Where the British Army led, its Indian counterpart followed. So in 1840, a year after British troops had switched from flintlock to percussion small-arms, the soldiers of the East India Company did the same.* Over the next decade or so nearly 460,000 percussion muskets, carbines and pistols were dispatched to India. The procurement of these smooth-bore guns ceased in 1851, however, when the British government decided to replace its percussion musket with the revolutionary Minié rifle.
Rifles had been used by British and Company troops for skirmishing and sniping since the turn of the century. But their accuracy had been more than offset by a slow rate of fire, a seemingly inevitable consequence of the need for the ball or bullet to have a loose fit during loading and a tight fit in the rifling grooves when fired. This conundrum was solved in the 1840s by two French officers – Delvigne and Minié – who developed an elongated bullet with a hollow base that expanded on ignition. As it was Minié who had perfected the design, it became known by his name alone. Yet the Minié rifle was never generally issued to the British Army because its ·702 bore was considered too large; the Enfield rifle, modelled along similar lines but with a ·577 bore, was selected instead.
In 1854 the East India Company was promised 30,000 new Enfields by the British government. But supply problems and the outbreak of the Crimean War prevented the first batch of 1,500 rifles from reaching the Bengal Presidency until the spring of 1856. Earmarked for Bengal troops, they were eventually assigned to a British regiment, the 60th Rifles, on the grounds that their existing weapons were ‘unserviceable and should be replaced immediately’. A total of 12,000 Enfields had arrived in Bengal by the outbreak of mutiny in May 1857. But only one regiment, the 60th, had been issued with them; the rest were in magazines and musketry depots.
It was not the rifles themselves but their bullets that were to prove so controversial. Cartridges for most muzzle-loading firearms of the period took the form of a tube of paper that contained a ball and enough powder for a single shot. The approved method of loading was to bite the top off the cartridge and then pour the powder down the barrel. The rest of the cartridge, including the ball, was then forced down the barrel with a ramrod. This type of ammunition was used by both the existing percussion musket and the Enfield rifle. The crucial difference between the two was that the Enfield’s grooved bore required the bottom two thirds of its cartridge to be greased to facilitate loading.
In 1853, when the first Enfield cartridges were sent to India to test their reaction to the climate, General Sir William Gomm, the Commander-in-Chief of India (1850–56), had warned that ‘unless it be known that the grease employed in these cartridges is not of a nature to offend or interfere with the prejudices of caste, it will be expedient not to issue them for test to Native corps’. But the Military Board chose to ignore Gomm’s counsel, and the ammunition was tested over a period of some months by being carried in the pouches of sepoy guards at various garrisons. No objection to these cartridges was raised by either the sepoys themselves or the committees of European officers set up to report on them. The tests confirmed that the grease could stand up to the Indian climate, and the consignment was returned to England in 1855. A year later, following hard on the heels of the first batch of Enfield rifles, was a shipment of greased cartridges and bullet moulds. Thereafter the Bengal Army’s Ordnance Department began to manufacture its own cartridges at its Fort William, Meerut and Dum-Dum arsenals. The grease used for the rifle patch – a mixture of wax and oil – was discounted because its lubricating properties disappeared when cartridges were bundled. Instead the same combination preferred by the Royal Woolwich Arsenal – five parts tallow, five parts stearine (purified fatty acids) and one part wax – was used. But the department made the fatal, and unforgivable, error of not specifying what type of tallow was to be used.
In early January 1857 Bengal Native Infantry regiments were ordered to send detachments to one of three musketry depots – Dum-Dum near Calcutta, Ambala in the Cis-Sutlej and Sialkot in the Punjab – for instruction in the care and handling of the new weapon. Not a cartridge had been issued or a practice shot fired by the time a rumour began to circulate among the sepoys at the Dum-Dum depot that the grease was offensive to both Hindus and Muslims, and that this was part of a systematic plot by government to convert all Indians to Christianity. The origin of the rumour was a conversation on 22 January between a Brahman sepoy and a low-caste khalasi who worked in the Dum-Dum magazine. The khalasi is said to have asked the sepoy if he could have a drink from his lota. The sepoy refused: ‘I have scoured my lota, you will defile it by your touch.’ ‘You think much of your caste,’ replied the khalasi, ‘but wait a little, the Sahib-logue will make you bite cartridges soaked in cow and pork fat, and then where will your caste be?’
