The Great Indian Mutiny, by Richard Collier, is a scholarly work with a romantically repackaged cover. In the center, we have a lady with way too much décolletage and ankle showing to be plausibly Victorian; she is fleeing from a mounted sepoy who is wearing nothing but a turban and a dhoti, has a fanatical expression, and has turned ¾ of the way around in his saddle to deliver a decapitating blow with his tulwar. Fortunately for our distraught heroine, a stalwart if disheveled British officer is off to the left, drawing a bead on the mutineer with his service revolver. We can only imagine a happy outcome – at least for everybody but the sepoy – with the lady falling into the officer’s arms after her rescue and proclaiming how she will never be able to thank him adequately for saving her life. If the book was a real romance novel rather than a history, and if it had been written in the last 15 years or so, he’d probably have some suggestions, but as it is we must roll the end credits on the touching scene.

Surprisingly enough based on the cover, this is a very good history of the Indian Mutiny. It dates from 1963, but there can’t be that much in the way of new evidence for an event that happened in 1857. The main dramatic events – the siege and recapture of Delhi, the siege and relief of Lucknow, and the Cawnpore massacre - are all described with absorbing prose and with surprising – for the time – fairness to both sides. The sepoys really had been treated with injustice – the famous issuance of new Enfield cartridges was merely the final straw; the sepoys really did massacre women and children at Cawnpore; and the British really did take a bloody and excessive revenge. The sepoys, despite outnumbering their opponents by something like 30:1, could never coordinate the various religious and tribal factions well enough to actually accomplish anything. The British displayed their famous ability to muddle through somehow; although the initial behavior of the East Indian Companies army prefigured the famous WWI image of “lions led by donkeys” some competent officers eventually rose to the top and it was all over for the mutineers.

Interestingly, there are still conspiracy theories about a 150+ year old event. While browsing the net for additional information, I ran across a recent Indian drama about the mutiny that presented the Cawnpore massacre as inflicted by the British on their own women and children – to create an atrocity that they could use to justify their own brutality. I can sympathize with the desire for modern Indians to explain away a pretty disturbing chapter in their history, but this is a little too much. It would have been better to point out that many sepoys, although they didn’t like the British very much, refused to violate their military oaths, and others, although they joined in the mutiny, protected civilians that came into their hands.

Definitely worth a read; the only full length book I’ve read on the mutiny so I have no standard of comparison, but I can’t imagine this failing to stand up against more recent works. ( )

I liked this book. Once I started reading, it was hard to put down. The author uses quotes from diaries of persons involved to give a personal touch to the narrative. An historical account that reads like a fast paced adventure. ( )