One dies, and only intimate friends mourn—and how few they are.”

At the same time that most of Catholic Europe was given over to the Inquisition, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt for heresy at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori, in India the Mughal Emperor Akbar was holding multi-faith symposia in his palace and declaring that “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be

The courage of the sepoys invariably impressed their old officers; their tactics did not. The massed bodies of troops certainly looked magnificent when seen from the city walls—Zahir Dehlavi thought the contest was “a strange and fascinating war which one had never heard of or seen before, for both the armies belonged to the British government, and

Mirza Mughal’s attempts to act as a co-ordinating Commander-in-Chief had only very limited success.

Zafar was the last Mughal Emperor, and the descendant of the great world-conquerors Genghis Khan and Timur.

The criminals in the city had seen that there was a great opportunity in the unrest, and quickly decided to join the rebels. Full of greed and excitement, they took the rebels to the gate of the bank, brutally killed the men, women and children

civilisation championed by Akbar, Dara Shukoh or the later Mughal Emperors has only a limited resonance for the urban middle class in modern India. Many of these are now deeply ambivalent about the achievements of the Mughals, even if they will still happily eat a Mughal meal, or flock to the cinema to watch a Bollywood Mughal epic, or indeed head

The religious nature of the Uprising was becoming immediately apparent. British men and women who had converted to Islam were invariably spared, yet all Indian converts to Christianity—Hindu or Muslim—were sought out and hunted down.

At night sleep was all but impossible: if the damp heat and the smell were not enough, the boom of cannon, the baying of jackals and dogs, and what the Delhi Gazette Extra described as “the gurgling moan of obstinate camels” made rest a distant hope.62 More seriously, in this humid, stinking, stagnant quagmire, cholera also broke out again, passing