In March of 1857, a British Army surgeon in India wrote a letter to his sister, describing a mysterious affair going on “through the whole of India” that no one could quite surmise the significance of. He said it was called “the chupatty movement”. The appearance of the chapatis in the village and towns of the subcontinent’s interiors have been likened by one historian to a variant of the modern “chain letter” — if you received one, you were beholden to prepare and distribute a certain number of chapatis to others. No one knew where the chapati network originated, or even who (or what) was behind them — not even those who delivered them, running “through the night with chupatties in their turbans”, as one account says.
All that anyone knew for a fact was that one February morning, four of these chapatis had appeared on the desk of an English magistrate in Mathura, who called them “dirty little cakes of the coarsest flour, about the size and thickness of a biscuit”. One of the policemen who served under the magistrate had brought the chapatis in, apparently handed over by a puzzled village chowkidar. He in turn had simply received the chapatis from a man who emerged from the surrounding jungle, with the instruction to make four of the same type and pass them on.
The British were flummoxed as to the purpose of the flatbreads: the chapatis contained no messages or hidden codes of any kind, nor even was there any discernible pattern to their distribution, and yet they were being passed around with such urgency. The unexplained phenomenon alarmed the British and made them jittery. Meanwhile, the local populace was eyeing the British with increasing mistrust.
By May of 1857, when the introduction of the new Enfield rifle cartridges sparked the anti-British uprising by Indian soldiers serving in the British Indian Army — a movement known variously as the Sepoy Mutiny, Mutiny of 1857, or the Revolt of 1857 — many on both sides of the divide were convinced that the proliferating chapatis had been a warning of the violence to come. Historians are not so sure of any connection between the two events, but throughout history there has been more than one revolution sparked by food. Here’s a look:
FLOUR
At several points in France’s history, wheat shortages had led to riots among the populace, for whom flour and bread were the mainstays of their diet. The 18th century saw these revolts come to a boil, and in 1775 there was a nationwide clash between the masses and the authorities in several parts of the country. This clash — preceded by famine, cereal shortages and a deregulation of the grain market that proved counterproductive — was known as The Flour War. The people rose up, laid siege to granaries, and seized shipments of grain. Ultimately, order was restored and regulation was reintroduced for the grain market. Many historians consider The Flour War as a prelude to the French Revolution that followed just a decade-and-a-half later.
Other notable revolts: Flour Riot of 1837, New York.
BREAD
If The Flour War set the stage, then the Bread Riots directly preceded the French Revolution that saw Louis VI deposed and executed, as also his wife, Marie Antoinette. The story goes that one of the King’s economic advisers had cautioned him — possibly having learnt it the hard way from the Flour War — that no matter what, “ne vous mêlez pas du pain” (“do not meddle with the bread”). The role of the French monarch as the provider of the people was so deeply entrenched that there was even an affectionate nickname for the head of state: “le premier boulanger du royaume” (First Baker of the Kingdom).
But as a deep-in-debt France faced impending economic disaster in the 1780s, bread was in short supply. At the time, half of a peasant’s earnings would have gone into buying bread for his family. Small price fluctuations could trigger big crises. Everywhere there were stories of local uprisings and military reprisals. The King’s advisers made it known that in solidarity with the masses, Louis VI had stopped eating manchet — the fine white bread nobles and aristocrats preferred, which had the wheat-germ and bran removed from the flour — and was only served maslin (the coarser bread of the lower classes, made from wheat and rye).
Unfortunately, it is not this detail that surfaces in our collective imaginations when we think of the French Revolution, but rather, the false quote that reportedly illumined Marie Antoinette’s bourgeois disdain for the proletariat: “If they can’t have bread, let them eat cake”.
Other notable revolts: Boston Bread Riot, 1710-1713; Southern Bread Riots (in the American Confederacy), 1863; 1898 Bread Riots, Italy; several in the 20th century, including in Egypt, Tunisia, Malta, Morocco and Wales.
TEA
Tea had grown to be quite the bone of contention between the American colonies and the British Empire. It was one of the commodities — along with paper, glass, paint, lead etc — that had been prohibitively taxed by Britain in a bid to earn revenues. The colonists were unhappy not only because of these steep taxes, but also because they had been imposed on them “without representation” in Parliament. Violent scuffles occurred, following which Britain rolled back a lot of these taxes. Tea, however, was too much of a golden egg-laying goose for the English to squander it.
The colonists tried to circumvent the tax by bringing in Dutch tea, and relying on smugglers’ networks. To protect their profits, the British passed another law, that gave the East India Company sundry advantages when it came to selling its tea in America, including a waiver on duty. The colonists, however, were still expected to pay the tax.
Then, in December of 1773, three British East India Company ships drew in at Boston harbour, loaded with tea from China. After a tense stand-off with the governor over paying the tea tariff, a group of about 100 men stole onto the ships at night and proceeded to throw all 342 tea chests on board the three ships into the sea. They destroyed the chests with axes before dumping them in the water, to ensure the tea could not be salvaged. All told, about 45 tonnes of tea ended up in the harbour that night, with some estimates citing the cost in today’s money at $10,00,000.
POTATOES
The spread of a virulent fungus is now the trigger event in many a dystopian/post-apocalyptic tale, but in September and October of 1845 one such strain caused real devastation in Ireland. The “Phytophthora infestans” spread on the wind, and farmers noticed that the leaves of their potato plants had begun to show signs of disease. Nothing could be done to save the plants with these infected leaves; they withered quickly. When they were dug up, it was found that the potatoes had rotted below ground. Potato was one of Ireland’s main crops and food sources, but the harvest for 1845 was wiped out. The same disaster befell the potato crop in 1846, then 1847.
Famine was rife among the impoverished rural Irish, many of whom worked as tenant farmers on small tracts for English landowners. At the same time, other Irish produce — and beef — was being exported to Britain. The Great Irish Famine left a million dead. A million more were forced to migrate to America in search of a livelihood. Those who stayed behind found themselves evicted from their homes, with little or no aid from the British government. The long-simmering resentment against the British was fuelled even further, with support for Irish Nationalists growing by the day.
Other notable revolts: The Potato Riots against the Russian Empire, 1834, and 1840-44; the Dutch Potato Riots of 1917, Amsterdam.
SALT
The British had begun the process of imposing taxes on salt in India, and monopolising the market, as early as 1759. But in 1930, these policies triggered Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi March or Salt Satyagraha. The Salt Satyagraha was the first volley in the Civil Disobedience Movement. Accompanied by 78 of his followers, Gandhi began his nonviolent campaign from Sabarmati Ashram on March 12, reaching Dandi 24 days later, and symbolically breaking the Salt Law on April 6. He was arrested a month later, before a peaceful protest was scheduled to take place at the Dharasana Salt Works. The Salt Satyagraha would go on to influence leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, and give hope to many oppressed populaces in other parts of the world.
Other notable revolts: Moscow’s Salt Uprising of 1648