The Skull of Alum Bheg

by Kim A. Wagner

  ‘There is not the smallest doubt that all men whether ignorant or well-informed, whether high or low, felt a firm conviction that the English Government was bent on interfering with their religion and with their old established customs. They believed that Government intended to force the Christian Religion and foreign customs upon Hindu and Mussulman alike.’58

  This placed sepoys such as Alum Bheg in a precarious position within Indian colonial society, a precariousness also reflected in their unique living arrangements, which were outside the cantonment proper but also apart from the local population. To serve in the East India Company army carried the risk of pollution by association—the suspicion that European military drill and equipment somehow carried with it the taint of the religion of the British. The British of course controlled almost every single aspect of the sepoys’ lives, including what food they consumed, which had to be purchased from the Sudder Bazaar, and the uniform they wore. Under these circumstances, even the smallest changes were regarded with suspicion. According to Hedayut, people were used to ‘wear the same clothes, of the same pattern as their ancestors did before them, and imagine that if they put on a coat or trousers of an English cut that it indicates a Christian; they think anything new or anything they don’t understand must be meant in some way or other to affect their religion.’59 Even as military service ensured their status and respectability of the sepoys, it was incumbent upon Indian troops in British service to publicly reject any attempts by their employer that could be perceived as undermining that very status.

  The earliest and most serious rupture of this kind occurred at Vellore in the Madras Presidency in 1806, when a violent mutiny was triggered by something as seemingly unremarkable as the introduction of a new type of headgear for the sepoys. In order to make the appearance of the sepoys more uniform and in keeping with a Western military aesthetic, orders issued in 1805 stated that they could no longer wear caste-marks or jewellery while on duty, and they also had to trim their beards. These regulations interfered directly with most visible markers of masculinity and status, and were thus greatly resented by the sepoys. The following year a new type of headgear was introduced to replace the existing model, which the British considered to be impractical and altogether too similar to a turban. The new hat resembled the stovepipe shako worn by the musicians of the regimental bands, who were often Christians, as well as by the British troops. By wearing the hats of the Christians, the sepoys feared they would become Christians themselves, and would certainly be regarded as such by their relatives and caste members. Rumours circulated that no one would marry the sepoys, and some were apparently told by their own wives that they would no longer cook or sleep with them if they accepted the new headdress. The fear of being ostracised had an immense effect on the sepoys, who would do anything to avoid the odious appellation of ‘topi-wallahs’ or ‘hat guys’—a common term of abuse for the British.60

  The bond between the British and their Indian sepoys was in part based on the assumption that the rulers would never impose Christianity on their subjects, whose traditional beliefs they were obliged to uphold. Any new regulation or measure that could be perceived as impinging on religious issues was accordingly perceived as a breach of faith on the part of the British. Under such circumstances, the sepoys felt exempted from their oath of loyalty. The short-lived mutiny at Vellore was brutally suppressed, but highlighted the fact that the acceptance of British authority in India could not be taken for granted, not even amongst the sepoys. Shortly after the Vellore Mutiny, the British officer in command stated that ‘there was an idea among the troops that it was the intention of Government to force them to relinquish everything that distinguishes one caste from another, and by degrees to convert them to Christianity; that they also suspected the Europeans intended to massacre the native troops’. This was, of course, to be a recurrent fear amongst the sepoys, and one which eventually came to dominate their rejection of cartridges in 1857.

  By 1857, Alum Bheg could look back on a number of incidents where service in the Company’s army put the ritual and social status of the sepoys at risk. During the First Afghan War (1839–42), the sepoys had had to forgo a number of their religious observances, such as washing before each meal, and they also had to accept food prepared by Muslims.61 Their British officers personally supplied them with warm poshteens or sheepskin coats against the cold of the mountainous region, but wearing these was offensive to the high-caste Hindus. The Muslim sepoys also found it hard to reconcile the fact that they were serving an infidel government against other Muslims. The campaign was a catastrophic disaster, but once the sepoys who survived the gruelling retreat from Kabul returned, the real implications dawned on them as ‘they had become outcaste to their religion.’62 It is difficult to appreciate the profound implications being ostracised and shunned by family and kin had for sepoys, and for Alum Bheg, yet the following description, by an Indian officer, of the shame associated with corporal punishment is revealing:

  ‘There is no soldier, Sir, that does not feel disgraced by being tied up to the halberds and flogged in face of all his comrades, and the crowd that may choose to come and look at him: the sipahees are all of the same respectable families as ourselves; and they all enter the service in the hope of rising in time to the same stations as ourselves, if they conduct themselves well—their families look forward with the same hope. A man who has been tied up and flogged knows the disgrace that it will bring upon his family; and will sometimes rather die than return to it; indeed as head of a family he could not be received at home.* (* Sleeman: The funeral obsequies, which are every where offered up to the manes[sic] of parents by the surviving head of the family during the first fifteen days of the month of Kooar, (September,) were never considered as acceptable from the hands of a soldier in our service who had been tied up and flogged, whatever might have been the nature of the offence for which he was punished; any head of a family so flogged lost, by that punishment, the most important of his civil rights: that indeed upon which all the others hinged; for it is by presiding at the funeral ceremonies, that the head of the family secures and maintains his recognition).’63

