‘ Na Iran ne kiaya, na Shah Russ ne, Angrez ko tabah kiya kartoosh ne [“The mighty English who boast of having vanquished Russia and Persia, have been overthrown in Hindustan by a single cartridge”],’ wrote the octogenarian King of Delhi at the height of the mutiny.
Historians have tended to agree. Generations of British schoolchildren have been taught that the mutiny came about because the Indian troops of the Bengal Army refused to bite cartridges greased with cow and pig fat: the former unacceptable to Hindu soldiers and the latter abhorrent to Muslims. But were the prime motives for mutiny really the preservation of caste and religion, or were grievances particular to the Bengal Army more to blame? Did the sepoys act of their own volition, or was there an element of manipulation both inside and outside the military?
In 1857 the biggest single element of the Bengal Army was its seventy-four regiments of regular native infantry.* This branch was also the most homogeneous in terms of its recruits’ ethnic and provincial origin, and therefore the most liable to general mutiny. So it proved in 1857 when fifty-four of the seventy-four regiments mutinied or partially mutinied. Most of the rest were either disarmed or disbanded. Just three regiments were considered loyal enough to retain their arms (and one of those was composed of Gurkhas). The Bombay Army, by contrast, experienced partial mutinies in only three out of twenty-nine native infantry regiments; the Madras Army had no mutinies, though elements of one of its fifty-two regiments of native infantry – the 36th – refused to volunteer for service in Bengal in August 1857.
One of the reasons why mutiny was largely confined to the Bengal Army was because of its unique pattern of recruitment. The first companies of sepoys under British command were raised in the Madras Presidency by Major Stringer Lawrence in 1748. But Bengal saw the formation of the first Indian battalion – the famous Lal Paltan, or ‘Red Regiment’, from the colour of the sepoys’ coats – by Robert Clive at Calcutta in January 1757. Its recruits were chosen from the agricultural classes of India because Company officials had already decided that, as in Britain, they would make the best soldiers.
After Clive’s victory at Plassey had established British supremacy in the province, the Company began to recruit from the rural areas of Bengal, particularly around Burhanpur and Dinapore. But not enough recruits of the requisite size were available, causing the recruitment base to be extended westward to the wheat-growing areas of north India. These new infantrymen were clothed by the Company, armed with firelocks rather than matchlocks, commanded by European officers and ‘drilled and disciplined according to the methods first tried out in the South in the decades preceding Plassey’. They came to be known by the old name of purbia and were simply ‘new incarnations of the same old soldiering tradition of Hindustan’ in which Rajputs and pseudo-Rajputs from Purab – a term that describes the Oudh, Bihar and Benares region – had travelled far and wide to find employers. Most of these new recruits from outside Bengal were high-caste Hindu peasants: Rajputs, the traditional warrior caste of northern India; or Bhumimars, the military wing of the priestly caste of Brahmans; or Brahmans themselves. This reliance on high-caste recruits was partly because they were the most physically imposing, partly because the Company assumed that these ‘traditional high-caste warriors’ would prove to be the most loyal, and partly because Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General (1774–85), believed that the high-caste overtones of the army ‘provided the requisite legitimacy to Company rule’.
