Midnight at Vellore

The grievance would sound familiar fifty years later. New dress regulations for the Madras Army ordered sepoys to shave their beards, strip caste marks from their foreheads, and wear a new round hat with a leather cockade — leather whispered to be of cow and pig hide. To the sepoys it read as forced conversion by uniform. Their protests were answered with floggings and dismissals. Inside Vellore Fort, where Tipu Sultan's sons and household were held in comfortable captivity, the garrison's patience ran out.

In the small hours of 10 July 1806 the sepoys rose, shot down more than a hundred British officers and men in their quarters, and by dawn had raised the tiger-striped flag of Mysore over the fort, proclaiming Tipu's son their sovereign. It lasted one morning. Colonel Rollo Gillespie rode from Arcot with galloper guns, blew in the gates, and put the rising down with a slaughter that killed some three hundred and fifty sepoys; scores more were executed after drumhead trials, some blown from guns.

The Raj drew the small lesson and missed the large one. The offending regulations were withdrawn and the Governor of Madras recalled — but the deeper warning, that an army of Indians would not indefinitely serve masters who held their faith cheap, went unheeded. In 1857 the same fire, lit by the same kind of spark, would consume half of India. Vellore was the first tremor.