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

PUBLISHER'S NOTE
Most historians, British as well as Indian, have
described and dismissed the rising of 1857 as a 'Sepoy
Mutiny' or at best 'The Indian Mutiny'. Indian revolu-
tionaries on the other hand, and national minded leaders
and thinkers have regarded it as a planned and organised
political and military rising aimed at destroying the British
power in India.
Mr. Savarkar's is an attempt to look at the incidents of
1857 from the Indian point of view. A leading revolutionary
himself, he was attracted and inspired by the burning zeal,
the heroism, bravery, suffering and tragic fate of the leaders
of 1857, and he decided to re-interpret the story and to relate
it in full with the help of all the material available to him
at the time. He spent days and months at the India Office
Library studying the period. Finally, his work was published
in 1909, under the title "The Indian War of Independence
—1857". The full story of its publication and eventual fate
is related, at length, elsewhere in this volume. We shall only
mention here that its entry into India was banned by the
Government even before it was published. This ban was
finally lifted by the Congress Government of Bombay in May
1946, and this is the first authorised edition of the book to be
published in India.
As the publishers of this edition we take here the oppor-
tunity of recording our sense of gratitude to Mr. G. M. Joshi,
editor of the Marathi weekly journal Agrani, for making this
work available to us, and for his continued interest in it while
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