WEST COMES EAST 239back out. The first Anglo-Afghan war ended in 1841 with the Afghans
massacring the entire British community and its army as it tried to flee the
country. {A British army came back briefly, however, to set fire to the
Grand Bazaar in Kabul and burn up everyone in it.)
The British were still licking the wounds they had suffered from their
first invasion of Afghanistan when a conflagration erupted in India. It
began in 1857 with a revolt among the foot soldiers known as sepoys.
British officers had ordered these men to grease their bullets with a mix-
ture of beef tallow and pig lard, and the order didn't sit well. The vast ma-
jority of sepoys were either Hindus or Muslims. To the Hindus, cows were
sacred so greasing bullets with their tallow felt like sacrilege. To the Mus-
lims, pigs were ritually unclean beasts, and greasing bullets with their fat
felt repulsive.
One day a whole regiment of sepoys refused to load their guns. The of-
ficer in charge took decisive action: he put the whole lot of them in prison,
whereupon riots exploded all over town. Apparently, it never occurred to
the British that issuing bullet grease made of beef and pig fat might offend
their sepoys. This duelessness reflected the cultural gulf between the
British officers and their foot soldiers, a gulf that had not existed before
Europeans arrived, even though Indian armies were frequently composed
of many different ethnic and religious groups jammed together, Muslim
Turks fighting alongside Muslim Persians fighting alongside Hindi-speaking
Hindus and others. These groups quarreled and bristled at each other, but
each knew who the others were: they interacted. In Moghul military
camps, their languages blended into Urdu, a single new language derived
from Hindi, Persian, and Turkish {Urdu literally means something like
"soldier-camp lingo" in Turkish). In the British-led Indian army, no new
language emerged. English didn't blend with any of the local languages be-
cause the British officers and their men moved in separate strata.
With their bullet-grease gaffe, the British achieved the goal that had
eluded Akbar the Great: they united the Muslims and Hindus. The sepoy
rebellion expanded into the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857-1858, during
which both Hindus and Muslims attacked British settlements all over
India. Muslim activists called the mutiny a jihad, and their well-organized
assaults suggested that the bullet-grease issue had merely been the spark: a
great deal of preparation had gone into the mutiny.