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Almost immediately after the Crimean War of 1855, the British were faced with a serious rebellion in India. Since the arrival of the Europeans on the subcontinent, the interests of the local population had generally been subordinated to those of the newcomers. Christian missionaries had further challenged the local religions and way of life, unwittingly and unintentionally alienating a large percentage of the population. When the English army introduced rifle cartridges, allegedly greased with pig and cow fat, this incensed Muslim and Hindu sentiments respectively, and the resentment which had been simmering for decades came to a boil.
In 1857, a hundred years after the Battle of Plassey, the European-trained Indian armies mutinied in an effort to win back control of their own country from the British. Pledging allegiance to the Mughal emperor, they murdered the British inhabitants of Delhi, after which the uprising spread rapidly throughout India. Initially somewhat panicked, the British eventually managed to put down the rebellion as it lacked support and good leadership.
In 1858, as a direct result of the Indian mutiny, the British government abolished the Mughal dynasty that had by this time ruled India for 300 years. The emperor was exiled to Burma and the British government assumed the direct administration of India, a country with ten times its population. British rule in India prevailed over a good two-thirds of the country for the next 90 years in what came to be known as ‘the Raj’, a term derived from the Sanskrit term ‘raja’ which means King.
The British government installed a viceroy and dissolved the East India Company. India was too valuable to Britain, both in terms of providing raw materials and in terms of its size as an export market, to risk losing it. To avoid any doubt as to who ruled India, Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India in 1877.