 May 10, 1857. An Indian sepoy, sick of the daily insults, picked up his gun and killed his superior. That gunshot triggered the revolt of the sepoys of the light Bengal infantry. Impoverished peasants soon joined the sepoys and started the first major struggle for freedom. Bakht Khan, the leader of the rebel soldiers at Delhi, drafted a republican constitution in Urdu for a post-British India. His long poem calling upon the people to rise up and revolt and a ghazal authored by Zafar expressing the hope that Indians will soon push the firangi back to Britain were also written in Urdu. The language born in the streets and the bazaars had come to occupy the centre stage. The starkly Indian imagery in the poetry of Anise and Dabir later developed into the nature poetry of Hali, Azad and Ismail Meriti. Even as the Marcia was transformed by Josh Malia Badi into a poetic form which called upon the people to even die in the pursuit of freedom. The troubled 18th and 19th centuries provided fertile ground for the growth of Rekhta into Urdu. In 1835, the East India Company decided to switch to Urdu in the district courts under their control. Malvi Nazir Ahmad and Malvi Zakhaullah, both of Delhi College began translating the laws, legal commentaries and the various civil and criminal procedure codes into Urdu. The British soon learnt that in order to rule the new territories effectively it was necessary to learn the lingua franca. Therefore in 1800 the Fort William College was set up in Calcutta under the supervision of John Gilchrist in order to teach the British officers Hindustani. The College also undertook large-scale translations and publications of works of fiction from Sanskrit, Persian and other languages into Hindi and Urdu. It needs to be remembered that the practice of two sets of translations, Persianized Urdu for the Muslims and Sanskritized Hindi for the Hindus, started at Fort William, was responsible for causing great harm to both languages and to the unity of the Indian people in their struggle for freedom. The Fort William College was closed down by 1854, but other institutions like the Delhi College, the Hyderabad and Lucknow Translation Bureaus and the Scientific Society of Sar Sayed carried on the translation work started at Fort William. Urdu journalism made a beginning in May 1822, with the Urdu Persian newspaper Jame Jahanuma of Calcutta under the editorship of Munshi Sadasukhlal. The first Urdu paper in India, the Delhi Urdu Akbar, became the mouthpiece of the revolt by becoming Zafar Akbar, the victory news in 1857. A large body of material on the impact of British rule began to make its appearance. There were laudatory pieces as well as writings that were strongly critical of the British. The Indian National Congress set up in 1885 had traveled a long way. The partition of Bengal in 1905 led to widespread protest. The Swadeshi movement mobilized the entire nation. This was the time when the entire nation was fighting for freedom. The first world war began. This war led to developments that changed the world. These developments also had their impact on Urdu and were to shape its growth in the coming decades.