This happened.
Tamerlane is talking about the First Anglo-Afghan war. Briefly, the British intervened in Afghanistan to restore a pro-British monarch. They took Kabul and installed him as king, and left a garrison in Kabul. The Afghans then rose up, attacked the garrison, and killed British advisors to the king. After a lot of negotiation, the garrison was allowed to leave Kabul and promised safe passage back to India. Then it was massacred in the mountain passes when it was returning to India. There was only one survivor.
This was a favourite theme of Hitler’s (as reported in Hitler’s Table Talk, edited by H. Trevor-Roper). The example of the British holding down the huge Indian subcontinent and its vast population with a comparative handful of administrators and troops was held out as an indication of what the Germans could achieve in Russia and East Europe. He also saw this as an illustration of the Germanic people’s (the English were fellow-Germanics, of course) genius for subjugating lesser races.
I’m surprised that nobody has pointed this out yet - Pakistan didn’t exist at the time of the Indian Mutiny. The entire subcontinent (including what eventually became Pakistan) was considered “India”.
I’ve just re-read Martini Enfield’s post. He’s talking about the present day of course.
Just forget I said anything.
(sneaks away, trying to avoid attention)
Actually, I think the term “cartridge” is correct. The cartridges in question were heavy paper cylinders that contained both a musket ball and sufficient black powder to prime and fire the shot. Here’s one description. I believe the cartridges were greased to provide water proofing as well as to lubricate the bullets. To the best of my recollection, to open the cartridge, you had to bite off the bullet, pour in the powder and then drop or spit the bullet into the musket. Needless to say, if you were a Muslim or Hindu, the idea of biting a cartridge that was reputed to be greased with pig fat or beef fat respectively was abhorrent. (Whether the lubricant was vegetable or animal based is under debate – the British were apparently reasonably sensitive to the issue.)
Even though they’re fiction (and bawdy, politically incorrect fiction at that), the various Flashman books by George MacDonald Fraser are meticulously researched and give some painless background on the various Indian campaigns.
And note that the “recruit group A to help you conquer group B, use group A and B to help you conquer group C, use group C to put down revolts by A and B” strategy was how the city of Rome ended up ruling the entire Mediterranean basin. Most of the Roman legions weren’t Romans, or even from Italy.
And there wasn’t a pan-Indian identity that could be invoked against the British, any more than there was a pan-Mediterranean or pan-European identity that could be invoked against the Romans.
You’d learn best from George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman in the Great Game. 
The Tsarist Russian Empire had its sights on expanding southward into British-controlled India. Only Afghanistan separated them. There was diplomacy aplenty and occasional armed clashes between the two sides there.
This advice is not up to the high standards of the Straight Dope Message Board.
The correct reference for the story of the English army lost in Afghanistan is George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman.
As a more serious response, I found Tournament of Shadows by Meyer and Brysac to be a pretty readable history of the conflict between Russia and Great Britain in Asia.