ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider the divergent religious policies the pre-mutiny Bengal and Bombay armies followed with respect to the native sepoy. It argues that these policies had important consequences for the mutiny. While the native portion of the Bengal army practically disintegrated, the Bombay army held firm despite disturbances in Kolhapur, Karachi, Satara and a few other places. In all, the mutiny affected five out of twenty-nine infantry regiments in the Bombay army (Taylor 1996). This comparison of the Bengal and Bombay armies of the East India Company sheds important light on the mutiny of 1857 and, therefore, the British state’s decision to dissolve the East India Company. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when the company’s primary function had been managing a vast army, earlier models of Anglo-Indian connection appeared ill-suited to the process of projecting state power. The Bengal army was the primary seed of rebellion against company rule because it was an outmoded collaboration between high-caste Hindus and a company leadership overly subservient to local cultural concerns. The Bombay army, however, remained largely loyal because it was managed like a European army – without Anglo-Indian hybridities that accommodated caste.
