The Indian Mutiny of 1857
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY.
In the history of the world there is no more wonderful story than that of the making of the British Empire in India. It was not the result of deliberate design. The early English settlers on the coasts of India thought only of protecting the small tracts of territory conceded to them against aggression from native princes and European rivals. For a long time they never dreamt even of questioning the sovereign rights of the native princes who exercised authority in the territories nearest to their possessions. The instructions which the agents on the spot received from the directors of the parent Company at home indicated, in the plainest language, that their business was to trade; that to trade advantageously, it was necessary to humour the native princes, to display courtesy and civility, to put away from them all thoughts of aggression. The object of the Company was to pay good dividends. Such a result could only be obtained by the development of peaceful enterprise.
Suddenly there came a change in the action of the English agents on the Coromandel coast. The English had been the third European nation which had sought to open a profitable trade with India, and which, for that purpose, had secured lodgments on her coasts. Of the two nations which had preceded them, the Portuguese had declined; the Dutch were declining. The vigour and energy of the race which inhabits England was producing, in the rapid increase of the trade, the results which invariably follow the development of those qualities, when a fourth power, France, the hereditary rival of England in Europe, began, under the influence of MM. Dumas and Dupleix, to develop, in an extraordinary manner, the resources of a settlement which one of her children, François Martin, had made, under very difficult circumstances, on the same coast. This settlement, called from the town of which Martin had obtained possession Pondichery, had reached a high state of prosperity under the careful nursing of the immediate predecessor of Dupleix, M. Benoit Dumas. This able man had known how to conciliate the friendship of the native princes on the coast. In return for many civilities and good offices, he had been granted permission to enlist sipáhís and to erect fortifications. Between Pondichery and the English settlement of Madras there had been in his time no thought of hostility. Peace between the rival powers reigned in Europe, and no temptation arose in India to disturb the happy relations of friendship.
In October 1741 M. Dupleix succeeded Dumas at Pondichery. A man remarkably gifted, endowed with a genius which could conceive the largest schemes, he continued that system of ingratiating himself with the native princes, which had been attended with such favourable results in the time of his predecessor. The policy was soon to bear the most brilliant fruits. In 1743 the English and French had taken opposite sides in the war of the Austrian succession. The battle of Dettingen had been fought (June 16, 1743) before war had actually been declared. But the declaration soon followed, and it was not long before warlike operations, begun in Europe, extended to India.
Both nations despatched squadrons to the Indian seas. The English squadron, preceded by instructions from the directors of the East India Company to its agent at Madras, Mr Morse, to use it to destroy the French settlement at Pondichery, arrived first. But before Morse could carry out his instructions he was compelled to ask the sanction to the undertaking of the ruler of the country of which Madras formed a part, the Nuwáb of the Karnátik. But that prince was under the spell exercised by Dumas and Dupleix. He refused the permission, and Pondichery was saved.
Two years later the position of the two principal European powers on the Coromandel coast was inverted. The English squadron was absent: the French squadron was on the spot. Dupleix then prepared for his rivals the fate with which they had threatened him. In vain did the English appeal to the Nuwáb of the Karnátik. That prince, gained by Dupleix, declined to interfere in the quarrel between the settlers. The result was that, on September 21, 1746, Madras surrendered to the French, and was promptly occupied by a garrison composed of French troops and of sipáhís trained by French officers.
