Richard Holmes – Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914 (страница 14)

When the Mutiny actually broke out in 1857, sepoys rushed to Delhi, where they found Bahadur Shah II, grandson of the last Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II. Aged eighty-two, and with neither subjects nor army, but enjoying the honorific title ‘King of Delhi’, the old gentleman ‘ruled’ from the Red Fort, built by Shah Jehan, Akbar’s grandson. ‘For there is not the slightest doubt,’ avers Surendra Nath Sen, ‘that the rebels wanted to get rid of the alien government and restore the old order of which the King of Delhi was the rightful representative.’⁴¹ Yet it was never as simple as a nationalist historian might aver, and if British rule depended in part on military power, it also in part relied on ‘lack of national feeling among Indians and their long habituation to domination by people of other races and religions’.⁴² A similar view was expressed, though far more robustly, in the standard late-nineteenth-century handbook Our Indian Empire, which warned its readers:

The races of India have less resemblance to each other than the nations of Europe. A native of Bombay or Calcutta is as much a foreigner in Peshawar or Delhi as an Englishman in Rome or Berlin. The languages of Southern India are no more intelligible in Lahore than they would be in London. India is not yet a nation, and until time and civilisation rub the edges off the sharp distinctions of caste and soften the acuteness of religious jealousies, it must remain as at present a mere patchwork of races … ⁴³

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