329. Indian Uprising 1857: The British Raj is Born (Part 8)

In the finale of our series on the Great Uprising of 1857, we leave Delhi a smoking ruin and turn our eyes to the final battlefield of Lutnau. And this was once a centre of luxury, of poetry, of beauty, of art, and now it is a city of corpses, blood, and despair, under siege from the rebels. But the Scottish general, the brutal Scottish general, Lord Clyde, is marching up to the city to stamp out the final fire of rebellion. And you know this is a red line in Indian history where the East India Company falls, the British Raj takes over, and this is an entirely different grip on the Indian subcontinent. India will change forever.

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnhem. And me, William Drimple. Now this is our series finale of our Empire special on the 1857 uprising. So we are going to turn our attention back to a place where we started, the glittering domed capital of Lucknow, the city of poets, of courtesans, of music, of of art. It is now, though, a city of corpses.

And if Delhi was the political heart of the rebellion, Anita, Lucknow. You could say, really, is it so? In Delhi the sepoys were fighting for an old king, but in Lutnau the entire population of Avad, from the great Talukdar landlords to the peasants, rise up in what one of our guests for a future bonus, Rudrangshu Mukaji, the great expert on the rebellion in Lutnao, has famously called a peasant war. So let me just remind you, we last looked at Lucknow when the British were trapped in the residency. So the date was September 1857.

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