[10]. By Mr Knighton, author of Forest Life in Ceylon.
[11]. Lacs or lakhs of rupees: a lac being 100,000, value about £10,000.
[12]. The word telegram, denoting a message sent, as distinguished from the telegraph which sends it, has been a subject of much discussion among Greek scholars, concerning the validity of the grammatical basis on which it is formed; but as the new term is convenient for its brevity and expressiveness, and as it has been much used by the governor-general and the various officers connected with India, it will occasionally be employed in this work.
General View of Calcutta from Fort William.
CHAPTER VII.
SPREAD OF DISAFFECTION IN MAY.
The narrative has now arrived at a stage when some kind of classification of times and places becomes necessary. There were special reasons why Delhi and Lucknow should receive separate attention, connected as those two cities are with deposed native sovereigns chafed by their deposition; but other cities and towns now await notice, spread over many thousand square miles of territory, placed in various relations to the British government, involved in various degrees in mutinous proceedings, and differing much in the periods at which the hostile demonstrations were made. Two modes of treatment naturally suggest themselves. The towns might be treated topographically, beginning at Calcutta, and working westward towards the Indus; this would be convenient for reference to maps, but would separate contemporaneous events too far asunder. Or the occurrences might be treated chronologically, beginning from the Meerut outbreak, and advancing, as in a diary, day by day throughout the whole series; this would facilitate reference to dates, but would ignore local connection and mutual action. It may be possible, however, to combine so much of the two methods as will retain their advantages and avoid their defects; there may be groups of days and groups of places; and these groups may be so treated as to mark the relations both of sequence and of simultaneity, of causes and of co-operation. In the present chapter, a rapid glance will be taken over a wide-spread region, to shew in what way and to what degree disaffection spread during the month of May. This will prepare us for the terrible episode at one particular spot—Cawnpore.
To begin, then, with Bengal—the fertile and populous region between the Anglo-Indian city of Calcutta and the sacred Hindoo city of Benares; the region watered by the lower course of the majestic Ganges; the region inhabited by the patient, plodding, timid Bengalee, the type from which Europeans have generally derived their idea of the Hindoo: forgetting, or not knowing, that Delhi and Agra, Cawnpore and Lucknow, exhibit the Hindoo character under a more warlike aspect, and are marked also by a difference of language. A fact already mentioned must be constantly borne in mind—that few Bengalees are (or were) in the Bengal army: a population of forty millions furnished a very small ratio of fighting men.