Imagine the following scenario: in 2021 the US armed forces, in its wisdom, decides to introduce a new technology said to afford its fighting men and women a key advantage on a rapidly evolving battlefield. This new technology entails ingesting a substance rumored to be controversial. Many soldiers resist for both medical and religious reasons, and soon this resistance swells into a wholesale refusal to ingest the substance by entire regiments. As a result, the military authorities decide to make an example of the dissenters, whom they accuse of mutiny – the refusal to obey a direct order – and subject to a series of courts martial. Entire regiments are, one after another, convicted and dishonorably discharged, and the more outspoken “ringleaders” are sent to prison. Reeling from this dramatic turn of events and furious at the ill-treatment of their recently punished brothers and sisters in arms, two special forces battalions stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, rise up in revolt. The resulting mayhem, in which not just key commanding officers but also members of their families are killed, sends shock waves across the nation. Meanwhile the military revolt quickly spreads from base to base throughout the South. Soon the violence crosses the civil–military divide, as anxieties about the controversial substance link up with simmering discontent with government among the public at large. The ensuing “civil rebellion” is eventually put down, but not before many hundreds of thousands innocent civilians are killed in brutal counter-insurgency operations.

Had there been a mutiny-revolt-rebellion like the one counterfactually posed here, there is no doubt that a swarm of officials, journalists, policy analysts, and – eventually – historians would want to know why it occurred and what lessons might be drawn from it.Footnote ² They would doubtless examine all factors, including the decision to introduce the controversial substance in the first place. They also would look for patterns – why some battalions or branches of the service revolted while others did not; whether there was geographic or sociocultural variation to the mutiny-revolt-rebellion; and whether there were warning signs that went unheeded. Of particular interest would be why, and how, what began as simply a refusal to ingest a substance quickly exploded into a revolt at a specific military base – in other words, whether there were particular circumstances or developments in and around Fort Bragg that turned an essentially nonviolent mutiny into a violent revolt.

As it happens, a process of mutiny → revolt → rebellion like the one counterfactually described here did occur in British India in 1857. As with the US army today, Britain’s Indian (or “native”) army was one of the largest volunteer forces of its time, with about a quarter of a million men stationed in bases (called “cantonments”) across the subcontinent. And like its American counterpart, service in the Company Army was voluntary, highly sought after, and considered a mark of distinction. The controversial substance imposed upon the soldiery was a greased cartridge, introduced in the early months of 1857, as part of a plan to replace the old “Brown Bess” musket with the Pattern 1853 Enfield. The original drill for loading the new weapon involved tearing the top of the paper cartridge with the teeth. (This process, as well as its slight alteration in April of 1857 that involved tearing the cartridge with the fingers instead of teeth, is described in greater detail in Chapter 1.) Because the grease for some of the original cartridges was rendered from cow and pig fat, the prospect of touching, let alone biting, the ammunition was scandalous for both Hindus and Muslims. This led to a series of “mutinies” across north India, as regiment after regiment in the Bengal Army refused to perform routine “firing drills” in preparation for the issuing of the new weapon. The military trials (courts martial) for these mutinies invariably resulted in guilty verdicts, dishonorable discharges, and even imprisonment for some men. Remarkably, save for one famous episode in March 1857, in which a soldier attacked his British officers in a failed bid to spark a regimental revolt,Footnote ³ the refusal of the cartridges and the “reduction” and dismissal of the mutinous regiments was a nonviolent process.

Until May 10, 1857.

In the late afternoon and evening of May 10, Meerut cantonment, a major military garrison about forty miles north of Delhi, was rocked by violence. Nearly the entirety of the Bengal 3rd Light Cavalry and 20th Native Infantry, joined by a large portion of the 11th Native Infantry, rose up in revolt and began attacking their officers, killing several. A mob from the cantonment bazaar quickly joined in the mayhem and began an indiscriminate killing of British military and civilian residents, including some women and children. A day earlier, the native regiments had been forced to watch while eighty-five “skirmishers” of the 3rd Light Cavalry, who in late April had refused to perform the firing drill and were subsequently court-martialed, were stripped of their uniforms, placed in irons, and marched off to prison. For reasons that, to my mind, have never been made entirely clear, the remaining men of the 3rd Light Cavalry plus the men of the 20th Native Infantry and most men of the 11th Native Infantry, decided to revolt. This book is, in part, about that decision. But it is also about the social and emotional world of the cantonment upon which the circumstances of that decision necessarily cast light.