A report of the incident was submitted to the station commander on 23 January. It included details of a parade held the evening before at which two thirds of the Indian troops at the depot, including all the Indian officers, had stated their objection to the grease and requested wax and oil to be used instead. Both documents were then forwarded to Major-General John Hearsey, commanding the Presidency Division, whose headquarters were at Barrackpore, 16 miles north of Calcutta. ‘There could hardly, in such a crisis, have been a better man in command,’ wrote Kaye. Hearsey was very much an old-style Indian officer: he had two Eurasian sons by his first wife, Harriet – the daughter of his own Eurasian half-brother and a native lady – and spoke fluent Hindustani; he also had a well-deserved reputation for gallantry and tact, having quelled, almost single-handedly, a mutinous regiment at Wazirabad in 1849. Despite his age, sixty-four, he was still remarkably active and saw at once the potential consequences of the grease rumour. The khalasi’s claim was ‘no doubt totally groundless’, he told his superiors, but so ‘suspiciously disposed’ were the sepoys that the only remedy was to allow them to grease the cartridges themselves with materials from the bazaar.
The Indian government, ever sensitive to issues of religion and caste, was swift to concur: on 27 January Colonel Richard Birch, the Military Secretary, ordered that all cartridges at the depots of instruction were to be issued free from grease and that the sepoys were to be allowed ‘to apply, with their own hands, whatever mixture for the purpose they may prefer’. At the same time Colonel Augustus Abbott, the Inspector-General of Ordnance, made inquiries as to the exact composition of the cartridge grease. On 29 January he reported to Birch that, in line with the instructions received from the Court of Directors, ‘a mixture of tallow and bees’ wax’ had been used and that ‘no extraordinary precaution’ appeared to have been taken to ensure ‘the absence of any objectionable fat’. In a separate letter that day Abbott informed Birch that strict orders would be given for the exclusive use of sheep or goat fat if it was decided that some form of tallow was necessary.
While it has never been confirmed that the cartridge grease contained beef or pork fat, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. In a letter of 7 February Canning himself stated that the grease grievance had ‘turned out to be well founded’. In March the officer in charge of the Fort William arsenal testified that no one had bothered to check what type of animal fat was used. At the same tribunal Abbott admitted that the tallow may well ‘have contained the fat of cows or other animals’. At this stage, therefore, the Dum-Dum sepoys appear to have had a genuine grievance – though not one of them had been, or ever would be, issued with a greased cartridge. Moreover, no greased cartridges were ever made at the Dum-Dum magazine – its operatives were still learning the complicated process of manufacture when the rumour began – nor were any greased cartridges ever sent from Fort William to the Dum-Dum depot. Which raises the question: how did the Dum-Dum khalasi discover the ‘truth’ about the cartridge grease in the first place?
The government, meanwhile, had moved swiftly to correct its earlier error. But no sooner had it authorized its troops to apply their own grease than sepoys at Barrackpore were voicing fears that the cartridge paper contained objectionable fat. These suspicions first arose when ungreased Enfield cartridges and the paper used for making them were shown to a parade of the 2nd Native Infantry at Barrackpore on 4 February. At a subsequent court of inquiry, four days later, witness after witness stated his belief that the cartridge paper was offensive. This objection to the paper was groundless: it contained no grease and certainly no tallow. Suspicions had arisen partly because the English manufactured paper was slightly thicker than that used to make musket cartridges. But the lack of a genuine grievance prompts the speculation that some guiding hand – within or without the regiments – was trying to keep the cartridge controversy alive by switching attention from the grease (which was no longer an issue) to the paper. Canning suspected such a conspiracy and told Vernon Smith that there was a mutinous spirit in the 2nd Native Infantry, or at least in part of it, that had ‘not been roused by the cartridges alone if at all’.
