The renovation of a cemetery has focused attention on a controversial Irish figure in Indian history. It's a story which won't easily be laid to rest, writes David Orrin Delhi.

There we were sitting in the mess tent one evening when in strode that Irishman, Nicholson. Chap coughed once or twice to catch our attention, then announced calm as you like: "I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks." Without further ado, he sat down and poured himself a glass of wine. Don't have to tell you, took my appetite clean away.

We may thus imagine a 19th-century British officer in India regaling his comrades with yet another anecdote about Gen John Nicholson as the port was passed around of an evening. The hanging incident is said to have occurred during the Indian Mutiny of 1857 when Nicholson learned that the regimental chefs had poisoned the soup. When they refused to taste it for him, he force-fed it to a monkey which expired on the spot. He then had the cooks hanged from a nearby tree.

It was, however, not the least of Nicholson's exploits. On another occasion, the temperamental Irishman - described by William Dalrymple in his latest book, The Last Mughal, as "an imperial psychopath" - had a servant beaten to death for insufficient grovelling in his presence. His treatment of Indian soldiers captured during the uprising was equally brutal: "I would inflict the most excruciating tortures on them with a perfectly easy conscience," he wrote to the commissioner of Peshawar.

Such behaviour might have remained forgotten to all but a few historians of the period were it not for the recent renovation of the cemetery in New Delhi, where Nicholson is buried alongside hundreds of other empire-builders who died in India. The refurbishment - funded by the British-based Group 4 Securicor security company and supported by the British High Commission in the Indian capital - has given rise to a heated exchange of letters in the Indian press.

"The renovation of the Nicholson cemetery . . . is an insult to those Indians who died fighting for the country in 1857," wrote one reader of the (Calcutta) Telegraph. "The British are trying to prove that their patriotism is superior to ours and we, by allowing such renovations, are accepting their view."

Other Indians, however, have applauded the renovation. "What is wrong with the honouring of John Nicholson as a war hero who died for the sake of his country?" wrote another Telegraph reader. "The awareness that Britons have shown regarding the preservation of the Nicholson cemetery is commendable," declared another.

Like those in most post-colonial societies, Indians are sensitive to nuances of history and national identity. The Mutiny - the 150th anniversary of which will be celebrated next year - is a case in point.

Many Indian and other historians now refer to the mid-19th century revolt by native Indian soldiers (sepoys) against the British as India's first war of independence. (In this pre-Raj period, before India came under control of the British Crown, the army of the British East India Company comprised mainly sepoys officered by Europeans - interestingly, Irishmen made up a disproportionate number of the company's forces and of the regular British regiments serving in India.)

Debate continues about the accuracy of so describing an uprising that had little coherent military purpose and was mainly confined to the northern part of the country. There is, however, little disagreement about the fierce and often cruel passions that the struggle engendered.

Indian mutineers were vilified for their massacre of hundreds of defenceless British women and children at Cawnpore on the banks of the Ganges. "Avenge Cawnpore" became a rallying cry among British soldiers who tied hapless Indian captives to the mouths of cannons and blasted them to smithereens. Amid such gore and bloodshed, a character such as Nicholson seems less improbable than at first glance.

Born in Dublin in 1822, the eldest son of a doctor, the young Nicholson was educated at Dungannon College in Co Tyrone. Having served in the Bengal infantry, he went on to distinguish himself in the first Afghan war of 1839-42. He proved particularly successful as a political officer on the unruly Punjab frontier, where he kept the mummified head of a bandit on his desk.

Large and brooding, he stood 6ft 2in and sported a bushy black beard. He had a habit of turning up at crucial moments of battle and is even mentioned in Kim, Rudyard Kipling's famous tale of imperial derring-do.

Flogging seems to have been something of a theme in Nicholson's colourful life. Miscreants were routinely horse-whipped in his presence. Later on, his reputation became so exalted in some places that holy men would flog themselves in his honour. Though brutal at times, he was also known to be compassionate.

The Sikhs were so impressed when he told all his prisoners to return home after the Battle of Gujarat in 1849 that they established a cult of Nikkul Seyn. Devotees revered him as a reincarnation of the god Brahma.

"His imperial air," wrote one of his fellow-officers, "which never left him and which would have been thought arrogant in one of less imposing mien, sometimes gave offence to the more unbending of his countrymen, but made him almost worshipped by the pliant Asiatics."

"Nicholson impressed me more profoundly than any man I had ever met before, or have ever met since," wrote another. "I have never seen anyone like him. He was the 'beau ideal' of a soldier and a gentleman."

Nicholson's demise at the age of 34 (not 35, as indicated on his gravestone) was fittingly dramatic, inspiring ballads as well as many a tale in Victorian boys' annuals. During the height of the Indian Mutiny in September 1857, he led a column of 1,000 men to lift the siege of Delhi. As he cleared the ramparts, sword arm raised aloft, he was shot in the back.

For nine days he lingered at death's door before succumbing to the wound.

The refurbishment of the Nicholson cemetery - costing some £4,000 (€5,900) - shows what can be done to preserve such unique vestiges of the past.

But, as writers to the Indian press have pointed out, it also draws attention to the sorry state in which many splendid Mughal and other Indian monuments languish on the sub-continent.

As India's economy explodes and city skylines are transformed by ever more ambitious construction projects, it sometimes feels as if the country's glorious past is fast losing out to a brash new world of gaudy glass towers and hulking concrete flyovers.

However turbulent Nicholson's life, his last resting place remains an oasis of calm amid the hubbub of modern Delhi.