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To deal with the problem of native mistresses, the Company was induced to start shipping young British women to India. The arrival of this “fishing fleet” became a signal event in nineteenth-century Calcutta's social calendar. At great parties thrown by Calcutta's leading British socialites, the hopeful bachelorettes would “sit up” for three nights in a row, while eligible soldiers and officers of all ages passed through. After a year, those who failed to land a husband were shipped back to England.

More fatefully, in 1829, the missionaries helped push through a ban on sati, the traditional Hindu practice of immolating widows upon their husband's funeral pyres. This ban represented the first explicit British interference with an important Indian religious practice and, as Company officials had feared, provoked broad resentment among the Hindu majority. In 1833 missionaries won the right to proselytize and set up schools in India without Company approval. In 1850, in direct violation of Hindu law, the British passed legislation allowing converts to Christianity to inherit property. In 1856, the British legalized second marriages by Hindu widows. Particularly obnoxious to India's Muslims were the missionaries’ extension of education to women and their adoption and conversion of abandoned orphans.29

The evangelicals were not the only Britons interested in anglicizing and “civilizing” Indians. There were also the modern-izers, such as the Scottish governor-general James Dalhousie, who brought railroads, the telegraph, and ingenious new inventions to India. Ironically, it was one of these inventions that set off the worst conflagration in the history of the Raj.

Introduced in 1857, the new muzzle-loading Enfield rifle was a technological triumph. Before using the rifle, a soldier had to bite off both ends of the new Enfield cartridges. Unfortunately, rumors—very possibly true—soon spread that the Enfield cartridges were greased with a mixture of pig and cow fat. For Indian soldiers (sepoys), touching their lips to these cartridges therefore risked defilement—pork being repugnant to Muslims and cows sacred to Hindus. Indeed, the Indians were convinced that the Enfield rifle was part of “an insidious missionary plot to defile them” and impose Christianity on India. On top of all this, the British had just forcibly annexed the rich province of Oudh, ignominiously deposing its king—an act of utmost hubris given that 75,000 sepoys in the army that invaded Oudh hailed from that very province.

Company after company of Indian soldiers refused to load the new Enfield rifles. In each case, the insubordinate sepoys were summarily discharged and stripped of their uniforms, weapons, and pensions. On May 9, 1857, eighty-five men from the Third Native Cavalry in Meerut were shackled and imprisoned for this act of disobedience. The next day, while their British officers were at church, the entire native brigade revolted, storming the prison and freeing their comrades. In the words of one contemporary English private:

There was a sudden rising … a rush to the horses, a swift saddling, a gallop to the gaol… a breaking open of the gates, and a setting free, not only of the mutineers who had been court-martialled, but also of more than a thousand cutthroats and scoundrels of every sort. Simultaneously, the native infantry fell upon and massacred their British officers, and butchered the women and children in a way that you cannot describe.

The rampaging soldiers, joined by civilian mobs, then headed for Delhi, “burning bungalows and murdering every European man, woman and child they encountered.” By the end of May, what the British would call “the Mutiny” had spread across India.

There followed two years of mutual slaughter and savagery. At Cawnpore, even after the British garrison surrendered, two hundred British women and children were killed, many hacked to death. In return, the British unleashed a barbarous vengeance. “Man-hunting” for mutineers became the “best sport,” and soldiers