The Indian War of Independence is an Indian nationalist history of the 1857 revolt by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar that was first published in 1909. The Indian War of Independence; 1857; is a step by step account of the uprising of Indian Hindus and Muslims against the ruthless British rulers. Tracing footsteps of the barefooted; undernourished and almost unarmed Indian masses challenging the British bullets by the sheer force of their will power; the author establishes beyond an iota of doubt that the uprising was a War of Independence and not a mere Sepoy Mutiny as dubbed by the British. Mr. Sawarkar's is an attempt to look at the incidents of 1857 from the Indian point of view. A leading revolutionary himself, was attracted and inspired by the burning zeal, the heroism, bravery, suffering and tragic fate of the leaders of 1857, and he decided to re-interpret the story and to relate it in full with the help of all the material available to him at the time. He spent days and months at the India Office Library studying the period. Finally, his work was published in 1909, under the title "The Indian War of Independence -1857". The full story of its publication and eventual fate is related, at length, elsewhere in this volume. We shall only mention here that its entry into India was banned by the Government even before it was published. This ban was finally lifted by the Congress Government of Bombay in May 1946, and this is the first authorised edition of the book to be published in India.