civilians were seriously caught up in the front line of conflict alongside
officers and soldiers.” 66 As such, Britons across the Empire – in India, at
the margins of rebellion, and safely at home – not only called for
retaliation, but also experienced deep anxiety and fear about their
personal status in India and about the status of the British Empire in
India.
While history favors the victor, and many British commentators
certainly assumed victory, this outcome was not always so assured. As the
Rebellion progressed, it was clear that the outnumbered Britons did not
necessarily expect to win. Reinforcements needed to be called in to
ensure security and to replace lost sepoy (i.e., Indian) infantrymen, who
were no longer seen as trustworthy. Some socially marginal whites –
whom scholar Sarmistha De calls “low Europeans” – were drafted into
the EIC armies; these included English working-class men, poor
Scotsmen, and Irish peasants. 67 The desperation in British calls for
retaliation and desire to suppress the revolts indicates the depth of fear
and uncertainty caused by the rebels. When the British regained control,
though it was imperfect, there was no uncertainty in their actions.
Brutality was not limited to the massacres in Delhi and Cawnpore,
and Britons quickly answered the call for retribution. As others have
noted, the British doled out retribution not just to active rebels but also
to women, and, as historian Arshad Islam demonstrates, particularly to
women affiliated with the former ruling Mughal elite were heavily
targeted in the wake of the Rebellion.68 Concurrent to the Rebellion,
Parliament passed Act XIV, which instituted martial law and allowed
British officials to try native officers and soldiers in the sepoy regimes for
actions against the army and state.69 It is unclear, however, if all who
were tried were actively engaged in rebellion or mutiny. In fact, in the
moments immediately after the Rebellion, as British forces sought to
regain and maintain authority, they summarily executed vast numbers of
rebels. In addition, under a “scorched earth” policy, they left wide
swathes of the landscape in utter ruin, which both induced and added to
the already-extant widespread suffering of Anglo-Indian society. 70
In light of famine, murders, sensational (if largely discredited) stories
of rape, and viciousness on all sides, the Great Rebellion became
imprinted on the collective memories of Britons and Indians alike.
30
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
Many have debated the “true” or “authentic” causes of the Rebellion,
with numerous contemporary eyewitnesses and commentators pointing
to religious fervency, ethno-racial inclinations to fanaticism, and,
ultimately, an inescapable irrationality. Anxieties around religion and
religious (in)sensitivity permeated initial reports about the “mutiny”
and continue to bear weight today. While the Great Rebellion cannot
and ought not be characterized as a singular moment without precedent
nor aftershocks, it is nevertheless uniformly understood as a watershed –
if not the watershed – in modern Indian history. 1857 looms large
because of the depth and scope of the Rebellion, its unprecedented
violence, and the resultant reinforcement of British authority. Its effects
continue to be manifold: the machinations of Rebellion, in the imperial
record and in native responses to it, shaped religion, religious definition,
and especially the portrayal and conceptualization of Indian Muslims by
both imperial and native agents.
Greased Cartridges and Chapatis: the Anxiety
of Religious Conspiracy
If the Great Rebellion is the watershed for South Asian history, then
the harbingers of that climactic event are greased cartridges and passed
chapatis. These two – the former more than the latter – figure
immensely in the narrative of the Great Rebellion and contribute
especially to its inherent religious undertone. Many have disputed the
actuality of these events. Others have discredited the notion that these
limited occurrences could have sparked such widespread and long-
lasting bloodshed. Still others place these events within a complex
matrix of other events, policies, and shifts. Despite these efforts, the
narrative stands: rifle cartridges greased with religiously prohibited
animal fat caused the Rebellion, and the rebels used chapatis to
secretly pass the conspiracy of rebellion from region to region.
Religion, religiosity, and fanatic adherence to religious law – law
beyond state control, importantly – figure principally in the story of
how the Great Rebellion came to be and came to be so devastating.
In short, greased cartridges and passed chapatis underscore the widely
held belief that religion was a viable and real threat to the Empire, an
actual and potential cause for the Great Rebellion particularly and
rebellion generally.
THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM
31
No aspect of the Rebellion so captured the imagination of writers,
politicians, and commentators as the Enfield Rifle, the updated musket
meant to be distributed to the sepoys. It replaced the equally famous
“Brown Bess,” a smoothbore musket used for decades in sepoy
regiments. The Pattern 1853 Enfield rifled musket was more powerful,
more accurate, and able to attain better striking distances. The Brown
Bess and the Enfield Rifle both required cartridges to be loaded
manually. To load either of these guns, the operator had to break open a
cartridge of gunpowder by biting it, pour the gunpowder into the
muzzle of the weapon, stuff the cartridge case – typically paper coated
with some kind of grease or wax to make it waterproof – into the musket
as wadding, then finally load it with the ball that would be fired. The act
of biting the cartridge, while not a new physicality of sepoy armament,
has been credited with sparking the Great Rebellion. Cartridges of the
Brown Bess were greased with beeswax. It was rumored that the Enfield
cartridges were greased with animal fat – specifically, the fat of beef and
pork, religiously prohibited animal products for Hindus and Muslims,
respectively. As the popular retelling goes, word of the new weapon’s
problematic grease spread, causing upheaval; some argued that these
reports were merely rumors that conspiratorial leaders seized upon and
used to rile up their religious compatriots while working together, 71
though others preferred to see the greased cartridges as the match that
ignited the average sepoy’s revolutionary zeal. 72
Rumor, legend, and embellishments typify rationales for the Great
Rebellion. Like Colonel George Bruce Malleson’s (d. 1898) assertion of a
tidy conspiracy story, he (and others) recounted a similar, somewhat
fanciful story of the start of the mutiny. He wrote:
It happened in this wise. A lascar engaged in the factory at Dam-
Dam asked a Brahman sipa´hı´ to let him have a drink of water from
his lotah, or brass pot. The si
pa´hıíndignantly refused, on the
ground that his caste would not permit him to use the lotah
afterwards if it should be defiled by the drinking of a man of a
lower position in the Hindu hierarchy. The lascar, in reply,
laughed at him for talking of defilement, when he said, ‘You will
all soon be biting cartridges smeared with the fat of the cow and
the pig.’ He then told the sipa´hı´ the method of the new cartridges.
The incident occurred when the mind of the sipa´hıś had been
32
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
inflamed, in the manner already recounted, to a high state of
tension. The story spread like wildfire. Thenceforward the sipa´hıś
were as soft clay in the hands of the chief conspirators.73
This story is repeated, nearly identically, in a number of places, and it is
also repeated only to be refuted elsewhere.74 Many have commented on
the religious underpinnings of the story of the greased cartridge, but
Malleson’s observation best summarizes the general theme: “The men
seriously believed that they were about to be juggled out of their
religion by means of cartridges.”75
Of course, it is both historically irresponsible and flatly incorrect to
suggest that the Enfield rifle singularly sparked revolts. It is absolutely
unfathomable – and unsupportable – that one issue could have caused a
widespread rebellion that entailed small- and large-scale violence,
military action, tribunals, displacements, and months of ongoing
warfare, with vast legal and social ramifications that followed. The story,
however, contains meaningful kernels of broader contexts and schemas of
complex issues. For example, the Enfield was to be – coincidentally –
smeared with exactly the animal fats the two major religious factions
could or would not abide. The rumor was not that the rifle would require
generic animal fat, some of which – like that of mutton – would not be
as offensive or polluting to either religious community. Rather, the story
plays on a commonly known stereotype of religion in South Asia,
Muslims avoidance of pigs and Hindu veneration of cows, lending an
obvious marker of religious offense to the retelling of the rifle story.
Likewise, the tale of how sepoys, and Indians more broadly, came to first
learn of the offensive grease happens in a near-perfect critical fable:
a Brahmin’s religious sensibilities are offended – and his religious
haughtiness lampooned – to an audience that both understands the
offense and sees a moral in watching him be humbled.
The greased cartridges often appear alongside a complementary
rumor that leaders of various religious and political outfits signaled
widespread rebellion by way of circulating chapatis, a typical north
Indian flatbread. The passing of chapatis and its evident appearance
of conspiracy, too, became part of the historiography and popular
imagination about the Great Rebellion.76 Malleson related that the
key agitators of the Mutiny were “Maulavıóf Faiza´ba´d, the mouthpiece
and agent of the discontented in Oudh; NańaŚa´hib; one or two great
THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM
33
personages in Lakhnao; the Rańıóf Jhańsı´; and Kundwar Singh.” 77 He
referred to them as “conspirators,” and he named each as responsible for
some aspects of the revolts, but seemed to suggest that their power –
and evidence of a true conspiracy – lay in the collective. He narrated the
controversy, religious offenses, and conspiratorial narrative as such:
The practice with the old paper cartridges, used with the old
musket, the ‘Brown Bess,’ already referred to, had been to bite off
the paper at one end previous to ramming it down the barrel.
