… The Construction Of The Raj.
Old… but still interesting…
"THE major stumbling block to British ambitions was not the growing disaffection in the Bengal Army, but the continuing legitimacy of the Emperor at Delhi. They chaffed against it and were pressurising the royal family to leave the Red Fort and their claims to sovereignty after the death of Bahadur Shah. ". . .although the Delhi Sovereign had long been deprived of all real power and dominion. . . . almost every state, and every class of people in India, still continue to reverence his nominal authority. The current coin of every established power is still struck in his name and the princes of the highest rank still bear the titles and the insignia, which they or their ancestor derived from this source; . . . The universality of this impression maybe further inferred from the conduct of the Tamburetty or Princess of Travencore, a Hindoo state situated near Cape Comorin, the southern extremity of the region, and at no period of its history subject to the Mughal, or to any Mohammedan superior: yet in 1813, she applied to have a dress of investiture for her son, the infant Raja, although he was under the special guardianship of the British government, to which he was indebted for the tranquility of his accession." [Walter Hamilton: Description of Hindoostan and the Adjacent Countries. 1820. Reprint 1971. p422-3].
"All persons conversant with Indian history must be aware of how much moral importance attaches to the possession of Delhi in the eyes of the inhabitants of India generally."
For this reason, the outbreak at Meerut was "seized upon as the real starting point of the Indian Mutiny; for the weakness of Hewitt and Wilson (who failed to contain it) allowed the mutineers to seize the Imperial city . . . and to enlist the influence of the Mughal's name on their side, and thus yielded to them an immense moral and material advantage at the very outset of their operation. . . .They could confidently appeal to the discontented who had hitherto longed but feared to rebel." …"
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