prosperity, and progress" seemed to have
so well and truly laid.

CHAPTER V

THE MUTINY AND FIFTY YEARS AFTER

Many different causes, much more clearly apprehended to-day than at the
time, contributed to provoke the great storm which burst over India in
1857. On the surface it was a military and mainly Mahomedan
insurrection, but it was far more than that. It was a violent upheaval
not so much against the political supremacy of Britain as against the
whole new order of things which she was importing into India. The
greased cartridges would not have sufficed to provoke such an explosion,
nor would even Mahomedans, let alone Hindus, have rallied round a
phantom King of Delhi in mere revenge for the annexation of Oudh or the
enforcement of the doctrine of lapse. The cry of "Islam in danger" was
quick to stir the Mahomedans, but the brains that engineered and
directed the Mutiny were Hindu, and the Mutiny itself was the
counter-revolution arraying in battle against the intellectual and moral
as well as against the material and military forces of Western
civilisation that was slowly but steadily revolutionising India, all the
grievances and all the fears, all the racial and religious antagonism
and bitterness aroused by the disintegration under its impact of ancient
social and religious systems. Western education was to yield other
fruits later on, but before the Mutiny it was rapidly familiarising the
mind of India with Western ideals which imperilled not only the worship
of the old gods but also the worship of the Brahman as their mouthpiece
and "the guardian of the treasury of civil and religious duties."
Modern schools and colleges threatened to undermine his ascendancy just
as Western competition had by more dubious methods undermined Indian
domestic industries. No man's caste was said to be safe against the
hidden defilement of all the strange inventions imported from beyond the
seas. Prophecy, vague but persuasive, hinted that British rule, which
dated in the Indian mind from the battle of Plassey in 1757, was doomed
not to outlive its centenary. All the vested interests connected with
the old order of things in the religious as well as in the political
domain felt the ground swaying under their feet, and the peril with
which they were confronted came not only from their alien rulers but
from their own countrymen, often of their own caste and race, who had
fallen into the snares and pitfalls of an alien civ