  A sepoy who had suffered the public humiliation of being flogged, or had otherwise exposed himself to the accusation of ritual pollution, had not only jeopardised his own status but had also brought disrepute upon his entire family. Such concerns converged and were, to some extent, confused with similar issues emerging from the prison regimes of the colonial jail. When common messing was introduced in the colonial jails during the 1840s, it provided a further impetus to the fears of some that the Government was seeking to undermine the caste and religion of a part of the Indian population entirely in its power.64 Another cause of contention was the removal of prisoners’ brass vessel, the lota, which allowed high-caste inmates to maintain their purity—this was not possible with the earthenware vessels that replaced them. The prisoners’ protests over these infringements of their dietary practices were widely supported by the Indian community outside, as the Indian police officer, Shaik Hedayut Ali observed:

  ‘…that law must be very bad which by its infliction ruins our religion,—for instance, when any one is sentenced to imprisonment, immediately on his reaching the prison, his beard and moustache are cut; this to us is a great insult. In jail it is ordered that the prisoners should eat in messes, the Mahomedans by themselves and the Hindoos by themselves; this is no outrage to a Mahomedan, but it is a great one to the feelings and religion of a Hindoo. One Hindoo won’t eat from the hand of another unless they happen to be brothers or cousins.’65

  Sepoys openly voiced their fears that they might be the next to suffer the same fate at the hand of the Government. Like the prisoners, sepoys were subject to official rules and had their dietary habits disciplined by army regulations. In a show of solidarity with Brahmin and Rajput inmates who had rioted in the jail at Sahabad, several sepoys wrote to them that ‘the day on which the English shall attempt to destroy our religion, e
very regiment will revolt.’66

  The length of beards, or the nature of cooking utensils, might seem to be trivial matters, but they reflected broader concerns about the motives of British administration—and the wider implications of colonial rule. According to Hedayut, ‘None of the Hindoos in Hindoostaan would eat with their comrades who went to Afghanistan, nor would they even allow them to touch their cooking utensils: they looked upon them all as outcasts, and treated them accordingly.’67 The same applied to people who had been incarcerated. ‘When a Hindoo is released from prison,’ Hedayut explained, ‘he is always tabooed by his family and looked upon as having lost caste: on this account both the prisoner and his relatives become disaffected towards the Government.’68 It was accordingly not any one act of proven defilement that led to people being ostracised, but merely the fact that they had been in a position where their ability to maintain ritual observances had been compromised. The same applied to the greased cartridges. Once the ammunition served out by the British came to be identified as an object of pollution, any sepoy who accepted any cartridge exposed himself to the same opprobrium that had hitherto been associated with crossing the kala pani, eating food prepared by others, being in prison or wearing the skin of animals. It is for this reason that the exact composition of the grease on the Enfield cartridges, or which cartridges were even handled, mattered little to the sepoys in 1857.

  Military service and an elaborate set of observances is what made the sepoys of the Bengal Army high-caste. The concern over pollution amongst the troops in 1857 was therefore a throwback to the social struggles and conflicts of the eighteenth century, during which Rajputs and Bhumihars had established themselves as high-status groups through the appropriation of Brahmin practices concerning ritual purity.69 The exalted social status enjoyed by the high-caste Hindu majority in the regiments furthermore extended to the other sepoys, including the Muslims, Sikhs and other Hindus. Rather than stable or innate identities, caste, religion and social status were performative and the claim to high status had to be constantly affirmed through daily rituals and practices. Anything that might undermine the ritual purity of the sepoys thus had to be publicly disavowed by them, even if this entailed refusing to handle blank cartridges for the muskets they had been using for decades. Alum Bheg and the other sepoys were compromised by the mere fact of serving the British, and therefore they had to make a public display of their rejection.

  At the most immediate level, service in the Bengal Army, which had formerly been a guarantor of high status, of high caste and martial respectability, had now become a social and ritual liability; it had become polluting rather than empowering. The cartridges should thus be regarded as tangible symbols of vague fears, and what the sepoys and sowars at Barrackpore, Berhampore, and later Meerut rejected was in essence the terms of their service with the British, rather than the small packets of lead-balls and gun-powder wrapped in paper. That is why the nature of the grease was far less significant than the British imagined it to be. By allowing the sepoys to prepare their own lubrication and by changing the drill for tearing the cartridges, the British did nothing to alleviate the real causes behind the sepoys’ objections. There was, in other words, nothing that the British could have done to counter the rumours of pollution that spread with such speed across northern India in the spring of 1857. If the fears of the greased cartridges were largely symbolic, they nevertheless materialised to mobilise real resistance. The sepoys had no means by which to roll back time and renegotiate the terms of their service with the British, but they could refuse the cartridges.

