is the clearest case of the doctrine of lapse, Awadh of outright annexation on grounds of misgovernment in 1856, Delhi of the decision to end the Mughal title. The pattern matters more than the individual names, because it explains why the rising was strongest in a belt from Delhi through the Doab into Awadh and Bundelkhand, and weak where such dispossessed claimants did not exist.

State PCS 2024 Q4 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q4 — History PYQ with Answer