The first definite signs of a conspiracy were revealed on 26 January 1857 when senior Indian officers of the 34th Native Infantry made an abortive attempt to capture key installations in Calcutta with the assistance of troops en route to Chittagong. All four infantry regiments at Barrackpore – the 2nd, 34th, 47th and 70th – were later implicated in the plot, as were elements of the Calcutta Native Militia and senior advisers to Wajid Ali, the ex-King of Oudh, who was still living at the villa in Garden Reach. The conspirators had attempted to rally support by citing the ‘objectionable cartridges’ and offering a pay increase of 3 rupees a month. But the plan came unstuck when a jemadar of the 34th, commanding the Treasury Guard, refused to cooperate.
The conspiracy was not confined to the Calcutta area. On 28 January General Hearsey reported to government the simultaneous burning of European property at Barrackpore and the railhead of Raniganj, where separate wings of the 2nd Native Infantry were stationed. It was later alleged by Mainodin Hassan Khan, one of the leading rebels at Delhi, that the burning of the Raniganj telegraph office was a preconcerted signal for mutiny, and that those in the know would respond with similar acts. Mainodin also claimed that the central cause of the mutiny was the annexation of Oudh in 1856, and that it was no coincidence that two of the three regiments in Lucknow at that time – the 19th and 34th – were at the centre of the conspiracy. Mainodin explained:
Both these regiments were full of bitterness… and from them letters were written to other Purbeah regiments. The 34th took the lead. These letters reminded every regiment of the ancient dynasties of Hindustan; pointed out that the annexation of Oude had been followed by the disbandment of the Oude army, for the second time since the connection of the English with Oude; and showed that their place was being filled by the enlistment of Punjabis and Sikhs, and the formation of a Punjab army. The very bread had been torn out of the mouths of men who knew no other profession than that of the sword. The letters went on to say that further annexations might be expected, with little or no use for the native army. Thus was it pressed upon the Sepoys that they must rebel to reseat the ancient kings on their thrones, and drive the trespassers away. The welfare of the soldier caste required this; the honour of their chiefs was at stake.
A large proportion of Bengal sepoys came from Oudh. The annexation was not only a blow to their national pride, it also brought an end to the privilege enjoyed by all Company soldiers from Oudh of being able to prosecute their legal cases and petitions through the British Resident. So abused had this privilege become – with some sepoys receiving up to ten months’ leave for the sole purpose of prosecuting their claims – that in 1853 the maximum period of leave was set at that which ‘would enable the applicant to travel to Lucknow, remain there for 10 days, and then return (unless the Resident certified that the man’s continued presence was necessary)’. Yet the privilege remained until annexation, and there is no doubt that its loss was keenly felt. In a letter to Canning of 1 May 1857 Sir Henry Lawrence mentioned that he had received a number of letters attributing the ‘present bad feeling not to the cartridge or any specific question, but to a pretty general dissatisfaction at many recent acts of Government which have been skilfully played upon by incendiaries’. Lawrence gave the example of an Oudh sowar in the Bombay cavalry who was asked if he liked annexation. ‘No,’ the sowar replied. ‘I used to be a great man when I went home; the best in the village rose as I approached; now the lowest puff their pipes in my face.’
Sitaram Pandy later admitted that the ‘seizing of Oudh filled the minds of the sepoys with distrust and led them to plot against the Government’. He added: ‘Agents of the Nawab [King] of Oudh and also of the King of Delhi were sent all over India to discover the temper of the army. They worked upon the feelings of the sepoys, telling them how treacherously the foreigners had behaved towards their king. They invented ten thousand lies and promises to persuade the soldiers to mutiny and turn against their masters.’ The involvement in this plot of Wajid Ali, the ex-King of Oudh, or at least members of his entourage, is highly likely. The commanding officer of the 17th Native Infantry later claimed that it, the 19th and 34th regiments all offered their services to the King of Oudh at the time of annexation in early 1856.
