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To: Little Ray
The Sepoy Mutiny in India, in 1857, is an example of a Perfect Day. This was a spontaneous uprising by Muslims (and Hindus), with everyone giving the British their “best shot.” Nannies killed the kids, cooks poisoned the food, and shop owners murdered the British ladies as they came into the shop. And soldiers (sometimes complete units) killed their British officers and then used their weapons to attack the British.

A wildly inaccurate summation of the Mutiny.

For one thing, a great many British survivors owed their lives to the help, often at risk of their own lives, of Indian servants and even strangers.

The notion that ALL Indians were involved is just untrue. It was probably a rather small minority of the population. If all Indians, ore even a majority, had been involved it is likely every Brit in India would have been killed.

The Company at the time had three armies. The Mutiny among soldiers was limited almost entirely to the Bengal Army.

Most of India was still ruled by native princes, allied, sometime involuntarily, with the British. Most of them stayed loyal or at least neutral. Only a few joined the revolt.

Entire native peoples, notably the Sikhs, who the British had only recently conquered and the Gurkhas, stayed entirely loyal. The British could not have defeated the sepoys without their enthusiastic assistance.

Horrible atrocities were indeed committed by both sides, though the number of Indians murdered by the Brits is probably a large multiple (20x, 50x, 100x, who knows?) of the Brits murdered by Indians. This is largely because there just weren't that many Brits in India at the time, while there were lots and lots of Indians available for slaughter.

The point is that while these atrocities happened, the true nature of events bears little semblance to this definition of a "Perfect Day."

19 posted on 09/27/2012 10:46:37 AM PDT by Sherman Logan (Perception wins all the battles. Reality wins all the wars.)
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To: Sherman Logan

Moreover, since such a large portion of the Company’s armies were made up of sepoys, many of the atrocities perpetrated against the mutineers were likely hindustani-on-hindustani.

I didn’t realize it was the Bengals that were so largely involved. Explains a lot. Like why the British capital was later moved from Calcutta, West Bengal to New Dehli. And why the Bengalis later became such a bunch of communists. And why Churchill couldn’t give a fig when a million or three Bengalis starved when he took their produce for the war effort.


90 posted on 09/18/2016 7:16:43 AM PDT by ichabod1 (Make America Normal Again)
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