The Cartridge and the Century of Grievance

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 is often described as if it began with a cartridge — the greased paper casing of the new Enfield rifle whose loading procedure required biting off one end, and whose grease was rumored to contain beef tallow and pork lard in proportions offensive to Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike. The cartridge was real. The grease controversy was real. The eighty-five troopers of the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry who refused the cartridges in April 1857 and were stripped of their uniforms, shackled, and marched off to prison in front of their comrades were real. But the cartridge was a trigger, not a cause. The cause was a century.

The East India Company had been in India since 1608, had been governing vast territories since Robert Clive's victory at Plassey in 1757, and had been accumulating power and territory ever since with a systematic ruthlessness that its defenders called progress and its subjects called plunder. By 1857 the Company governed 250 million people through an army of 300,000, of whom only 45,000 were British. The Bengal Army's sepoys — the Indian soldiers who carried Company rule across the subcontinent — had conquered Punjab, fought in Afghanistan, and garrisoned every frontier. They were paid adequately, but they had been promised that they would never be required to serve overseas (crossing the sea meant ritual pollution for high-caste Hindus) and that their religious customs would be respected. Both promises were being broken, slowly and then faster.

Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse had disinherited the adopted sons of Indian princes, transferring their states to Company rule. Oudh — the kingdom in which much of the Bengal Army's recruitment base was concentrated — was annexed in 1856 on the grounds that its Nawab governed badly. The sepoys of the Bengal Army had relatives and patrons in Oudh's court. They watched the kingdom seized, the court dissolved, and the Nawab pensioned off to Calcutta. The annexation of Oudh was, in the view of many historians, the single most important political cause of the rebellion. The cartridge was simply the insult added to injury.

On the evening of May 10, 1857, the sepoys at Meerut broke their chains. They shot their officers, freed the imprisoned troopers, and marched through the night toward Delhi. They were not following a plan — there was no plan, no coordinated conspiracy, no Nana Sahib giving orders from Bithur. They were soldiers who had watched the Company take everything they valued and had decided to take some of it back. They marched to Delhi because the Mughal Emperor was there, and because the Emperor was the only symbol of Indian sovereignty that still existed.