One morning early in 1857, Mark Thornhill, a British magistrate in the Indian town of Mathura, came into his office to find four small chapattis lying on his desk. These “dirty little cakes of the coarsest flower” had been sent to him by a puzzled village watchman, who had been handed them by a stranger and confessed that he had no idea what they were.
There was nothing unusual about the chapattis themselves; they were identical to the breads cooked in every home in India. Yet Thornhill’s enquiries elicited the discomforting information that thousands of the things were passing from hand to hand throughout his district. Indeed, the breads formed what amounted to a culinary chain letter – “A man had come to a village, and given a cake to the watchman, with injunctions to bake four like it, to distribute them to the watchmen of adjacent villages, and desire them to do the same” – and it was one that was spreading with such spectacular rapidity that Thornhill’s boss in nearby Agra calculated that a wave of chapattis had been advancing across his province at the rate of well over 100 miles a night.
This was vastly quicker than the fastest British mail – and, to make matters worse, no-one appeared to have the least idea who had started the chain moving, or why. Some thought the breads were a superstitious attempt to prevent hail from ruining the crops, or an invocation by local tradesmen, or a sort of spiritual inoculation against disease.
All this was deeply worrying for the British, who – as Kim Wagner observes in this original new book – “regarded with deep suspicion, bordering on paranoia, any type of communication amongst Indians which they could not understand.” But it was not until later that year, when thousands of Indians suddenly rose in violent rebellion, that the true meaning of the “chupatti movement” became clear. The breads, it was decided, had actually been coded warnings – alerts despatched by the mysterious men behind the uprising to warn their followers to be ready to revolt.
The Indian Mutiny, or uprising, or call it what you will, was the defining moment in British imperial history. It came as a greater shock than the loss of the American colonies, and prompted reprisals far more hysterical and vicious than those visited on rebellious subjects elsewhere. In one sense this was not surprising; India had a large settled British population, which meant that there were more women and children about for the rebels to kill. It was their deaths, and the wild stories spread about them, that drove British soldiers to slaughter their enemies in turn, to blow them from cannon or force them to clean paving stones caked with blood using only their tongues.
Yet, as Wagner makes clear, there was a good deal more to it than that.
What really shocked the British was the realisation that they had known so little about the peoples of their districts – even the ones who had served them with impeccable loyalty for decades – and had only the most superficial understanding of the feelings of the millions they ruled.
It is this disconnect that lies at the heart of The Great Fear, and it existed on both sides of the racial divide.
Just as the British looked for, and found, “proofs” that the uprising of 1857 had been planned long in advance, so large numbers of Indians – Muslim and Hindu – became convinced that the British had been scheming for decades to forcibly convert the lot of them to Christianity.
This plot, it was generally believed, centred on the introduction of new cartridges to Indian troops that had been greased with the fat of pigs and cows, and so were ritually unclean to soldiers of both religions. With their caste broken and their bodies defiled, these men would be ripe for conversion, and it was this fear, and not some intricate plot, that led directly to the outbreak of disorder.
Wagner’s book is largely devoted to tracing the origin and spread of these and other panics, and while highly specific in its focus on a time and place, there is much of wider relevance within it. Some forteans will recognise a nod to Georges Lefebvre’s classic 1930s history The Great Fear of 1789, which traced the equally rapid spread through pre-revolutionary France of wild tales of sacking, murder and rape in village after rural village by an enemy variously said to be Austrians, pirates or local brigands; a few may even remember an article in Pursuit, Ivan Sanderson’s old journal, which sought to compare the “propagation waves” of that panic with the spread of the great wave of mystery airship sightings in the US in the 1890s.
This book, which makes no such dramatic leaps, offers an insightful look at the way in which rumours start and spread, and along the way it even supplies some answers. There was, Wagner concludes, no plotting on either side – which makes the uprising itself an even greater tragedy. Oh, and the mysterious chapattis were actually circulated to ward off a smallpox epidemic, and had nothing to do with the slaughter that followed them at all.
All of which makes the eternally valid point that not only are panics of this sort uncontrollable; they frequently don’t even mean what the people who experience them think they do.
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