The Indian Mutiny (An Old and Rare Book)

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The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was a huge and bloody struggle, a 'Devil's Wind' of retribution and death that swept across the jungles, hills and parched plains of the Indian sub-continent.

The author vividly recaptures the experience and atmosphere of the time - the smell of battle, the tired men and forced marches, the sleges and the appalling massacres - all enacted beneath the relentless, cruel heat of the Indian sun. It was a war of treachery and incompetence, desperately fought without mercy on either side, but a war of heroism and endurance. It threw up remarkable personalities: Nicholson, who recaptured Delhi: Henry Lawrence, the defender of Lucknow: "Holy' Havelock, the bible-thumping general who relieved Lucknow only to find himself trapped; and the dour uncompromising Colin Campbell. who was sent from England to return India to sanity.

The Mutiny transpired to be the first significant crack in the solidly-built. rigid structure of the British Empire and at its conclusion, and thereafter, the British were never able to feel quite as secure again.

THE GREAT INDIAN MUTINY OF 1857 is remembered for events that have T become legendary: the massacre at Cawnpore; the Kashmir Gate at Delhi: the relief of Lucknow. In this book John Harris has vividly brought to life the pity and terror of the Mutiny, the sense of shock to both sides at the challenge to established order. Britishers in India and England were horrified by the murders of women and children, and yet British reprisals were no less horrific; captured rebel sepoys were blown from guns.

Despite its horrors the Mutiny was followed by one of the most splendid chapters in British Imperial History- the long years of the Raj. Yet looking back, we can see that in the year of 1857 when a coloured people rose against its British rulers for the first time were the first stirrings of the movement that was to lead to independence in 1947, and eventually to the dissolution of the Empire itself.