British India’s Hindus and Muslims feared enforced conversion to Christianity
Posted in Historical articles, History, Religion on Thursday, 28 November 2013
This edited article about India first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 467 published on 26 December 1970.
There had been the Sikh wars, and now there was to be the Indian Mutiny. As usual, the British had only themselves to blame. Firstly, they had made enemies of the Brahmins, the most highly educated and influential class of Hindus, who had previously ruled the life of the Hindu. Education, law and religion and nearly every kind of business had been in their hands. But recently the influence of European education and a recently established British court of appeal which could rescind their decisions, were breaking down their privileges and power. Their hostility had increased when a new law was passed in 1856, which legalised the remarriage of Hindu widows. The law may have been passed in the spirit of purest benevolence, but to the Brahmins it merely meant that yet another attack had been made on one of their cherished institutions. Intent on causing as much trouble as possible, they began to spread rumours that the Government intended to abolish the caste system as a preliminary step to the forcible conversion of all natives to the Christian religion.
The native army, too, was becoming hostile to the British. A vast number of the more efficient British officers had been removed, and most of these who remained were either too old or had been worn out by the climate. The native army, too, had suddenly become conscious that they outnumbered their white comrades in arms in the ratio of six to one.
A fuse had been laid to a keg of gunpowder. All that was needed was the spark to set it off.
The spark was provided by the British themselves.
In 1857, the military authorities decided to introduce the Enfield rifle, which needed a greased cartridge with a top to it, which had to be bitten off by its user before loading. Rumours began to circulate that the cartridge grease was composed of beef fat and hog lard, the use of which would have defiled any Mohammedan and made a Hindu lose caste. More rumours followed. It was the intention, it was whispered in the bazaars to reduce India’s manhood to a common state of defilement by making him use the bullet. Then every Indian would be forced to turn Christian at the cannon’s mouth. It was also rumoured that thousands of soldiers were on their way from England to enforce this conversion.
Although these rumours were obviously ridiculous, there was no doubt that many well meaning but ill-advised missionaries had indirectly contributed to the rumours by over zealously extolling their own religion, while violently condemning the Hindu and Mohammedan beliefs. Such fanatical behaviour must have seemed to an equally fanatical people, to be the prelude to a wholesale conversion to the Christian religion.
But it was the bullet which did the real damage.
On 24th April, 85 soldiers of the 3rd Native Cavalry, while on parade at Meerut, refused to accept the greased bullet. A Court of Inquiry was convened which decreed that the troopers must be court-martialled for mutiny. The Court which finally sat in judgement saw no reason for leniency, and the troopers were given sentences from between five to ten years’ hard labour. Incredible as it might seem, they could perhaps count themselves as lucky; two stiff necked officers of the court had asked for the death penalty.
But the army was not finished with them yet. At dawn on 9th May, the prisoners were brought out barefoot on parade to receive their sentences. After these had been read out, their buttons were ripped from their uniforms, and the uniforms themselves ripped up the back by bayonets. The final humiliation was yet to come. Standing there with their uniforms in shreds the prisoners had to suffer the degradation of having fetters hammered on to their ankles. It was too much for these poor troopers who had once been proud to serve the British. Frantically they began to call for help to their comrades, the sepoys (Indian troops) of the 20th Native Infantry, who could only stand there and weep silently for the prisoners.
Let us now move on to the evening of 10th May, that brief hour before sunset when the long shadows of the later afternoon made it possible for the British to venture out of their homes. Nothing could have been more peaceful that evening, as the ladies and their officers went out for their weekly Sunday promenade. There was a band playing, as it had always done, and as usual, the area around the bandstand was full of gallant officers anxiously looking after the wants of the eligible young spinsters, who sat listening to the current favourites of the time. In the native bazaar, things were somewhat different. In this stifling warren of alleyways, the sepoys were bitterly discussing the fate of the comrades languishing in jail. Suddenly, their anger, already close to boiling point, could no longer be contained. A party of troopers started off, shouting: “To horse, brothers. To the jail!” Within minutes, others had appeared as if from nowhere, to join the ever growing tide. By the time it had reached the jail, the band of rebels had reached 200. Freeing their 85 comrades, the mob moved on to the civil prison and freed a further 720 prisoners.
By then the army had been joined by all the criminal elements of the bazaars. Howling like demented dervishes, the mob went on its way, killing looting and burning, turning Meerut into a city of terror and horror for the 2,028 Europeans living there. In the orgy of murder and destruction that took place, no one was spared, from the Colonel of the Native Infantry, who fell from his horse under a hail of bullets, to innocent women and children who were dragged from their homes and butchered in the streets.
Then as quickly as it had flared up, the violence petered out. It was almost as if sanity had suddenly returned to a group of lunatics who had found themselves standing with bloodstained hands, amid scenes of hideous carnage of their own making. Aghast at what they had done, the sepoys began to flee from the city in small groups. All of them were heading for Delhi, where there lived the one man who might help them – Mohammed Bahadur Shah, last of the Moghul Emperors.