According to the sacred Shastras, Hindu society is divided into four pre-ordained and mutually exclusive varna or classes: Brahman (priest), Kshatriya (warrior), Vaishya (farmer and merchant) and Shudra (serf). To marry, take food from or mix with a person from a lower varna is to become ritually polluted. The Mleccha (Untouchables) are outside the system and traditionally performed degrading tasks like sweeping and working with leather. Christians and Muslims, by the same token, are also ritually unclean. The caste system developed gradually as Brahmans sought to divide the invading Aryans and the indigenous population into a large number of distinctive groups, or jati, based loosely on region and occupation, and each internally bound by rules concerning diet and marriage. Castes were regulated by local committees of senior members who could formulate rules and judge those who infringed them. The ultimate sanction was expulson: a person who was ritually polluted would lose his place both in the cosmic order (his varna) and in society (his caste). Castes, however, were not immutable: new castes appeared, rules changed and membership was not necessarily exclusive. One British commentator, writing in the early nineteenth century, observed that Bhumihars (or military Brahmans), like Rajputs, were ‘not scrupulous in admitting into their number whatever tribes adopted their manners’. This was mainly because Indian civil society did not begin to take caste distinctions seriously until the nineteenth century. ‘The boundaries between individual orders or classes was still open and ambiguous in the early decades of British expansion; the language of caste or castelike relationships still allowed for the great man who could reshape or disregard conventional marriage rules or dietary codes.’ As the nineteenth century progressed, caste distinctions became increasingly important to those well-born Indians who were fighting to preserve their economic and social status – in particular, to the self-same impoverished gentry that Stokes identified as the dominant force in the Bengal Army. Enhanced caste status was a means of compensating for their increasingly humble standard of living. But because this Rajput and Brahman preoccupation with caste was a relatively recent phenomenon, caste rules were never as rigid as they might have appeared.
The same could be said about caste consciousness in the Bengal Army. According to the Shastras, the role of warrior was confined to the Kshatriya class. From the earliest times, however, the Hindu armies of India were composed of men from different varna. The Rajputs of western India, whose name was later synonymous with Kshatriya, were descendants of non-Aryan invaders. Brahmans turned to soldiering because there was not enough employment for priests. At no time in Indian history was there a caste barrier to men serving as soldiers. All this was to change in the late eighteenth century, as Warren Hastings and his successors strove towards the creation of a high-caste monopoly in the Bengal Army.
As Seema Alavi, a scholar of the Indian military labour market, has noted, ‘by providing a forum for sorting out the social tensions hinging around the ritual purity of the rural high caste, the army formalized these tensions and made them more obvious and rigid’. But for the Bengal Army’s recruitment policy, she added, ‘the evolution of high-caste status in rural north India would have progressed differently’. Part of the process of achieving this high-caste monopoly was the promotion of the sepoys’ religious, dietary and travel preferences. In 1779, during the First Maratha War, Hastings sent reinforcements from Bengal to Bombay by the slower overland route because he knew that a sea crossing would offend the religious feelings of the high-caste sepoys (who would, in theory, lose their caste if they travelled over the ‘black water’). By the early nineteenth century a complex set of rules governed the Bengal sepoys’ diet, manner of preparation and mode of eating. According to Alavi, the sepoys began to eat food ‘which had previously been associated exclusively with high caste and ritual purity’. They were therefore able ‘to mark out their high-caste status much more effectively than would have been possible in their own villages’. In a sense, the Company was promoting the ‘sanskritization of the military’.
The initial method of recruitment was for the commanding officer of a battalion to enlist from the area in which his regiment was stationed. Occasionally recruiting parties were sent out to neighbouring areas when sufficient recruits were not available. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century the preferred method was to encourage sepoys on furlough to bring recruits from their own villages. This was because the serving sepoy ‘acted as the guarantor of the respectable antecedents and future loyalty’ of the new recruit. One such recruit was Sitaram Pandy, a high-caste Brahman from the Rai Bareilly district of southern Oudh. The son of a small landholder, he was persuaded to join up in 1812 by his maternal uncle who was a jemadar on leave from his battalion of Bengal infantry. Sitaram recalled:
My uncle was a very handsome man, and of great personal strength. He used of an evening to sit on the seat before our house, and relate the wonders of the world he had seen, and the prosperity of the great Company Bahadur he served… Nothing else could I think of, day or night. The rank of Jemadar I looked on as quite equal to that of Ghazidin Hydar, the King of Oudh himself… He had such a splendid necklace of gold beads,* and a curious bright red coat, covered with gold buttons; and, above all, he appeared to have an unlimited supply of gold mohurs…My uncle had observed how attentive I was to all his stories… he repeatedly told me privately that if I wished to be a soldier, he would take me back with him on his return to the regiment.
