For whom the wedding bells do not chime: A DNT called the Nat

Nineteenth century India was characterised by a plethora of pell-mell events that was to decide the fate of an empire where the ‘sun never set’. Administrative cracks and fissures had come to the fore after the decline of the Mughal power in the eighteenth century where large tracts of north India lay outside state control evoking the famous epithet ‘limited Raj.’ Various exigencies both internal and external were weighing down on the metropole. Among others, it included the daunting socio-economic climate of the mother country and the pressure of accelerating ‘moral and material progress’ in her colonies through a new set of social and political policies.