Indian history

Rejecting the Raj: Gandhi’s acolytes in the West

22 January 2022 9:00 am

Madeleine Slade, born in 1892, was a typical upper-class Victorian daughter of empire: a childhood riding around her grand-father’s estate…

A drawing of the massacre by Eduard Thöny for the satirical German magazine Simplicissimus, January 1920

Bloodbath at Baisakhi: the centenary of the Amritsar massacre

6 April 2019 9:00 am

On 10 April 1919, the peppery governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, ordered the immediate arrest of two leaders…

‘Attack on the Sealkote mutineers by General Nicholson’s Irregular Cavalry, 1857.’ Illustration by Charles Ball

The Lion of the Punjab: the short, brutish career of John Nicholson

17 November 2018 9:00 am

‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’, said Winston Churchill as prime minister in 1942,…

The execution of mutineers by the Bengal Horse Artillery, in a painting by Orlando Norie

Did the reprisals following the Indian mutiny seal Britain’s fate in the subcontinent?

13 January 2018 9:00 am

Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull…

A Sikh member of the Indian Army Services Corps at Dunkirk, 1940

Britain didn’t fight the second world war — the British empire did

25 July 2015 9:00 am

Had it not been for the empire, Britain might have lost the second world war, says William Dalrymple. The war certainly lost Britain the empire