How did Britain establish its legitimacy as the ruler of India after thousands of rebels from the 1857 revolution had been shot and hanged during 1858 and 1859? This book offers a unique perspective on the answer: mercy and clemency.

The point has been fleetingly made in the past but this book dwells at great length on it. Thus, not only did the British spare Bahadur Shah Zafar’s life — after a farcical trial in his own palace — they offered amnesty to all the rebels of 1857 if they surrendered. The idea was to create “a new class of subjects…with each individual bound to the sovereign through a tie of allegiance”.

Maintaining control

McClure says that while the British used extreme force and violence — Jallianwala Bagh was an extreme example — to bring Indians to heel, they “remained equally reliant on calculated exercises of mercy and leniency… to understand the complex nature of colonial violence, we need to examine the constitutive relationship to discretion and colonial mercy.” Modern Indian governments can learn something from this and not leave it to individual judges to take a kinder view of protest.

Miraculously, the strategy worked, at least for four decades after which it began to fray at the edges. McClure says it took 60 years and Gandhiji to see through the design. He called on all Indians to defy the British and accept the punishment. Indeed, he rejected everything British including the Indian Penal Code.

The book has seven chapters along with the Introduction and Conclusion and makes for fascinating reading, not least because it comes as a surprise that mercy and leniency were used via the judicial system to persuade Indians to accept the legitimacy of British rule. Chapters 3, 4 and 7 are the most revealing as they deal with judges, juries, discretion and most importantly, in chapter 6, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the first mobiliser of mass protests against the British and the use of the sedition law.

The British had a simple rule: if you have a problem amongst yourselves our justice system will act impartially. But if you have a problem with us, you’d better watch out, we will get you. In other words perish any notions of independent political agency. If Indians protested against the government they would be excused at the discretion of the judge but only after apologising publicly and claiming ignorance about what they were doing.

But why would you apologise if you believed that you had done nothing wrong? This circle has never been squared. The trials and tribulations of Tilak stand testimony to this, as would those of V D Savarkar a few years later.

The ‘law’ came down very heavily on both because both believed that Hindu unity was essential to fight the British. The chapter on Tilak gives us an excellent description of the difficulties in reconciling the liberal British ideas prevailing in Britain with this utterly self-serving and ambiguous law in India.

Political function

McClure argues that judicial discretion, by which method the British actualised a governance need, had a political function. He begins chapter 7 with a surprising little nugget: the 1837 provision about having a go at the British ‘government’ was missing from the penal code of the 1860s. It sneaked in the idea of ‘disaffection’ against the government. This is more-or-less what we had in Section 124-A. The new penal code has retained the concept of sedition in Section 152 but removed disaffection against the government as a trigger.

The author provides a fascinating account of how the law was applied, albeit only after two decades of being encoded and on a matter that had no bearing on political actions: the medical implications of child marriage and adult men cohabiting with little girls because they had married them. The Age of Consent Bill of 1891 led conservative Hindu groups to unite against the government and it responded by using the sedition law against them.

There’s lots more in the book that needs wider reading in India.

Book details

You can find the book here.

Published on April 19, 2026