White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

It was not just that most of the sepoys totally refused to touch the new rifles. More dangerously still, the idea quickly gained acceptance that the mistake was far from accidental and was part of a wider Company conspiracy to break the sepoys’ caste and ritual purity before embarking on a project of mass conversion.

He made the man who had forcibly married her sign and seal a divorce decree before witnesses, and got Nader’s secretaries to write a raqam saying that the girl was to remain a Christian and should marry a Christian, and that the abductor should not be allowed to bring litigation over the case. Then he gave the girl and the raqam to the father, and

Throughout the autumn and the early part of the winter of 1857, while the battle for Lucknow still raged in the eastern half of Hindustan, much of the effort of British administration in Delhi went into preparing for the historic trial of the man who was now clearly going to be the last of the Mughals.