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September 5, 2020 9:30 AM

Chapati Movement: How the Ubiquitous and Harmless Chapati Terrified the British in 1857
posted by infini (15 comments total)

Is this satire?

Thousands of unmarked chapatis were distributed to homes and police outposts ...

As opposed to... what... normal chapatis which are always emblazoned with the maker's secret code name?

The police chowkidars would bake and hand over the chapatis, two inches each in diameter, to their colleagues

What is this, a chapati for ants?!

It is said that chapatis were also a staple in the army of Tantia Tope and Lakshmi Bai when they moved around during the revolt.

Waaiiiiit whaaaaaat?! Their armies... ate... their own culture's most basic staple bread... DURING THE REVOLT?! Whoa!! That proves it. The chapatis must have been a secret spy conspiracy!

Upon re-read it seems this article is really meant in deadly earnest and is not satire. That's ... disappointing. It's not really worth reading, imo, as a serious account of historical events. There are no citations whatsoever, only breathless proclamations that

Panic spread among British officers
chapatis had British officials in quite a tizzy
the British were livid
the baffled British
The fact that the chapatis were moving more swiftly than the fastest British mail was particularly disconcerting to them.
the entire chapati ‘movement’ left the British Empire shaken to the core.
put the British into such a tizzy turned out to be an effective weapon of psychological warfare against colonial rule.

All with zero evidence, zero references, zero footnotes, zero citations. And that's not even getting into the positively bizarre aspects of this article:

Oddly enough, when the chapati runners were later questioned about the significance of carrying the bread from one home to another, they were absolutely clueless as to the purpose of their actions.

Of course there is no reference or sources offered to share where the writer of this article found transcripts of chapati runners being questioned. But set that aside for a moment - how facepalmingly ludicrous is this whole sentence? The runners claimed they don't have no clue why they're running around with a bunch of chapatis and you think the British believed them? YOU believe them, writer of the article?! LOL.

The chapatis were real but no one, not even the runners, knew for sure what they were for.

Food. Buddy. It's the subcontinent's staple bread. It's FOR EATING. It ain't mysterious. There was a famine, a cholera outbreak, and a military mutiny which further disrupted food supplies. Folks had to eat. Folks maybe wanted to make sure their neighbors ate. Anyone ever heard of Occam's razor? Just let those poor policemen eat their 2-inch "unmarked" chapatis in peace.

I shudder to think what the writer of this article will make of memes or kids' fads 80 years from now. Probably write an article about how the authorities were baffled! BAFFLED I TELL YOU! by the mysterious ritual of children making videos of themselves dancing to the same song and posting it for their friends to see. Was it Satanism? Nobody can know. Contemporary accounts of children being questioned show the children were themselves clueless about the purpose of these videos. Satan must have wiped their memories.
posted by MiraK at 10:07 AM on September 5, 2020 [15 favorites]

Ooh, turns out I was wrong, and the "chapati revolution" is a real event that mystified many in 1857. I found a much better article about it here, at the Smithsonian magazine. It's worth reading, even though - spoiler - it seems to have been a meme, not an actual spy plot. And here is another article about it with even more original photographs of newspapers and references to books which discuss the event. Thanks for turning me on to reading about this, infini.

Note the following:

- many sentences from this Smithsonian article have been plagiarized word-for-word by Sanchari Pal, the writer of the originally posted article . For shame!

- the Smithsonian includes many citations and sources that Pal didn't feel the need to plagiarize.

- there is also a significant portion of the Smithsonian article dedicated to the examination of the fact that many of the Indian chapati runners who were questioned believed this was a British spy plot. I suppose this did not fit well into Pal's rah-rah-Hindutva-patriotism-rah-rah agenda so she chose not to plagiarize this bit either.
posted by MiraK at 10:26 AM on September 5, 2020 [30 favorites]

you may scoff subalterns but have you ever been chased by a jolly big chapati in a dream
posted by lalochezia at 10:35 AM on September 5, 2020 [8 favorites]

This was a good post. Very interesting. Thanks for posting it.
posted by gt2 at 11:03 AM on September 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

It’s like it was one of the first viral memes. And the plagiarism is like perpetuating the meme too. Lol
posted by gt2 at 11:10 AM on September 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

"chapatis, two inches each in diameter" - that caught my eye, too.
posted by doctornemo at 11:11 AM on September 5, 2020

I finally understand the name of this old time blog 'pass the roti on the left hand side'
posted by infini at 11:21 AM on September 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

I shudder to think what the writer of this article will make of memes or kids' fads 80 years from now. Probably write an article about how the authorities were baffled! BAFFLED I TELL YOU!

Not precisely on point but I’m having a solid laugh imagining all the Church Lady SNL sketches with the word “Satan” replaces with “chapati”.
posted by mhoye at 11:23 AM on September 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

What a great story. Watching imperialist be baffled due to their inherent parochialism is delightful.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 11:37 AM on September 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

Just so I’m clear on this - British boffins baffled by clandestine chapati conspiracy, MetaFilter moots memetic meaning?
posted by sysinfo at 11:50 AM on September 5, 2020 [17 favorites]

This makes me hungry for roti prata.
posted by grumpybear69 at 4:49 PM on September 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

chapatis, two inches each in diameter

proving beyond all doubt that time travel is a thing
posted by flabdablet at 8:39 PM on September 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

He ordered his fellow-official to make ten more, and give two to each of the five nearest village Chowkeydars with the same instructions.

Classic chain letter.

The smithsonian.com article is a Mike Dash piece (previously) and it's good. To quote from near the end in case tl,dr:

Kim Wagner, who has made the most recent study of the phenomenon, concludes that the movement had its origins in Indore, a princely state still nominally independent of British rule, and that it began as an attempt to ward off the ravages of cholera:

At some point the chapattis passed beyond the limits of their meaningful transmission and simply continued through the country as a “blank” message. This allowed different meanings an interpretations to be attributed to them, and the chapattis became an index of people’s thoughts and worries.
[...]
Although the original specific meaning of the chapattis had been lost early in the distribution, the dire consequences of breaking the chain of transmission remained, and thus ensured their successful circulation over an immense area. In the event, the chapattis were not ‘harbingers of a coming storm.’ They were what people made them into, and the significance attributed to them was a symptom of the pervasive distrust and general consternation amongst the Indian population during the early months of 1857.

Kim A. Wagner. The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising
posted by away for regrooving at 10:55 PM on September 6, 2020

I'm still a bit confused even by the eventual explanation. The original chapati scheme was an anti-cholera measure, sure, but how was it supposed to work? Was food distribution to cholera-ravaged villages the purpose, and if so, how did a random process of asking villages both to receive and give food help? Was it based in some religious or mystical process, or a general morale-building exercise? Maybe I don't get it, but it's not clear how a chain letter made of food is a common-sense response to a disease outbreak.
posted by jackbishop at 7:06 AM on September 7, 2020

I know this is unlikely to be the answer, but I'm so tempted to think this was the useless awareness-raising nineteenth-century equivalent of 90% DON'T CARE ABOUT CHOLERA AND WON'T SHARE THIS, IF YOU CARE ABOUT CHOLERA THEN COPY AND PASTE THIS AS YOUR STATUS AND TAG TEN FRIENDS,
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:15 PM on September 7, 2020 [2 favorites]