ABSTRACT
The proceedings of the trial of Mangal Pandey are available in Forrest’s Selections and have been extensively used in the main text of this book. But I thought it would be worthwhile to reprint the relevant parts of this record for a number of reasons. First, this is the only source that we have on the sepoy. All that one knows about him comes from these documents. Second, I thought that since my interpretation of Mangal Pandey’s action runs somewhat against the grain of the prevalent historiographical opinion especially that of nationalist historiography, it would be best to make the principal documents available to readers so that they could form their own opinions and evaluate the validity or otherwise of my interpretation.
