The Chapatis Reach Mathura
The board in the spring of 1857: the cartridge, the annexations, and the map of who rose where
At the end of January 1857 Mark Thornhill, the magistrate of Mathura, found four chapatis on his table and learned that villages across the north were passing them hand to hand. This scene-setter lays out the board that tipped three months later: the Doctrine of Lapse, the annexation of Awadh, the greased cartridge and Meerut on 10 May. It names Bahadur Shah Zafar, Nana Sahib, Begum Hazrat Mahal and Ahmadullah Shah as the allies they were, and carries Kushal Singh of Auwa, the Wagher chiefs of Okhamandal and Shahmal of Bijrol, who have no lesson of their own.
Four Cakes on a Magistrate's Table
It is the end of January 1857. Mark Thornhill, the magistrate of Mathura, has just come back from a tour of his district. He walks into his office and finds four small cakes lying on his table. He wrote later that they were four dirty little cakes of the coarsest flour, about the size and thickness of a biscuit. Chapatis. Plain, cold, and nobody could tell him who had put them there.
He asked. The answer came back in a chain. One of his Indian police officers had brought them in. The officer had them from a village watchman. A stranger had walked into that village and handed the watchman one cake. Bake four more like it, the man said. Carry them to the watchmen of the next villages, and tell each of those men to do the same.
The watchman baked the cakes. He also told the police.
The next day the same reports came from other parts of the district. Then the newspapers carried it: the cakes were moving all over the north. Thornhill broke them open. There was no message inside, no paper, no ink. Nothing but flour. He decided, in his own words, that they were signals to those in the secret to be ready for some great explosion. He remembered that something similar had gone round Madras before the sepoys rose at Vellore in 1806.
He never found out who started them. Nobody has since. What we do know is what happened three and a half months later, and where.
The Board Before the Board Tipped
By January 1857 the East India Company had been taking Indian states for nine years, faster than at any time in its history, and mostly on paper.
Lord Dalhousie, Governor General from 1848, used a rule the Company called the Doctrine of Lapse. If a ruler died with no natural-born son, his adopted son was not recognised, and the state came to the Company. Satara went in 1848. Jhansi went in 1853, which is why there was a Rani of Jhansi with a grievance and an adopted boy. Nagpur went in 1854.