In fact, this book is not merely an account of the terrible happenings at Cawnpore. It's also a picture of the whole of India at the time, and of the entire British colonial enterprise in South Asia. In writing up the 1854 visit to London of the thoughtful and ambitious young Indian aristocrat Azimullah Kahn, for instance, Ward takes the opportunity to display mid-Victorian society in all its vigor and oddity. Whereas the Indians had been taught to imagine the UK as peopled by an unconquerable race of supermen, what the prince saw was a society comprising bizarre individuals ruled over by a diminutive and podgy queen and a country wet, windy, cold and surprisingly small. Ward manages such shifts of perspective very well -- the UK close-up and seen from afar, Afghanistan (where the British lost an important war just before the Mutiny broke out) as a remote frontier territory and as a dream of Muslim sovereignty and independence.
The author has all the appearances of having started out with an anti-colonial stance but, once he became immersed in the details, coming to terms with the fact that individuals of all kinds, some base, some heroic, were involved on both sides. This is, of course, the reality of almost all historical situations.
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