In 1815, so tight was the stranglehold that high-caste Hindus enjoyed over recruitment to the Bengal infantry that they made up almost four fifths of one newly raised battalion. Yet by 1842, the high-caste proportion of the Bengal Native Infantry as a whole had fallen to around two thirds. This reduction was largely the result of the ‘General Order’, issued by Lord William Bentinck in 1834, which removed all official objection to the recruitment of ‘men belonging to the respectable classes of the native community’ (including both ashraf Muslims and ‘middling’ Hindu castes such as Ahirs, Bhats, Kaits and Kumbis). Bentinck and his advisers had come to the conclusion that the tendency of Brahmans and Rajputs to put caste issues before duty was a serious threat to military discipline. The General Order was issued to widen the recruitment base.
Further inroads were made into the high-caste monopoly as a result of the two Sikh wars of the 1840s. After the successful conclusion of the first war, two local regiments of Sikh infantry – the Ferozepore and Ludhiana – were raised to protect the new frontier with the Punjab. The famous Corps of Guides was also formed in 1846 to assist the Sikh rulers of the Punjab in policing the turbulent North-West Frontier with Afghanistan. Following the Second Sikh War (1848–9) and the annexation of the Punjab, five regiments of irregular infantry and five of cavalry were enlisted in the province to pacify and protect the frontier. They were composed of roughly equal proportions of Pathans, Punjabi Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus.
The necessity for an alternative instrument of authority was made clear in 1849 when a number of Bengal infantry regiments reacted angrily to the withdrawal of foreign service batta* in the Punjab. Sir Charles Napier, the Commander-in-Chief, believed that as many as twenty-four regiments (a third of the total) were tainted with a ‘mutinous spirit’. His response was to enhance the status of the three irregular Gurkha battalions – the Nasiri, Sirmur and Kemaon that had been raised in the wake of the First Nepal War of 1814–15 – by paying and equipping them as regulars. He also disbanded the most mutinous regiment of native infantry – the 66th – and replaced it with the Nasiri Battalion, henceforth known as the 66th (Gurkha) Native Infantry. ‘I resolved to show these Brahmins that they cannot control our enlistment,’ he informed Lord Dalhousie on 27 February 1850. There was one other significant change in the Bengal Army’s recruitment policy before Napier’s departure in December 1850: Sikhs and Punjabi Muslims were made eligible for service in regular infantry regiments, though their total number in any one regiment was ‘never to exceed 200, nor are more than 100 of them to be Seikhs’.
The high-caste monopoly was to receive a further blow in the summer of 1856 when the new Governor-General, Lord Canning, ordered that all enlistment to the armies of the East India Company would henceforth be for general service. Hitherto it had been the practice in Bengal to ask for volunteers when troops were needed for service beyond the sea, in deference to its Brahman and Rajput sepoys. As a result, only the Bengal Artillery and six of the seventy-four regiments of Bengal Native Infantry had been recruited for general service. Now all new recruits would be taken on that basis.
The ‘General Service Enlistment Order’ has often been cited as a major cause of mutiny. But Lord Canning did not believe that the new regulation was in any way responsible for the disaffection shown by certain Bengal regiments in early 1857. ‘Not a murmur has been heard against it anywhere,’ he informed Robert Vernon Smith, the President of the Board of Control, ‘and the two regiments who have shown the worst spirit, the 2nd and 34th, have enrolled as many recruits monthly under the new system as the old & without any signs of difference between the old sepoys & their new comrades.’ Sir Henry Lawrence was of a different opinion. ‘The General Service Enlistment Oath is most distasteful,’ he told Canning on 1 May 1857, ‘keeps many out of the service, and frightens the old [sepoys], who imagine that the oaths of the young recruits affect the whole regiment.’