From the start senior figures in the Bengal Presidency suspected outside interference. In a letter of 28 January Major-General Hearsey blamed ‘Brahmins or agents of the religious Hindu party in Calcutta (I believe it is called the Dhurma Subha)’ for the rumour that the cartridges were part of a government plot to convert natives to Christianity. Canning himself was not entirely convinced. ‘I cannot say that [Hearsey’s] evidence is very conclusive,’ he told Vernon Smith on 22 February, ‘but if there has been any attempt to seduce them with a view to embarrassing the Government it is much more likely to have come from the Oude courtiers than the Brahmins as was first suspected.’ Within a month Canning’s belief in an external conspiracy had hardened. He informed Vernon Smith that while many sepoys, even the majority, were sincere in their alarm for their religion, these fears had been put into their heads by civilians, though once such feelings had taken root they were ‘disseminated from one corps to another without aid from without’. He was convinced that the prime movers had no ostensible connection with the army, though whether they were political malcontents such as the King of Oudh’s followers or religious alarmists he could not say. But despite the emphasis on religion, he added, the ‘moving purpose may be purely political’ and there were some small incidents to point the finger at the ‘Oude herd’. Hearsey, who prided himself on his close relations with Indian troops, was of a similar opinion. ‘Rajah Maun Sing and other [senior advisers] of the ex-King of Oude,’ he informed the government on 5 April, ‘have been bribing some evil-minded & traiterous Hindoos of the 19th and 34th N.I. to seize the first opportunity to incite disturbance. This cartridge business came opportunely for them & they seized it even before the cartridges were made for distribution… In short, the sepoys have never even seen a greased cartridge.’
In a letter to the government of 11 February Hearsey likened the disaffection at Barrackpore to a ‘mine ready for explosion’. The minds of the sepoys, he added, had ‘been misled by some designing scoundrels who have managed to make them believe that their religious prejudices, their caste, is to be interfered with by Government’. That some of the scoundrels were probably soldiers themselves does not seem to have occurred to Hearsey at this juncture. These ringleaders were almost certainly behind the move to spread the net of disaffection. On 12 February an Indian doctor overheard a sepoy of the 2nd Native Infantry telling a comrade that a cossid had been sent to the 19th Native Infantry at Berhampore and to the three infantry regiments at Dinapore, ‘informing them that ten or twelve of us have raised a disturbance, and we want you to support us’.
The small cantonment town of Berhampore was situated on the left bank of the Hooghly River, 120 miles upstream from Calcutta. In February 1857 Berhampore was garrisoned by elements of two Indian regiments: the 19th Native Infantry and a wing of the 11th Irregular Cavalry. The 19th contained an unusually high proportion of Brahmans – around 40 per cent – who had been especially disaffected since the annexation of Oudh. This bad feeling was not helped by the presence of an unfamiliar commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel William Mitchell, forty-nine, who had been with the regiment for less than eighteen months.
Matters came to a head in late February. On the 25th, an escort party of the 34th Native Infantry arrived at Berhampore and camped beside the 19th’s lines. The following day the sepoys of the 19th refused to accept copper caps for a blank firing exercise because they had been led to believe that the cartridge paper contained objectionable grease. Mitchell reminded them that not only were the blank cartridges the same ones they had been using for years, but that they had been made up in the regimental magazine by sepoys of another regiment. Any sepoy who refused to accept the cartridges at the parade the following morning, he warned, would be court-martialled. The sepoys’ response, shortly before midnight, was to break into their bells-of-arms and seize their muskets. Roused from his bed, Mitchell ordered a detachment of the 11th irregulars and two post-guns to cover the mutinous sepoys while he and his officers went to speak to them. He found the men ‘in undress formed in line and shouting’. Some were calling out: ‘Do not come on, the men will fire.’ At which point he ordered the guns to load with grape and called in his Indian officers. When they had assembled, he asked them the meaning of the disturbance:
The native officers made all kinds of excuses, begging that I would not be violent with the men. I then addressed the men and asked them what they had to complain of. I told them that I had explained to the native officers some days ago that if grease was required to be used for the new cartridges I would apply to the [General] to allow the pay-havildars of companies to make up what was required… the men said they were never told so by the native officer.