The capture of Madras by the French is an important event in the history of the connection of France and England with India; for it was indirectly the cause of the development of that sipáhí army, the great outbreak of which, against its masters, it is my object to describe in this volume. It would seem that Dupleix, when pleading to the Nuwáb for permission to attack Madras, had promised that prince that he would transfer it, after he had captured it, to the Nuwáb for disposal. But when the Nuwáb called upon him to fulfil his promise, he displayed great unwillingness to comply. He wished, at least, to level its fortifications, to dismantle it before making it over. The Nuwáb, however, had despatched his son with a force to take possession. To dismantle the place in the presence of that force was impossible. Dupleix determined then to use every diplomatic means at his disposal to persuade the Nuwáb to allow him to retain it. But the young prince who represented the Nuwáb was impatient, and precipitated a contest by cutting off the water supply of the town and fort. The French governor, Desprémesnil, despatched then 400 men and two guns to recover the water springs. It was the first contest on the Coromandel coast between the settlers of either nation and the indigenous population. Up to that time French and English had carefully refrained from all acts of hostility towards the children of the soil. In the princes of the coast they had recognised their landlords, their masters, to whose complaisance they owed the permission to maintain trading stations on the coast. They were to be courted, persuaded, won over, but never opposed. The sortie from Madras of the 2d November 1746 was, then, a rude infringement of a custom till then religiously observed. Its consequences were momentous. The fire of the two French field-pieces, well directed and continuous, put to flight the cavalry of the Nuwáb. The water springs were regained without the loss by the French of a single man, whilst about seventy Mughal horsemen bit the dust.
The son of the Nuwáb, Máphuz Khán by name, was not present on this occasion. When he heard of it he attributed the result to accident, to bad leading, to any cause but the right one. He would show himself, he said, how these Europeans should be met. He had heard, the very day of the defeat of his cavalry, that a small force, composed of 230 Frenchmen and 700 trained sipáhís, was approaching Madras from Pondichery, and would attempt to cross the little river Adyár, near St Thomé, on the 4th (November). Máphuz Khán had at his disposal 10,000 men. He took at once a resolution worthy of a great commander. He marched with his whole army to St Thomé, occupied a position on the northern bank of the Adyár, so strong and so commanding that he could not fail, if the combatants were at all equal in military qualities, to crush the little force marching on Madras.
Máphuz Khán was on the chosen spot, eager for combat, when the small French force appeared in sight. Paradis, who commanded it, was an engineer, a man who knew not fear, and who was not easily moved from his purpose. He saw the serried masses in front of him, barring his way. To attack them he must wade through the river, exposed to their fire. Had he hesitated an instant the story of the Europeans in India might have been different. But Paradis recognised, as many English commanders after him have recognised, that the one way for the European to pursue when combating Asiatics is to go forward. He did not hesitate a moment. Without waiting even to reconnoitre, he dashed into the river, scrambled up the bank, formed on it in line, delivered a volley, and charged. The effect was momentous. Never was there fought a more decisive battle, a battle more pregnant with consequences. The army of the Nuwáb was completely defeated. Vigorously pursued, it vanished, never again to appear in line against a European enemy, unless supported by the presence of that enemy's European rival.
It is impossible to over-estimate the effects on the minds of the native princes and native soldiers of Southern India of the victory gained by the French at St Thomé. The famous historian, Mr Orme, who was almost a contemporary, wrote of it that it broke the charm which had invested the Indian soldiers with the character of being 'a brave and formidable enemy.' Another writer[1] has recorded of it that, 'of all the decisive battles fought in India, there is not one more memorable than this. The action at St Thomé completely reversed the positions of the Nuwáb and the French governor. Not only that, but it inaugurated a new era, it introduced a fresh order of things, it was the first decided step to the conquest of Hindustán by a European power.'
There can be no doubt but that the result of the battle gave birth in the mind of Dupleix to ideas of conquest, of supremacy, even of empire, in Southern India. It is no part of this work to follow the course he adopted to secure the triumph of those ideas; but this at least has to be admitted, that the scheme of forming a regular force of trained native soldiers, if it did not actually date from the victory of St Thomé, acquired from it a tremendous impetus. Thereafter the spectacle was witnessed of the representatives of two European nations, longtime enemies in Europe, taking opposite sides in the quarrels of native princes in Southern India, and for that purpose employing not only their own countrymen but natives armed and drilled on the European system, led by European officers, vying with their European comrades in deeds of daring and devotion, and becoming by degrees the main supports of their European masters. After the lapse of a few years the European nation which inaugurated the new system was completely vanquished by its rival. But before that could be accomplished the system had taken a firm hold of that rival. When, in 1756, Clive set out from Madras to recover Calcutta from the hands of Suráju-daulah, he took with him, in addition to his 900 Europeans, 1200 sipáhís, natives of Southern India, armed and drilled on the European system. These men formed the nucleus of that glorious native army which, led by European officers, helped their English masters to win Bengal and Bihár from the satraps of the Mughals; to wrest Banáras and the delta of the Ganges from the Nuwáb Wazir of Oudh; to expel the Maráthás from the North-west Provinces; to establish a frontier on the Satlaj; to invade Afghánistán; and, finally, to acquire the Panjáb.
