Moving on from the style of the book, which is very straightforward narrative history, to the contents, I think the thing that raised most surprise is the emphasis the book puts on the religious rhetoric of 1857. Every generation of historians are imprisoned in their own time, whether they realize it or not. They think they are being objective and looking at things dispassionately without often being aware of the degree to which they are trapped in the concerns and fashions of their time. So if you look at the historiography of 1857 you find that in the great rush of works that was produced in 1957, ten years after Independence and 100 years after the outbreak of the uprising, many of the books and articles produced had a nationalist and economic spin. People saw the uprising of 1857 in the terms that they had seen the liberation of the country 10 years earlier played in front of them and they saw 1857 through the prism of their own times. Working on this book from 2001 onwards, it was very obvious to me that religion was one of the great motivating forces of human history. Reading the rhetoric in Delhi I felt Marxist historians had hugely underplayed the role that at least the language of religion played in the public pronouncements. You can argue endlessly about motives, but what you can show empirically though is the rhetoric that was used, the speeches which were made, the leaflets that were produced and the articles which were written in newspapers. And it was very clear empirically that within Delhi, which is what I was looking at, not in the wider historiography of 1857, but more specifically in the case of Delhi, that overwhelmingly this was talked about as a war of religion. And words. The word jihad is used very frequently in Delhi in 1857 as is the whole sub-stratum of the mujahideen.

... contd.