Reviewing The Moonstone for the Athenaeum in July 1868, Geraldine Jewsbury noted that Wilkie Collins brought his readers to tears as the novel ended - not by uniting the English hero and heroine but by dividing three South Asian men. These men are Hindu priests who have together travelled to England and back, violating caste restrictions to restore a sacred Hindu diamond to its shrine in remote Kattiawar:

Although critics often identify sentimentality as politically evasive, the sympathy that Collins evokes for the Hindus here is politically charged. In a novel published on the tenth anniversary of the rebellion that Victorians termed the 'Indian Mutiny' - an uprising that generated racial hatred towards South Asians among the British - Collins humanises figures commonly represented as bestial by his contemporaries and identifies as their rightful property a valuable diamond looted by British forces in Seringapatam fifty years before the main action of his story is set. Depicting the 1799 Siege of Seringapatam in his Prologue, Collins prefaces The Moonstone with an instance of British violence against Indians and suggests that their later acts of violence against Britons are marks of retribution triggered by an original, imperial crime.