In another work[2] I have told in detail the principal achievements of that army up to the time when Lord Dalhousie annexed the Panjáb (1849). During that period of a hundred years the organisation of the native army had been more than once altered, but the spirit of devotion to its European officers had been manifested throughout all the changes on many memorable occasions. In the time of Clive the sipáhís had stood firmly by their European masters (1766) when the European troops in India, officers and men, had mutinied. They had never shrunk from following their European officer whithersoever he would lead them. And if, on some rare occasions, some few of them had displayed momentary disaffection, that disaffection had been, up to 1857, the result of feelings in which there was not the smallest tinge of patriotism. Speaking broadly, the result in each instance was the consequence of an attempt, well meant but clumsily carried out, to graft western ideas upon an oriental people. The secret of the influence of the Englishman in India has lain in the fact that he had so conducted himself, in all his relations with the children of the soil, that his word had come to be regarded as equal to his bond. It was only when the sipáhí, at Vellor in 1806, at Barrackpur in 1824 and again in 1852, in the North-western Provinces in 1844, in the Panjáb in 1849-50, deemed that the promises made to him on his enlistment had been deliberately violated, that he displayed an obstinate determination to break with his master rather than to continue service on terms which, it seemed to him, could be disregarded at that master's pleasure.
Action of a different character, although based on the same principle, so dear to the untravelled Englishman, of forcing the ideas in which he has been nurtured upon the foreign people with whom he is brought into contact, assisted, especially after the first Afghán war, to loosen the bonds of discipline, which, up to that period, had bound the sipáhí to his officer. In the time of Clive the sipáhí army had been officered on the principle which, in India, is known as the irregular system. The men were dressed in the oriental fashion, the companies were commanded by native officers; the European officers attached to each battalion, few in number, were picked men, selected entirely for their fitness to deal with and command native troops. The powers of the commanding officer were large. He was, to the sipáhí, the impersonification of the British power in India. His word was law. Beyond him the mind of the sipáhí did not care to travel. The sipáhí did not concern himself with regulations and appeals to the Commander-in-Chief. The system had answered admirably. It was in force throughout the reigns of Clive and Warren Hastings, and in no single respect had it failed.
But in course of time the idea came to the ruling authorities in India that great advantage would accrue if the sipáhí regiments were to be remodelled on the system then prevailing in the British army. Just before the great Marquess Wellesley, then Lord Mornington, arrived in India, such a scheme was carried into effect (1796). The dress of the sipáhís was assimilated to that of his European comrades. The native officers, though maintained, were relegated to an inferior position. The English system, with its list of captains, lieutenants, and ensigns, supervised by a colonel, a lieutenant-colonel, and a major, was introduced into the native army, and that army was brought more completely than it had ever been before into the European centralising system.
Fortunately for the tranquillity of British India it was only gradually, almost imperceptibly, that the great powers of the commanding officer were interfered with. Under the new system the sipáhís fought well against Típu Sáhib, against the Maráthás, against the Pindárís, and against the Peshwá. They conducted themselves with their accustomed courage and resolution in the first war with Burma, 1825-6. Then came a period of peace, to be broken only in 1838 by the first invasion of Afghánistán.