If the General Service regulation is seen in the context of the previous twenty years, when successive governments had sought to broaden the recruitment base of the Bengal Army, then it is possible to understand why, in Kaye’s words, it caused ‘the old race of [sepoys]’ to leap to the conclusion ‘that the English had done with the old Bengal Army, and were about to substitute for it another that would go anywhere and do anything, like coolies and pariahs’. Canning may have insisted that the new legislation had not affected the recruitment pattern of the 34th Native Infantry, but the writing was clearly on the wall. On 21 April 1857, shortly before its disbandment for mutinous conduct, the proportion of high-caste sepoys in the 34th Regiment was just 52.6 per cent. There are no figures available for the Bengal Native Infantry as a whole in 1857; but of those 22,000 or so Bengal sepoys who had not mutinied, deserted or been disbanded by April 1858, around 57 per cent were high caste.
A typical early-nineteenth-century Bengal sepoy has been described as follows: ‘He was a Hindu of high caste, a resident of Bihar and Oudh regions and had Hindustani as his mother tongue. He was a person of good physique and… hailed from the peasantry and a station which possessed a social heritage. In fact, as like as not, he was of the landed gentry and did not seek escape in the ranks; rather by enlistment he gained status in his society to which he continued to retain his allegiance.’ Yet by the outbreak of mutiny, these ‘representative’ high-caste sepoys were barely in a majority. In 1858 a senior officer testified that the Bengal Native Infantry ‘was composed of Mahommedans, Brahmins… [Rajputs], Gwallahs, Kaits, Aheers, Jats, and that some few low caste men… had crept into corps’. They hailed, he said, from Oudh, North and South Bihar, the Doab of the Ganges and Jumna, Rohilkhand, ‘a few’ from Bundelkhand and ‘a proportion’ from the Punjab. Some historians have suggested that mutiny was a means of reversing this trend.
Once in the army, these peasant soldiers were relatively insulated from civilian life. They sent and received letters and went on leave once a year. For the rest of the time they ‘lived in cantonments, mostly situated at some distance from the towns and usually alongside the civil lines where the British officers lived’. Lord Elphinstone, the Governor of Bombay (1853–60), was convinced that the mutiny came about because the Bengal sepoys were more influenced by their intra-regimental brotherhood than by their family ties. The ‘influence of the family and the village’, he wrote, was ‘wholly wanting’ in the regiment of a high-caste Bengal sepoy. On the other hand, ‘any attack real or fancied upon the susceptibilities of one regiment was thus felt by the whole, and when one mutinied, the rest followed’.
As far as the other arms of the Bengal Army were concerned, the Company’s recruitment policy was much less provocative. By 1857 the ten regiments of Bengal Light Cavalry were also dominated by high-caste Hindus. If anything, their proportion seems to have increased in the decades prior to the mutiny. But despite being more secure as a group, they would naturally have sympathized with their high-caste kinsmen in the infantry. This might explain why the majority of Bengal cavalry regiments were so willing to follow the lead taken by mutinous sepoys in 1857.
The members of the eighteen regiments of Bengal Irregular Cavalry, however, were overwhelmingly Muslims from the Delhi region and Rohilkhand (and always had been). This lack of kinship with the Bengal sepoys is probably one of the reasons why only ten irregular cavalry regiments mutinied or partially mutinied in 1857 (the lowest proportion of the three native arms of Bengal infantry and cavalry), why three regiments retained their weapons and fought on the side of the British, and why eight regiments were later considered loyal enough to be incorporated into the post-mutiny Bengal Army.
Muslims were also the largest single ethnic group in the Bengal Artillery, but they were not in an absolute majority. Their proportion was just over two fifths, with Hindus of inferior caste and high-caste Hindus sharing the remaining 57 per cent. With such a mixed level of recruitment, it is perhaps logical that artillerymen rarely took the initiative in the mutinies of 1857. Of the nine out of eighteen companies of foot artillery and two out of five troops of horse artillery that mutinied or deserted, only one unit – the 6/8th Foot Artillery – actually took an active part in the plotting. Most of the others were coerced to join the rebels by mutinous sepoys. None is credited with having murdered its European officers, and many actually helped them to escape.
