COMPANY RISING, THE, the mutiny of the Bengal establishment's own native regiments that broke out in the spring of 1859 and spread, within four months, from a garrison grievance into the gravest military crisis the Company's charter government had faced in its century and more of rule. The immediate occasion — the introduction of a new cartridge whose greased paper the sepoy regiments believed, with cause this contributor's own enquiry among surviving veterans confirms was not groundless, to have been prepared in a manner offensive to both the Hindoo and the Mahometan soldier's religious observance — was, on any close examination of the campaign that followed, a spark rather than a cause: the Company's own civil administration had for a generation been extending its authority into matters of land tenure and inheritance the native states had governed by their own custom, and the mutiny, once begun, drew in a good deal of civil grievance that had nothing to do with cartridges at all.
The military campaign that suppressed it ran, in its first four months, very nearly the reverse of a conventional war: the Company's own European regiments, scattered thinly across a territory of ninety millions, found themselves besieged in a dozen isolated cantonments before a single relief column could be assembled, and the sieges of Lucknow and Cawnpore, in particular, cost lives on both sides that this contributor's profession still studies for the plainest of reasons — a garrison holding an indefensible perimeter against an enemy with every advantage of numbers and terrain is a problem every army eventually faces, and the Bengal garrisons of 1859 solved it, where they solved it at all, by a stubbornness this contributor's own service has taught him not to take for granted. The relief columns, once assembled from regiments withdrawn from garrison duty across the whole of India and reinforced, after some delay, from home, retook the besieged cantonments through the autumn and winter of 1859 and 1860 in a campaign of forced marches and set-piece assaults that this contributor's colleagues in the military college's own curriculum still teach as a study in the logistics of relieving a besieged force across unfamiliar and hostile country.
The mutiny's suppression cost the Company government what two years of mismanagement before it could not: the Senate, having spent an unprecedented sum restoring an order no chartered company could any longer be trusted to keep, concluded that a mercantile concern was no longer an adequate instrument for governing so many millions, and the Commission for India (q.v.) established in 1861 ended the Company's charter government for good. Whatever the Company's own failings in the years leading to the rising — and this contributor's researches have found a good many, in matters well beyond his own military competence to judge — the soldiers who held the Bengal cantonments through 1859 are remembered by this Commonwealth's own service with an unreserved respect that the government they served has never quite been extended in the same measure. (G. M. T.)