  In a petition written by the sepoys of the 43rd BNI at Barrackpore to their officers in March 1857, we can see how the specific objections to the greased cartridges merged with the wider rumours concerning the pollution of foodstuffs and the message identified in the circulation of chapattis:

  ‘The representation of the whole station is this, that we will not give up our religion. We serve for honour and religion; if we lose our religion, the Hindoo and Mahomedan religions will be destroyed. If we live, what shall we do? You are the masters of the country. The Lord Sahib has given orders, which he has received from the Company, to all commanding officers to destroy the religion of the country. We know this, as all things are being brought up by Government. The officers of the Salt Department mix up bones with the salt. The officer in charge of the ghee mixes up fat with it; this is well known. These are two matters. The third is this: that the Sahib in charge of the sugar burns up bones and mixes them in syrup the sugar is made of; this is well known—all knows it. The fourth is this: that in the country the Burra Sahibs have ordered the Rajahs, Thakurs, Zemindars, Mahajans and Ryots, all to eat together, and English bread has been sent to them; this is well known. And this is another affair, that throughout the country the wives of respectable men, in fact, all classes of Hindoos, on becoming widows, are to be married again; this is known. Therefore we consider ourselves as killed. You all obey the orders of the Company, which we all know. But a king, or any other one who acts unjustly, does not remain.’70

  All the different rumours that had troubled the sepoys, and the wider population, for months, here came together in the notion of a fully-fledged British conspiracy to undermine the religion of all Indians. Yet it was not simply the case that the sepoys and the population of northern India believed something absurd and demonstratively untrue to be true—the rumours of the greased cartridges, the pollution of foodstuffs and the stories associated with the circulation of chapattis were emblematic of what many feared from British rule. Rather than specific narratives of panic, in their own right, these rumours crystalised the fears and uncertainty that the governance of the East India Company instilled in its subject population after a century of political, economic and socio-religious intervention. At the purely symbolic level, the rumours of the greased cartridges and polluted foodstuffs all represented the same basic fear: that under British rule no-one would be able to maintain their religious and ritual purity, that everything Indians held dear would be undermined by colonial rule. The rumours presented an image of British rule which controlled all aspects of local life, and which therefore Indians could not protect themselves against. The very fact that such stories could be considered plausible and gain credence was an indication of the gap between rulers and ruled. This was, according to Ahmed Khan, a crucial factor in alienating the Indian population from the British government:

  ‘Government could never know the inadvisability of the laws and regulations which it passed. It could never hear as it ought to have heard the voice of the people on such a subject. The people had no means of protesting against what they might feel to be a foolish measure, or of giving public expression to their own wishes. But the greatest mischief lay in this, that the people misunderstood the views and the intentions of Government. They misapprehended every act, and whatever law was passed was misconstrued by men who had no share in the framing of it, and hence no means of judging of its spirit. At length the Hindustanees fell into the habit of thinking that all the laws were passed with a view to degrade and ruin them, and to deprive them and their fellows of their religion. Such acts as were repugnant to native customs and character, whether in themselves good or bad, increased this suspicion. At last came the time when all men looked upon the English Government as slow poison, a rope of sand, a treacherous flame of fire. They learned to think that if today they escaped from the hands of Government, tomorrow they would fall into them; or that even if they escaped on the morrow, the third day would see their ruin.’71

  * * *

  The British confidence in their sepoys had reached the point of crisis by the end of March, and while the instruction in the use of the Enfield rifle was temporarily suspended, the military administration decided to modify the drill, so that the cartridges could be torn by hand rather than by using the teeth. At Meerut, the British commander decided to implement the new drill immediately, and ordered a firing parade for ninety skirmishers of the 3rd BLC
on 24 April.72 When all but five of the sowars refused to accept the blank, ungreased cartridges, for their old carbines, they were promptly dismissed and during a subsequent court-martial each given ten years of hard labour. One of the things that had contributed to the sowars’ collective refusal to take the cartridges was the fact that the commander had promised to publicise their participation in the drill in the local papers.73 This had been intended to demonstrate throughout the Bengal Army that there was no longer any cause for objection to the use of any cartridges, but the effect was quite the opposite. Considering the significance of peer pressure, and the fear of being ostracised, this was in fact the very last thing any Indian soldier would wish for. As the sowars themselves stated on the parade-ground of 24 April: ‘If the other regiments will fire one cartridge, we will fire ten.’74 It was accordingly the attempt to make the sowars at Meerut a test-case for the new drill that determined their absolute refusal to go through with the procedure. The punishment of the skirmishers resonated throughout the Bengal Army, as Ahmed Khan noted:

  ‘The fatal month of May 1857 was now at hand, in which the army was punished in a manner which thinking men know to have been most wrong and most inopportune. The anger which the news of this punishment created in the minds of the Sepoys was intense. The prisoners, on seeing their hands and feet manacled, looked at their medals and wept. They remembered their services and thought how they had been recompensed, and their pride, which as I have before said was the feeling of the whole army, caused them to feel the degradation all the more keenly. Then the rest of the troops at Meerut were fully persuaded that they would either be compelled to bite the cartridges or undergo the same punishment. This rage and grief led to the fearful events of the l0th of May, which events are unparalleled in the annals of history. After committing themselves thus, the mutineers had no choice left but to continue in their career of rebellion.’75