The Hindus (100 page)

As long as it was just a matter of graft and the lust for power, the British treated the people they robbed as human beings. It was religion that made them treat them like devils. At first the East India Company had adamantly excluded all Christian missionary activity from its territories, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of what was at stake in the religious debate
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and a consciousness of the disadvantages of unnecessarily antagonizing its Indian subjects. In 1793, Charles Cornwallis (Governor-General from 1786 to 1793) made a pact promising not to interfere with the religions of the people of India. The Company continued the patronage accorded by indigenous rulers to many Hindu temples and forbade its Indian troops to embrace Christianity. But when the Company’s charter was renewed in 1813, the growing evangelical conscience in England forced it to allow Christian missions to operate in India. The evangelical Clapham Sect in London converted a Governor-General (Sir John Shore, 1793- 1798) and a leading Company director and put pressure on the government in Westminster.
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Thus the second wave began. In contrast with the conservatives and Orientalists of the first wave, this batch of British might be labeled evangelicals and opportunists, who regarded India as a land of heathens and idolaters in desperate need of being missionized. They met with some degree of success. Tribals converted to Christianity in large numbers because they associated the value system of the Christian missionaries with the power of the British.
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Some low-caste Hindus converted to avoid the stigma of being Pariahs, though the missionaries, respecting caste, as all religions in India always did, boasted of the number of their Brahmin converts. Other low-caste Hindus converted just for the relief of the soup kitchens, which made upper-caste Hindus call them rice Christians. Hindus of all castes converted as a result of their involvement in government and administration, intermarriage, and change of heart.

Both Hindus and Muslims blamed the government for allowing the missionariesfree rein.
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The missionaries influenced the government to intervene in Hindu matters; under James Dalhousie (Governor-General from 1847 to 1856), the government passed laws making it possible for Hindu widows to remarry, Hindu converts to Christianity to retain inheritance rights (which, according to Hindu law, they would have lost when they ceased to be Hindus), and castes to mingle in railroad carriages.
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Evangelical officers favored Christian sepoys, and meddling, arrogant missionaries taught the young Indian students in their schools to be ashamed of their parents’ religions.
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In a move reminiscent of the ambiguous positioning of the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu, Jesus became one of the avatars in a Christian tract published in Calcutta (and written in Oriya) in 1837, warning the reader that the deity worshiped in the Jagannatha Temple at Puri in Orissa was a degenerate form of the true Jagannatha and exhorting the pilgrim to Puri to “remain a Hindu and also believe in Christ,” who is, by implication, the true Jagannatha.
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The tipping point came in 1857. The eighteenth century saw military incursions, floods, famines, epidemics, political disruptions, and bankrupt treasuries. Great land settlements displaced many landholders, and the confiscation of buildings previously rent-free for religious officials raised hackles in various quarters. The British relationship to Indians changed dramatically after 1813, degenerating into “a compound of cold utilitarian logic, cloying Christian ideology, and molten free-trade evangelism.”
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That Christian ideology made the country a tinderbox of resentment, just waiting for a flame to touch it off.

The flame, the proximate cause of the rebellion, came, in 1857, in the form of a bit of awkwardness about certain cartridges. Religious awkwardness. The British issued a new rifle, the Enfield, for which the cartridges had to be bitten open (since both hands were otherwise occupied; think of John Wayne biting off the tops of those grenades in World War II movies) to pour the powder down the rifle’s barrel. Greased cartridges had been first imported in 1853.
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The sepoys believed, possibly rightly, that these cartridges were greased with a tallow probably containing both pigs’ fat and cows’ fat (lard and suet, animal fats that were used for a lot of things in the military, and though the fat was more likely to have been mutton fat, it was still anathema to the many vegetarian Brahmins among the sepoys). The one thing that you could say for this arrangement, which would have forced Muslims to eat pork and Hindus to eat beef, is that it was equally disgusting for both groups to bite the bullet, and at least the British could not be accused of favoritism. But the animal grease was not merely disgusting; it would have been spiritually disastrous, bringing instant excommunication and damnation. (Later the British briefly entertained but finally dismissed a suggestion to allow the troops to grease the cartridges with ghee.) From early 1857, “newspapers had made known the general repugnance felt by the Sepoys to the use of the new cartridges.”
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As one contemporary British observer
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wrote of the cartridge scandal, “It was so terrible a thing, that, if the most malignant enemies of the British Government had sat in conclave for years, and brought an excess of devilish ingenuity to bear upon the invention of a scheme framed with the design of alarming the Sipáhi [sepoy] mind from one end of India to the other, they could not have devised a lie better suited to the purpose.”
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The rumors fueled the suspicion that the British had done it on purpose, in order to leave the sepoys no option, if they wanted to save their souls, but conversion to Christianity. When sepoys refused to load the cartridges, they were publicly humiliated, imprisoned, or expelled.
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Although the British quickly withdrew the offending cartridges, the damage had been done, and the sepoys didn’t trust any existing cartridges.
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In the intense heat of May 9, 1857, eighty-five sepoys in Meerut were arrested for refusing to handle the cartridges. On the next night, other sepoys banded together, massacred the English residents of the town, and marched on Delhi.
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More sepoys, and more officers, joined the fight, which quickly escalated. Muslims fought on the side of the Hindus, Sikhs hostile to Muslims with the British. Innocent civilians, women and children, were routinely killed by both the British and the Indian troops.
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A small British community sought refuge from the rebellion in the local fort at Jhansi, which was ruled by a Maharashtrian queen named Lakshmi Bai, a beautiful young widow who was an accomplished horsewoman. The British refugees were massacred. Lakshmi Bai insisted that she too had been victimized by the sepoys. When a local rival to the throne invaded Jhansi, she claimed loyalty to the British, but they did nothing to help her. When the British laid siege to Jhansi, in 1858, she led her troops into battle, but Jhansi fell. She slipped out in disguise, rode away, and (with the help of a confederate) captured Gwalior. When the British attacked Gwalior, she was shot to death.
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The Jhansi massacre is one of several events that stand out amid a long catalog of deaths and horrors and thus serve as historical pegs upon which people have hung a range of myths and legends that express the emotional impact of the Rebellion. Another concerns Mangal Pandey, a sepoy of the No. 5 Company of the Thirty-fourth Native Infantry at Barrackpore, near Calcutta, who, on March 29, 1857, more than a month before the Rebellion, publicly objected to the cartridges, on religious grounds. Others joined in, all hell broke loose, and Mangal Pandey was executed by hanging on April 8. But subsequent mythologies (and a popular Bollywood film, Ketan Mehta’s
Mangal Pandey,
2005, with Amir Khan as Pandey) have overlaid the events surrounding Mangal Pandey to such an extent that they have almost totally obscured what evidence there is. According to one legend, when a mounted officer rode at him, Pandey fired at him and hit the horse (the first casualty in the Rebellion), unseating the officer.
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There is also some debate about whether Pandey was under the influence of bhang,
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opium, alcohol,
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some combination of all of them, or none. (The hardship caused by a new opium tax was said to be one of the major factors that led to the Rebellion.
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)

