The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

Good authorities hold that the greased cartridges were something more than the occasion of the Mutiny; they were its supreme producing cause. The history of the greased cartridges may be told almost in a sentence. “Brown Bess” had grown obsolete; the new rifle, with its grooved barrel, needed a lubricated cartridge, and it was whispered that the cartridge was greased with a compound of cow’s fat and swine’s fat, charged with villainous theological properties. It would destroy at once the caste of the Hindu, and the ceremonial purity of the Mohammedan! Sir John Lawrence declares that “the proximate cause of the Mutiny was the cartridge affair, and nothing else.” Mr. Lecky says that “recent researches have fully proved that the real, as well as the ostensible, cause of the Mutiny was the greased cartridges.” He adds, this is “a shameful and terrible fact.” The Sepoys, he apparently holds, were right in their belief that in the grease that smeared the cartridges was hidden a conspiracy against their religion! “If mutiny,” Mr. Lecky adds, “was ever justifiable, no stronger justification could be given than that of the Sepoy troops.”

But is this accusation valid? That the military authorities really designed to inflict a religious wrong on the Sepoys in the matter of the cartridges no one, of course, believes. But there was, undoubtedly, much of heavy-handed clumsiness in the official management of the business. As a matter of fact, however, no greased cartridges were actually issued to any Sepoys. Some had been sent out from England, for the purpose of testing them under the Indian climate; large numbers had been actually manufactured in India; but the Sepoys took the alarm early, and none of the guilty cartridges were actually issued to the men. “From first to last,” says Kaye, “no such cartridges were ever issued to the Sepoys, save, perhaps, to a Ghoorka regiment, at their own request.”

When once, however, the suspicions of the Sepoys were, rightly or wrongly, aroused, it was impossible to soothe them. The men were told that they might grease the cartridges themselves; but the paper in which the new cartridges were wrapped had now, to alarmed Sepoy eyes, a suspiciously greasy look, and the men refused to handle it.

The Sepoy conscience was, in truth, of very eccentric sensitiveness. Native hands made up the accused cartridges without concern; the Sepoys themselves used them freely—when they could get them—against the British after the Mutiny broke out. But a fanatical belief on the part of the Sepoys, that these particular cartridges concealed in their greasy folds a dark design against their religion, was undoubtedly the immediate occasion of the Great Mutiny. Yet it would be absurd to regard this as its single producing cause. In order to assert this, we must forget all the other evil forces at work to produce the cataclysm: the annexation of Oude; the denial of the sacred right of “adoption” to the native princes; the decay of discipline in the Sepoy ranks; the loss of reverence for their officers by the men, &c.

The Sepoys, it is clear, were, on many grounds, discontented with the conditions of their service. The keen, brooding, and somewhat melancholy genius of Henry Lawrence foresaw the coming trouble, and fastened on this as one of its causes. In an article written in March 1856, he says that the conditions of the Indian Army denied a career to any native soldier of genius, and this must put the best brains of the Sepoys in quarrel with the British rule. Ninety out of every hundred Sepoys, he said in substance, are satisfied; but the remaining ten are discontented, some of them to a dangerous degree; and the discontented ten were the best soldiers of the hundred! But, as it happened, the Mutiny threw up no native soldier of genius, except, perhaps, Tantia Topee, who was not a Sepoy!

“The salt water” was undoubtedly amongst the minor causes which provoked the Mutiny. The Sepoys dreaded the sea; they believed they could not cross it without a fatal loss of caste, and the new form of military oath, which made the Sepoy liable for over-sea service, was believed, by the veterans, to extend to them, even though they had not taken it: and so the Sepoy imagination was disquieted.

Lord Dalhousie’s over-Anglicised policy, it may be added, was at once too liberal, and too impatient, for the Eastern mind, with its obstinacy of habit, its hatred of change, its easily-roused suspiciousness. As Kaye puts it, Lord Dalhousie poured his new wine into old bottles, with too rash a hand. “The wine was good wine, strong wine, wine to gladden the heart of man;” but poured into such ancient and shrunken bottles too rashly, it was fatal. It was because we were “too English,” adds Kaye, that the great crisis arose; and “it was only because we were English that, when it arose, it did not overwhelm us.” We trod, in a word, with heavy-footed British clumsiness on the historic superstitions, the ancient habitudes of the Sepoys, and so provoked them to revolt. But the dour British character, which is at the root of British clumsiness, in the end, overbore the revolt.

The very virtues of the British rule, thus proved its peril. Its cool justice, its steadfast enforcement of order, its tireless warfare against crime, made it hated of all the lawless and predatory classes. Every native who lived by vice, chafed under a justice which might be slow and passionless, but which could not be bribed, and in the long-run could not be escaped.

Some, at least, of the dispossessed princes, diligently fanned these wild dreams and wilder suspicions which haunted the Sepoy mind, till it kindled into a flame. The Sepoys were told they had conquered India for the English; why should they not now conquer it for themselves? The chupatties—mysterious signals, coming whence no man knew, and meaning, no man could tell exactly what—passed from village to village. Usually with the chupatti ran a message—“Sub lal hojaega” (“everything will become red”)—a Sibylline announcement, which might be accepted as a warning against the too rapid spread of the English raj, or a grim prediction of universal bloodshed. Whence the chupatties came, or what they exactly meant, is even yet a matter of speculation. The one thing certain is, they were a storm signal, not very intelligible, perhaps, but highly effective.

That there was a conspiracy throughout Bengal for the simultaneous revolt of all Sepoys on May 31, cannot be doubted, and, on the whole, it was well for the English raj that the impatient troopers broke out at Meerut before the date agreed upon.