The Madras Army – the next biggest with 51,000 Indian troops – had few ethnic ties to its Bengal counterpart. The Bombay Army – the smallest with 45,000 troops – was a mixture of the two in that a significant proportion of its men was recruited from the same classes and areas that supplied the Bengal Army. Yet only six of its twenty-nine native infantry regiments gave any cause for anxiety during the mutiny. This was chiefly because the Bombay Army was more disciplined, more meritocratic and less inclined to pander to caste than its Bengal counterpart.
All armies have grievances relating to conditions of service, particularly pay, promotion and relations with officers. What sets a colonial force like the Bengal Army apart is that it was a volunteer mercenary force officered by men of a different race and religion. Its loyalty to its paymasters, therefore, was entirely dependent upon the incentives for service outweighing the disincentives. By 1857 this was no longer the case: mainly because the number and seriousness of the sepoys’ grievances were increasing, while the Bengal Army’s control over its soldiers was weakening.
Of particular irritation to sepoys in all three presidency armies were their European-style uniforms and equipment. In place of his baggy native dress, a sepoy had to wear a tight red coatee and close-fitting dark blue trousers (white in summer). On his head he wore a shako dress cap that weighed from two and a half to three pounds with its brass rim, scales and badge, ‘a heavy unwieldy thing, more like an inverted fire-bucket’. Sitaram Pandy, who joined a Bengal regiment in 1812, recalled: ‘At first I found it very disagreeable wearing the red coat; although this was open in front, it was very tight under the arms. The Shako was very heavy and hurt my head, but of course it was very smart. I grew accustomed to this after a time, but I always found it a great relief when I could wear my own loose dress.’ Describing other elements of a sepoy’s equipment, one Madras officer wrote:
On his back is slung a great knapsack, fastened to his body by means of leather-straps going round his shoulders and his chest, tight enough to cut him in two… Across his chest he has two broad belts, held together by a brass plate passing on either side of him. To one of these is fastened his bayonet, and to the other his pouch or [cartridge-box], large enough to contain some sixty rounds of ball ammunition, the whole sufficent to break a poor man’s back. Round his waist passes another belt, intended to keep the others together, but tight enough to cut his very intestines out of him.
Upon his feet the sepoy wore ‘a pair of clumsy things called sandals’, while constricting his neck was a stiff black leather stock. But most irksome of all was his unwieldy musket known as the ‘Brown Bess’, weighing more than ten pounds and with an effective range of 300 yards, though only accurate up to 100. Sitaram found his musket ‘very heavy, and for a long time my shoulder ached when carrying it’. The Madras officer noted that it was ‘heavy enough for a roast-beef-fed Englishman to carry, but too much for the delicately-formed light body and slender limbs of the sepoy lad’. Though Bengal sepoys were generally bigger than their southern counterparts, they still struggled to carry and fire this large weapon.*
There were many calls for the reform of the Indian soldiers’ dress and equipment in the years prior to the mutiny. Ironically, though, the only pre-1857 reform of dress or equipment was the replacement of the sepoys’ smooth-bore muskets with the lighter Enfield rifle (8 lb 14 oz) whose greased cartridge was the ostensible cause of mutiny.
Indian troops, particularly Bengal sepoys, also griped about the nature of their peacetime duties: these included a morning parade for cleaning arms and accoutrements, an evening parade for orders, guard duties, a brigade exercise once a week and regimental exercises four times a week. The situation became particularly acute during the first half of the nineteenth century because ‘campaigns were waged at less and less frequent intervals and the native soldiery was restricted to duties which it considered to be monotonous and tiring’. For while annexations reduced the chances of active service, they increased the need for policing new areas. Such duties – which included escorting treasure and guarding prisoners – were increasingly undertaken by sepoys.
