1857.

THE BENGAL SEPOY.

53

were far more numerous than the Mahomedans, and were chiefly Brahmins of high caste; while in Madras and Bombay the army was made up, as the Bengal regiments are now, of men of all sects and races without discrimination. Until the very year before the Mutiny the Bengal soldier was only enlisted for service in India, and was exempted from any liability to be sent across the seas; across the black water which the Sepoy dreaded and hated to have to cross. No such exemption was allowed to the soldiers of Bombay or Madras; and in July 1856, an order was issued by the military authorities to the effect that future enlistments in Bengal should be for service anywhere without limitation. Thus the Bengal Sepoy had not only been put in the position of a privileged and pampered favourite, but he had been subjected to the indignity and disappointment of seeing his privileges taken away from him. He was indeed an excellent soldier, and was naturally made a favourite by many of his commanders. But he was very proud, and was rigidly tenacious of what he considered his rights. He lived apart with his numerous and almost limitless family representing all grades of relationship; he cooked his food apart and ate it apart; he acknowledged one set of governing principles while he was on parade, and had a totally different code of customs and laws and morals to regulate his private life. The tide of blood relationship was very strong with the Sepoy. The elder Sepoy always took good care to keep his regiment well supplied with recruits from among his own family. As the Highland sergeant

in the British army endeavours to have as many as possible of his kith and clan in the regiment with himself; as the Irishman in the New York police force is anxious to get as many of his friends and fellow countrymen as may be into the same ranks, so the Sepoy did his best to surround himself with men of his blood and of his ways. There was therefore the spirit of a clan and of a sect pervading the Sepoy regiments; a strong current flowing beneath the stream of superficial military discipline and esprit de corps. The Sepoy had many privileges denied to his fellow-religionists who were not in the military ranks. Let it be added that he was very often deeply in debt; that his pay was frequently mortgaged to usurers who hung on him as the crimps do upon a sailor in one of our seaport towns; and that therefore he had something of Catiline's reason for desiring a general upset and a clearing off of old responsibilities.

But we must above all other things take into account, when considering the position of the Hindoo Sepoy, the influence of the tremendous institution of caste. An Englishman or European of any country will have to call his imaginative faculties somewhat vigorously to his aid in order to get even an idea of the power of this monstrous superstition. The man who by the merest accident, by the slightest contact with anything that defiled, had lost caste, was excommunicated from among the living, and was held to be for evermore accurst of God. His dearest friend, his nearest relation, shrank back from him in alarm and abhorrence. When Helen Macgregor, in Scott's

1857.

CASTE.

55

romance, would express her sense of the degradation that had been put upon her, she declares that her mother's bones would shrink away from her in the grave, if her corpse were to be laid beside them. The Sepoy fully believed that his mother's bones ought to shrink away from contact with the polluted body of the son who had lost caste. Now, it had become from various causes a strong suspicion in the mind of the Sepoy that there was a deliberate purpose in the minds of the English rulers of the country to defile the Hindoos, and to bring them all to the dead level of one caste or no caste. The suspicion in part arose out of the fact that this institution of caste, penetrating as it did so subtly and so universally into all the business of life, could not but come into frequent collision with any system of European military and civil discipline, however carefully and considerately managel. No doubt there was in many instances a lack of consideration shown for the Hindoo's peculiar and very perplexing tenets. The Englishman is not usually very imaginative personage; nor is he rich in those sympathetic instincts which might enable a ruler to enter into and make allowance for the influence of sentinents and usages widely different from his own. T many a man fresh from the ways of England, the Hindoo doctrines and practices appeared so ineffably absurd that he could not believe any human beings wre serious in their devotion to them, and he took no jains to conceal his opinion as to the absurdity of he creed, and the hypocrisy of those who professedit. Some of the elder officers and civilians

The

were imbued very strongly with a conviction that the work of open, and what we may call aggressive, proselytism, was part of the duty of a Christian; and in the best faith and with the purest intentions they thus strengthened the growing suspicion that the mind of the authorities was set on the defilement of the Hindoos. Nor was it among the Hindoos alone that the alarm began to be spread abroad. It was the conviction of the Mahomedans that their faith and their rites were to be tampered with as wel. It was whispered among them everywhere that the peculiar baptismal custom of the Mahomedans was to be suppressed by law, and that Mahomedan women were to be compelled to go unveiled in public. slightest alterations in any system gave fresh confirmation to the suspicions that were afloat among the Hindoos and Mussulmans. When a charge was made in the arrangements of the prisons, and the native prisoners were no longer allowed to took for themselves, a murmur went abroad that this was the first overt act in the conspiracy to destroy the caste, and with it the bodies and souls of the Hindoos. Another change must be noticed too. At one time it was intended that the native troops should be commanded for the most part by native officers. The men would, therefore, have had something like sufficient security that their religious scruples were regarded and respected. But by degrees the clever, pushing, and capable Briton began to monopolise the officers' posts everywhere. The natives were shouldered out of the high positions, until at length it

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THE FRUITS OF ANNEXATION.

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became practically an army of native rank and file commanded by Englishmen. If we remember that a Hindoo sergeant of lower caste would, when off parade, often abase himself with his forehead in the dust before a Sepoy private who belonged to the Brahmin order, we shall have some idea of the perpetual collision between military discipline and religious principle which affected the Hindoo members of an army almost exclusively commanded by Europeans and Christians.

There was, however, yet another influence, and one of tremendous importance in determining the set of that otherwise vague current of feeling which threatened to disturb the tranquil permanence of English rule in India. We have spoken of the army and of its religious scruples; we must now speak of the territorial and political influences which affected the princes and the populations of India. There had been just before the outbreak of the Mutiny a wholesale removal of the landmarks, a striking application of a bold and thorough policy of annexation; a gigantic system of reorganisation applied to the territorial arrangements of the north and north-west of the great Indian peninsula. A master-spirit had been at work at the reconstruction of India; and if you cannot make revolutions with rosewater, neither can you make them without reaction.

Lord Dalhousie had not long left India on the appointment of Lord Canning to the Governor-Generalship when the Mutiny broke out. Lord Dalhousie was a man of commanding energy, of indomitable