A WELCOME STUDY 149 If the colonialist history thus presented the Revolt in terms of the consolidation of British colonialism, the nationalist historians, by inverting the colonialist discourse, depicted it in the context of the emerging National Movement, as an event that anticipated it. V. D. Savarkar, for example, described the Revolt as 'the first war of Indian independence' .2 Along similar lines, S. N. Sen argued that the Revolt was 'inevitable', for 'no dependent nation can forever reconcile itself to foreign domination' .3 These views were challenged by other nationalist historians, notably by R.C. Majumdar and Tara Chand, who saw in the Revolt nothing more than the last-lit flames of the dying system, of the decadent post-Mughal political order that had been replaced by the English.4 However, even these critical opinions were informed by the overall context of Indian nationalism. The Revolt appeared a failure only when compared with the success story of the later National Movement. It was hard for nationalist history to assess the Revolt outside the context of the Nationalist Movement. While, indeed, the Revolt bears no semblance to the national movement, the two being vastly different events, situated in altogether divergent political and social contexts, they enjoy one similarity: they were both seeking to overthrow British rule in India. The Revolt, like the National Movement, was successfully able to unite a large section of the Indian society behind a vague anti-foreigner sentiment. The book under review makes an important contribution to our understanding of the Revolt by highlighting the role of anti-British feelings in unifying this otherwise disparate, heterogeneous and assorted uprising of different social and political groups. Tapti Roy aptly demonstrates the heterogeneous character of the Revolt, and rejects the irresistible tendency among historians to subject the Revolt to a unifying framework, based on categories of class and/or caste. Here, of course, she is in the good company of Eric Stokes and Chris Bayly, both of whom have argued in favour of studying the Revolt in terms of its local specificities, rather than painting it with broad strokes of class or caste.5 Yet, she argues, the divergent strands of the Revolt were tied together by a vague, but strong, anti-British feeling. It is this feeling that Chris Bayly describes as a 'crisis of legitimacy', caused by the collapse of the 'intermediate economy' that depended for its survival on the regional and local 'kingdoms' progressively eliminated by British expansionism. However, Tapti Roy argues that the Revolt was not simply an expression of discontent against the British rule, but was equally also a