Gautam Chakravarty explores representations of the event which has become known in the British imagination as the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857 in British popular fiction and historiography. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including diaries, autobiographies and state papers, Chakravarty shows how narratives of the rebellion were inflected by the concerns of colonial policy and by the demands of imperial self-image. He goes on to discuss the wider context of British involvement in India from 1765 to the 1940's, and engages with constitutional debates, administrative measures and the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian novel. Chakravarty approaches the Mutiny from the perspectives of postcolonial theory as well as from historical and literary perspectives to show the extent to which the insurrection took hold of the popular imagination in both Britain and India. The book has a broad interdisciplinary appeal and will be of interest to scholars of English literature, British imperial history, modern Indian history and cultural studies.

In ‘The Indian Mutiny in Fiction’, a review article that appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1897, Hilda Gregg made an observation that bears recall. At the start of her survey of recent novels on the subject Gregg noted that: ‘Of all the great events of this century, as they
are reflected in fiction, the Indian Mutiny has taken the firmest hold on the popular imaginations. Gregg does not quite explain her meaning, but as this book hopes to show, the imagination that seized on the rebellion of 1857–9 was the vulgate of late-nineteenth century British expansionism.