Muzaffar Iqbal: Obliterated history

May 10, 2009 passed without any official or unofficial event in Pakistan to remember that historic day of May 10, 1857 when a last, ill-planned, and fatal attempt was made to get rid of the overweening English traders who were becoming de facto rulers of the vast subcontinent. What began on that Sunday morning in the town of Meerut would be later called "Ghadar" (Mutiny), "the Great Rebellion", "the Indian Mutiny", "the Revolt of 1857", "the Uprising of 1857", the "Sepoy Mutiny" by those who wrote its history for the colonized people of India and inserted this appellation in the textbooks which were to be used for generations.

A policy of "no prisoners" was adopted, whole villages were wiped out on the flimsiest rumours of sympathy for the local soldiers.

An estimated ten million Indians lost their lives, as Amaresh Misra describes in his two volume work, War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, published in 2008. Back in England, the accounts of atrocities of the British "Army of Retribution" were generally considered justified in the wake of exaggerated press accounts of Indian "savagery" against the "Europeans and Christians". During a year of terror that followed the events of May 1857, and for a long time to come, India went through a gigantic transformation which must be considered as one of the largest and most cruel experiment in social reengineering in modern history.