It was a new attitude, but it was connected to the more widespread and steadily growing arrogance on the part of the powerful British merchants and the army. Many parts of India had been subdued by the British, especially Punjab, by 1850. The British had defeated many Indian rulers, including Tipu Sultan (who was far more enlightened than the British in his outlook towards other religions but vilified by the British as a religious fanatic).

For the first time since the British set foot in India, they were feeling that they had become the masters of what we now call South Asia. There was nothing for them to learn, the missionaries came to be convinced. On the other hand, there was much to teach. It was natural arrogance would set in.

The Delhi College was remodeled in 1828 by the Company to provide Western education. The movement was led by Charles Trevelyan, brother-in-law and admirer of Thomas Babington Macaulay, who had infamously declared that a 'single shelf of good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.'

It is important to remember that just as the arrogant and myopic Christianity was rising among the British in India in the 1850s, a very rigid Muslim fundamentalism was also rising. A Delhi divine called Shah Waliullah began preaching the Wahabi kind of Islam after his return from Haj. He disliked Sufis (and by extension Zafar), calling their ecstatic religious practice a form of Hinduism.

He wanted to strip out anything he felt was not directly sanctioned by the Koran. He opposed what he called the decadence of the Mughals. Muslims should not behave like 'camels with strings in their noses,' he said.

What was the bitterest result of the collapse of the 1857 rebellion?

Immediately, it was the savage way the British took revenge. But a rip had also been opened in the fabric of composite Hindu-Muslim culture and it kept widening, finally splitting into two in 1947.

In the subsequent years, Muslim prestige and power sank, and Hindu wealth, education and power began ascending. The two people would grow apart far more than before. And the British made things worse for both communities with its divide-and-rule policy. There were willing collaborators of both faiths who helped the British do that.

But people do not know much about the relationship between Hindus and Muslims in the 1850s. How many people in 1947 -- or for that matter even now -- I wonder, could think of Hindu soldiers rallying to the Red Fort in 1857 and joining their Muslim brothers to revive the Mughal Empire?

Image: The Secundra Bagh after the slaughter of 2,000 rebels by the 93rd Highlanders and the 4th Punjab Regiment. Albumen silver print, by Felice Beato, 1858.
Also see: 'The complexity of India is most appealing'

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