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By Root 1196 0

across India. But its prevalence was not the point. Its suppression was a dramatic and emotional demonstration of the ethical purpose of empire. Soon, there was another dragon to slay, when one of Bentinck’s subordinates, William Sleeman, began a campaign against the Thugs, a secret sect, he revealed, who worshipped the goddess Kali by falling on travellers and strangling them with a silken cord. After robbery, the bodies were buried in graves dug with a sacred pickaxe. This, too, became a practice Bentinck determined to stop: hereditary lord confronted hereditary murderer. Again, the precise scale of thuggee will never be known – no doubt many different groups of murderers, from muggers to discharged soldiers, also had their crimes attributed to the cult. Indeed, there are some who noisily claim that the whole cult thing was got up by the British to justify their ‘civilizing mission’. What is unarguable is that when Sleeman was given charge of a force to eradicate highway murder he was remarkably successful. By deploying decent detective methods – including the assiduous collection of evidence, the cultivation of informants and the offer of rehabilitation to those who would turn queen’s evidence, thousands of alleged murderers were brought to justice, to be hanged, imprisoned or transported. It was an achievement spoken of in the same breath as the abolition of slavery.

In 1857, the 10th of May fell on a Sunday. As the sun began to sink in the sky, British officers and their families at the military camp at Meerut, about 40 miles from Delhi, prepared for evening prayers at the garrison church. Boots and belts were being buffed when suddenly, soon after five in the afternoon, the place exploded in shouts, shots and screams. Indians, both civilians and sepoy soldiers of the East India Company army, burst through the cantonment, setting fire to buildings and looting weapons from the armouries. A few officers found their horses and rode out to confront the furious mob as it rampaged around, only to be hacked down or chased away. The pregnant wife of an infantryman was disembowelled by a rebel butcher, a patient sick with smallpox was set alight. By night-time much of the military compound was ablaze, about fifty men, women and children were dead, and the rioters had set off on horses for Delhi, intent on spreading the mutiny against foreign rule across the country.

The following morning, the Mughul emperor was disturbed by the sound of shouts outside the Red Fort in Delhi. The current tenant hardly matched the grandeur of his surroundings. His palace had been designed as an earthly reflection of the delights after death promised in the Koran. But Bahadur Shah Zafar was a feeble, hen-pecked valetudinarian, under the impression that he possessed magical powers. Although his ‘court’ still issued bulletins each day, the emperor’s dominions had shrunk to the point where they extended scarcely further than the rooms of his palace, around which the old man would shuffle, leaning on a stick and stroking his waist-length beard. The Company paid him courtesy and a large annual allowance in exchange for his staying inside the palace composing poetry and painting the occasional miniature, leaving it free to go about its business. The angry mutineers now planned to ask this eighty-two-year-old poet to be the figurehead for a campaign to throw the British out of India. Bahadur Shah Zafar’s first reaction was to send the commander of his personal guard, a Colonel Douglas, to see what was up. The mutineers killed him. More and more rebels poured into the city. Shops were looted. More Europeans were hunted down and killed – neither gender nor age was any protection. The angry soldiers had no plan: the uprising was an incoherent expression of anger, and in the long term it was destined to fail. But in the meantime the revolt’s enormous, merciless energy terrified the British. It was one of the biggest shocks the empire ever experienced, and it changed it for ever.

In the shorthand version of history, the trigger for what the British called