Mutiny! The uprising that shook the world

On the evening of Sunday 10 May 1857, 150 years ago next week, 300 mutinous sepoys from Meerut rose up against their officers. They shot as many as they could, then rode through the night to the old Mughal capital of Delhi, where there they massacred every Christian man, woman and child, and declared the 82-year-old Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to be their leader.

What is striking about so many of the proclamations coming out of the uprising's storm centre, Delhi, was the emphatically religious articulation that the rebels adopted. As the sepoys told Zafar on arrival: "We have joined hands to protect our religion and our faith." Later they stood in the Chandni Chowk, the main street of Delhi, and asked people: "Brothers: are you with those of the faith?" British men and women who had converted to Islam - and there were a surprising number of those in Delhi - were not hurt; but Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down immediately.

From the start, the odds were always against the rebels: they had a chaotic and officerless army of unpaid peasant soldiers set against the forces of the world's greatest military power. Yet the rebellion soon spread dramatically: of the 139,000 sepoys of the East India Company's Bengal Army - the largest modern army in Asia - all but 7,796 turned against their British masters.

In some parts of northern India, such as Avadh, the sepoys were joined by a very large proportion of the population. By early June the uprising had snowballed and turned into the largest anti-colonial revolt any European empire would face anywhere in the world in the entire course of the 19th century.

It quickly became a peculiarly bloody conflict. Atrocities abounded on both sides, no prisoners were taken, and the great Mughal capital, caught in the middle of a remarkable cultural flowering, was turned overnight into a battleground. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat.

Yet there was nothing inevitable about this conflict. Only 60 years earlier, at the end of the 18th century, things had been very different between the British and the Indians they lived among: one third of British men in India were leaving their possessions to Indian wives, and a third of all British households were racially and religiously mixed. In Delhi the period was symbolised by Sir David Ochterlony, the British Resident who arrived in the city in 1803: every evening, all 13 of his Indian wives went around Delhi in a procession behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant.

This was not a one-way street: as Michael Fisher has shown in his recent book, Counterflows to Colonialism, anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that at this period a roughly similar proportion - perhaps one in three - of Indian men resident in Britain and Ireland found themselves British wives. Some 200 years before multiculturalism became a buzzword capable of waking Norman Tebbit and the Tory undead from their coffins at party conferences, the India of the East India Company was actually an infinitely more culturally, racially and religiously chutnified place than the most mixed areas of London today.

At the centre of my book about the uprising, The Last Mughal, lies the very contemporary question of how and why the relatively easy inter-racial and inter-religious relationships of the time of Ochterlony gave way to the hatreds and racism of the high 19th-century Raj: how a close clasp of two civilisations turned into a bitter clash.

Two things in particular seem to have put paid to this easy co-existence. One was the rise of British power: in a few years the British had defeated all their Indian rivals, as they progressed from removing threatening Muslim rulers, such as Tipu Sultan of Mysore, to destabilising and annexing the land of even the most pliant. In February 1856 they annexed the prosperous kingdom of Avadh on the lame excuse that the Nawab was "excessively debauched". In this way, by early 1857, the East India Company was directly ruling about two thirds of the subcontinent.

Rather as happened with the Americans after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the changed balance of power quickly led to an attitude of undisguised imperial arrogance.

The other factor was the ascendancy of Evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in social, sexual and racial attitudes that this brought about. Many Evangelical British officials were nursing plans to impose not just British laws and technology on India, but also British values: not just to rule and administer India, but also to redeem and improve it. This meant banning the burning of widows, allowing widows to remarry, and outlawing infanticide.

The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly began to decline: from turning up in one in three wills between 1780 and 1785, they are present in only one in four between 1805 and 1810. By 1830, it is one in six; by the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared. In half a century, a vibrantly multicultural world refracted back into its component parts.

The reaction to this came in 1857 with the Great Mutiny. Though it had many causes and reflected many deeply held political and economic grievances, particularly the feeling that the heathen foreigners were interfering with a part of the world to which they were entirely alien, the uprising was nevertheless consistently articulated as a defensive action against the rapid inroads missionaries and Christian ideas were making in India, combined with a more generalised fight for freedom from Western occupation.

Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, in Delhi a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque, and many of the insurgents described themselves as mujahedin or jihadis. Indeed by the end of the siege, after a significant proportion of the sepoys had melted away, the proportion of jihadis in the rebellion's storm centre grew to be about half of the total rebel force, and included a regiment of "suicide ghazis" who had vowed never to eat again and to fight until they met death at the hands of the kafirs - "for those who have come to die have no need for food".

Yet in the end, the rebellion failed, as much as anything thanks to the lack of a generally agreed leadership. None of the sepoys would take orders from the subedar (senior Indian officer) of any other regiment, so they fought in a disconnected and uncoordinated fashion.

On top of this there were the shortcomings of the rebels' administrative and financial organisation: they had created turbulence and chaos, but could not restore order. This was particularly fatal for them in the countryside around Delhi. Their failure to establish a well-governed "liberated area" or Mughal realm, from which they could draw tax revenue, manpower and most of all food supplies ultimately proved the Delhi rebels' single most disastrous failure. No food was coming in, and the roads were unsafe, so prices rose dramatically, and starvation soon set in. By the time the British finally assaulted the city, the number of sepoy defenders had sunk from a peak of 100,000 to 25,000. Most left because of hunger: the rebel administration had failed to provide either food or pay or munitions.

The siege came to its climax on 14 September 1857, when British forces attacked and entered the besieged city through a breach in the walls near the Kashmiri Gate. Then they proceeded to massacre not just the forces that were ranged against them, but also the ordinary citizens of the Mughal capital. In one muhalla (neighbourhood) alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 unarmed citizens of Delhi were cut down. "The orders went out to shoot every soul," recorded one young officer, Edward Vibart.

"It was literally murder ... I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but such a one as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful ... Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that man's heart I think who can look on with indifference."

Those city dwellers who survived the killing were driven out into the countryside to fend for themselves. Delhi, a bustling and sophisticated city of half a million souls, was left an empty ruin. Though the Mughal imperial family had surrendered peacefully, most of the Emperor's 16 sons were tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked. "In 24 hours I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar," Captain William Hodson wrote to his sister the following day. "I am not cruel, but I confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches."

The father of the princes, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was captured soon after the fall of Delhi. He was put on trial in the ruins of his own palace, and prosecuted as a rebel and a traitor - despite the fact that the Company had long acknowledged its legal status as the Emperor's vassal.

The court sentenced him to transportation to Burma. There he died and was buried by his British jailers in an unmarked grave. In one of his last ghazals (verses), the Emperor, a noted poet, lamented:

My life now gives no ray of light,
I bring no solace to heart or eye;
Out of dust to dust again,
Of no use to anyone am I.

The violent suppression of the Great Uprising of 1857 was a pivotal moment in the history of British imperialism in India. It marked the end both of the East India Company and of the Mughal dynasty, the two principal forces that shaped Indian history over the previous 300 years, and replaced both with undisguised imperial rule by the British government.

Shortly after Zafar's corpse had been tipped in its anonymous Burmese grave, Queen Victoria accepted the title Empress of India from Disraeli, initiating a very different period of direct imperial rule.

Yet in many ways the legacy of the period is still with us, and there is a direct link between the jihadis of 1857 and those we face today. For the reaction of the Delhi ulema after 1857 was to reject both the gentle Sufi traditions of the late Mughal emperors, who they regarded as apostate, and the West; instead they too attempted to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots.

With this in mind, disillusioned refugees from Delhi founded a Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband which went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything European from the curriculum.

One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas inPakistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible out from which emerged al- Qa'ida, and the most radical fundamentalist Islamic counterattack the modern West has yet had to face.

Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as a religious war. Suicide jihadis fight what they see as a defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent civilians are slaughtered.

As before, Western Evangelical politicians are apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of "incarnate fiends" and simplistically conflate armed resistance to invasion and occupation with "pure evil." Again, Western countries, blind to the effect their foreign policies have on the wider world, feel aggrieved and surprised to be attacked - as they see it - by mindless fanatics.

Yet as we have seen in our own time, nothing so easily radicalises a people against us, or undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive Western intrusion in the East: the histories of Islamic fundamentalism and Western imperialism have often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined.

There are clear lessons here. For, in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke - himself a fierce critic of British aggression in India - those who fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it.

William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, which won the 2007 Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography, has just been published in paperback by Bloomsbury (£8.99)