The British officers started writing about their experience of the 1857 prising from late 1858, when the rebellion was in its death throes. The colonial officials' fascination with the 1857 Mutiny as they called it continued till the end of the British Raj in 1947. The autobiographies and biographies of the British officials related with the 1857 Uprising as well as general histories of the 1857 rebellion written by the British till India's independence is categorized as colonial historiography. The focus of the colonial historiography is the handful of Englishmen who saved India from the 'barbaric rebels'. From the 1960s, historians offered an agrarian analysis of the 1857 Uprising. The 1980s witnessed the rise of the 'Subaltern School' which focussed on the activities of the faceless and nameless common mass among the colonized.   The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the 1857 Uprising witnessed a sort of revival of liberal secular nationalist historiography. Liberal historians shocked by the rising divisiveness among the Hindus and the Muslims of India and increasing terrorist activities by the adherents of a pan Islamic camp throughout the world attempted to portray the past as a glorious epoch representing Hindu-Muslim unity. The net result has been that the present political scenario is shaping the agenda of research. And the ultimate victim is historical 'truth'.   The four books under review fit the above mentioned format. The three books by Shamsul Islam (teacher of political science in Satyawati College) are in the shape of pamphlets. Of these three small volumes, two are primary documents which are translated and edited by Islam and the third one is a small volume written by the same author on the 'glorious' role of the Sikhs in 1857. The fourth book is the published version of a Ph.D. thesis of Delhi University by Smita Pandey   In 2007, this reviewer had the opportunity to attend 11 seminars on 1857 organized within India. A vocal minority among the participants asserted that the 1857 Uprising was not confined only within north India. Rather, the fire of anti-colonial resistance spread to the North East, Bengal, Punjab, West India. Deccan and even in the far down south Tamil country. The self-proclaimed 'experts' claimed that the traditional view of the 1857 Uprising as confined to the high castes and Muslims of north India is also erroneous. Rather, all the castes (high, middling and low) among the Hindus, and all the communities within the subcontinent participated in the anti-colonial struggle. Both Pandey and ...