Men Without Hats: Dialogue, Discipline and Discontent in the Madras Army, 1806–1807 (review)

In 1857, the Bengal Army blew up, triggering a crisis for the Raj. In the end, the Bengal Army Mutiny collapsed partly because the Bombay and Madras armies remained loyal to the East India Company. However, the paradox is that the Madras Army was rocked by a series of mutinies in 1806. The disturbances among the Madras sepoys and sowars (Indian infantry and cavalry) in 1806, known as the Vellore Mutiny, are the subject matter of the book under review.

James W. Hoover, in his Ph.D. thesis turned monograph, argues that the Vellore Mutiny and related disturbances in Hyderabad were apolitical in nature. It is erroneous to argue that the sepoys were instigated by Tipu Sultan’s sons. In fact, the mutineers were not interested in destroying the Company Raj but merely wanted to redress their grievances. However, cautions Hoover, it is wrong to assume, as did the British commanding officers, that the sepoys were merely simpletons led astray by their irrational religions. Hoover builds up his case on the basis of depositions by the Madras soldiers before the court martial after the suppression of the mutiny.

The sepoys and sowars were angry because of the decreasing real value of their pay. Further, the introduction of Western style tight breeches and hat shaped turbans made them the laughing stock of local society. This was part of the Madras Army high command’s programme of Europeanizing the ‘native’ contingents. The common people jeered that the sepoys and sowars were becoming Christians. The local communities refused to allow these sepoys and sowars to marry their daughters. All their cultural and economic grievances were clothed in religious idioms. Since the new generation of British officers were no more interested in having a dialogue with the Indian soldiers in order to negotiate and compromise, the only option open for the latter to show their dissatisfaction against the ‘new order’ in the Madras Army was to get violent. The net result was the outbreak of the mutiny on 10 July 1806. The Madras authorities quickly crushed the mutiny but learnt from the mistakes.

Most of the historians of the military mutinies in India, from Eric Stokes to C.A. Bayly, including Tapti Roy and Gautam Bhadra, attempt to link these events with changes in the agrarian tenures and caste structures in Indian society. Credit is due to Hoover for showing that there was no relationship between the caste and religious backgrounds of the soldiers and the Vellore Uprising. What started as a series of military grievances snowballed into a mutiny because the British commanding officers were rigid and lacked knowledge about the local south Indian culture. The blessing in disguise was that the Madras authorities learnt from it. Hence, when the great uprising occurred at Barrackpur, Meerut, Ambala, etc., during May–June 1857, the Madras sepoys shouldered their muskets and agreed to follow their British officers.