Poor housing was another cause of soldier dissatisfaction. When a Bengal sepoy arrived at a new station, he had to buy or build for himself a hut on a plot of land 30 feet by 10 feet. Each infantry regiment contained ten lines of such huts, one per company, with a street between each. The huts belonging to sepoys and NCOs were about 10 feet long, 8 feet wide and 7 feet high, with mud walls, thatched roofs and a small enclosed front yard; native officers had two or three huts around a tiny courtyard, fenced in by a low mud wall. Unlike their comrades in the Madras and Bombay Armies, who had their families with them, the Bengal sepoys lived alone with minimal possessions: usually a charpoy, dhurrie and a few cooking pots.
There was much criticism of this system of housing. The Times described the huts as ‘relics of barbarism’, adding that they were crowded, leaked in the rainy season (July to September) and were sited on land that was often swampy because of the lack of subsoil drainage. Florence Nightingale, while criticizing the poor state of European barracks in India, commented: ‘But all these conditions paled before what was endured by native troops. The native troops had no barracks, no lavatories, no baths, no kitchens, no sanitary supervision of any kind. They used the ground round them as privies without hindrance and left cleansing to the rains. The squalor of their huts was indescribable, bodies of animals and of human beings were left unburied for days; the water they drank was stinking. Consequently, though temperate, the Bengal native soldiers were decimated by disease.’
An even more serious grievance was low pay. There was a strong financial incentive to serve the East India Company in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because it offered regular pay, pensions and other economic benefits like foreign service batta – perks largely unheard of in the armies of Indian states. Yet the basic pay for ordinary sepoys – 7 rupees, or 14 shillings, a month – was the same in 1857 as it had been at the turn of the century (and would remain so until it was raised to 9 rupees in 1895). Given that the cost of living in the form of grain prices ‘nearly doubled between 1796 and 1852’ – with the wages of civilian workers such as ploughmen and agricultural labourers rising proportionately – the sepoy’s pay fell in real terms by almost 50 per cent during the first half of the nineteenth century.
By contrast, the domestic servants of European officers could earn between 4 and 20 rupees a month, field labourers between 2 and 6 rupees, carpenters between 5 and 10 rupees and blacksmiths between 5 and 20 rupees. A private in one of the East India Company’s European regiments, meanwhile, received a basic 10 rupees, 3 annas and 2 pice a month (with supplements for long service and duty beyond a certain distance from the presidency capital), while a private in the British Army was paid a shilling a day – or roughly 15 rupees a month – with an extra penny a day for every five years of good conduct.
The relative decline of pay for Indian troops was partially offset by the introduction, in 1837, of long-service pay, which increased a sepoy’s monthly wage by 1 rupee after sixteen years’ service and 2 rupees after twenty. It was, however, dependent upon good service and would be forfeited by those who had been convicted by a court martial ‘of some serious offence’ or whose names had been twice entered in the regimental defaulter book during the two years prior to qualification. Furthermore it was a flat rate that took no account of rank.
New pension regulations were also introduced in 1837. They reduced the number of years that a sepoy had to serve to qualify for a pension from twenty to fifteen, and increased the basic rate from 3 rupees a month to 4. The minimum higher rate of 7 rupees a month – which applied to those sepoys who had served forty years, those disabled by wounds and the families of those killed in action – was unaltered. Both lower and higher rates of pension were on a sliding scale depending on rank: a subedar or subedar-major, for example, still received 25 rupees after fifteen years’ service and 40 rupees a month after forty years. To qualify for either rate of pension, moreover, an Indian soldier had to be pronounced unfit for duty by a board of surgeons – which was easier said than done. ‘There is,’ wrote the Judge Advocate-General of the Bengal Army in 1857, ‘no chance whatever’ of a Bengal soldier ‘being granted a pension as long as he can put one foot before another.’
In short, Bengal sepoys found it hard to make ends meet. They were charged for a number of items of dress and equipment, including three undress tunics, three pairs of white linen trousers, one pair of coloured trousers, one set of beads, one knapsack and one greatcoat. As of 1828, they were given a jacket and a pair of woollen pantaloons every two years free of charge, while deductions for the other items were not to exceed 5 rupees per annum. But they often did. And there were other expenses, such as paying for the services of a washerman, barber and sweeper, and defraying the cost of transporting their baggage when on the march (a sum that generally came to more than the marching batta of 1½ rupees a month).
