The Story of the Indian MutinyMoncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
History
The Story of the Indian Mutiny
Moncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
India -- History -- Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-1858
The leaven of agitation naturally spread into the two other
Presidencies, where the English officials could have no quiet rest
till the danger in Bengal should be over. But the organization of the
Madras and Bombay armies was not so dangerous for their rulers. Here
men of various creeds and castes were more thoroughly mixed together
in the ranks, which in Bengal had been allowed to consist too much of
fellow-believers, and of cliques of the same family, caste or locality,
turning every company into a clan animated by a common feeling apart
from that of soldierly duty; nor, outside of Bengal, were the regiments
permitted to be accompanied by squalid fakirs, to keep alive their
superstitious zeal.
When Patna and Dinapore gave signs of commotion, not four hundred
miles from Calcutta, the people of the capital might well look to see
peril at their doors. They loudly accused Lord Canning as wanting to
the exigency. He certainly seemed to go too far in trying to allay
alarm by putting a calm face upon his inward anxiety. He forbore, as
long as possible, to show distrust of the Sepoys in Eastern Bengal;
he hesitated about accepting a contingent of Goorkhas offered him
from Nepaul; he delayed in letting the inhabitants arm for their
own defence. Not for a month did he allow them to form volunteer
corps, and at the same time was forced to disarm the Sepoys at the
neighbouring stations of Dum-Dum and Barrackpore. But rumours of what
the Sepoys there had intended were already at work, producing a panic
through Calcutta, where one Sunday in the middle of June a great part
of the Europeans and Eurasians hastened to barricade themselves in
their houses, or fled to the fort and the shipping for refuge from
an imaginary foe, while the poor natives lay hid, trembling on their
own account, expecting quite as groundlessly to be massacred by the
white soldiers. The ludicrous terror of this "Panic Sunday" will long
be remembered as a joke against the Calcutta people, who only towards
evening began to see they had nothing to fear. Next day their restored
confidence was strengthened by the arrest of the King of Oudh, who held
a quasi-state in his palace near the city, and whose retainers were
believed to have been plotting, with the now harmless Sepoys at the
neighbouring stations, for a great Christian massacre.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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