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When the British came to India, "Hindustan" (a Persian word) was a single country both in the eyes of the conquerors and the conquered, albeit politically divided. Resistance to British conquest was qualitatively different from previous ones in that it was against a colonial enterprise, a subordination of the entire Indian economy, polity, and culture to the interest of the metropolitan power. Resistance against wholesale submergence of the country which, in course of time, took on an unparalleled degree of bitterness. In its territorial vastness and the involvement of large sections of the population, the great revolt of 1857 was a national revolt and thereafter resistance to British rule, in the form of peasant revolts occurred almost throughout the 19th century. Taken in conjunction with the events in the first half of the 20th century, which finally led to the demise of the Raj in 1947, it is evident that Pax Britannica was not the time of peace some British historians would have us believe. Indeed, resistance against the British forged a "nation" out of the "country" and created political unity out of a widely and often vaguely felt sense of cultural oneness. Behind the rising tide of the National Movement was its unpretentious participant, the common man. The episodes of resistance in this collection, ranging from the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries are essentially about the ordinary men and women who made up India's National Movement, from all parts of the country and from all classes and occupations. In these pages we see them facing a firing squad or mounting the gallows, suffering imprisonments and sequestration of property with an incomprehensible serenity, all for a simple cause: "Swaraj", freedom. This is an accessible and episodically structured account of the freedom struggle with a grass-roots perspective.