The Plaque Gets It Wrong
Stand at the Bibighar well in Kanpur and read the memorial the British erected after 1857. It does not mention what happened to the Indian dead. It memorialises the British women and children killed there, frames the uprising as a mutiny, and presents the suppression that followed, in which thousands of Indians were blown from cannons, hanged from trees, or burned alive in their villages, as the restoration of order. The plaque is still there. So is the well. The Indian government has added nothing beside it.
