The Revolt of 1857, often called the First War of Indian Independence, began as a mutiny of sepoys in the British East India Company's army and quickly swelled into a broad civilian and feudal uprising across the Ganga valley and central India.

Nana Saheb (Dhondu Pant) was the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II. Under Lord Dalhousie's Doctrine of Lapse, the Company refused to continue the pension paid to his adoptive father, and this grievance turned him into a determined leader of the revolt.

He made Kanpur (then written Cawnpore), an important Company garrison town and Ganga river station, his headquarters and rallying point.

At Kanpur, in June 1857, Nana Saheb gathered the mutinous sepoys and local armed forces, besieged the British garrison under General Wheeler, forced its surrender and expelled Company control from the city, after which he proclaimed himself Peshwa. His trusted general Tatya Tope organised much of the military campaign.

Among the wrong options: Delhi was the symbolic seat of the revolt where the rebels rallied around the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, not Nana Saheb. Meerut was the place where the mutiny first broke out on 10 May 1857 when sepoys refused the greased cartridges, but it was the point of ignition, not Nana Saheb's base. Nagpur, a Maratha-linked territory annexed earlier under the Doctrine of Lapse, was not a significant theatre of the 1857 fighting.

Therefore, the place where Nana Saheb assembled his forces and drove out the British garrison was Kanpur.