The vast uprising across northern India against the rule of the British East India Company, which began in May 1857 as a mutiny of the Company's Indian soldiers and swelled into a broad revolt of soldiers, peasants, and dispossessed elites. It was the bloodiest challenge the British ever faced in India, marked by atrocities on both sides, and the Company crushed it with great ferocity. Its defeat ended Company rule, transferred India to the direct government of the British Crown, ended the Mughal dynasty, and left a memory so contested that the event has no single agreed name.
The fighting ended, but the argument over what to call it never did. To the British it was the Sepoy Mutiny, a treacherous breach of military discipline. To later Indian nationalists it was the First War of Independence, the opening shot of a freedom struggle. Most historians now reach for something flatter, the Great Rebellion or the Uprising of 1857. The names are not neutral. Each one decides in advance who the rebels were and what they wanted. The rebellion itself was real enough. For more than a year, much of northern India turned on the most powerful trading company in the world, and shook its rule more violently than anything before.