HEROES OF THE INDIAN MUTINY

One influence which weighed heavily with the superstitious native was caused by a rumour circulating through all the bazaars that fate limited the English rule in India to one hundred years from the date of Clive's great victory at Plassey (1757). The sepoy troops, too, had learnt on many a battlefield to win great victories, and thought the time had come for them to recognise their own valour and secure a great destiny. Being most of them the younger sons of zemindars, or small landholders, the sepoys were full of pride and ambition: they believed that the treasures of India belonged by right to them; they were looking forward to founding a great military despotism, under which they were to be the spoilt children of fortune. It is true a sepoy's pay was only seven rupees a month, less than fourteen shillings at that period: but as a Brahmin his faith restrained him from wasting his money on gross appetite, and his simple mode of life left him a surplus from which he could help his needy relations: so that he felt himself a man of some importance. For the Hindoo possesses a strong sense of clanship, and is extremely generous in his dealings with poor kinsmen. But the Indian dustoor, or etiquette of the family, sometimes compels him to launch out into enormous expenses through which he falls deeply into debt and becomes the slave of a grasping, pitiless usurer. For instance, a private soldier has often been known to celebrate a marriage feast in such style as to necessitate the spending of three or four hundred rupees. By this means he achieves a temporary consideration amongst the native populace, while he loses permanently all peace of mind, grows discontented and infects his regiment with his own sense of wrong. For an Indian regiment was not composed of separate units like a British regiment: the soubandar-major, or native colonel, allowed his havildar, or sergeant, to recruit as many natives as he liked from his own village: so that a sepoy regiment partook of the nature of a clan in which near relations stood shoulder to shoulder, and any grievance which hurt one sepoy affected all together: this made them strong as a fighting machine, but in time of mutiny proved to be fraught with danger to our Empire, for family ties held them together against us. Some historians give the annexation of Oude as a cause for the mutiny, on the ground that the sepoy lost land by the change. Others attribute it to Russian intrigue, or Persian interference, or Mahommedan conspiracy, things difficult to prove.