Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
into most hotels, but Bombay itself did not even
have
a first-class
hotel.
The seed was planted, and it grew deep roots.
Since Robert Clive had crushed the nawab of Bengal,
Sirajuddawlah, in June 1757, with the help of the nawab's own
mutinous generals, the British had acquired Bengal and cemented
their domination of the subcontinent. They had also ensured that
their rivals, the French, lost the economic edge they had enjoyed up
to that point. Over the next hundred years, British control expanded
and deepened. Then the famous 1857 Rebellion shook the Raj to
its very foundations.
It originated early that year with inaccurate reports among local
native soldiers that the British were quietly greasing their gun
cartridges with cattle and pork fat. Naturally, this alarmed the sepoys,
those troops of Indian soldiers under British command, offending
Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike. Fuelled by growing discontent
under the Raj, the rumours spread from regiment to regiment and
through the villages and cities up and down the Ganges and Jumna,
the length of Hindustan and the Punjab. Soldiers and civilians alike
magnified the rumours into unfounded reports that the British
actually intended to convert all Indians to Christianity by forcing
them to breach their own faiths this way. Word was passed on that, in
fact, the British planned to use their Indian colonials to conquer Persia
and China for the Empire.
By June, the northern part of India was up in arms. The British
forces could no longer contain those native troops who refused to
believe British assurances that the rumours were false. Like
dominoes, the cities of Lucknow, Kawnpor, Meerut, Benares,
Allahabad, Agra, Ambala, Sealkote, and, most significantly, Delhi fell
to rebelling local troops and civilians. Months of sieges of the British
and their desperate appeals for reinforcements from Britain followed,
the European troops hampered by frustratingly poor communications.
The army stationed there could only march as fast as it could from
city to city, to try to counteract the panic. Meanwhile the British
battled dysentery and fevers and the growing civil unrest, which often
