AS the sudden and shocking news of the bloody events of 1857 in north India reached Britain, the thousands of Indian men and women ofall classes living there faced new challenges in their ongoing negotiations with the surrounding society. Lurid rumours and reports poured into the British media and popular discourse, about mutinous sepoys and treacherous oriental princes, who were both suddenly notorious for betraying, assaulting and assassinating British women, children and men. In this heated atmosphere, Britons expected Indians living among them in the metropole to proclaim and demonstrate their submission to Britain and to distinguish themselves in word and deed from their disloyal countrymen in the colony. Most of the diverse Indians in Britain, whatever their personal feelings towards the anti-British fighting back in India, felt compelled to protest their loyalties to the British crown, but nonetheless endured considerable hostility from the host society, with long-term repercussions. Thus, 1857 marked a key moment in the history of Indians in Britain. Certainly, the tens of thousands of people from India living in 'Britain over the preceeding 250 years had experienced—and partially shaped—many shifts in attitudes toward them. While some Britons had regarded all Indians as col-lectively 'Black', like people from Africa and the Caribbean, many other Britons had differentiated among them. In particular, the social class, religious com-munity, gender, individual circumstances and historical era of each Indian in Britain shaped his or her possible roles there. European fantasies about the exotic `Oriental woman', especially the members of the regal harem, as sensually desir-able but enticingly inaccessible, added a gendered aura to these images. Overall during the early nineteenth century, British attitudes towards Indian women and men had hardened as the British Empire asserted authority and gained cultural confidence over colonised Indians collectively. The events of 1857 accelerated and altered these patterns, catalysing new British formulations that combined all Indians together based on hereditary race. In particular, the Indian man became perceived as threatening to the putative purity of white women.