A sepoy regiment in the Bengal army was cantoned in ten rows of huts, a company of 100 sepoys in each row. The arms and ammunition of each company were kept in a circular magazine in the front of each line. The European officers, with or without wives and families, lived round about in one-storied houses with thatched roofs, known as bungalows. The European officers rarely visited the sepoy lines during the heat of the day, but two European sergeants were appointed to each regiment to lodge close to the lines and report all that was going on.
Enfield rifle: musketry schools at Dumdum, Meerut, and Sealkote.
§4. In 1856 the Russian war was over, and the Enfield rifle, which had been used with such success in the Crimea, was introduced into India. Accordingly three musketry schools were established in Northern India for teaching the sepoys of the Bengal army the use of the new rifle. One school was established at Dumdum for the instruction of the sepoys in the Bengal presidency; another at Meerut, forty miles from Delhi, for those in the North-Western Provinces; and the third at Sealkote for those in the Punjab. Under this arrangement, detachments from the different regiments were to be sent from time to time to one or other of these schools until the whole Bengal army was familiar with the use of the Enfield. It will be seen hereafter that the three most dangerous mutinies in India grew out of these musketry schools.
Greased cartridges.
In those days every sepoy and soldier had been accustomed for generations to bite off the end of his paper cartridge before loading his musket. Accordingly a supply of cartridges for the new rifle was received from England, and forwarded to each of the three schools, and further supplies of the same pattern were manufactured in the arsenal at Dumdum by low-caste workmen known as Lascars. Suddenly it leaked out that the new cartridges were greased with the fat of cows, or with the fat of pigs. Thus every Hindu sepoy who bit the cartridge would lose his caste and religion as if he had eaten beef; whilst every Mohammedan sepoy would be polluted by contact with pork, and not only lose his religion, but be barred out for ever from the heaven of celestial houris.
Discovery at Dumdum.
A Lascar employed in Dumdum arsenal met a Brahman sepoy going to Barrackpore, and asked him for a drink of water out of his brass lotah. This was an unusual request, intended to vex and annoy the Brahman. A thirsty low-caste Hindu might ask a high-caste man to pour water into his mouth, but would not offend the Brahman by the bare suggestion of drinking out of his lotah. The Brahman turned away in disgust at the idea of low-caste lips polluting his drinking-cup. The Lascar retorted that the Brahman would soon be as impure as himself, for he would bite the new cartridges which had been smeared with the fat of cows and pigs, and would lose caste altogether.
Horror of Hindus and Mohammedans.
The Brahman was thunderstruck at this taunt. Europeans who have never visited India can scarcely realise the horrors that must have seized on his Brahmanised imagination. Suet and lard are such familiar ingredients in European cookery, that no one in the British Isles could have been surprised at their being used for greasing Enfield cartridges. But to Europeans that have lived in India, the bare fact that cartridges should have been greased with suet or lard, to be bitten by Hindu or Mohammedan sepoys, seems a mad freak of fortune which is altogether incomprehensible. In the fierce antagonism between the two religions, Hindus have thrown dead pigs into Mohammedan mosques, and Mohammedans have thrown slaughtered cows into Hindu temples; but the British government stood on neutral ground. It had always professed to hold an even balance between the two religionists, and any attempt to destroy the caste of Hindus, or the religion of Mohammedans, was altogether foreign to the ideas of Asiatics or Europeans.