ABSTRACT
When Mangal Pandey was exhorting his comrades to come out and join him, he spoke of how biting the cartridges would be a betrayal of their religion. The cartridges he was referring to were those of the Enfield Rifle which had recently been issued to the native soldiery. The matter of the greased cartridge has become the most cited cause of the mutiny of the sepoys in 1857. So much so that the last Mughal Emperor, who was more of a poet than a king, wrote according to legend: Na Iran ne kiya, na Shah Russ ne— Angrez ko tabah kiya kartoosh ne
(What Iran [i.e. the Crimean and Persian wars] and the Tsar of Russia could not do to the British, was achieved by the cartridge.) 1
