causes

The causes of the Indian Mutiny which erupted in Meerut on May 10, 1857, and raged across north and central India for more than a year, have long been the subject of Indo-British historical debate.

The immediate trigger was the introduction of the Enfield rifled musket which had cartridges greased with pig and cow fat, causing offence to Muslim and Hindu soldiers respectively.

More sophisticated historical readings find a range of causes for the bubbling discontent that led to open rebellion - the punitive tax collection system, a succession of British territorial seizures and the rise of aggressive Christian evangelism among them.

However it was the refusal to bite into those Enfield musket cartridges that led, on April 24, to the imprisonment of 90 soldiers of the Third Indian Cavalry in Meerut. They were sprung from jail on May 10 by the mutinous sepoys, who then marched on Delhi.

After Delhi was occupied, the revolt spread to other cities such as Lucknow, Cawnpore (now Kanpur) and Jhansi, where the rebels committed a series of massacres of women and children which transfixed the Victorian popular imagination.

However by the end of 1858, when the rebellion was finally suppressed, those same massacres had been used to justify a wave of even more savage British reprisals, including the razing and execution of entire villages. Indians called it the "Devil's Wind". Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, William Dalrymple, the historian whose latest book The Last Mughal tells the story of the siege of Delhi, described the British action as "the most brutal moment in British imperial history".

The rebellion had two immediate consequences - the exiling of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, to Burma and the founding of the British Raj as the East India Company was dissolved and India placed under the direct rule of the British government.