ABSTRACT

Even one hundred and forty-eight years after the event and after a considerable amount of research on the subject, we have little or no precise knowledge about Mangal Pandey. There is a name and there is an action. There is no record about where he came from. Who were his parents? Was he married? When was he recruited and by whom? Answers to all these questions are unknown and speculative. Mangal Pandey has no curriculum vitae to put up to the board of history. He could have preserved this anonymity, like innumerable other sepoys, had he not shot at his superior officers in Barrackpore. His was an unexpected intrusion into history.