That the disasters of the first Afghán war had an effect on the feelings with which the sipáhí had until then regarded his English master is undeniable. During that war he had behaved with remarkable courage, self-denial, and devotion. A distinguished officer who served in it declared on a public occasion, after the return of the troops, that his personal experience had convinced him that, properly led, the sipáhí would follow his English officer anywhere, and would bear uncomplainingly any amount of hardships. But the imagination exercises upon the mind of an oriental an influence which is often not at all understood by the colder nature of the Englishman. Notwithstanding the triumphs of Nott and Pollock in the last phases of the war, the sipáhí recognised that for the first time the enterprise of his English master against a native power had failed. There was no disguising the fact that the English troops had suffered greatly, and had finally retreated; that the soldiers of the Punjab, a territory which they had traversed on sufferance, had scoffed and jeered at them whenever they came in contact with them. They realised that a heavy blow had been dealt to British prestige. Possibly, with that tendency to exaggeration which characterises imaginative natures, they thought the blow greater than it actually had been.
But the retreat from Afghánistán was but the beginning of many evils. Within two years of the return of the army Lord Ellenborough annexed the province of Sind. The annexation was absolutely necessary, and had the Government of India been ruled by men of Indian experience, that is, by men possessing experience of the natives of India north-west of Bengal, the annexation might have been made a source of strength, instead of for a time weakening the relations of the Government with its native army, and in the end impairing its efficiency.
The first step taken by the Government shook the confidence of the sipáhís in its promises. Up to that time certain extra allowances for food had been granted to all sipáhí regiments serving beyond the then British frontier. Now, service in the hot and arid regions of Sind had always been distasteful to the sipáhí of the Bengal Presidency, but he was reconciled to the discomforts by the promise that, whilst employed in that province, he should receive a considerable addition to his pay. But the Government of India argued that the incorporation of Sind within the British territories had cancelled the prevailing regulations referring to service beyond the Indus, and they notified the fact to the several divisional commanders. The result was to create so great a revulsion in the minds of the sipáhís that the native regiments under orders for Sind refused to march thither.
Ultimately the difficulty was got over, but in a manner not very creditable to the Government. The Bengal troops were relieved of the necessity of garrisoning Sind, and their place was taken by native troops from Bombay. One commanding officer was dismissed the service because, to induce his men to march, he had guaranteed them the allowances to which they considered themselves entitled, as indeed, upon the principles of abstract justice, they were. One regiment was disbanded. Sipáhís in others were selected for punishment. The Government of India believed they had by these and kindred measures stayed the plague, when in reality they had shaken to the core the confidence of the sipáhís in their justice, and laid the foundation of the evils which followed thirteen years later.
Those evils were precipitated by the conduct of the Commanders-in-Chief sent out from England, often without the smallest experience of India, to command, that is, to administer, an army of sipáhís outnumbering, in the proportion of five to one, the European garrison — men born under a different sky, bred in a religion and in the respect of customs regarding which the Commanders-in-Chief knew nothing and desired to know nothing, and animated by sentiments which prompted them either to be the most docile of followers or the most importunate of solicitors. These Commanders-in-Chief were, up to the close of the Mutiny, men trained in the traditions of the Horse Guards, and who, in their narrow view, regarded any deviation from those traditions as an evil to be at all cost eradicated. For a long time they had chafed at the largeness of the powers exercised by commanding officers of native regiments. They were eager to introduce into the guiding of those regiments the rule of red tape and routine. For some time the Adjutants-General, men trained in the native army, and placed at their elbow to prevent the too great exercise of a mischievous zeal, had restrained their action. But after the first Afghán war there arose a series of courtly Adjutants-General who, far from checking, even stimulated the narrow instincts of their chief. It gradually became the fashion at army Headquarters to quote the Horse Guards as the model for all that was practical and military. When it is recollected that in those days the military instincts of the Horse Guards had been displayed by devising a clothing for the European soldier so tight that if he were to drop his bayonet he could scarcely stoop to pick it up, that the weapon known as 'Brown Bess' was lauded up, from the Commander-in-Chief downwards, as the most perfect of weapons, that inventions tending to improve our military system were steadily discouraged, that the highest authorities of the British army — the great Duke himself — deliberately preferred to live in a fool's paradise, declaring that because the British army had been able to go anywhere and do anything in 1814, therefore, without taking advantage of the improvements developed in the course of thirty years of peace, it could accomplish the same results in 1844, it can easily be understood why the Commanders-in-Chief in India, the nominees and adulators of one great man, should do their utmost to bring the native army within the fold of red tape, the fold which they had been taught to regard as the most perfect in the world.
