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Of all the figures 1857 gave to Indian memory, one rides above the rest, literally, in the equestrian statues that stand in half the towns of the republic, sword raised, child bound to her back. Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi is the rebellion’s supreme icon, the warrior queen whose last ride every Indian schoolchild can recite in Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s galloping verse, khoob ladi mardani, how like a man she fought, the queen of Jhansi. This article honours the icon by doing what this series does, laying the documented life beside the legend, for the documents, remarkably, need little help.
She was born Manikarnika, pet name Manu, at Varanasi around 1828, daughter of a Marathi Brahmin official of the exiled Peshwa’s establishment at Bithur, which set her childhood, extraordinary detail, in the same courtyard as Nana Saheb, the rebellion’s future leader, among whose companions she learned what the zenana did not teach, riding, sword play, and shooting. Married young to Gangadhar Rao, the middle aged Maharaja of Jhansi, the Bundelkhand successor state the previous batch traced to Chhatrasal’s Maratha bargain, she was renamed Lakshmibai, bore a son who died in infancy, and stood beside the dying Maharaja in 1853 as he adopted a kinsman’s child, Damodar Rao, and petitioned the British to honour the succession. Dalhousie refused. Jhansi was declared lapsed, annexed, its queen pensioned, and her protest, pursued through counsel to London with arguments the lawyers themselves found sound, was dismissed. The tradition preserves her answer in four words, main apni Jhansi nahi doongi, I will not give my Jhansi, and whether or not the sentence was spoken, the sequel proved it meant.
When the storm of 1857 reached Jhansi that June, the station’s rising produced its atrocity, the killing of the British community, men, women, and children, who had surrendered the fort, at Jokhan Bagh. The Rani’s role remains the most argued question of her record, the British at the time holding her complicit, her own letters to the authorities pleading that the mutineers had extorted her and that she held the town for order awaiting their instructions, and the scholarship since inclining, on the documents, to her defence, while this series records the dispute as a dispute. What is certain is that the British, distracted for months, treated her as guilty, and that she governed Jhansi in the interval with conspicuous ability, raising troops, including women, striking her arrangements with neighbouring powers, and repelling an invasion by rival claimants, so that when Hugh Rose’s Central India Field Force arrived before her walls in March 1858, it found not a pensioner but a defended state.
The war that followed made her legend unassailable even in her enemies’ dispatches. Jhansi’s fort held Rose’s siege for two weeks of bombardment and assault, and when the walls were carried, and the city given to a sack whose civilian toll the records own frankly, the Rani did not fall with it. She escaped through the lines by night on horseback, the adopted child Damodar bound to her back in the image the statues fixed forever, rode the eighty odd miles to Kalpi through country swarming with her enemies, and joined the rebellion’s remaining commanders, Tantia Tope among them. Defeated again at Kalpi, the leaders answered with the war’s most audacious stroke, descending on Gwalior, whose Maharaja’s army defected to them, and seizing the great fortress as a final base. There, at Kotah ki Serai outside Gwalior, on June 17, 1858, leading her cavalry in the rearguard’s fighting, dressed as a trooper, she was killed in combat, aged about twenty nine, her body burned by her own people before the enemy could claim it. Rose’s report gave her the epitaph her country has never improved, the best and bravest of the rebel leaders.
The afterlife conquered where the rising had failed. The queen entered the ballads of Bundelkhand beside Alha and Udal, entered nationalist verse and Subhash Bose’s army, which named its women’s regiment for her, entered the republic’s iconography, cinema, and currency of names, and entered, this series notes, its arguments, Dalit and feminist rereadings contesting and enriching the cult as living memory should be contested. Damodar Rao, the child on her back, lived out an obscure pensioned life petitioning the government that had unmade him, history’s bill presented, as usual, to the survivor.
For the UP Files, the Rani closes the rebellion’s gallery beside the Begum of the previous article, two queens, Brahmin widow and Faizabad courtesan’s daughter risen to regent, holding the war’s two flanks, and between them burying the empire’s claim that India’s cause had no leaders worth the name. The rising failed. Its queens did not, and Bundelkhand’s hard country, which this series left waiting at her threshold, keeps her ballad in the rains.
