Volume 54, Number 7 · April 26, 2007
Plain Tales from British India
By William Dalrymple
The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
by Nicholas B. Dirks
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 389 pp., $27.95
The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj
by David Gilmour
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 381 pp., $27.00
Exactly 150 years ago, on September 14, 1857, at the height of the Great Uprising against the British in India, British forces attacked Delhi. They entered the besieged city through a breach in the walls near the Kashmiri Gate. Then they proceeded to massacre not just the combatants that were ranged against them—their own rebellious infantrymen (or sepoys), supported by freelance Muslim jihadis armed with battle-axes—but also the ordinary defenseless citizens of the old Mughal capital. In one muhalla (neighborhood) alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 unarmed citizens of Delhi were cut down. 'The orders went out to shoot every soul,' recorded Edward Vibart:
Review, 4848 words
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