Yet another incident, somewhat better authenticated but equally mythologized, concerns a massacre at Kanpur (or Cawnpore, as the British called it, near what was Harsha’s Kanauj) on June 27, 1857. When insurgents besieged the British there, General Wheeler accepted terms under which the British would be allowed passage by boat downriver to Allahabad. Some four hundred of the British surrendered; as they boarded boats at Sati-Chaura Ghat, a detachment of sepoys under the command of Nana Sahib, the Indian ruler of Kanpur, ambushed them, and many of them were shot down or drowned. Nana Sahib rescued about two hundred women and children and locked them up in the Bibighar (“Ladies’ House”), which was, significantly, a small bungalow where a British officer had once housed his Indian mistress. Many of the captives were suffering from dysentery and cholera.
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On July 15, troops of Nana Sahib’s adopted son attacked the Bibighar, and when the regular soldiers refused to carry out the command to execute them all (a minor rebellion of its own), four or five butchers from the local market slaughtered all who were still alive and threw the body parts down a well. Some historians argue that Nana Sahib intended to use the captives as hostages and did not issue the order for the extermination, while others believe that he panicked, fearing that the British would seize Kanpur, and gave the order. In any case, as Keay describes it, “Their slaughterhouse methods, clumsy rather than sadistic, constituted an atrocity which would haunt the British till the end of their Indian days. For sheer barbarity this ‘massacre of the innocents’ was rivaled only by the disgusting deaths devised for dozens of equally innocent Indians by way of British reprisal.”
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Though the cartridges were the proverbial straw, the camel (flanked by the cow and pig) was already heavily loaded with economic, social, and political resentments, which continued to fester.

Recognizing the power of the resentments ignited by these events, the British took countermeasures. In 1858 Victoria proclaimed that the British crown was taking over all the rights of the East India Company; she became queen of India.
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She forced the missionaries to lay off, now more than ever realizing, again, what was at stake in interfering with Hinduism. Acknowledging that the sepoys in 1857-1858 had genuinely feared conversion to Christianity, Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 not only curtailed missionary activity but reduced the public funding of mission schools and ordered British officials to abstain from interfering with Indian beliefs and rituals “on the pain of Our highest displeasure.”
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She also specifically disclaimed any “desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects.” (Victoria herself has become the religion: She capitalizes “Our” as the missionaries capitalized “God.”)

Many of the missionaries had been killed during the Rebellion, but the damage had already been done. While the new official attitude was superficially similar to the earlier hands-off policy toward Hinduism, the sentiments fueling it were very different; whereas the missionaries had attempted to convert the Hindus, now the British as a whole were totally dismissive of them as irredeemable heathens, with no hope of ever becoming human beings. After 1858 the government officials themselves had become more Christian in their scorn for Hindus, whom they avoided as much as possible. Now that they felt that they had a divine mission to rule India and were convinced of Christianity’s moral superiority, they lost their earlier toleration, let alone their support, of Indian religions.
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This third batch, in contrast with the conservatives and Orientalists, together with the evangelicals and opportunists, were Utilitarians and Anglicists, who believed in the superiority of reason and progress and pushed for Western education.

What made the sepoys so suspicious of those greased cartridges in the first place? Let us go back and reconsider the shifting winds of religious interactions in the century between 1756 and 1857.

In the first wave (roughly between 1750 and 1813), despite the steadily darkening political scene, the British had respected both Islam and Hinduism and were, in general, blessedly free of religious zeal.
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In the late eighteenth century a Muslim visitor to India commented with surprise on the respect that the British paid to both Hindus and Muslims—at least to those of a certain respectability:

And there were conversations. The medieval Indian tradition of debate in the Mughal court, patronized by rulers and commonly held in the royal darbar (Akbar is the most famous but by no means the only example), was transformed, in the colonial period, first into Muslim-Christian debates, retaining much of the medieval structure and rhetoric,
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and then, through the end of the nineteenth century, into debates between Hindu court pandits and traveling controversialists. The social context of these debates was radically broadened, now accessible to a much wider literate audience. One missionary remarked that religious debate was a major source of entertainment in India, “and the people will enjoy the triumph as much when a Brahmun falls as when the Christian is foiled.”
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The crowd laughed at the Brahmins and then at the missionaries. This was a self-serving argument, implying that since Hinduism was already a space of debate and entertainment, the missionaries would do no harm,
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but there was some truth in it.