WRITING to the London Missionary Society (LMS) in January 1858, Rev. J. Bradbury of the Berhampore mission, Orissa, commented that 1857 had been a year 'of great and startling events. Seldom if ever have such dire calamities happened as those which have befallen India during the past few months, and never in any country were they less apprehended.'' The military and civil insurrection that swept north-west India in 1857 took Britain largely by surprise, shattering any sense of colonial complacency and forcing a renegotiation of the moral, ideological and practical basis of British imperialism. Despite retrospective impositions of cohesion and consensus,2 immediate reactions to the uprising were fractured: a cacophony of conflicting voices that exposed the fragility of colonial identities and the many 'fault lines" within the national imperial project. By tracing the shifting textual terrain of published and unpublished LMS missionary accounts of 1857-1858, this chapter will examine how immediate events, pre-existing agendas and embedded preconceptions were reconciled in a public evangelical discourse that intersected wider popular narratives of 1857. The evangelical response both diverged from and negotiated with other public discourses on the uprising, and tensions between missionary accounts and those of the popular press, the Houses of Parliament and East India House highlight the multivalent nature of the national response, while the fractures found within and between missionary accounts demonstrate that the 'public' evangelical discourse of the LMS was itself constructed out of a variety of sometimes conflicting individual narratives. By looking at these constituent elements we can, as Ranajit Guha suggests, 'examine those cuts, seams and stitches—those cobbling marks—which tell us about the material it is made or.' This chapter will explore 'ruptures in the apparently seamless colonialist textual practice" for