The end of the hot weather had seen cities, cantonments and towns somnolent beneath the beating sun, with many sepoys in their home villages on furlough. Now the month was ‘attended with much rain…the weather frequently gloomy’.
Calcutta’s European community pursued a sweaty round of entertainment in the damp heat, listening
to Madame Frery’s violin soirées in the Town Hall, the New York Serenaders at Dowley’s Family Hotel, Garden Reach or, for those with a taste for the grotesque, entertained by the famed ‘Indian Dwarf’.
Seemingly minor events heralded further change: the Military Consultations sent from Calcutta to London recorded a ‘Report on greased cartridges for new rifled muskets’, but without comment, unaware of how rumours of the composition of the grease would in time lead to the Bengal Army’s trauma, while in Calcutta the Hindu College had just been renamed Presidency College, heralding even greater change.
Newspaper subscribers read of Dalhousie’s intentions to annexe the kingdom of Oudh for India. And all the while, the rain poured down. ‘The rains continue heavy’, the Citizen reported, with ‘copious showers’ night and morning.
‘This is my authority’: the murder of Mohesh Dutta
Four brothers living near Burhyte, at the heart of the Damin, became the instigators and leaders of…