By degrees, then, after the first return from Afghánistán, and when the refusal of the sipáhís to march to Sind afforded an excuse for the contention that the discipline of the native army required to be looked to, the Commanders-in-Chief in India reduced that army to the Horse Guards' standard. They restricted the powers of the commanding officers; they encouraged appeals to army Headquarters; they insisted that promotion to the rank of native officer should be regulated, not by merit, but by seniority. They issued order after order the tendency of which was to impress upon the mind of the imaginative oriental the conviction that the Government desired to pet the sipáhí at the expense of his actual commandant. In this way they undermined the discipline of the army, and made their European regimental officers contemptible in the eyes of their men.
The sipáhís have always obeyed a master who knows how to command. But they will not obey a lay figure. Nor, equally, will they transfer their respect to an unseen authority residing in the lofty hill ranges which overlook the plains of Hindustán. They may use that unseen authority, indeed, to vex and annoy and baffle their own commandant. And that was the manner in which, for a few years immediately prior to the Mutiny, the sipáhís did use it. By petitions against the rulings of the officers appointed to command them, petitions examined and acted upon by the authority in the hills who did not know them, they in many cases rendered the enforcement of a rigid state of discipline impossible.
Whilst the determination of inexperienced Commanders-in-Chief, that is, of Commanders-in-Chief unacquainted with the oriental mind, but tied hand and foot to the traditions of the Horse Guards, was thus undermining the discipline of native regiments, other causes were supervening to alarm them as to their personal interests. The sipáhís of the Bengal army were enlisted, with the exception of those of six regiments, for service in India only. They were never to be required to cross the sea. It happened, however, in 1852, whilst the second Burmese war was being waged, that the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, desired to send a native regiment to that country in addition to those then employed there. There were many ways of accomplishing this end without riding roughshod over the rights and engagements of the sipáhís. Lord Dalhousie might have despatched one of the six regiments pledged to service across the sea, or he might have called for volunteers. He did neither. He arbitrarily selected a regiment stationed at Barrackpur, the sipáhís of which had enlisted on the condition that they were to serve in Hindustan, and in Hindustan only. The sipáhís, whose minds had been emancipated, by the process referred to in the preceding page, from all respect for their commanding officer, had none for a Governor-General who trod upon their privileges. They flatly refused to embark. Lord Dalhousie was placed by his own act in the invidious position of having to succumb. The story spread like wildfire all over India. The effect[3] of it was most disastrous to discipline. In the lines and huts of the sipáhís the warmest sympathy was expressed for a regiment which could thus successfully defy a Governor-General.
Then followed the crowning act: the act which touched to the quick nine-tenths of the sipáhís in the Bengal army, and many of those serving in the Bombay Presidency. The sipáhís serving in Madras were not affected by it. When the storm came, in 1857, the Madras sipáhís then took no part in the revolt. The case may thus be stated. The majority of the sipáhís serving in the Bengal Presidency, and a proportion of those serving in the Bombay army, were recruited from the kingdom of Oudh. The sipáhí so recruited possessed the right of petitioning the British Resident at the Court of Lakhnao (Lucknow) on all matters affecting his own interests, and the interests of his family in the Oudh dominion. This right of petition was a privilege the value of which can be realised by those who have any knowledge of the working of courts of justice in a native state. The Resident of Lakhnao was, in the eyes of the native judge, the advocate of the petitioning sipáhí. The advantage of possessing so influential an advocate was so great that there was scarcely a family in Oudh which was not represented in the native army. Service in that army was consequently so popular that Oudh became the best recruiting ground in India. Events subsequent to the Mutiny have shown that the reason why it was so regarded lay in the enormous benefits accruing to the sipáhí from a system which made the British Resident his advocate.
