the disintegration under its impact of ancient social and religious systems.  Western education was to yield other fruits later on, but before the Mutiny it was rapidly familiarising the mind of India with Western ideals which imperilled not only the worship of the old gods but also the worship of the Brahman as their mouthpiece and “the guardian of the treasury of civil and religious duties.”  Modern schools and colleges threatened to undermine his ascendancy just as Western competition had by more dubious methods undermined Indian domestic industries.  No man’s caste was said to be safe against the hidden defilement of all the strange inventions imported from beyond the seas.  Prophecy, vague but persuasive, hinted that British rule, which dated in the Indian mind from the battle of Plassey in 1757, was doomed not to outlive its centenary.  All the vested interests connected with the old order of things in the religious as well as in the political domain felt the ground swaying under their feet, and the peril with which they were confronted came not only from their alien rulers but from their own countrymen, often of their own caste and race, who had fallen into the snares and pitfalls of an alien civilisation.  The spirit of fierce reaction that lay behind the Mutiny stands nowhere more frankly revealed than in the History of the War of Independence of 1857, written by Vinayak Savarkar, one of the most brilliant apostles of a later school of revolt, who, as a pious Hindu, concludes his version of the Cawnpore massacre with the prayer that “Mother Ganges, who drank that day of the blood of Europeans, may drink her fill of it again.”

The revolt failed except in one respect.  It failed as a military movement.  It had appealed to the sword and it perished by the sword.  But it is well to remember that the struggle, which was severe, would have been, to say the least, far more severe and protracted had not a large part of the Indian army remained staunch to the Raj, and had not Indian troops stood, as they had stood throughout all our previous fighting in India, shoulder to shoulder with British troops on the ridge at Delhi and in the relief of Lucknow.  It failed equally as a political movement, for it never spread beyond a relatively narrow area in Upper and Central India.  The vast majority of the Indian people and princes never even wavered.  British rule passed through a trial by fire and it emerged from the ordeal unscathed and fortified.  For it was purged of all the ambiguities of a dual position and of divided responsibilities.  The last of the Moghuls forfeited the shadowy remnants of an obsolete sovereignty.  Just a hundred years earlier Clive had advised after Plassey that the Crown should assume direct sovereignty over the whole of the British possessions in India, as the responsibility was growing too heavy for the mere trading corporation that the East India Company then still was.  The Company had long ceased to be a mere trading corporation.