How did a few thousand British troops hold down a subcontinent of 200 million people? In his superb short history of the Indian army, Philip Mason, himself a longstanding officer in the elite Indian civil service, evokes the threads of loyalty that bound the British and the sepoys together until the threads snapped in 1857, and even after that brutal rupture were sewn up again, so that the British influence lingers on in the far larger army that independent India deploys today...

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