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Published on October 14, 2007

You probably think the Raj has vanished. It hasn't at the Nicholson Christian Cemetery near old Delhi's Kashmiri Gate. A year after its renovation, this pocket of the last Victorian remnants in the Indian capital - a tranquil oasis in the hustle-bustle of the great city gate's bus terminal - has re-emerged as a reminder of a bloodied colonial past.

With the Brits gone and India assuming self-government, the cemetery had been - until last October - overgrown, repeatedly vandalised and a haven for monkeys and drug addicts.

Then restoration work began, with a grant from the British High Commission.

Established shortly after the 1857 Indian Mutiny - a disastrous setback for the British, who'd ruled the country for half a century - the cemetery is where the empire's military heroes were laid to rest, among them the generals who guided Delhi's recapture.

The greatness of the British Empire is in some ways encapsulated at Nicholson, though the public and tourists remain largely indifferent. It's on no tourist map and missing from the guidebooks, and sees about 70 visitors a year, mostly next-of-kin and war veterans.

Its importance lies in its link with the Mutiny on May 10, 1857, the incident widely believed to have sparked the Uprising. Indian soldiers at an army barracks in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh revolted over a rumour that a new type of bullet was greased with fat from cows (sacred to Hindus) and pigs (regarded as unclean by Muslims). Since the troops, known as sepoys, had to bite the end off the cartridge to load their rifles, they were livid at the innovation.

The mutiny meant different things to different people: Some Britons merely sensed ingratitude on the Indians' part, others were rocked from their complacency; missionaries saw a sign of divine displeasure. The rulers seemed no longer able to rule.

The cemetery bears the name of its most illustrious inhabitant - John Nicholson, one of the leaders of the fierce counterattack on the mutinous sepoys.

The weeds and tall grass have been cleared away from his tombstone, once again revealing its somewhat sorry epitaph: "The grave of Brigadier General John Nicholson, who led the assault on Delhi, but fell in the hour of victory, mortally wounded, and died 23rd September 1857, aged 35."

Elsewhere lie Peter Charles Caernarton, an engineer of the Ganges Canal - he served at the siege of Delhi and the subsequent capture of Lucknow and died at age 50 in 1880 - and Arthur Wellesley Craigie of the 36th Regiment Bengal, who died at Narnoulin in 1857.

The side story to the cemetery is that heroes can be villains, depending on one's viewpoint.

To Indians who regard the 1857 revolt as the country's first war of independence, honouring Nicholson insults the indigenous martyrs. They would be offended by the ways in which the recapture of Delhi is described on the stones.

To the colonialists, Irishman Nicholson - who stood at six feet, four inches tall - is a hero of towering proportions.

Born in Ulster and educated at Dungannon School, Nicholson joined the army of the British East India Company in 1839. He fought in the first Afghan War (1839-42) and then, back in India, was appointed Kashmir's political officer and later commissioner of Sagar district in Sind province, now part of Pakistan.

After distinguishing himself further in the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848-49), Nicholson was appointed deputy commissioner of Bannu, a town now in Pakistan's North-West Frontier, bordering Afghanistan.

Then the Indian Mutiny broke out, and after weeks of confrontations, the men of the British East India Company fought their way to strategic Delhi, which was under siege by the mutineers.

Leading the assault, Nicholson's column stormed through the Kashmir Gate, only to meet heavy resistance on the streets. In the midst of the mayhem he was shot in the back as he was trying to rally his exhausted troops toward the Lahore gate.

He succumbed to his injury nine days later, in a bungalow in Delhi's cantonment area.

It seems like a classic tale of gallantry, and to many it is, but other accounts depict a far darker side to the man. The general once had mutineers who were captured at Peshawar executed by being placed directly in front of cannons.

On another occasion he wanted those found guilty of killing Britons flayed alive, though this order was apparently blocked.

The cemetery also shares a story of harsh realities in Delhi following the mutiny. Many of the graves are those of children, some of whom died within days of being born.

History is clear that, after 1857, the romance of India vanished for most Britons. The bloody revolt was a profound shock to the nation's self-confidence, and gone was any notion of exotic adventure in far-away Asia.

"Who can describe the India of the untravelled popular mind?" a missionary observed in 1871. 

"The days of romantic, jewelled visions of the East are past indeed, but there still remains enough to bewilder - the car of Juggernaut, the hideous idol, the sacred river, murderous Thugs, shrivelled fakirs, crafty Brahmins, bigoted Mussulmans [Muslims], the gibberish of heathen tongues, the seething mass of complicated and horrible superstitions, all illuminated by the flames of the Mutiny which cannot be forgotten."

Manote Tripathi

The Nation