4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The work of extracting this material for the reconstruction of the events in J.W Kaye' s History of the Sepoy War or G.B. Malleson' s History of the Indian Mutiny, written in the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny, deserves all credit even when full allowance is made for their obvious bias. But the authors would have been the last to claim that they had exhausted the possible sources, or that they were called upon to see the events from the rebel point of view as well. Much new information has since then been published, and the series of collections of documents on the History of the Freedom Movement, commissioned by the state governments after independence, such as the series issued by the Uttar Pradesh government, edited by S.A.A. Rizvi, deserve special mention. The National Archives as well as the state archives contain much material, still unpublished, that needs to be utilised. One must draw^particular attention to the material in Urdu, then almost universally the language of lower levels of administration, lying in government archives. This remains largely unused, owing to the sad decline of that language in India. If the inner history of the rebellion, with an emphasis on what the rebels thought, did or aimed at (in which respect S.N. Sen' s official history "1857" unfortunately fails so very lamentably) is to be reconstructed, then this material must be studied and analysed. One of the objectives of the Aligarh Historians Group for which it has been modestly working for many years is to further the cause of people' s history based on rigorous fealty to documentation. For some time we have approached colleagues and friends to give us studies that could contribute to the building in future of a Rebels' History of 1857. The intention is not to glorify, but understand the rebels, who fought so strongly for their cause even when all was lost. Professor Irfan Habib' s general essay on the coming of 1857 (courtesy SAHMAT) serves for an introduction. Faruqui Anjum Taban uses 1857 Urdu newspapers to establish how civilian unrest was preparing the ground for the Revolt. Iqbal Husain studies the Rebel administration of Delhi from archival sources and Delhi' s contemporary Urdu newspapers. S.Z.H. Jafri takes up Ahmadullah Shah, a notable and uncompromising rebel, who was already in prison for sedition when the Revolt broke out. Iqtidar Alam Khan pursues the history of the Gwalior Contingent, which, betrayed by the Scindia, yet trounced General Windham in open battle. K. Suresh Singh describes the role of the tribal people in 1857 - an oft-forgotten chapter. Three essays deal with the impact of 1857 in different ways: Badri Narayan and Pankaj Rag explore the survivals of 1857 in folk