On October 15, 1857, a havildar and a sepoy were marched onto the Esplanade in Bombay. Each was tied to the mouth of a cannon. The verdict — that they were guilty of plotting a “rising” against the British — was read out. A few moments later, before a large crowd, the guns were fired. As fate would have it, an arm, torn from one of the men, flew into the air and landed on the head of a young Englishman who promptly collapsed in shock. His name was JP Hughlings — and though he did not know it at the time, he was going to help the natives standing in the maidan mount a very different challenge to British rule.

Born to a working-class family in 1831, Hughlings had decided early in life to serve others, electing to attend Kneller Hall, a training college whose graduates were expected to administer schools for the children of paupers.

From a humble background to Oxford and India

However, the principal at Kneller Hall soon decided Hughlings deserved a better education and sent him to see Benjamin Jowett, the celebrated Oxford don. Jowett helped Hughlings into Oxford and subsequently recommended him to the East India Company when it sought faculty for the newly- expanded Elphinstone College. And so, only a few months after graduating in July 1856, Hughlings found himself aboard a ship to India, with the title of Professor of English for company.

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When Hughlings arrived in Bombay, his plebeian background stood out in an environment populated by unhurried “gentlemen” who owed their positions to family connections. He was, a colleague sneered, “ill-made, splay-footed, short in stature, and endowed by nature with irregular and unhandsome features”. Worse still, he was much too “industrious”, spending........

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