Rumours and Rebels

Rumours and Rebels examines the months in which distrust and rumour turned unrest within the Bengal Army into the Indian Uprising of 1857. Wagner follows the controversy over greased cartridges, the disturbances at Barrackpore and Berhampore, Mangal Pandey’s attack, the circulation of chapattis and reports of conspiracy, and the outbreak at Meerut that carried the rebellion to Delhi and the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Rather than treating the uprising as the execution of a single hidden plot or as a purely spontaneous explosion, Wagner reconstructs the networks of information, fear and expectation through which soldiers and civilians interpreted events. This revised and retitled edition of The Great Fear of 1857 uses close reading of colonial records and Indian testimony to show how rumours could become politically consequential even when the stories themselves were uncertain or false.