8 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the civil administration mounted, he began to see his own identity cast more and more in a religious colour. For his morale, the army authorities had encouraged giving to the Bengal Army the reputation of an upper-caste army. The enlistment of lower castes was specifically discouraged by the Regulations of 1855. The Army authorities also took much care to encourage respect for caste-taboos, by letting the sepoys cook privately. Not surprisingly, the sepoys became particularly sensitive about their caste and religious status. At the same time, the regiments were made up of diverse composition to thwart the growth of any common feeling among the sepoys. But the result of such mixture, as Syed Ahmad Khan noted, was the opposite: By coming together in the same companies, bonds grew between Hindu and Muslim sepoys and both camejo consider each other as brothers.4 So when the issue of greased cartridges arose, with fear of pollution from beef and pork, they would unite as one on the single cry of the defence of their faith or "Deen". The greased cartridges for the new Enfield rifles were designed to make the Bengal Army more effective. Biting the cartridge made reloading far quicker than breaking it by hand; for the sepoy too the time gained might make all the difference between life and death in the battle-field. There were good reasons, therefore, for the Army authorities to press on with the newrweapon and method of using the cartridge, even when the the alarm and indignation of the sepoys became manifest as the year 1857 began. Concessions came too late and were not believed: enough combustible material had otherwise gathered in the breast of the sepoy, to make the greased cartridge just the torch that could set the whole army aflame. When on 29 March 1857 Mangal Pandey, the Revolt' s first martyr, called upon his comrades at Barrackpore to rise, the immediate summons proved abortive. The 19th and the 34th Infantry allowed themselves to be disarmed and disbanded. But the call spread from cantonment to cantonment, until on the llth of May the Meerut Mutineers occupied Delhi and sent out the signal for a general uprising of the entire Bengal Army. That signal, with some passage of time, was almost universally obeyed. In September 1858 the India House could report only seven regiments with just 7,796 sepoys surviving in service from the Bengal Army of two years earlier, when it had a "native" strength of some 139,000 men.5 There can, therefore, be little doubt that the sepoys who mutinied and went into armed rebellion must have numbered well over 100,000. They constituted not only the bulk of the armed strength of the rebels, but