Men Without Hats
James W. Hoover
Manohar, Rs 750
The fort at vellore in Tamil Nadu is today better known as the place from where imprisoned Tamil tigers escaped by digging a tunnel, leading an embarrassed government to totally close it to the public, thus relegating it further into obscurity. Obscurity is not the fate expected of Vellore, for it was here, for the first since the arrival of the British in India, that a mutiny broke out amongst Indian soldiers in 1806.

The mutiny of the Madras Army at Vellore on July 10, 1806, is usually ascribed to two factors. The first was that new army regulations forced the soldiers to eliminate all marks of religious identity. The Hindus were told to erase all caste marks; the Muslims were forced to shave their beards and moustaches. Furthermore, the soldiers had been guarding the sons of the Tiger of Mysore, Tipu Sultan. They are said to have won over the soldiers loyalty. In fact, Tipu’s second son, Fateh Hyder, was proclaimed king, and the old Mysore flag raised over the fort. The mutiny was swiftly put down, as a British officer escaped, and alerted his superiors. In the aftermath, Tipu’s family was sent off to far-away Calcutta, to live under the watchful eye of the Raj.

James W. Hoover — of Salem State College in the United States — is not satisfied with the traditional view of the origins of the Vellore mutiny. He has delved through all the available documents on the mutiny, comprising the reports of the British commanders, the records of the trials of the mutineers and, most importantly, the depositions of the mutineers and other witnesses to the events. The result is a fascinating and detailed account of Company Raj and the colonial state into which it was evolving, and how it was seen by the sepoys who were its foundation.

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