All at once this privilege was swept away. The British Government decided to annex Oudh. Oudh was annexed. Sir James Outram was sent from Calcutta to take possession. I happened, at the time, to be the officer at Kánhpur (Cawnpore) upon whom devolved the duty of supplying carriage to the force which was to cross the Ganges and march upon Lakhnao. Never shall I forget the agitation which prevailed in the sipáhí guard over my official quarters when the object of the expedition oozed out. Most of those forming it were Oudh men, and I had to use all the influence I possessed to prevent an outbreak. My native subordinates in the Commissariat department assured me that a similar feeling was being manifested in the lines of the sipáhís. I reported the matter to the general, and I mentioned it to one of the highest of the new officials who passed through the station to take up his post in Oudh. My warnings were disregarded; but when the crisis at Kánhpur arose, and when those regiments displayed against British officers, their own included, a truculent hatred not surpassed, and scarcely equalled, at any other station, they were remembered.
The annexation of Oudh was felt as a personal blow by every sipáhí in the Bengal army, because it deprived him of an immemorial privilege exercised by himself and his forefathers for years, and which secured to him a position of influence and importance in his own country. With the annexation that importance and that influence disappeared, never to return. English officials succeeded the native judges. The right of petition was abolished. The great inducement to enlist disappeared.
Nor was the measure more palatable to the large landowners. The two officers to whom the Government of India confided the administration of the newly annexed province, Mr Coverley Jackson and Mr Gubbins, had been trained in the school the disciples of which, endeavouring to graft western ideas upon an eastern people, had done their best in the North-west Provinces to abolish landlordism in the sense in which landlordism had flourished in those provinces since the time of Akbar. The result of their revolutionary proceedings was shown, in 1857, by the complete sympathy displayed by the civil districts in the North-west Provinces with the revolted sipáhís. It was shown in Oudh by the rising of the landowners throughout the province.
The causes I have stated had brought the mind of the sipáhí, in 1856, to fever heat. He had lost faith in the Government he served. The action of army Headquarters had deprived him of all respect for his officers. He was ready to be practised upon by any schemer. His mind was in the perturbed condition which disposes a man to believe any assertion, however improbable in itself.
Conspirators to work upon so promising a soil were not wanting to the occasion. There was a large amount of seething discontent in many portions of India, In Oudh, recently annexed; in the territories under the rule of the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-west Provinces, revolutionised by the introduction of the land-tenure system of Mr Thomason; in the Southern Maráthá territory, the chiefs of which had been exasperated to the very verge of revolt by an inquiry, instituted under the auspices of a commission, called the Inám Commission, into the titles of estates which they and their forefathers had held without question since the beginning of the century, men's minds were excited and anxious. Suddenly, shortly after the annexation of Oudh, this seething discontent found expression. Who all the active conspirators were may probably never be known. One of them, there can be no question, was he who, during the progress of the Mutiny, was known as the Maulaví.[4] The Maulaví was a very remarkable man. His name was Ahmad-ullah, and his native place was Faizábád in Oudh. In person he was tall, lean, and muscular, with large deep-set eyes, beetle brows, a high aquiline nose, and lantern jaws. Sir Thomas Seaton, who enjoyed, during the suppression of the revolt, the best means of judging him, described him 'as a man of great abilities, of undaunted courage, of stern determination, and by far the best soldier among the rebels.' Such was the man selected by the discontented in Oudh to sow throughout India the seeds which, on a given signal, should spring to active growth. Of the ascertained facts respecting his action this at least has been proved, that very soon after the annexation of Oudh he travelled over the North-west Provinces on a mission which was a mystery to the European authorities; that he stayed some time at Agra; that he visited Dehlí, Mírath, Patná, and Calcutta; that, in April 1857, shortly after his return, he circulated seditious papers throughout Oudh; that the police did not arrest him; that the executive at Lakhnao, alarmed at his progress, despatched a body of troops to seize him; that, taken prisoner, he was tried and condemned to death; that, before the sentence could be executed, the Mutiny broke out; that, escaping, he became the confidential friend of the Begum of Lakhnao, the trusted leader of the rebels.
