A missing chapter of the Indian mutiny / by Charles Lionel Showers.

  • Charles Lionel Showers
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A missing chapter of the Indian mutiny / by Charles Lionel Showers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    by the masterly stroke of combining both sections of the Native Army—Mahomedan and Hindoo —in an apprehension for the integrity of their respective religions, by the instigation that the Government designed to absorb both in a general Christian propagandism. The fiction of the greased cartridge for the new rifle being prepared with pig’s fat and bullock’s fat, was implicitly believed by the uneducated rank and file of the army, and thus by a master-stroke both of the hereditarily antagonistic sections were combined in one common crusade against the supposed perfidious subverters of both religions. While waiting however for an expected signal for a simultaneous rise, the troops generally dis- sembled well, remaining steady to routine duty and respectful to their officers, so that it was believed, and by none more hopefully than the Government, that the restiveness exhibited here and there was but a passing ebullition of partial discontent from possibly local.or personal causes. At this juncture, I wrote in April my views regarding the situation to the Political Resident of Bhopal, eliciting the follow- ing reply : “ I hope your dreary anticipations of coming evils to India will not be realized. I do not think there is much danger in the direction you point at—among the Native Army.” Within less than a month from that date the crash came— prematurely precipitated by the imprisonment of the 3rd Cavalry men at Meerut. And it must be con-
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