The available literature on the uprising of 1857 is fairly voluminous. Successive generations of historians have studied the subject in its varied aspects. Their concern, however, quite often lay with long-term political issues, with questions of the growth of the colonial state, of nationalism, of the unity and integrity of the country. These problems were made central to the study of the rebellion not because they were of any relevance to the rebels but because contending imperialist and nationalist historians were seeking to accommodate the event in a longer time span of history.The rebellion of 1857 was thereby assimilated to a linear order related to a context that largely lay outside of the occurrence itself. To most early English writers the mutiny marked the watershed between Company rule and Crown rule, an interlude in the transition to a better imperial system. For Indian writers it was the beginning of India's struggle for national independence