1. See, M. L. Bhargava, Saga of 1857: Success and Failures, New Delhi, 1992, S. B. Chaudhuri, English Historical Writings on the Indian Mutiny 1857–9, Calcutta, 1979, for a historiography and bibliography of the «mutiny». The causes of the uprising were and are contested. Imperial histories have tended to focus on the rumour that cartridges for new Enfield rifles had been greased with beef and pork fat. Biting into such cartridges would thus break the religious faith of both Hindu and Muslim infantry soldiers known as sepoys. In contrast, most contemporary debates about the causes of the «mutiny» focused on the organization of the Bengal army; a widening distance between British officers and sepoys; and the annexation of the province of Oudh in 1856
2. Graham Dawson has described the uprising as “the first «national-popular» imperialist war fought by Britain in its Empire”. See, G. Dawson, The imperial adventure hero and British masculinity: the imagining of Sir Henry Havelock, in T. Foley et al. (Eds), Gender and Colonialism Galway, 1995, 46, 59, 47, 8, The conflict continued to shape imperial imaginations about India after 1858, as shown by the publication of a wide range of imperial histories, including, for example, W. H. Fitchett, The Tale of the Great Mutiny, London, 1902, G. W. Forrest, A History of the Indian Mutiny, Edinburgh, 1904, J. W. Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India 1857–58, London, 1876, G. B. Malleson, The Indian Mutiny of 1857, London, 1891, More than 50 English novels about the «mutiny» were published between 1857 and 1900 and 30 more appeared before 1939. See, P. Brantlinger, The Well at Cawnpore: literary representations of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, in idem, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 Ithaca, 1988, N. Paxton, Mobilizing chivalry: rape in British novels about the Indian uprising of 1857, Victorian Studies, 36, 1992, 5, 30, 7
3. See, for example, G. Bhadra, Four rebels of eighteen-fifty-seven, in R. Guha and G. C. Spivak (Eds), Selected Subaltern Studies I Oxford, 1992, R. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Delhi, 1983, J. Pemble, The Raj, the Indian Mutiny and the Kingdom of Oudh 1801–1859, London, 1977, E. Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India, Cambridge, 1978
4. The Aftermath of Revolt: India 1857–1870;Metcalf;Princeton,1965