ON THE last page of William’s most controversial chapter in his Life of the Prophet, ‘The belief of Mahomet in his own Inspiration’, he added a dramatic postscript penned in his family’s cramped quarters inside the Agra fort.

Two months earlier, on 10 May, some sepoys stationed in Meerut to the north-east of Delhi had murdered some of their British officers and marched overnight to Delhi to request the octogenarian pensioner Mughal king to head their cause, an indication of the symbolic power this dynasty could still exert. By mid-July the king was besieged in his own fort city by British forces while the call to rise had spread among sepoys and civilians in many parts of the province. When a ‘rebel’ attack on Agra from the south, en route to Delhi, seemed imminent, the European population of Agra, including the Muir family, had taken refuge in the fort where they remained until Delhi fell to relief forces from the Punjab in late September.

William’s regular correspondent in Britain during these months and afterwards, apart from his mother, was his brother, John, by then in scholarly retirement in Edinburgh where he was engrossed in finalizing the long-planned first volume of his Original Sanskrit Texts. Understandably, the brothers’ letters to each other after mid-May 1857 were concerned almost solely with the uprisings. Even though each continued with his literary endeavours, William was severely constrained by the conditions in Agra. The brothers’ surviving private letters complement a mass of official intelligence records for their views on unfolding events. Almost 40 years later William would publish a short account of his family’s ‘life in the fort’, based on his diary and some letters no longer extant, for the benefit of his own children and grandchildren, which he instructed should be kept private to the family. Yet a few years later, in 1902, he commissioned a relative to publish the records he had collected and transmitted as intelligence officer during 1857.