Much has been written about 1857. Much less about the events at Meerut. This is because the Meerut rebels quickly abandoned the cantonment and rode south to Delhi, turning the old Mughal capital into the epicenter of the rebellion. Aside from the ignominy associated with the failure to pursue the rebels as they galloped to Delhi, Meerut quickly recedes into the background in the emerging 1857 historiography.Footnote ⁴ As is detailed in Chapters 1 and 2, insofar as Meerut cantonment appears in the history, it does so mainly as the site of the initial revolt – little more than a narrative point of departure. There are three main exceptions to this rule. The first is a study of the Meerut revolt by J. A. B. Palmer, entitled Mutiny Outbreak at Meerut in 1857 (1966). Palmer was interested in the question of whether the revolt was premeditated, as was often alleged – especially in nationalist narratives. He ultimately concluded that while there was some local premeditation, there was no widespread conspiracy.

The second exception is the work of Eric Stokes, especially his posthumous The Peasant Armed: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 (1986), whose focus was less on Meerut cantonment itself than on the rebellion in the Meerut Division – especially with an eye to whether an overarching logic, whether class, caste, or religious, might be discerned in the agrarian uprisings that accompanied the insurgency and gave it the character of a broad-based civil rebellion.Footnote ⁵ His answer, ultimately, was in the negative, or more precisely that insofar as there was an agrarian logic to the revolt, it was whether local actors could benefit vis-à-vis their enemies in the locality by remaining “loyal” or by joining the rebellion. There is some early attention to events in Meerut cantonment, but Stokes is mainly focused on the loss-of-caste fears attendant on the greased cartridges and how those connected to the precarious economic conditions in the countryside.

The third and most important exception is the painstaking narrative reconstruction by Kim Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising, (2010), which devotes several chapters to Meerut. Both Palmer and Wagner offer a close examination of the unfolding events in the cantonment and both point to the importance of developments in the cantonment bazaar (called “sudder” [sadr or main] bazaar in the military argot of the time) and key bazaar inhabitants in initiating the soldiers’ turn to violence. Curiously, however, Palmer had provided no information about the bazaar, to say nothing of the people that worked and lived there. This deficiency is admirably remedied by Wagner, who introduces the reader to the array of bazaar characters that took part in the mayhem that erupted on May 10, 1857. In Chapter 1, building on Wagner’s account, I undertake a more synchronic investigation of the cantonment bazaar, in Meerut and beyond. One important class of characters involved in the precipitation of the revolt was, according to a major source, “prostitutes”. Indeed, the allegedly catalytic role of the prostitutes of the Meerut bazaar in sparking the soldiers’ revolt quickly became a staple of Mutiny historiography. Chapter 2 is devoted to this theme – that is, to the origin of the prostitute narrative, the manner in which it became embedded in the story of 1857, and the twists and turns of that narrative as it underwent considerable evolution over the course of the following century and more. Indeed, the entire book may be read as a commentary on the degree to which the blanket term “prostitute” is something of a blunt instrument that conceals more than it reveals – a reflection of which point are the many and varied terms and euphemisms that were used in the mid nineteenth century (and not only in India) to reference women who provided sexual service and companionship. As such, scare quotes may be presumed around my usage of the term henceforth.

Especially surprising, given the prominence and longevity of Meerut prostitutes in the narrative of 1857, to say nothing of the question of their actual identity (questions that took on greater intrigue in the wake of discoveries about the mysterious figure of “Mees Dolly” in the early twentieth century, recounted in Chapter 2, as well as the roughly concurrent emergence of Zahir Dehlvi’s Urdu account of the mutiny-revolt in Meerut, discussed in the Entr’acte between Chapters 3 and 4), is the fact that no one has bothered to actually investigate the quality of the source material concerning the prostitute narrative, to say nothing of the precariously influential position of prostitutes in the world of the mid-century cantonment that the narrative implies. Chapter 3 investigates this latter issue, relying mainly on heretofore ignored police and judicial records – much of which were generated by the new hybrid office of the “Cantonment Joint Magistrate” in the 1850s. While post-1860s prostitutes in Britain and the British Empire have been the subject of much detailed analysis, due in large part to the generation of massive “lock hospital” documentation in the wake of the “Contagious Diseases Acts,” a body of 1860s legislation that subjected prostitutes to hostile official attention and unprecedented imperial medical control,Footnote ⁶ there has been comparatively little analysis of pre-1860 prostitution in India – and that which does exist tends to fall back on generalities concerning a largely benign and nostalgic image of pre-colonial (mainly Mughal, late Mughal, and early Company) courtesanship and the glamorous, if ontologically challenging, figure of the tawāif.Footnote ⁷ One contribution of this book is the focus on the cantonment world of entertainment, prostitution, and “domestic sociality”Footnote ⁸ that links (and served as a transitional space between) the world of the “common prostitute” with the world of the tawāif.

