 The British rule of India had begun with the advent of the East India Company, a trading house given a charter by the English monarchy and which had come to the subcontinent in search of trade and commerce. It was in the process of protecting its commercial interests that the early company agents actually laid the foundations of the British Empire in India. The East India Company began without a strip of territory, but gradually a warehouse was expanded into a province and a province into an empire. 1857, in the desolate confines of the Red Fort in Delhi, an 82-year-old Bahadur Shah Zafar, with the imposing title of the Emperor of Hindustan, but whose writ is now restricted to a small territory between Parlam and Yamuna. Some 40 miles away in the British Contownment of Meerut, there is brewing resentment among Indian soldiers against the new rifles and Greece-laden cartridges issued to them. These cartridges, they have been told, contain beef and pig tallow. The spark that set off this explosion had been provided on the 29th of March that year, with the execution of Mangalpande, who was the first to revolt against the use of the new rifles. The euphoria of this rebellion was however short-lived. It was crushed and barbaric reprisals followed. The colonialists called it the Sipoy Mutiny. Indians said it was a war of independence. It is for the first time that such a large number of people in different parts of the country drawn from different areas resisted the British government. It also tried to throw away the British rule in a very, very consistent manner. Gandhi's appearance on the scene transformed the struggle for freedom. He intuitively recognized that freedom was inextricably linked with democracy, with human rights, with the upliftment of the poorest of the poor, with a campaign for the emancipation of women, with the eradication of the caste system, and he familiarized himself with the problems of this India. A novel method of protest which gave Gandhian philosophy a moral dimension that was almost transcendental, which gradually made India's freedom struggle an inspiration the world over, among all those struggling against colonialism. Non-violent demonstration was the thrust of Gandhi's form of protest. The Muslim League, led by a Bombay-based barrister, Muhammad Ali Jinha, propagated the theory that Hindus and Muslims were two nations and could therefore never live together. Gandhi and Congress opposed this idea vehemently. To them, secularism had been the linchpin of the freedom movement, and India's secularism had its roots in its civilization. Independent India was born on the midnight of 14th August 1947, but only after another nation, Pakistan, justified on religious grounds, had been carved out of its physical configuration. The country's freedom struggle had not only overthrown colonial rule, it had also in the process given the nation an identity and a vision of what free India should be like. A secular, democratic republic with universal franchise. Nationalism had blended the concept of freedom with that of equality and justice for all.