Undegraduate dissertation on Indian Mutiny? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

It's practically impossible to comment on this without having some clearer idea of your own interests and the parameters of the the dissertation you're required to submit. But I can advance a few general observations that may at least help start suggesting ways forward.

First, simply calling this event "the Indian Mutiny" (a British coinage that implicitly places the rebels firmly in the wrong) is a contentious thing to do these days; many Indians would prefer "The First War of Independence" and some scholars the more neutral "Sepoy rising" or something similar. This in itself suggests some interesting possible investigations into the historiography of the rebellion, or perhaps the limitations of the terminology. To what extent is it reasonable to call the rising a "war of independence", for example - when so much of India was not involved, and so many Indians fought on the British side? How far did willingness to rebel spread beyond the sepoys, and what motivated those who chose to join the rebellion, rather than playing a part in starting it?

A second and related point is that the available materials on the rebellion are heavily weighted in favour of British accounts. Is there anything you could do to address or redress this bias? Do you have the linguistic skills required to read materials in other languages? William Dalrymple's recent book The Last Mughal is a good starting place for anyone who wants to get a feel for the source materials available in Indian languages, and the book gives an account of events focused on the court at Delhi, rather than the British forces.

Thirdly, what are your requirements in terms of incorporating original research and primary source materials into the dissertation? If this is expected of you, you will need to do some scoping of the options here. Most of the East India Company and India Office records of the period are in the British Library and are ridiculously extensive; you'd need to be careful not to over-extend yourself if you go for them. The National Archives of India has a press list of its 'Mutiny papers', if you're able (or expected) to travel. Alternatively, you could take advantage of the progress of newspaper digitisation to frame a project that looks at the way in which the rebellion was reported, or the "home front" in Britain reacted to news of disasters or successes.

Fourthly, do you get credit for writing something comparative? How about looking the the rising of 1857 alongside the Vellore Mutiny for instance?

A few areas that are active or controversial at present would include the following:

The role of rumour and hearsay in formenting the rebellion. I wrote about this here, and Kim Wagner recently published an excellent study of the "Great Fear" that preceded the rebellion that would give you some fascinating potential jumping-off points

The ways in which atrocity were used as justifications for extreme acts, on both sides of the rebellion. British accounts heavily stressed violence against women and children, for example, as a means of framing British reprisals as morally justifiable

If your interests tend more towards the visual, then there are interesting things to say about the role of photography or the war artists despatched by the Illustrated London News in the ways in which the rebellion was understood. This could be combined with something about atrocity, too – there's lots of unresolved controversy about Felice Beato's images of the Sikander Bagh massacre site, for instance.

A look at the post-rebellion trial of the King of Delhi might offer ways of looking at big issues via a containable amount of research. The Proceedings of the trial were printed, too (offering an easier way in than looking at a lot of 150-year old manuscripts)

But really it is up to you. I'd say that in general any dissertation that steered clear of rehashing the military history of the rising would have a decent chance of forging some new lines of inquiry. I hope this helps.