Without giving away too much, as I wish for the reader to experience the excitement of discovery that I enjoyed in the archives over the past decade or more while conducting the research for this book, let me add (as I have already hinted) that the publication of Zahir Dehlvi’s memoir of the mutiny, Dāstān-e-Ghadr, in 1914 raised wholly new and intriguing questions about the identity of the Meerut prostitute – or more precisely, whether the women who played a key role in prompting the men of the 3rd Light Cavalry, 20th Native Infantry, and 11th Native Infantry to rise in revolt were, in fact, prostitutes. The key passage in Dehlvi’s account has been available in English translation since 1957, but almost no historians have made actual analytical recourse to it.Footnote ⁹ I examine the account anew in the Entr’acte (between Chapters 3 and 4) and offer a new and more detailed translation there of the key passage concerning the women of Meerut and their catalytic role in the revolt. The startling implications of my close reading of Dehlvi’s account are played out in Chapter 4, entitled “… Women Whose Men,” which relies upon heretofore untapped military pension records and “fraudulent wife” controversies in the 1850s. In addition to helping to resolve the question of the Meerut women/prostitutes conundrum, Chapter 4 also affords unprecedented access to the social and emotional world of the Indian soldier in the Company Army – an army that, as Seema Alavi noted in her pioneering work three decades ago, was the main source of legitimacy for British sovereignty from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ Chapter 4 also suggests a possible new source of sepoy disaffection that led to the explosion of 1857.

This book is, then, both a microhistory of 1857 – and the world that made 1857 – as well as a new military history of the Company Army. The “new military history” promised, decades ago, to reinvigorate the study of military history by connecting transformations in the army to changes taking place in society – either as a stimulant or a response, or both simultaneously in true auto-catalytic fashion. (This is as true for armies in the mid nineteenth century as it is for armies today.) As noted earlier, I rely in part on military and police/judicial records – particularly in the more social-history-oriented Chapters 3 and 4. However, I also make recourse to Hindi and Urdu materials throughout. Zahir Dehlvi’s Dāstān has already been mentioned. Also crucial are Hindi songs sung in the wake of 1857, which afford a sense of what 1857 meant to the largely agrarian society in which it occurred. This is in marked contrast to Dehlvi’s point of view, which is decidedly more urbane and elite.

The pursuit of microhistory is predicated on the idea, for me at any rate, that the closer we look at the past, the stranger (and more interesting) it becomes. Certainly 1857 looks different when we examine it up close and personal, and so does the world of the military cantonment. While this may not overturn long-standing arguments about the ultimate causes of 1857, it will, I hope, help us understand not only what motivated the sepoys (and sawārs, cavalrymen) to take the unprecedented step of attacking their British commanders, but appreciate how profoundly difficult a decision – a dizzying leap into an unknown, perilous future – that was. (A measure of that difficulty is that even as they turned against their officers, some and perhaps many of the rebel sepoys sought to protect them, their wives, and their children.)Footnote ¹¹ Another virtue of microhistory is that it prompts the historian to pay closer attention to how it is that we arrive at knowledge of the past. As such, it brings us face to face with history as ontology. As will be evident in the following pages, what historians came to believe about the “fact” of the prostitutes of Meerut was constituted by a long process of narrative unfolding, a process that began in the immediate wake of the moment of revolt and concludes, in the early twenty-first century, with an interweaving of historical fact and literary fiction. What, then, does this say about history as a domain of truth? Are we to conclude that the Meerut narrative about women is not true, that it is merely a form of literary representation that has infected the discourse of history? And to what degree is this a subset of a larger philosophical issue, about the nature of the history itself – as both the past as well as the story about the past?Footnote ¹²

Read on and decide for yourself.