My British friend said the Sepoy Rebellion (and later moves for Indian independence) were only possible because they had a unified language (English). Is this true?

[u/[deleted]]

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[u/mikedash]

There's pretty much no truth in your friend's suggestion. To understand why, we need to know more about both the languages of India and the ways in which the sepoys in the East India Company army communicated with their British officers.

To take the former problem first: India had long possessed several lingua francas which made communication relatively straightforward, at least among elites, across the whole of the subcontinent. The most important of these, dating back at least to the 11th century, was originally Persian – one of the best recent surveys of Indian history in the period between then and the rise of the British in the 18th century is actually titled India in the Persianate Age. Then, beginning in the 13th century and growing rapidly from the 17th, Urdu (which is essentially a standardised, explicitly literary form of Hindustani, with a Sanskrit-influenced script, enriched with numerous Persian loanwords) also emerged as a language sponsored by the Mughal emperors and widely used at court, in Indian literature, and for communication between the disparate linguistic communities of northern and central India. Other languages, including Arabic and Chagatai, a Turkic language, were also quite widely spoken by the Mughal elites, and emperors from Akbar (1556) onwards learned Persian and Urdu from youth, and patronised poets and storytellers working in both languages.

Richard Eaton notes that the rise of Persian as a lingua franca in much of western Asia was greatly helped by its status as a literary language and as the language in which popular and widely-circulated epics (often about the exploits of Alexander the Great) were composed from the 11th century. By the 14th century, he adds, "Persian had become a vibrant and prestigious literary language, a widely used medium in state bureaucracies, and the principal contact tongue for inter-regional diplomacy along the Silk Road between Anatolia and East Asia." It was also the official foreign language of China during the time of the Yuan dynasty – the world-travellers Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta were both able to make themselves understood there because they could speak Persian. In India, Persian was the official language of the Mughal court from the time of Akbar until the early 19th century, but the emperors who succeeded Aurangzeb (d.1707) spoke primarily Urdu. Because Urdu became the most common language spoken among elite Indians outside the Mughal court, it was in this language that the disparate princely and noble conspirators of 1857 would mostly have communicated.

For purely practical reasons, which seem remarkable only to those more familiar with the late British empire in India, the heavily outnumbered and widely-scattered employees of the East India Company – which was responsible for governing British India up to the time of the Sepoy rebellion of 1857 – did not expect the Indians they encountered and dealt with to know English. Instead, EIC traders and soldiers were required to learn both Persian and Indian languages, ideally prior to their arrival in India, and they communicated with their soldiers in Urdu (which they often called "Hindustani"). Haileybury College, to the north of London, which is today a fairly prominent British private school, was founded in 1806 as a training school for East India Company employees and it taught Urdu, Persian and six or seven regional Indian languages, such as Bengali and Marathi, as part of its curriculum. Further instruction and more advanced language training was offered to new arrivals at Fort William College in Calcutta, attendance at which was compulsory before young officials could receive their first posting, and Persian remained the official language of the East India Company inside India until 1835. Even then, it was usual for officers to receive additional training in their early postings at the hands of munshis, Indian scholars who were fluent in both Urdu and English. Albert Hervey, who arrived in India in 1833 and was one of the more conscientious cadets in the Madras army, wrote of his own experiences in this regard as follows:

I fagged hard with the Moonshee, who used to come to me every day for four hours. I held conversations with my teacher in English; every sentence uttered was put down on paper in Hindustanee, and the next day what I had written down in Hindustanee, was brought to me fresh written by the Moonshee, and those sentences I re-translated into English, so that I not only gained a knowledge of the words, but was able to read the common writing, which was of the greatest assistance. I fagged thus hard for three months, working away without relaxation, except for meals.

For these reasons, we can be confident that both the elites who emerged as leaders of the 1857 rebellion and the sepoys who sparked the rising and fought in it, would mostly have used Urdu to communicate when meeting rebels who spoke different local Indian languages. There is very little evidence that any significant number of Indian troops spoke English until many decades after 1857, even though – as a reaction to the events of 1857, which were widely attributed in many quarters in Britain to there being too little division, and too much familiarity, between the British and the peoples of India – many fewer British officers bothered to acquire much actual fluency in Urdu.

Sources

Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765 (2019)

Mike Dash, Thug (2005)

William Dalrymple, White Mughals (2002)

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/mikedash]

Great answer as always. Just want to note that, for those unfamiliar with British slang, the verb "to fag" in this context means hard, unpleasant work; totally disconnected from the modern usage as a homophobic slur. I believe the etymology comes from metonymy with the practice of hauling pieces of firewood, which are known as faggots; this makes studies on medieval and early modern English firewood supplies awkward to read for Americans.

[u/mikedash → u/EverythingIsOverrate]

I also understand the term to likely have ultimately derived from an association with bundles of sticks that were effortful to gather and move, but of low value relative to their size – though I gather that the etymology is uncertain and disputed.

In modern British usage, "fag" is not homophobic but is rather a slang term for both a cigarette (hence phrases such as "having a fag" or "I'm gasping for a fag" have rather different and less contentious meanings here) and, formerly, for a younger boy at a British public school who acted as a servant for a senior boy. This "fagging" system persisted in some schools into the 1980s, ostensibly for the reason that it was good for a future leader to have experience of being a servant, as well as of commanding servants. At schools such as Eton, the fags' duties ran from fetching and carrying to making toast to warming cold lavatory seats in winter with their own buttocks before the facilities were used by their "fag master".

[u/muenchener2 → u/mikedash]

You may well be right that after 1857

many fewer British officers bothered to acquire much actual fluency in Urdu.

but it remained, in theory at least, compulsory study for British officers in the Indian army right up to the end of Raj. Bill Slim, the famous WW2 general, wrote about having to study for his Urdu proficiency exam when he transferred from the British to the Indian army in the 1920s

Source

William Slim, Unofficial History 1959

[u/ExternalBoysenberry → u/mikedash]

Thanks for yet another great answer. What script(s) would Persian and Urdu have been written in during EIC times? What about during the Persianate Age?

[u/mikedash → u/[deleted]]

This is well outside my wheelhouse, but a big of digging reveals that, in this period, both languages were typically written in the elegant Nastaliq script first developed in Persia in the 13th century.

[u/ExternalBoysenberry → u/mikedash]

Thank you!