Pigs unclean.
It is easy to understand why both Hindus and Mohammedans regard swine as unclean. The Jews have had the same horror of pigs and pork from time immemorial. To this day, both Hindus and Mohammedans shudder, or affect to shudder, at the idea of Europeans cleaning their teeth with brushes made of bristles; and none but those of enlarged experiences, who have been Europeanised out of their religious prejudices, or smitten with a passion for European luxuries, would venture to eat a slice of ham.
Cow worship.
The cow is not more to Mohammedans than it is to Europeans, but the Hindus worship it as a deity. Gratitude for the milk and butter which she gives to the family has swelled into affection and adoration, which have invested a common-place animal with attributes that are at once mystic and divine. The cow is the living representative to the Hindu of all that is beautiful and spiritual in women, and of all that is mysterious in the sex. The cow is the incarnation of the earth, the mother of all things, the goddess of good fortune, the living manifestation of Lakshmi; she who was created by the gods, who descended from the heaven of Indra and churned the ocean, until the bright goddess rose out of the waves, like a Hindu Aphrodite, to become the wife of the supreme spirit, Vishnu. To kill a cow is a sacrilegious crime, like killing a Brahman, a woman, or a Raja. To taste the flesh of a cow is as revolting to the Hindu imagination as tasting the flesh of a mother.
Eating beef a mortal sin.
Eating or tasting beef through the most distant medium is a mortal sin in the eyes of Hindus. Under Hindu rule, when the caste system was enforced by village communities, the vile sinner was driven from his wife, family, kinsfolk, and village by the ban of Brahmanical excommunication. In the days of Mohammedan persecutions, thousands of Hindus were compelled to swallow shreds of beef by tyrants of the stamp of Tippu Sultan of Mysore, in order to force them to become Mohammedans. There was no way of escape. They had no alternative but to accept Islam, marry a Mohammedan wife, and enter a new life and career with a new home and surroundings.[28]
Excitement at Barrackpore.
§5. The ball set rolling from the arsenal at Dumdum soon assumed monstrous dimensions in the cantonment at Barrackpore. The sepoys blindly accepted the conclusion that Her Majesty the Queen and Lord Canning had arranged a secret scheme for converting them all to Christianity. The greased cartridges, they decided, must have been manufactured expressly to destroy their religion; to compel them to become Christians, and to eat beef and drink beer until they became as strong as Europeans, and were able to conquer Persia, Russia, and China. Wild fictions, the outcome of Oriental imaginations which would not have imposed upon a European child, were greedily accepted and talked over as matters of fact, by the ignorant and credulous sepoys. India, it was said, was being bound in iron fetters by railway lines and telegraph wires; and now the poor sepoy was to be cut off from his countrymen and co-religionists, and to become the helpless vassal of his European masters, like the genii who are slaves to magicians and sorcerers.
Fruitless explanations.