Meerut to Delhi

On 9 May 1857 eighty-five troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry who had refused the new cartridges were publicly shackled at Meerut. The next evening the regiments there rose, freed them, killed British officers and civilians, and rode through the night to Delhi, about 65 kilometres to the south-west. On 11 May they entered the Red Fort and asked the 81-year-old Bahadur Shah Zafar to lead them, and the rising took the Mughal emperor's name across the north.

Delhi held out through a summer siege by a British force on the Ridge, reinforced from the Punjab. The city was stormed between 14 and 20 September; Zafar surrendered at Humayun's tomb, two of his sons and a grandson were shot by William Hodson outside the gate since called the Khooni Darwaza, and much of the population was driven out. Tried by a military commission in the Red Fort in early 1858, Zafar was exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862.

Whether 1857 was a mutiny, a peasant war or a first war of independence has been argued ever since; in different places it was each of these. Zafar's own part, reluctant figurehead or real leader, is also disputed.