The Devil’s Wind

The Devil’s Wind concentrates on the military causes of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Saul David examines the Bengal Army as a volunteer force whose Indian soldiers served under European officers and depended on pay, status, promotion and respect for religious practice to sustain their loyalty to the East India Company.

The book argues that long-term grievances over allowances, overseas service, career prospects and changing relations with officers made the army increasingly brittle before the cartridge controversy triggered open revolt. Beginning with discontent in the regiments and the outbreak at Meerut, it explains why a force that had enabled British expansion became the instrument of the empire’s most violent nineteenth-century crisis.