![]() The P53 was a kind of halfway house, half a generation ahead of a musket but not a modern breech-loading rifle, where you lever a cartridge into the breech, shoot the bolt home and blaze away mercilessly. It was half the truth - ardh satya, a fairly common feature of Indian history. The mobile bread must remain unexplained, but a slim volume titled Instruction of Musketry, which was a standard training manual of the English infantry at the time of the Indian rising and the Crimean War, makes it clear that the story about the cartridge was no rumour. Apparently, some mysteriously chapatis were also involved in the matter. It was all quite mysterious, because we had seen cartridges in Westerns, metal-jacketed objects that no one could possibly bite without losing their teeth. Even contemporary accounts and fairly learned studies of the events of 1857 report this as a rumour, and some speculate that it was circulated by the wily gentlemen of Awadh in the hope of recovering their fortunes. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)īack in school, we were taught that the rising of 1857 was sparked off by a rumour that the new Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle-musket issued to the sepoys of the East India Company came with a cartridge dipped in beef and pork fat, which made it anathema to both Hindu and Muslim sepoys, who had to bite open the cartridge to load the weapon. Shots fired: The ardh satya of the First War of Independence.
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