1857

Chose agricultural science after seeing the Bengal famine, then worked with Norman Borlaug to adapt semi-dwarf wheat to Indian conditions. Wheat output roughly tripled in a decade and the ship-to-mouth years ended.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

India's first woman press photographer, working a beat full of men in a saree and on a bicycle. Photographed the last British departure and the first Indian government, then retired in the seventies and largely stopped talking about it.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

196 terse lines, most of them about the mind rather than the body. The subcontinent's most successful export after the numeral system, and the one most often mistaken for stretching.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

Mortgaged his life insurance, learned filmmaking from a London supplier, and shot India's first feature with his wife doing the catering, the costumes and the film developing. No woman would act, so the female lead was played by a young man who worked in a restaurant.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

Hung a golden chain of justice outside his palace that any subject could pull. Also commissioned some of the finest natural-history painting of the era because he wanted an accurate picture of a turkey.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

Lost a leg in a motorcycle accident at seventeen, took up para athletics, and has broken the world record repeatedly since — including on the way to gold in Tokyo and Paris.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

Refused to hand over her state under the Doctrine of Lapse, trained a women's regiment, and fought at Gwalior in her twenties. The British general who defeated her called her the most dangerous of all the rebel leaders.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

Kept the revolt alive for a year after the cities fell, moving constantly across central India with a force that had no supply line. Betrayed and executed in 1859.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

Witnessed a lynching in Bombay during Partition and painted the falling, fractured human figure for the next fifty years. Introduced a hard diagonal that splits his canvases in two, which is about as literal as a metaphor gets.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

Called a mutiny by one side and the first war of independence by the other. Whatever it was, it ended the East India Company: the Crown took direct control in 1858.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

Took charge of Awadh after her husband was deposed, held Lucknow for months, refused every offer of pension and amnesty, and died in exile in Kathmandu rather than accept terms.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

A ceremony of synchronised high kicks and competitive moustaches performed nightly on both sides of a border, watched by thousands, and genuinely rather moving.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

The rifle drill required biting the cartridge, and the grease was rumoured to be beef and pork tallow. The underlying causes — annexations, land revenue, pay — had been building for decades.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

A weaver from Varanasi who annoyed the priests and the qazis equally, and whose couplets are still quoted by people who have no idea they are quoting him. Both communities claimed his body; the story says they found flowers.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

A soldier in Jhansi's women's regiment who resembled the Rani closely enough to impersonate her, and did so to cover her escape. Almost entirely absent from the official histories and central to the local ones.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising

Led an Adivasi uprising in Chotanagpur against land alienation and forced labour, was jailed at 25 and died in prison at 25. Jharkhand keeps his birthday as a state holiday.

Find it on the floor: 1857: The First Uprising