Above all, sepoys had to pay for their own food. The diet of high-caste Hindu soldiers was strictly vegetarian: atta, rice, dal, ghee, salt, sugar and some vegetables. They were not supposed to consume fish, meat, pulao, curry or alcohol. Tubular vegetables like potatoes, aubergines, radishes, leeks and onions were also avoided. To maintain their ritual purity the high-caste sepoys cooked their own food, ate alone and even spread cow-dung on their place of repast – as laid down in the Shastras. The type of food available at the permanent station bazaars and temporary camp bazaars mirrored these preferences, as did the rations provided by government for overseas expeditions. The problem was not availability but cost: it has been estimated that Bengal sepoys spent between 3 and 5 rupees a month on food alone. Those who sent the most money back to their families – often as much as three quarters of their total pay – were forced to live on less. As a result, even lower-caste Hindu and Muslim sepoys could rarely afford to eat anything other than chapattis and cooked dal. If they ate curry, it was usually made from the cheapest vegetable. Was it any wonder, asked one authority, that the Bengal sepoy ‘found himself in straitened circumstances, lived on the cheapest kind of food, and at times even starved so as to fulfil his various social obligations’.
Of the other regular Bengal troops, only the cavalry and the horse artillery received more pay than the infantry, with a trooper receiving a basic 9 rupees a month. Irregular cavalrymen were paid 20 rupees a month, but they had to pay for and maintain their own horses and equipment. In an essay published in 1844, Henry Lawrence pointed out that Bengal irregulars were mostly well-born Muslims with ‘expensive habits’. He added:
Every man… had not only to purchase his horse and equipments, but to pay one hundred and fifty rupees or thereabouts to the estate or family of the man whose decease or invaliding caused the vacancy. Such donation of course throws the recruit at once into the moneylender’s hands, and often leaves him for life a debtor. If the man… has not the cash to purchase a horse, he rides one belonging to a Native officer or to some privileged person, and becomes what is called a bargeer – the soldier receiving only seven or eight rupees a month, and the owner of the horse the balance of the twenty.
Lawrence suggested redeeming all debts and only admitting those recruits who could bring their own horse. Other experienced officers – like John Jacob, Sir Charles Napier and Lord Gough, Commander-in-Chief of India from 1843 to 1849 – recommended a pay increase of at least 5 rupees a month. Yet nothing was done, and the irregular regiments continued to accumulate debts. The 10th Irregular Cavalry, for example, ‘owed nearly £10,000’ to its regimental banker by 1857. The irregular sowars, therefore, had a very strong financial incentive to mutiny that, in certain instances in 1857, may have overriden the fact that only a small proportion of them had ethnic links to the mutinous native infantry.
The reduction in the real value of pay suffered by all Indian troops in the decades prior to the mutiny was partially offset by successful military campaigns and the accumulation of war booty. Plunder had long been a welcome supplement to the ordinary pay of Indian mercenaries; the East India Company had even legitimized the practice in the form of prize money. But by the 1850s the internal conquest of India was complete and the occasional action against the tribes of the Sonthal and North-West Frontier did not provide the same opportunity to loot as a conventional campaign. Henceforth the only way for native troops to augment their diminishing pay was to serve in wars outside India. Under the circumstances, an uprising against their colonial masters – and a return to the traditional cycle of war – would have appealed to many.
