The map below is an interpretation of the path that the chapati traveled, based on information from several historical narratives. Every attempt has been made to be faithful to those texts. However, several names that were used at the time are no longer in use. If it could be reasonably concluded that an alternative name, which was discovered during an internet search, is the current spelling of the mentioned village, the alternative was used as the map marker. All instances have been noted in the descriptions.
The map below is an interpretation of the path that the chapati traveled, based on information from several Mutiny Novels. Every attempt has been made to be faithful to those texts. However, several names that were used at the time are no longer in use. If it could be reasonably concluded that an alternative name, which was discovered during an internet search, is the current spelling of the mentioned village, the alternative was used as the map marker. All instances have been noted in the descriptions.
The reasoning behind separating the historical from the literary in the circulation of the chapati is to allow for appropriate comparison without continuing to conflate the two styles of circulation. The chapati circulation rumors took on a life of their own during the uprisings. They became a novelesque source of tension and their presence in both history and literature demands a side-by-side comparison.
The maps above show that while the chapati did not circulate in the exact same places in the historical texts and the novels, circulation stayed within the Northern regions of India. The novel authors, when discussing the chapati circulation and creating dialogue, stayed within the framework that was originally created by the area magistrates and other civil servants’ written records. As Gautam Chakravarty writes in The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, “the main body of British fiction on the rebellion bears the impress of formative intersections such as those between the historical novel and the history of empire, between popular culture in Britain and the British self-image in India, between colonial knowledge and its transcription in fiction” (8).