History: Was the disgruntlement of the Indian soldiers of the East India Company due to their officers being provided with English wives rather than Indian bibis, to attempts to convert them into Christianity, or to their fury at their cartridges being greased with pigs' fat or cows' fat? Saul David is unimpressed by any of these theories, writes Charles Chenevix Trench
The Indian soldiers of the Bengal Army had been shaken by the reduction in the purchasing power of their pay since the beginning of the century to less than that of their officers' private servants. Their houses were filthy, with sanitation non-existent. It was, in the author's opinion, these things rather than matters of pigs' fat or cows' fat, which caused the Bengal Army to mutiny.
That their mutiny failed in the end was due mainly to a dozen or so very able officers on the British side - John Nicholson, Herbert Edwardes, Sir Colin Campbell and Maj Hodson, a superb cavalry leader if somewhat dodgy about regimental funds. His regiment, Hodson's Horse, was composed mainly of Sikhs who, a few weeks earlier, had been his sworn foes.
The British insisted on disarming disloyal or suspect regiments, often to the fury of their commanding officers who insisted that their regiments were beyond reproach.
The war was fought with the utmost brutality on both sides. The murder of European women in the bibi-ghar at Cawnpore was matched by the wholesale hanging or blowing-from-guns of captured mutineers. But the rumoured rape of European women was surely untrue, since this would defile Hindu and Muslim soldiers.
This is an excellent book by an author with a through understanding of the India of 1857. He should not, however, refer to "The Raj", an expression invented by the BBC in about 1947 and never used by anyone connected with India.
A word of praise is due to the book's excellent maps.
Charles Chenevix Trench served with Hodson's Horse during the second World War and was awarded an MC
The Indian Mutiny, 1857. By Saul David. Penguin/Viking, 404pp. £20