But money was not the only advantage to be gained from a successful rebellion. Power and prestige were also on offer: incentives that were virtually non-existent for the East India Company’s Indian troops. Even the most senior Indian officer was subordinate to a junior European officer, nor could he give orders to a European NCO. Writing in the Calcutta Review in 1844, Henry Lawrence pointed out the danger of this situation ‘in a land… that above all others, has been accustomed to see military merits rewarded, and to witness the successive rise of families from the lowest conditions’. The army of the East India Company, he added, ‘offered no inducement to superior intellects, or more stirring spirits’ who left in disgust. There were, as a result, many men like General Dhokul Singh, who had been a drill naik in the Bengal Army before transferring to the Sikh Army. While nine out of ten were no doubt satisfied with the possibility of reaching the rank of subedar-major by the age of sixty, noted Lawrence, it was for the tenth – ‘the bold and daring spirit that disdains to live for ever in subordinate place’ – that a greater stimulus was necessary. Lawrence recommended that Indian soldiers be given command of irregular regiments, grants of land and pensions to the second and third generations. Sir Charles Napier agreed. To allow a veteran subedar to ‘be commanded by a fair-faced beardless Ensign, just arrived from England’, he wrote, was the ‘imposition of conquerors’ and ‘one which the Native gentlemen feel deeply and silently resent’. Equality between natives and Europeans was being ceded in the civil service, he added, ‘so it must be for the military’.
Yet no reforms had been instituted by the time Lawrence wrote to Canning on 2 May 1857, warning him that ‘until we treat Natives, and especially Native soldiers, as having much the same feelings, the same ambition, the same perception of ability and imbecility as ourselves, we shall never be safe’. The accuracy of Lawrence’s prediction was proved during the coming months: in the majority of mutinous regiments, the Indian officers were either behind the plot to rise or they quickly assumed control once their European counterparts had been driven off or killed. Some commanded rebel brigades and even armies. For a short time, at least, the frustrated ambitions of these experienced soldiers were realized.*
The inadequacy of career prospects for Indian soldiers was particularly acute in the Bengal Army because its system of promotion was based upon length of service rather than merit. In Bombay and Madras the opposite was true: recruits to the two smaller presidency armies could become junior officers (jemadars) in under fifteen years, whereas Bengal troops took twice as long to attain that rank. Few Bengal jemadars were under fifty, while most subedars were over sixty. Sitaram Pandy, for example, served forty-eight years of ‘hard wear and tear’ in the Bengal Native Infantry before being promoted to subedar. ‘I was an old man of sixty-five years of age,’ he recalled, ‘and had attained the highest rank to be gained in the Native Army, but I would have been much better fitted for this position thirty years earlier.’ The subedar-major of the 7th Bengal Light Cavalry, which partially mutinied at Lucknow on 31 May 1857, was seventy years old. Three years earlier John Jacob had warned that the unavoidable outcome of promotion by seniority was the ‘ultimate ruin of the army’ because it failed to reward ‘talent, skill, energy, high principle, and soldierlike pride’.
The seniority system of promotion had three potentially disastrous consequences: it deprived the commanding officer of an important power to reward, thereby reducing his authority over his men; it frustrated ambitious and talented sepoys who had to wait in line for promotion; and it produced old, inefficient and often bitter Indian officers who had no worthwhile occupation. These last two groups may hold the key to the mutiny. Lawrence believed that, on average, three out of every hundred sepoys were ‘dangerously discontented’ in 1856 because they felt ‘they have that in them which elsewhere would raise them to distinction.’ It is highly probable that such men were the instigators of the mutinies in 1857, and that they used the religious and caste implications of the cartridge question to persuade the rank and file to join them in rebellion.
Yet the vast majority of rebel regiments were led by their old Indian officers. The implications are twofold: first, that the mutinous regiments retained their cohesiveness and former command structure, and that they did so because their rebellion was simply an attempt to find an employer who could offer them more attractive incentives to serve; second, that a significant number of Indian officers were so alienated by service under the British that they were prepared to put both their lives and their future pensions at risk. Twelve years before the mutiny Sir Henry Hardinge applauded the Bengal policy of ‘preferring inefficiency & seniority, to activity and selection’ because aged and inactive Indian officers were less likely to lead an armed insurrection than their younger and more zealous counterparts. He could not have been more wrong.