That this man was the brain and the hand of the conspiracy there can, I think, be little doubt. During his travels he devised the scheme known as the chapátí scheme. Chapátís are cakes of unleavened bread, the circulation of which from hand to hand is easy, and causes no suspicion. The great hope of the Maulaví was to work upon the minds, already prone to discontent, of the sipáhís. When the means of influencing the armed men in the service of the British Government should have been so matured that, on a given signal, they would be prepared to rise simultaneously, the circulation of chapátís amongst the rural population of the North-west Provinces would notify to them that a great rising would take place on the first favourable opportunity.
It is probable that, whilst he was at Calcutta, the Maulaví, constantly in communication with the sipáhís stationed in the vicinity of that city, discovered the instrument which should act with certain effect on their already excited natures. It happened that, shortly before, the Government of India had authorised the introduction in the ranks of the native army of a new cartridge, the exterior of which was smeared with fat. These cartridges were prepared in the Government factory at Dam-Dam, one of the suburbs of Calcutta. The practice with the old paper cartridges, used with the old musket, the 'Brown Bess,' already referred to, had been to bite off the paper at one end previous to ramming it down the barrel. When the conspirators suddenly lighted upon the new cartridge, not only smeared, but smeared with the fat of the hog or the cow, the one hateful to the Muhammadans, the other the sacred animal of the Hindus, they recognised that they had found a weapon potent enough to rouse to action the armed men of the races which professed those religions. What could be easier than to persuade the sipáhís that the greasing of the new cartridges was a well-thought-out scheme to deprive the Hindu of his caste, to degrade the Muhammadan?
If the minds of the sipáhís had not been excited and rendered suspicious of their foreign masters by the occurrences to which I have adverted, the tale told by the conspirators would have failed to affect them. For, after all, they, up to January 1857, had had no experience of the greased cartridges. A new musket had been partially issued, and a certain number of sipáhís from each regiment at Barrackpur were being instructed in its use at Dam-Dam. But up to that period no greased cartridges had been issued. The secret of their preparation was, however, disclosed in January, by a lascar employed in their manufacture to a sipáhí, and the story, once set rolling, spread with indescribable celerity. In the olden days, the days before the confidence between the sipáhí and his officer had been broken, the sipáhí would at once have asked his officer the reason for the change. But, in 1857, they sullenly accepted the story. They had been told that the object of their foreign masters was to make them all Christians. The first step in the course to Christianity was to deprive them of their caste, This end could be accomplished insidiously by the defilement to be produced by biting the greased cartridge. Existence without a religion was in their minds intolerable. Deprived of their own, having become outcasts by their own act, they must, in despair, accept the religion of their masters.
That such was the reasoning which influenced them subsequent events fully proved. In the times of the earlier invasions of India by the Muhammadan princes who preceded the Mughals the conqueror had employed compulsion and persecution as the one mode of converting the Hindus. The sipáhís, alarmed and suspicious, could conceive no other. It was in vain that, in the earlier stages of the Mutiny, General Hearsey, an accomplished linguist, addressing the sipáhís in their own language, told them that such ways were essentially foreign to the Christian's conception of Christianity; that the Christian's religion was the religion of the Book; and that conversion could only be founded on the conviction of the mind. They heard, but heeded not. What was this argument but a wile to entrap them? The conspirators had done their work too well. Before the hot season of 1857 had set in there were but few sipáhís in the Bengal Presidency who were not firmly convinced that the greased cartridge was the weapon by means of which their foreign masters had resolved to deprive them of their religion. No sooner had it become certain that this idea had taken a firm root in their minds than chapatis passed from village to village in the rural districts of the North-west Provinces, announcing to the population that grave events were impending for which it became them to be prepared.