The 1857 MutinyA first war of independence?

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

I haven't gone to Kanpur for any particular reason, except the same reason as everywhere else I go during my travels in the North of India: I am heading slowly but surely for Calcutta, and it happens to be in the way. In terms of history, however, it is a logical next stop after Delhi and Agra. If two cities are enclaves of Mughal history, with the past fossilized in their architectural relics, then Kanpur - like Lucknow, my next halt - has for its historical substrata the nawabs of Avadh and the British, the Mughals' successors.

After Aurangzeb, as the Mughal empire waned and fragmented into a dozen regional states which paid only lip service to the emperor, this corner of the world was ruled by the nawabs of Avadh, or Oudh as the British called it, whose reigns were marked by ever greater displays of decadence, until the last of them, Wajid Ali Shah (whose name was still a local byword for indolence and lavishness) was deposed and the kingdom of Avadh annexed by the British East India Company. The annexation of Avadh was one of the sparks igniting the Mutiny of 1857, when most of the Indian battalions of the Bengal Army, the sepoys, rebelled. They elevated as their leader the aged Bahudur Shah II, the heir to the Mughal line, who, under the British, was a mere figurehead.

The real cause of the Mutiny is still disputed, and will doubtless never be agreed upon, but one of the possible underlying reasons for it was British policy in India. Western values - Christian values - were gradually introduced to their subjects and imposed through the education of the young. English replaced the Mughals' native Persian as the language of government. India, a land of ancient tradition, could tolerate innovation only if it could later be absorbed and Indianized, as happened with the Mughals; this was never going to be the case with the British. It is easy to understand why nationalist historians have tried to see in the uprising India's first war of independence and why the Mughal Empire, which was also essentially a rule imposed by a foreign power, has been elevated in the national consciousness and is looked back on with pride.

It was at Kanpur, or Cawnpore as it had then been, that some of the worst outrages were committed during the 1857 Mutiny. After months of fighting, the besieged European residents finally agreed a truce and negotiated safe passage to Allahabad, only to be mown down by the forces of the princeling Nana Sahib as they boarded their boats. The women and children were spared, although it was to prove only a brief stay of execution: the several hundred who remained alive were imprisoned in a small room for several weeks, and then, as the relief forces arrived, were murdered and their dismembered bodies thrown down a well. The reprisals were equally brutal: the mutineers, after capture, were forced to lick up the blood still pooling in the slaughter chamber before being massacred in turn.