Mitchell then told the Indian officers to order their men to lay down their arms. They replied that the men would not do so in the presence of guns and cavalry. Finally, at three in the morning, Mitchell lost his nerve and withdrew the covering force. Only then did the men lodge their weapons and return to their lines.
During the subsequent court of inquiry, the 19th’s Indian officers, NCOs and sepoys sent a petition to General Hearsey to explain their behaviour. They stated that the rumour about the new cartridges containing objectionable fat had been in circulation for ‘two months and more’, and that they were very much afraid for their religion. Their minds had been temporarily put at ease by Lieutenant-Colonel Mitchell’s announcement that grease for the new cartridges would be made up in front of the sepoys by the company pay-havildars. But their fears returned when they inspected the blank cartridges at their bells-of-arms on the afternoon of 26 February. ‘We perceived them to be of two kinds,’ they wrote, ‘and one sort appeared to be different from that formerly served out. Hence we doubted whether these might not be the cartridges which had arrived from Calcutta, as we had made none ourselves, and were convinced that they were greased.’ It was for this reason, they claimed, that they refused to accept the firing caps. Mitchell had angrily responded by threatening to take the regiment to Burma, where they would all die of hardship, if they did not accept the cartridges. This outburst had convinced them that the cartridges were greased. They had seized their arms in fear of their lives amid shouts that they were about to be attacked by Europeans, the cavalry and the guns.
The sepoys’ objections, it seems, had switched from the grease on the Enfield cartridge to the paper used for the Enfield cartridge, and finally to the paper on the old musket cartridge. The reference to two different kinds of blank cartridge is explained by the fact that, since the mid 1850s, some of the paper used for musket ammunition had been produced by the Serampore mills near Barrackpore. Its paper was of a slightly darker shade than the familiar English product of John Dickinson & Co. Yet it contained no grease, nor was grease ever applied to cartridges for smooth-bore muskets. There is, therefore, no proper rational explanation for the behaviour of the 19th regiment on the night of 26 February beyond a complete breakdown of trust between the sepoys and their European officers. Lieutenant-Colonel Mitchell had assured them that the cartridges were of the old type and contained no grease, and yet they preferred to believe the wild rumour that the Indian government was planning their forcible conversion to Christianity. It is highly probable that certain members of the regiment were playing upon the fears of their comrades to incite mutiny.
On 11 March Canning told Vernon Smith that there was much evidence to show that the 19th regiment had been ‘seduced from without’, particularly by the sending of emissaries from Barrackpore and the arrival of the guard of the 34th. But the clincher came after the regiment had been disbanded on 31 March. In two petitions to Major-General Hearsey, the ‘faithful’ officers and men of the 19th claimed that the regiment had been led astray by the ‘advice of some wicked men’. The names of the instigators, they added, were known only to their enemies who were young sepoys and therefore ‘independent of the Honourable Company’s service’. Those thought to be faithful had not been let in on the plot. They were prepared to say, however, that the guard of the 34th was the cause of the mutiny.
Given that the disbanded men of the 19th were trying to secure a reversal of the government’s punishment, there is every reason not to accept these two petitions at face value. It is extremely unlikely that the ‘loyal’ officers and sepoys would not have known the identity of at least some of the ringleaders. Their decision not to hand them over is probably an indication that a sizeable proportion of the regiment was disaffected. Certainly there is evidence that, having dispersed, the disbanded men of the 19th incited other regiments to mutiny. In May, for example, the commanding officer of the 17th Native Infantry prohibited the admittance of strangers into the regimental lines in an attempt to prevent fraternization between his sepoys and those former members of the 19th who lived in the vicinity (the two regiments had forged close links during their time at Lucknow). But contact was made, none the less, and the 17th mutinied soon after. So who were the ringleaders? One clue was provided by a conversation between the regiment’s British doctor and a group of disbanded Muslim sepoys. Asked the real reason behind the mutiny, the Muslims replied that the Hindus in the regiment ‘had threatened them with instant death’ if they told the authorities, yet they promised to disclose the ‘true cause’ of the supposed cartridge outbreak after the Hindus had dispersed to their homes. They never did – but high-caste Hindus are the obvious suspects.
By mid March the disaffection had spread to the musketry depot at Ambala, where detachments from forty-one infantry regiments were being instructed in the use of the new rifle. Ambala was the headquarters of the Sirhind Division of the Bengal Army and was situated in an open plain three miles east of the River Chaghar, and 120 miles north-east of Delhi. As well as the musketry depot, its large military garrison housed two native infantry regiments, the 5th and 60th, one light cavalry regiment, the 4th, one British cavalry regiment, the 9th Lancers, and two troops of European horse artillery.
On the morning of 16 March, as all the Indian detachments at the musketry depot were being paraded for drill, the instructor Lieutenant Martineau called the Indian officers to one side and expressed his surprise that the men were still discussing whether to use the Enfield cartridges despite his assurance that they could apply their own grease. To which a subedar of the 71st regiment replied that the men were against using any of the new cartridges until they had ascertained that their doing so was ‘not unacceptable to their comrades in their respective corps’. This provoked an immediate response from a jemadar of the 36th regiment, who said that the previous speaker knew ‘perfectly well that many of the detachments here entertain no such feelings’. The jemadar added:
I will fire when I am told, & I know many others will do the same. I have sufficient confidence in Government & my officers to know that no improper order will be given to us, & to demur using cartridges merely because they are of a different form, or made of different paper, is absurd, in fact there is no question of caste in the matter, & he who refuses to obey proper orders, or who cavels about doing so on the pretext of religion, is guilty of mutinous and insubordinate conduct.
According to Martineau, the jemadar’s sentiments were backed up throughout by the Indian officers of the 10th and 22nd regiments. Clearly not all Indian soldiers were sufficiently disillusioned with either their European officers or the government to believe, or even claim to believe, that the cartridge question was still a legitimate issue. Those who continued to do so were, in this Indian officer’s opinion, using religion as a pretext.
On 19 March the Commander-in-Chief of India, General the Hon. George Anson, arrived in Ambala on a tour of inspection with his escorting regiment, the 36th Native Infantry. Aged fifty-nine, the second son of the first Viscount Anson and the brother of the first Earl of Lichfield, he had served with the Scots Guards at Waterloo but had seen no active service since. He had spent much of the intervening period as MP for South Staffordshire and aide-de-camp to Prince Albert. His favourite pursuits were the Turf and cards: he won the 1842 Derby with a horse bought for £120 and was described by Disraeli as the ‘finest whist player in Europe’. He and his wife Isabella, the daughter of Lord Forester, were a handsome and popular couple, and it was a great surprise to London society when Anson accepted the offer of a Bengal division in 1853. Within a year he was given command of the Madras Army, and in January 1856, after less than three years in India, he became Commander-in-Chief. This meteoric rise owed much to his court and aristocratic connections, but was also testament to his affable yet discerning nature. Lord Elphinstone admired his ‘good sense and tact’; one of his officers described him as ‘an able, intelligent man, an excellent judge of character’. Since his arrival in India, however, Anson had aroused a good deal of resentment by his open prejudice against Company troops. Canning found him a disappointment and described as ‘injudicious’ his habit of appointing all his aides-de-camp from British regiments, favouring the Queen’s troops ‘to the disadvantage of the sepoys’ and never seeing an Indian sentry ‘without turning away in disgust’. Yet on a personal level Canning and Anson got on well. ‘His temper is charming,’ wrote the Governor-General, ‘and I know no one whom I should not be sorry to see substituted for him.’
