In a region where the politics of wartime memory are ever sensitive, the restoration of Nicholson cemetery, one of the last great graveyards of British India, has hardly been a burning priority for Delhi. Named after the bearded brigadier-general who led British forces in recapturing the Mughal city from mutinous Indian sepoys in the great uprising of 1857, the burial ground had long been overrun by monkeys and littered with rubbish thrown from nearby apartments.

This week, however, the gravestones of Nicholson cemetery emerged gleaming from a two-year renovation sponsored by Group 4 Securicor, a British security company, in a reopening ceremony presided over by Sir Michael Arthur, the UK’s high commissioner in India. For many familiar with the bloody history of the British siege of the city, the care lavished on the graves of Victorian soldiers responsible for some of the most wanton violence in imperial history has raised some awkward questions.