१८५७ का स्वातन्त्र्य समर (वीर विनायक दामोदर सावरकर - अंग्रेजों द्वारा छपने से पूर्व प्रतिबन्धित महाग्रन्थ)

THE VOLCANO
Man Singh, the leader of the Purbhayas, was also won
over. Then the Sepoys began to organise amongst them-
selves and the Sirkars of Lucknow began to help them.
No replies to letters were received till Oudh was annexed ;
but as soon as that was accomplished, hundreds of people
came forward boldly and replied confidentially to Nana.
Next came the affair of the cartridges and, then, the dis-
affection was so great that letters were simply showered
on Nana".⁵ This very agent has given a long list of the
letters sent by Nana to the various Durbars.
While agents of Nana were moving from one Durbar
to another from Delhi to Mysore in order to draw them
into the War of Independence, it was in the Déwan-i-Khas
of Delhi, more than in any other Durbar, the seeds of
Revolution began to take root. The English had not
stopped at merely taking away the Padshahi of the
Padshah of Delhi, but had recently decided even to take
away the title of Padshah from the descendants of Babar.
The Emperor, though reduced to such an extremity, and
Zinat Mahal, the beloved, clever, and determined Begum
of the Emperor, had already decided that this last oppor-
tunity of regaining the lost glory should not be allowed
to go by, and, if dying was the only resource, then, they
should die the death which would only befit an Emperor
and an Empress. At this juncture, the English were
engaged in a war with Persia. Seeing that a simultaneous
5. "For months, for years indeed, they had been spreading
their network of intrigues all over the country. From one native
court to another, from one extremity to another of the great conti-
nent of India, the agents of the Nana Sahib had passed with over-
tures and invitations discreetly, perhaps mysteriously, worded to
princes and chiefs of different races and religions, but most hopefully
of all to the Mahrattas . . . . There is nothing in my mind more
substantiated than the complicity of Nana Sahib in widespread intri-
gues before the outbreak of the Mutiny. The concurrent testimony
of witnesses examined in parts of the country widely distinct from
each other takes this story altogether out of the regions of the
conjectural." Kaye's Indian Mutiny, Vol. I, pp. 24-25.
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