No sooner had Anson’s infantry escort pitched their tents at Ambala than they were visited by two of their comrades, a havildar and a naik, who were being instructed at the musketry depot. But instead of the usual salutations, the pair were refused entry to their colleagues’ tents, and one subedar taunted them with having become Christians by handling the new rifle. Martineau conducted an inquiry among all the depot’s detachments and discovered the existence of a rumour that the Enfield rifle was ‘nothing more or less than a Government missionary to convert the whole Army to Christianity’. That ‘so absurd a rumour should meet with ready credence’ was proof, he told Anson, that the feeling of native troops was anything but sound.
On 23 March General Anson addressed a parade of Indian officers at the depot. Through the medium of an interpreter, he told them that the rumoured intention of the government to interfere with their caste and religion was ‘utterly groundless and false’ and that he looked to them to satisfy those under their authority on this point. Their response, via Lieutenant Martineau, was that they knew the rumour to be false, but it was ‘universally credited, not only in their regiments, but in their villages & their homes’. They would not disobey an order to fire, they said, but they wanted the Commander-in-Chief to understand the social consequences to themselves – namely loss of caste. Martineau himself regarded the greased cartridge ‘more as the medium than the original cause of this wide spread feeling of distrust that is spreading dissatisfaction to our Rule’. Part of his reason for believing this, he later testified, was that only Hindu sepoys were genuinely concerned by the cartridge question; Muslim sepoys, on the other hand, simply ‘laughed at it’.
Anson was of a similar opinion. ‘The “Cartridge” question is more a pretext, than reality,’ he informed the Governor of Bombay on 29 March, adding: ‘The sepoys have been pampered & given way to, & have… grown insolent beyond bearing.’ Yet he accepted that the Indian officers at Ambala genuinely feared social ostracism, and so ordered the deferment of actual target practice at the three musketry depots until the government had voiced its opinion.
Meanwhile, on 27 March, Canning had ordered the disbandment of the 19th Native Infantry for ‘open and defiant mutiny’.* In the same general order he assured the native army that it had ever been ‘the unvarying rule of the Government of India to treat the religious feelings of all its servants, of every creed, with careful respect’, and that had the sepoys of the 19th ‘confided in their Government, and believed their commanding officer, instead of crediting the idle stories with which false and evil-minded men have deceived them, their religious scruples would still have remained inviolate’.
One of the means by which ill-feeling spread through the Bengal Army was the fraternization of detachments at the musketry depots. In mid March Lieutenant Martineau was told by sepoys at the Ambala depot that all Bengal regiments contained cabals determined to brand those who used the new cartridges as outcastes. These secret committees had one aim: to convince their comrades that the cartridge question was part of a wider government conspiracy to deprive them of their religion and caste. In case they were doubted, a number of other rumours were spread to reinforce this belief.
In early March a sepoy at Ambala had shown Martineau a letter from his brother in the 1st Native Infantry at Cawnpore that referred to contaminated flour. It was being claimed that flour from government depots had been deliberately mixed with the ground bones of cows and pigs. ‘I was excessively startled,’ recalled Martineau, ‘and saw at once that some brain of more than ordinary cunning had succeeded in combining for the time being the parties of both Hindus and Mahomedans against us.’ According to W. H. Carey, resident in India at the time, the rumour originated on 8 March when a merchant, hoping to clear his stock before other supplies arrived, sold a large quantity of flour at an unusually low price in the market at Cawnpore. Carey identified a sepoy who bought some of the flour as the man responsible for spreading the ‘evil report’ that it had been mixed with bullock and pig bone at the Canal Department’s mills at Cawnpore. The fact that the mills were run by Indian contractors with whom the owners of the grain made their own arrangements was either not known or deliberately concealed. The cartridge question had been so skilfully handled by the conspirators that many of their fellow soldiers were willing to believe the government was capable of just about anything. In the coming months more than one officer would hear his men repeat the contaminated flour rumour as if it were fact. It was taken so seriously by the sepoys of the 10th Oudh Irregulars that, in early June, they insisted on emptying into the river carts of flour that had been procured for them by the Indian mayor. They and other troops at Sitapur mutinied the following day.
