Mangal Pandey

Mangal Pandey attacked his officers on a parade ground at Barrackpore six weeks before the rising of 1857 and was hanged for it, and the rest of the century made him its first shot. He was a sepoy of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry, a Brahmin from the Awadh countryside, in an army where caste observance was a live and unresolved grievance. The immediate cause was the Enfield cartridge, greased with animal fat and issued to be bitten open, which defiled Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike; the deeper one was a decade of annexations, pay disputes and the sense that the Company no longer thought its Indian troops mattered. On 29 March 1857 Pandey, by several accounts under the influence of bhang, called on his comrades to rise, shot at the adjutant, wounded a sergeant-major with a sword, and turned his musket on himself when the guard would not seize him. He was tried and hanged on 8 April, ten days early because no local executioner would do it. The 34th was disbanded. The general rising began at Meerut on 10 May. British soldiers called mutineers pandies for the rest of the campaign. No likeness of him made in his lifetime is known, which is why every published portrait is an invention - the Indian government s 1984 commemorative stamp included. The jemadar Ishwari Prasad, who refused the order to arrest him, was hanged three weeks later. Whether the cartridges at Barrackpore had in fact been greased with cow and pig fat was never settled, and the Company withdrew them anyway. His name is on a park at the Barrackpore site and on films, plays and a 2005 feature. Historians differ over whether the incident was connected to the wider conspiracy or coincidental to it.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history