the policy devised by Dalhousie which said that any princely state or territory dominated by the British and without a natural heir to the throne would automatically be annexed. In 1848 the Raja of Satara, in western India, died without an heir. Dalhousie refused to recognise his recently adopted heir, declaring that his state had ‘lapsed’ to the paramount power. Two experienced political officers, Colonel William Sleeman and Colonel John Low, protested that this policy caused great concern. Low warned Dalhousie that Indians asked him: ‘What crime did the Rajah commit that his country should be seized by the Company?’ When the state of Nagpore was also annexed, he admitted: ‘After a very careful perusal of the Governor-General’s minute on this important subject – it is with feelings of sincere regret that I found it is quite out of my power to come to the same conclusions as his Lordship.’92
What happened to the large state of Oudh was even more serious. There was no question that the conduct of its ruler, Nasir-ud-din Hyder, the seventh nawab of his line, left a good deal to be desired. Henry Lawrence described him as being:
engaged in every species of debauchery and surrounded by wretches, English, Eurasian and Native, of the lowest description. Bred in a palace, nurtured by women and eunuchs, he added the natural fruits of a vicious education to those resulting from his protected position.
His Majesty might one hour be seen in a state of drunken nudity, at another he would parade the streets of Lucknow driving one of his own elephants. In his time all decency … was banished from the Court. Such was more than once his conduct that the Resident, Colonel Low, refused to see him or transact business with him.93
His successor seemed little better, alternating excursions to ‘the uttermost abysses of enfeebling debauchery’ with the ‘delights of dancing, and drumming, and drawing, and manufacturing small rhymes’.94 Dalhousie decided to annex Oudh, but first offered a compromise: the nawab could retain his royal title, have full jurisdiction (apart from the death penalty) in two royal parks, and receive a pension of 12 lakhs of rupees. There was some doubt as to whether this sum, enormous though it was, was actually ‘adequate to one of his prodigal inclinations’ who had just spent £5,000 on a pair of vultures. The nawab declined to sign a crucial document, and his state was duly annexed.
Another disgruntled nobleman was Nana Govind Dhondu Pant, better known as the Nana Sahib, adopted son of Baji Rao II, the last Maratha Peshwa, now living in well-pensioned opulence at Bithur. When Baji Rao died in 1851 the Nana Sahib was told that he would inherit neither pension nor title: he mounted a legal counter-attack which failed. After the Mutiny it would be easy for Englishmen to detect a conspiracy between the Nana Sahib and other noblemen such as the Oudh taluqdars who had lost land as a result of the 1856 revenue settlement, and to make a firm connection between growing civil dissatisfaction and incipient military mutiny.
The annexation of Oudh and insistence on the doctrine of lapse did not simply make some Indian rulers uneasy. It affronted the sepoys of the Bengal army, perhaps three-quarters of whom came from Oudh. They also had other grounds for complaint. Traditionally, most of them were high-caste Hindus, but changes in recruitment policy in 1834 and after the Sikh Wars had widened the recruiting base: new units, containing Sikhs, Hindus, Moslems and
Pathans, were raised to defend the Punjab and the new North-West Frontier. The General Service Enlistment Order of 1856 made all recruits liable for overseas service, which was believed, by high-caste Hindus, to be damaging to their status. All these measures seemed to make good sense from the government’s point of view, but they dismayed the high-caste sepoys who were still a majority in most native regiments when the Mutiny broke out. Tampering with allowances, particularly batta, often caused disaffection among British and Indian soldiers alike, and there had been a mutiny in 1849 when foreign service batta for the Punjab was cancelled because it was now part of British India; the most mutinous regiment, 66th BNI (Bengal Native Infantry), was disbanded, and the Gurkha Naisiri Battalion was given its place as 66th (Gurkha) Native Infantry.
To specific causes of grievance were added a wider sense of – well, the right word might even be apartheid. British officers, as we shall see later, were increasingly discouraged from long-term relationships with Indian women, and the offspring of such unions were denied official employment. European women arrived in India in ever-increasing numbers and this seems to have had an effect on the attitudes of the Company’s officers. One contemporary scathingly attributed the decline in relations between British and Indians directly to the impact of the memsahibs:
Every youth, who is able to maintain a wife, marries. The conjugal pair become a bundle of English prejudices and hate the country, the natives and everything belonging to them. If the man has, by chance, a share of philosophy and reflection, the woman is sure to have none. The ‘odious blacks’ the ‘nasty heathen wretches’ the ‘filthy creatures’ are the shrill echoes of the ‘black brutes’ the ‘black vermin’ of the husband. The children catch up the strain. I have heard one, five years old, call the man who was taking care of him a ‘black brute’. Not that the English generally behave with cruelty, but they make no scruple of expressing their anger and contempt by the most opprobrious epithets that the language affords.95
Christian missionaries, too, appeared in growing quantities, and although they were generally unsuccessful in achieving mass conversions, it was easy for Indians to suspect that the Company hoped to deprive them of their religion, as we shall see later. ‘Everyone believed that they were secretly employed by the Government,’ wrote Sita Ram. ‘Why else would they take such trouble?’96 There seemed good reason for this suspicion, as the Chairman of the East India Company had declared that: ‘Providence has entrusted the empire of Hindustan to England in order that the banner of Christ should wave from one end of India to the other.’ Finally, once Oudh was administered by British officials there were complaints that many were ‘totally ignorant of the language, manners and customs of the people, and the same was true of all the sahibs who came from Bengal and from the college’.97
By early 1857 there was ample evidence of the fact that the Bengal army was close to mutiny, had the authorities only been prepared to take it seriously. The proximate cause of the outbreak was the introduction of a new weapon which replaced muzzle-loading percussion muskets like those carried by HM’s 50th at Sobraon. The new Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle had a barrel which spun the conical bullet to give greater accuracy; to enable the bullet to expand to grip the shallow rifling its base was hollow and was forced into the rifling by the explosion of the charge; and around this hollow base were grease-filled flanges.98 Although a senior officer warned that there would be problems unless it was widely known that ‘the grease employed in these cartridges is not of a nature to offend or interfere with the prejudices of caste’, soon there were rumours that the grease was made either from cows (sacred to Hindus) or from pigs (unclean to Moslems). The authorities responded by declaring that sepoys could grease their own bullets with whatever material they chose to procure from the bazaar. But the damage was done.
In January 1857 there was an abortive mutiny around Calcutta, with the new cartridge, dissatisfaction of pay, and resentment about the annexation of Oudh amongst its causes. At much the same time local officials reported that chapatties (discs of unleavened bread) were being sent from village to village; there were rumours of imminent upheaval, and stories that British rule over India, begun at Plassey a century before, would soon be over. On 29 March, Sepoy Mungal Pandy of the 34th BNI at Barrackpore wounded his adjutant and sergeant major. Although both he and the guard commander, who had ordered his men not to detain Mungal Pandy, were hanged, things went from bad to worse. The skirmishers of the 3rd Light Cavalry at
