The Indian Mutiny -- to use its British name -- was a military uprising, political coup, a religious war, race riot and also a peasant riot. But the mutineers were never able to transform the uprising into a war of independence.

For one thing, many Indians -- princes as well as ordinary people -- joined the rebellion. The mutineers also had to fight the Sikhs who were supporting the British. I have wondered about the usage mutiny.

I ask how it could it be a mutiny when the British were the mutineers who had no right to be in India. How could we (the British) expect loyalty from the Indians? The word mutiny was used to justify the catharsis, the horrible torture and killings of thousands of mutineers or suspected mutineers.

Some of the British radicals who questioned the ill treatment and the killings pointed out that the British had no right to assume loyalty from a land taken and held in force, and governed for the benefit of rulers who were aliens in every respect of the word.

There was great deal of savagery in Kanpur, and the way the British were killed. The British felt they were stabbed in the back. They believed that this gave them a right to retaliate and their reaction was ferocious. Many British commanders were homicidal.

At Allahabad, an officer executed 6,000 people, more than were killed on his own side during the entire mutiny. There was a huge cry in England for vengeance, and retaliation that would be written in books of history. The accounts of children and women killed by the mutineers brought about an insensate lust for revenge.

Colonel James Neill, who executed thousands in Allahabad, flogged many of the mutineers or suspected mutineers and made them lick blood from the slaughterhouse floor before hanging them.

When I see what the Israelis do to the Palestinians and the humiliation they subject them to, I am reminded of what the British did to the Indians. The British retaliated against the mutineers in India in 1857 -- that was horrifying to say the least. The punishment they meted out to the Indians was far, far disproportionate to what the rebels had done.

We see such a thing whenever Palestinians attack the Israelis. And I am reminded that the spirit of imperialism is far from dead.

Once the mutiny broke, there was no way to revive the ties between the British and the Indians. Though they worked together for many decades, there was no more trust. There could be reconciliation, but it was clear that the Raj had no legitimate hold over India.

Many British newspapers used the word nigger to describe Indians, which added to the racial prejudice against Indians.