![]() The two are closely linked: but what the rebels most objected to in the foreign domination of their country was the way the British threatened their religions - the words din and dharma appear constantly in rebel proclamations, and were used as war cries by the combatants. ![]() So was it less a rebellion against foreign domination as commonly believed? There were no doubt a multitude of private grievances, but it is now unambiguously clear that the rebels saw themselves as fighting a war to preserve their religion, and articulated it as such. In the rebels' own papers, they refer over and again to their uprising being a war of religion. ![]() In the research for my new book, The Last Mughal, my colleague Mahmoud Farooqi and I have used the 20,000 rebel documents in Urdu and Persian which survive from the sepoy camp and palace in Delhi, all of which we found in the National Archives. Up to now most of the data used by historians exploring 1857 has come from British sources. ![]()
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