![]() ![]() We were not told that the uprising-not just a mutiny-very nearly succeeded in driving the British out of India that its causes were many and related to a variety of economic, political, and social grievances and particularly to a Christian threat to the Muslim and Hindu religions that British actions and reactions often exceeded the ferocity and brutality of the mutineers and that the bloody episode put an end to 332 years of Islamic-Hindu cooperation under the Mughal emperors who, at their best, had encouraged an extraordinary flowering of all the arts and of religious tolerance. In my childhood, the Indian Mutiny, as it was then exclusively called in England, was still a subject of high emotion-presented as an inexplicable outrage in which Indian soldiers, trained by the benevolent British, had suddenly turned on their benefactors and massacred large numbers of them over some question of the grease on a new batch of cartridges. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |