the Indian Mutiny – and what patriotic Indians prefer to term the Indian Rebellion or the First War of Independence – was a decision to issue locally recruited troops with a new paper cartridge, the tip of which had to be bitten off before the powder could be poured down the barrel of the Enfield rifle issued to Company soldiers. To keep the powder dry, the cartridges had to be covered in a waterproof coating and the rumour flew around the soldiery that the impermeable substance chosen was pork and beef fat. If it was true, this was the worst possible choice, outraging both Muslims, to whom the pig was unclean, and Hindus, to whom the cow was sacred. The decision about which type of fat to use was never intended as a deliberate insult – in fact, the manufacturers at the arsenal at Dum Dum, near Calcutta, would have been perfectly happy to have the cartridges coated in some substance like beeswax, just as long as the covering kept the powder dry. The problem for the British was that the sepoys were inclined to take it as a deliberate snub, because they were already unhappy. All armies live with a background chorus of belly-aching, but the sepoys had genuine anxieties – about their pensions, about the limited chances of promotion, about service overseas – as well as feeling a growing unease at the increasingly high-handed behaviour of the Company. (Its latest device for extending territory was the invention of a ‘Doctrine of Lapse’, by which it claimed ownership of any principality being incompetently administered or where the ruler died without a natural heir.) Many Indians were additionally troubled by the series of reforms bringing railways, ports, telegraphs and new roads, while Christian missionaries were ever more obvious in towns and countryside. (The missionaries were not particularly effective, but they made quite a lot of noise about the evils of Hinduism and Islam.) Barrack-room stories went around about how the Company was trying to undermine the ancient religions of India by adding cow’s blood to salt and by grinding pig and cow bones into the soldiers’ flour. It was hard to still rumours like these when growing numbers of junior officers were choosing to spend their time drinking in the officers’ mess instead of forming a bond with their men, and it looked increasingly as if, not content with removing their wealth, the British now also wanted to remove the Indians’ way of life.
Someone remembered a Brahmin prophecy that British rule would last for only a hundred years after the battle of Plassey: the centenary fell in June 1857.
At the end of March that year, Mangal Pande, a young soldier with the 34th Native Infantry, had emerged on to the parade ground at Barrackpore from a session of cannabis-smoking and taken a wild shot at one of his European officers. In the tussle which followed, Pande turned his gun on himself. The unfortunate man failed to take his own life, was dragged before a court martial and publicly hanged. In what became an established pattern of behaviour when a unit showed signs of restiveness, his regiment was disbanded. A few weeks later, in the British base at Meerut, eighty-five troopers with the 3rd Light Cavalry were ordered to load their weapons with the new cartridge. When they refused, all were court-martialled, sentenced to ten years’ hard labour and, in the middle of the parade ground, under the eyes of the rest of the garrison (and the guns of European soldiers) stripped of their uniforms and riveted into shackles and chains. Some of them wept with shame, one soldier crying out, ‘I was a good sepoy. I would have gone anywhere for the service. But I could not forsake my religion.’ In the commotion of the evening of 10 May, some of their comrades broke into the gaol and freed them. The uprising had begun.
The rebellion never enveloped the whole of India. But it spread with amazing speed and occurred in the hugely important area around the Grand Trunk Road, the old Mughal route from the Afghan border through the north of India to Bengal. This was the heart of British military might