Perhaps, therefore, it will not surprise the reader to be told that Sunker Tewāre stated, as a solemn matter of fact, that the Sepoys, taking them all together, were never disloyal until, suddenly seized by a superstitious panic, and in consequence becoming literally mad, they rushed headlong, like a crowd of frenzied demons, into an ever-lamentable rebellion — into which he, too, would have been dragged, in spite of himself, by caste fanaticism, had he been, as he affirmed, serving with, instead of a pensioner of, the army.
While the plot thickened, and Upper India simmered with treason, and the echo of the panic, which had broken out among the Sepoys, re-echoed in all the military cantonments of the Bengal Presidency, the infernal conspiracy, in which they were to act the part of the principal tragedians, had accomplished its designs so successfully that by this time their distracted minds could think of nothing else — of nothing else but of their castes hovering, as it were, on the very brink of eternal perdition! And who can gainsay the fact that the high-caste Hindu of the Bengal Army of those days held his caste more sacred than anything on earth, and not only adored and idolised it, but would rather have died than lost it? Indeed, it is quite within the truth to say that it would have been difficult to point to any people, in the civilised world, more deeply imbued with reverence for their own souls, than were those Sepoys for their castes.
But this was not all; for while perturbed as they were at this momentous period by irritating doubt and
