A forensic look into the Sepoy rebellion at Meerut in 1857 and the three-month siege and capture of Delhi which followed.

Even Though Much Literature On Bahadur Shah Zafar And The 1857 Revolt Exists, Mahdi Husain S Book Continues To Be Of Considerable Relevance To The Historians Of Modern India. It Is Rich In Details, And Offers A Dispassionate Interpretation Of The 1857 Revolt. The Book Brings Alive, To The Present-Day Reader, The Trauma Of Living In 1857, A Trauma That People Like Syed Ahmad Khan And The Poet Mirza Ghalib Experienced.

In a blow against the British Empire, Khan suggests that London artificially divided India's Hindu and Muslim populations by splitting their one language in two, then burying the evidence in obscure scholarly works outside the public view. All language is political -- and so is the boundary between one language and another. The author analyzes the origins of Urdu, one of the earliest known languages, and propounds the iconoclastic views that Hindi came from pre-Aryan Dravidian and Austric-Munda, not from Aryan's Sanskrit (which, like the Indo-European languages, Greek and Latin, etc., are rooted in the Middle East/Mesopotamia, not in Europe). Hindi's script came from the Aramaic system, similar to Greek, and in the 1800s, the British initiated the divisive game of splitting one language in two, Hindi (for the Hindus) and Urdu (for the Muslims). These facts, he says, have been buried and nearly lost in turgid academic works. Khan bolsters his hypothesis with copious technical linguistic examples. This may spark a revolution in linguistic history! Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide integrates the out of Africa linguistic evolution theory with the fossil linguistics of Middle East, and discards the theory that Sanskrit descended from a hypothetical proto-IndoEuropean language and by degeneration created dialects, Urdu/Hindi and others. It shows that several tribes from the Middle East created the hybrid by cumulative evolution. The oldest groups, Austric and Dravidian, starting 8000 B.C. provided the grammar/syntax plus about 60% of vocabulary, S.K.T. added 10% after 1500 B.C. and Arabic/Persian 20-30% after A.D. 800. The book reveals Mesopotamia as the linguistic melting pot of Sumerian, Babylonian, Elamite, Hittite-Hurrian-Mitanni, etc., with a common script and vocabularies shared mutually and passed on to I.E., S.K.T., D.R., Arabic and then to Hindi/Urdu; in fact the author locates oldest evidence of S.K.T. in Syria. The book also exposes the myths of a revealed S.K.T. or Hebrew and the fiction of linguistic races, i.e. Aryan, Semitic, etc. The book supports the one world concept and reveals the potential of Urdu/Hindi to unite all genetic elements, races and regions of the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent. This is important reading not only for those interested to understand the divisive exploitation of languages in British-led India's partition, but for those interested in: - The science and history of origin of Urdu/Hindi (and other languages) - The false claims of linguistic races and creation - History of Languages and Scripts - Language, Mythology and Racism - Ancient History and Fossil Languages - British Rule and India's Partition.

This volume explores the history of the Delhi college - considered the centre of Delhi Renaissance and the meeting ground between British and Oriental culture before 1857 - against the background of both traditional scholarship and the British education policy in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Includes section "Reviews and notices of books".