Ranajit Guha, in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, relays to us the mysterious case of the circulating chapati, “the flat unleavened bread made of wheat, maize or barley flour, which constitutes a staple of the popular diet in many regions of the subcontinent (239). “A symptom of collective anxiety and uneasiness in an agrarian society poised on the brink of a violent upheaval, it was regarded by some as the index of a conspiracy behind the Mutiny” (239). Using documents kept by Lord Canning, then Governor-General of India, John Kaye and George Malleson write, “he thought also of another strange story that had come to him from the North-West, and which even the most experienced men about him were incompetent to explain. From village to village, brought by one messenger and sent onward by another, passed a mysterious token in the shape of one of those flat cakes made from flour and water, forming the common bread of the people” (418). They describe this mysterious circulation, “a messenger appeared, gave the cake to the head man of one village, and requested him to dispatch it onward to the next; and that, in this way, it travelled from place to place; no one refusing, no one doubting, few even questioning, in blind obedience to a necessity felt rather than understood” (419).
Lord Canning’s documents go on to make clear the range of possibilities and skepticism that was placed on this occurrence. Many did see “it as a signal of warning and preparation” but just as many also “laughing to scorn this notion of a fiery cross” (419). Even for those who were certain it was a sign of warning they could not agree on what. “It was said that it was no unwonted thing for a Hindu, in whose family sickness had broken out to institute this transmission of chapátís, in the belief that it would carry off disease; or for a community, when the cholera or other pestilence was raging, to betake themselves to a similar practice” (419). Others believed “the cakes had been sent abroad by enemies of the British Government, for the purpose of attaching to their circulation another dangerous fiction” such as the bone-dust rumor (419). Even the possibility that the chapatis contained “seditious letters” within them was offered as a reason for the circulation (419). “But whatsoever the real history of the movement, it had doubtless the effect of producing and keeping alive much popular excitement…and it may be said that its action was too widely diffused, and that it lasted for too long a time, to admit of a very ready adoption of the theory that it was of an accidental character, the growth only of domestic, or even of municipal anxieties” (420). “[A]ll that History can record with any certainty is, that the bearers of these strange missives went from place to place, and that ever as they went new excitements were engendered, and vague expectations were raised” (420-421).
The excitement this one, otherwise innocuous, item raised was irresistible to an author looking to introduce intrigue and begin the development of an ominous tone. Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward first mentions the chapati (spelled chupattees in the novel) in their most basic form, as part of the basic breakfast of two military officers (88). Once he has raised the specter of the Mutiny with his introduction of 1857 as a “blood-stained” year that “thrilled the hearts of thousands with horror,” (219) he reintroduces the chapati. There is a small gathering of people at Edgington’s home during which Mr. Peters relates, “‘[a] curious circumstance was reported to me this morning’” (247). He continues, “‘a peon of the kotwalli’” relayed “‘the police in the village, on the north-west side of Cawnpore, received from other villages still further on, small chupattees, baked hard, about three inches in diameter. Immediately on their receipt, the policemen of each village baked four or five others, and sent them to all the bustees in his neighborhood’” (“Messenger; Police-officer; Village or hamlet”; 247). This is entirely in line with the real reports of what had been occurring in the northern regions of India. Money, from the beginning of his narrative’s shift to the Mutiny, blends reported events into his literary narrative to blur the lines of where history ends and fiction begins.
Money continues to use the reported events and matches the confusion of Lord Canning’s reports with his characters’ confusion. Mr. Peters continues his story, “‘I heard all this by accident early this morning, and during my ride I met the kotwal ‘Hoolas Sing,’ and asked him what it meant. He with me had heard of it only to-day, and is as much in the dark as I am. He thinks however, it is likely something in the shape of a circular connected with the pay of the police,—a kind of round-robin for an increase in wages’” (“Police officer”; 247). Edgington states that there was a newspaper report from that morning reporting a similar occurrence in Futtehghur (247). Marion calls the whole thing “[q]uite romantic” and she suggests there might be a “note hidden inside” (247). Edgington reads aloud the newspaper report which asks, “[i]s it treason or a jest? Is there to be an ‘explosion of feeling?’ or only of laughter? Is the chupattee a fiery cross, or only an indigestible edible?” (248). The conversation increases in excitement when they realize this news report indicates the chapati have been circulating back and forth across the region for a couple of weeks. Hoby suggests a military connection. “‘You all heard the other day of the mutiny at Berhampore—the 19th native infantry, who got an idea into their head that the new cartridges had pig and bullock fat in them. Is it not possible that this chupattee mystery may be connected with that mutiny?’” (250) No one else shares in this belief, but this passage in the novel shows the influence this mystery had on people’s thoughts.
Money is not in India during this period. He is, like everyone else, getting information through wired news reports or maybe connections he maintains within the army. This demonstrates the blending occurring between historical and literary narratives. There is very little temporal distance between these real events as reported by Lord Canning, and other British authorities, with what Money uses as fodder for his novel plot, which showcases how strong an influence events reported out from India has on this first Mutiny novel. As Gautam Chakravarty writes in The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, “[t]he articulation of the historical with the fictional was a formal device necessary to the novels of rebellion in as much as they were historical novels, but it was also the machinery that enabled a rather more substantive traffic of colonial knowledge (119). The chapati, and all of its supposed meanings become yet another way for those in power to characterize the indigenous population. They could become all at once, simple people susceptible to superstition or pawns of a native leader’s political intrigue. For the purposes of understanding a two-year period of sustained revolts, the British (in reality and in the novel), “by mistaking the sign of a spreading unrest among the peasantry for that of a sepoy rebellion it has helped to underline the ambiguity generated by their overlap” (Guha 239).
Works Cited
Chakravarty, Gautam. The Indian mutiny and the British imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Guha, Ranajit. Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India. Oxford, 1983.
Kaye, John, and George B. Malleson. Kaye’s and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8: Volume 1. vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Money, E. The Wife and the Ward, Or, A Life’s Error. Routledge, Warnes, & Routledge, 1859, https://books.google.com/books?id=uyACAAAAQAAJ.