When the conspirators suddenly lighted upon the new cartridge,
not only smeared, but smeared with the fat of the hog or the cow,
the one hateful to the Muhammadans, the other the sacred animal
of the Hindus, they recognized that they had found a weapon
potent enough to rouse to action the armed men of the races which
professed those religions. What could be easier than to persuade
the sipa´hıś [sepoys] that the greasing of the new cartridges was a
well-thought-out scheme to deprive the Hindu of his caste, to
degrade the Muhammadan?78
Malleson summarized the issues neatly: leaders, both political and
religious, seized upon a rumor that would surely enrage. He added that
when the British and sepoys had trusted each other, no one would have
believed that one would knowingly betray the other, but once all trust
had been eroded, it was possible to convince sepoys (and, later, civilians)
that the British had ill-intent toward them, and that rebellion was
appropriate. 79 He narrated:
The executive council of this conspiracy had arranged, in the
beginning of 1857, to act upon the sipa´hıś by means of the greased
cartridge, upon the inhabitants of the rural districts by the
dissemination of chapa´tıś. This dissemination was intended as a
warning that the rising was imminent. It was further decided that
the rising of the sipa´hıś should be simultaneous, and more than
once the actual day was fixed.80
The conspiracy was vast, and included an “executive” council, comprised
of various leaders; it involved sepoy regimens in a few areas, by way of
playing upon religious sensibility; and it aimed to spread to “rural
34
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
districts” by way of secret messages. Malleson saw in the Great Rebellion
a massive network of Indians, raging from powerful to lowly, working
together to destroy the British Empire in India.
We ought to be suspicious of the greased cartridges, the passed
chapatis, and the mythologies surrounding both. A number of observers
and contemporary historians have raised strenuous objections to the idea
that new rifles for sepoys caused the Great Rebellion. 81 The offending
rifles (which were never issued) and the chapatis (which, while plausible,
cannot be confirmed82) exist as testaments to a nexus of oral history and
legend; their authenticity is relative to its effects, not to its scientific
demonstrability. With regard to oral tradition, Peter Burke notes that
“what does not meet with general approval is not passed on; in the
sense the audience acts as a censor.”83 The rifle and the chapatis are
indispensable elements of the Rebellion story.
That these stories persist bears weight in two primary ways for our
purposes. First, their persistence indicates a neatness of narrative and
resonates as essentially accurate; second, it demonstrates that religious
belief – and British offenses to it – was and is seen as a viable, plausible
reason for rebellion. The latter demonstrates a number of assumptions:
that Britons would, or had, offended local religious custom and order;
that Indians, across assumed lines of Muslim and Hindu, would band
together in light of religious offense; and that the population could
tolerate all manner of the colonia
l regime’s trespasses so long as they did
not cross into the sphere(s) of religion.
The story of the Enfield rifle encodes an incredulity at the ignorance
or purposefulness with which the British acted in their plan to distribute
the weapon. In two of the most cited and standard British accounts of the
Great Rebellion, the authors demonstrate, collectively, this encoding:
as above, Malleson, in a fairly simple aside, noted what pigs and cows
mean to Muslims and Hindus, and, despite suggesting elsewhere that
simplistic religion did not singularly spawn rebellion, he intoned that
such grave offenses left both groups with little choice but anger. 84 John
William Kaye, on the other hand, merely noted that the greased
cartridges were to be distributed and did not bother explaining why this
might cause offense. 85 The distasteful nature of the greased cartridges is
presumed.
Both Malleson and Kaye implied that fat from pigs and cows would
be readily and immediately identified as religiously prohibited, so its use
THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM
35
in rifle cartridges would indicate either a truly unforgiveable ignorance
or a purposeful transgression by the British. Thus, the persistence of the
Enfield rifle as a cause of the Great Rebellion encapsulates a British India
in which religion comes above all else, and proper control means
effective management of religious sensibilities of the two major “sects,”
Hinduism and Islam. The standard British accounts of the Great
Rebellion reveal a critique in which authorities at best failed to know
enough not to offend, and at worst, knew enough but disregarded how
serious a religious offense would be in a heightened religious atmosphere
like India. Moreover, the Enfield story similarly implies that the British
model of divide et impera – divide and conquer – failed in this case
because the Britons misunderstood either religion or its grip on the
Indian populace. Proper and lasting control relied upon Hindus and
Muslims remaining divergent and at odds with each other; only in their
unity could rebellious conspiracies take root with measurable effects.
Offending both Hindus and Muslims at the same moment violated
British philosophies of proper rule in India and made the two groups
strange but dangerous bedfellows.
In the immediate aftermath of the Rebellion (and in some cases, even
Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion Page 6