There is a macabre undercurrent in much of the correspondence. The third source involves British labour force records, which show a drop in manpower of between a fifth and a third across vast swaths of India, which as one British official records was “on account of the undisputed display of British power, necessary during those terrible and wretched days – millions of wretches seemed to have died”. Two are records pertaining to the number of religious resistance fighters killed – either Islamic mujahideen or Hindu warrior ascetics committed to driving out the British. His calculations rest on three principal sources. But its scale has been kept a secret,” Misra said. Indians who stood in their way were killed. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. “It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. This is remarkable, he says, given that in an age of empires, nothing less than the fate of the world hung in the balance. The author says he was surprised to find that the “balance book of history” could not say how many Indians were killed in the aftermath of 1857. ![]() Britain was then the world’s superpower but, says Misra, came perilously close to losing its most prized possession: India.Ĭonventional histories have counted only 100,000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied the number of rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order, claims Misra. In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues that there was an “untold holocaust” which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857. ![]() NEW DELHI: A controversial new history of the Indian Mutiny, which broke out 150 years ago and is acknowledged to have been the greatest challenge to any European power in the 19th century, claims that the British pursued a murderous decade-long campaign to wipe out millions of people who dared rise up against them.
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