It is called "the chupatty movement"

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 59.

'There is a most mysterious affair going on through the whole of India at present,' Dr Gilbert Hadow wrote home to his sister towards the end of March 1857.' No one seems to know the meaning of it. . . It is not known where it originated, by whom or for what purpose, whether it is supposed to be connected with any religious ceremony or whether it has to do with some secret society. The Indian papers are full of surmises as to what it means . . . It is called "the chupatty movement".'

One morning that month Mark Thornhill, Magistrate of Muttra, found four of these chupatties, 'dirty little cakes of the coarsest flour, about the size and thickness of a biscuit', laid on the table in his office. He discovered that a man had come out of the jungle with them, had given them to the watchman with instructions to make four like them and to take these to the watchman of the next village who was to be told to do the same. Other officials reported that the number of chupatties was five and that that number had been sent on to the watchmen of five neighbouring villages who in turn had each been told to send five others on to five other villages. By this means, it was said, chupatties were travelling all over the North-Western Provinces at the rate of about a hundred miles in twenty-four hours. George Harvey, Commissioner for the Agra Division, thought that they were being distributed over a distance of between 160 and 200 miles in a single night.
Some believed that the distribution of chupatties was a magical rite to avert some impending catastrophe; others that it was a practice adopted to appease gods responsible for epidemics of cholera; yet others that it was a call to the people to resist the imposition of Christianity. There was a widespread belief among the natives that the British Government themselves were responsible for it, that the distribution was intended as a warning of the Government's determination to join everyone in India together, to make them eat the same food and to force them to become Christians. But' no one could say why such a curious method had been adopted' for conveying this determination to them. Certainly the village watchmen did not know why they had to run through the night with chupatties in their turbans, though they obviously felt some calamity would befall them if they should break the chain. The native police were as mystified as anyone. Mainuddin Hassan Khan, a thannadar in Delhi, was 'astonished' by the reports to which he nevertheless attached the utmost importance, since the distribution of chupatties 'undoubtedly created a feeling of great alarm in the native mind throughout Hindustan'. Asked by the joint magistrate at Delhi to report privately what he believed to be the origin of the matter, he could offer no explanation other than that his father had once told him that upon 'the downfall of the Mahratta power, a sprig of millet and a morsel of bread had passed from village to village, and that it was more than probable that the distribution of this bread was significant of some great disturbance which would follow immediately'.