The rebellion was largely a Muslim-led reaction to the eroding status of the Mughal Empire. Don’t be fooled by post-Independence write-ups by Indian authors who play up that Hindu-Muslim unity thing to mythological levels. The base stance was that the Muslims resented their loss of power, and British antipathy towards Hindus made for an ‘enemy’s enemy is a friend’ situation.
Pre-1857 British policy attacked Hindu beliefs more seriously than Muslim beliefs
http://www.defencejournal.com/2001/july/sepoy.htm
“The pre-1857 policy of the English East India Company was more anti-Hindu than anti-Muslim. The General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 was a serious piece of legislation which greatly demoralised the Hindu soldiers. Thus it is a simple fact that the rebellion was successful to some degree in 1857 because the Hindu soldiers who formed the majority of the Bengal Army soldiers joined the rebellion. It is true that most of the leaders of the rebellion were Muslim and the maximum casualties suffered by the British were in campaigns against essentially Muslim centres of rebellion like Delhi and Lucknow. It remains a fact that without support from Hindu soldiers who constituted the bulk of Bengal infantry the Muslims could not have lasted for as long as they did i.e. at Delhi from May to September 1857 and in Lucknow from July 1857 to March 1858.”
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“The aftermath of the rebellion has been the focus of new work using Indian sources and population studies. In The Last Mughal, historian William Dalrymple examines the effects on the Muslim population of Delhi after the city was retaken by the British and finds that intellectual and economic control of the city shifted from Muslim to Hindu hands because the British, at that time, saw an Islamic hand behind the mutiny.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857#cite_note-117
Christianity had no real role to play in the conflict.
The role Christianity played was that manyMuslims and Hindus thought the raj was planning to force them to convert.
It wasn’t of course, even the Brits were never that stupid, but the conspiracy theory that they were played a quite significant role in creating the disaffection that led to the rebellion.
You’re basically agreeing with what I said. Most (not all) of the leaders were Muslim, and Hindu soldiers supported them. Thus indicating there was little rift between the two communities at the time, or at least that antagonism towards the British outweighed it.
What most Muslims were objecting to was not the decline of the Mughal Empire as such. In fact, most of the leaders were beneficiaries of that decline, as they were local lords breaking off a portion of the empire, in practice though not usually in theory, for their own benefit.
They objected to their loss of status as Muslims, the dominant group in society, which was in the process of being replaced by Brits. And they objected to various British “reforms,” which while increasing efficiency were perfectly reasonable, were also pretty hard on the previous beneficiaries of the inefficiencies.