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The rebellion of 1857 brought the East India Company to its end. Its territories in India were put directly under government control. The Governor-General was replaced with a Viceroy, a representative of the Crown. The ratio of Europeans to Indians in the army was pushed up to 1:3 from 1:9. That is, for every three Indians, there was now one European in the army.

The British stopped taking over Indian kingdoms and instead gave them a permanent standing under the Crown. This framework survived till 1947. The Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 stated that the British would no longer try and impose their religion and customs on the local people.

Interestingly, the Queen’s Proclamation was read out not in calcuatta, Bombay, Madras or Delhi. It was read out in Allahabad, at the Triveni Sangam, the place where the Yamuna meets the Ganga and is said to be joined by the invisible Saraswati flowing underground. It is here that Ram is said to have

crossed the river and visited the sage Bharadhwaj before going on exile to the forests of central India. There is even a tree under which ram is said to have rested. It was also here that Xuan Zang saw the great gathering of the Kumbha Mela in the seventh century CE. Overlooking the temple and the merging rivers is the fort built by Emperor Akbar which has a Mauryan column with the inscriptions of three emperors—Ashoka, Samudragupta and Jehangir. In short, this was the heart of Indian civilization. The British seemed to have finally understood the nature of Indian nationhood.

Excerpted from Page 198 of ‘The Incredible History of the Geography of India by Saneev Sanyal