In earlier times, a brotherly trust had developed between the sepoys and their British officers, many of whom had taken Indian wives and mistresses and adopted a more or less Indian style of life. Instead, for various reasons, they came to feel that they were being treated with disrespect.
Sepoy mutiny causes and effects professional#
The sepoys, as professional soldiers, expected to be treated as professionals. That loyalty would be severely shaken by the events of the late winter and early spring of 1857. Over time, partly as a result of the company’s financial and military success and partly through the forceful personalities of company officials, native loyalty achieved a tenuous hold on the indigenous soldiers. Sepoy loyalty was largely a matter of caste honor and soldierly professionalism, not affection for the East India Company and its alien culture. They looked down on the native troops of the Madras and Bombay armies, who were drawn from many regions and classes in the far-flung country. Caste-ridden and clannish, many of them were from the recently annexed kingdom of Oudh. Most of the company’s sepoys and sowars were members of the Hindu faith and belonged to the so-called Bengal Army, headquartered in Calcutta.
These armies totaled over 250,000 men, of whom some 43,000 were British officers and enlisted men. At the height of its power, the East India Company administered three separate armies based in Calcutta, the British capital of India Madras and Bombay. The company’s military organization, upon which its control was based, consisted of British-officered native infantry (sepoys) and cavalry (sowars), British troops belonging to the East India Company, regular army troops stationed in India and subsidized by the company, and irregular cavalry associated-formally or informally-with the company. (Read more about the history of the British Empire, from Henry V to Operation Market-Garden, inside Military Heritagemagazine.) A Dissolution of Loyalty The cantonments, usually a mile or two outside the towns they dominated, were a combination of military barracks and English village, complete with homes, shops, churches, and social clubs. The 125,000 British civilians-men, women, and children-living in small cantonments amid a native population of 250 million, must have felt that they were in a state of perpetual siege. Since the founding of the company raj in 1600, militarism and war had been more or less a way of life for the British in India. The notion that native unrest might actually flare into open rebellion, however, was the last thing on their minds. Given the astonishing disparity of numbers between the natives of the Indian subcontinent and the British members of the East India Company who effectively ruled them, company officials would have done well to heed the rumblings of discontent. They were told in no uncertain terms to quit worrying about “these local substitutes for a hot-cross bun.” The company, after all, did not tolerate “croakers.” No one yet knew what shape those orders would take, but worried officials passed along their concerns to district superiors in Calcutta. According to local custom, anyone partaking of the chupatties committed himself to obeying any orders his village elders might give him. These chupatties, insignificant in themselves, were symbols of a growing unrest in the enormous British colony. Native runners were circulating at night through the villages in the region, bearing small, unleavened wheat cakes known as chupatties. Three months before the Indian Rebellion of 1857, British East India Company officials manning outstations in the northwestern provinces of India began to notice the revival of a strange and disturbing local custom.
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