The Rebellion was catalyst to many changes which decisively reshaped the information order of colonial north India in the later nineteenth century. It brought about a rapid expansion of the railway network and telegraphic communications. There was a sharp increase in numbers of European military and non-official personnel, followed by Bengali commissariat contractors, wholesale merchants and attorneys, in the cities of the Gangetic plains. This encouraged the English-educated to establish a new range of libraries, educational institutions and public bodies in the cities of the Gangetic plains. The huge internal market of the ‘bookwallah’ was galvanised by a slow but steady expansion of English and Hindi literacy. All this, in turn, brought more travellers, new commerce and new disruption to the inland market villages. Kaye believed that the ‘prodigious triumphs over time and space’ represented by the new communications caused the ‘Hindu hierarchy to lose half its power’; and it is true that the tide of change forced both an abrupt spread of scientific modernism and the rearmament of social conservatism with new methods of publicity and persuasion. Ironically, though, it was the British ‘hierarchy’ which was in danger of losing ‘half its power’ to control the direction and political import of the evolving information order. The invigorated Indian press and new-style Indian publicists and social reformers began to outflank the British rulers as innovators in the public arena. They could draw on the skills, connections and forensic techniques of the older ecumene, while at the same time projecting their personalities and ideologies through the printed media and at public meetings.