More sinister than the bone-dust rumour, however, was the mysterious spread of chapatties across central and northern India. One of the earliest sightings was in late January 1857 in the vicinity of Mathura, a large city on the Jumna River, 34 miles from Agra. The magistrate, Mark Thornhill, had just returned to his cutcherry when he noticed four chapatties lying on the table, ‘dirty little cakes of the coarsest flour, about the size and thickness of a biscuit’. On questioning his staff, Thornhill discovered that an unidentified man had arrived at a nearby village and given a single chapatti to the watchman, ‘with injunctions to bake four like it, to distribute them to the watchmen of the adjacent villages, and to desire them to do the same’. The watchman obeyed but also informed the police, who sent the cakes on to the magistrate. Thornhill recalled:
The following day came similar reports from other parts of the district, and we next learnt from the newspapers that these cakes were being distributed in the same manner over all Upper India. The occurrence was so singular that it attracted the attention of the Government, who directed inquiries; but notwithstanding all the efforts that were made, it could not be ascertained either by whom the distribution had been contrived, where it commenced, or what it signified. After being a nine days’ wonder the matter ceased to be talked about, and was presently for the time forgotten…
The chapatties are said to have originated in the Maratha principality of Indore in central India. From there they moved up through the Indian state of Gwalior and the Company’s Sagar and Nerbudda Territories to the North-West Provinces, eventually reaching Rohilkhand to the north, Oudh to the east and Allahabad to the south-east. One official estimated their rate of travel at up to 200 miles a night. The origin and purpose of the chapatties has never been established, though contemporary speculation was rife. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan pointed out that, with cholera prevalent at the time, some people regarded the chapatties as a talisman to ward off the disease. Most interpretations were not so benign. The Indian newspapers at Delhi thought their appearance was ‘an invitation to the whole country to unite for some secret object afterwards to be disclosed’. Mainodin Hassan Khan, then thanadar of a police station outside Delhi, told the local magistrate that he regarded the chapatties as ‘significant of some greater disturbance, that would follow immediately’. Before the downfall of Maratha power, Mainodin explained, a sprig of millet and a morsel of bread had been passed from village to village to signify a forthcoming upheaval. The British spy Jat Mall, a resident of Delhi, claimed that some people regarded the chapatties as a warning of an impending calamity, others that their purpose was to warn against the government’s plot to force Christianity upon the people, and still others that they were being circulated by government to intimate to the people of Hindustan that they would all be compelled to eat the same food as Christians: one food and one faith. This last view, according to Martineau, was prevalent among ‘the sepoys of every regiment that furnished a detachment to the depot at Ambala’. Lady Canning concurred. ‘They all think it is an order from Government,’ she wrote on 8 April, ‘and no one can discover any meaning in it.’
At the time the British did not attach particular importance to the chapatties. ‘Is it treason or jest?’ asked the Friend of India on 5 March. ‘Is there to be an “explosion of feeling” or only of laughter?’ An officer at Cawnpore noted that ‘various speculations were made by Europeans as to the import of this extreme activity’, but it was invariably dismissed as Indian superstition. The exceptions, according to Thornhill, were those ‘few who remembered that a similar distribution of cakes had been made in Madras towards the end of the last century, and had been followed by the mutiny of Vellore’. Mrs Sneyd, the mother of a Bengal officer, was among those who at once expressed a ‘firm conviction that it was… some deep laid plot & treachery on the part of the natives’ and that ‘something terrible was at hand’. But only in retrospect were the chapatties generally regarded as the harbingers of mutiny. A lieutenant in the 3rd Light Cavalry later described them as ‘in some way a signal, understood by the sepoys, of warning to be in readiness for coming events’. In his report of the outbreak at Agra, the commissioner said he had reason to believe the appearance of the chapatties ‘had some bearing upon the Hindoo prophecy limiting British rule to a centenary of years’ and that sepoys of the 34th Native Infantry were involved in some way. This reference to the 34th is the only tenuous link between the military conspirators and the chapatties. Yet the appearance of the cakes in January 1857, at the outset of the cartridge question, suggests a connection. If the intention was to unsettle the minds of sepoys and civilians alike, and make them more receptive to wild rumour, then it certainly succeeded.