Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, was a figure of some fascination to her Victorian contemporaries and indeed to posterity. Widow and ruler of the small north Indian kingdom of Jhansi, (her father was a Brahmin), she was described as the ‘Indian Boudicca’: attractive, intelligent, articulate, a stateswoman, she became a symbol of resistance to the British during the Indian Mutiny and has become a national heroine for India.
The Sydney-born lawyer John Lang was perhaps a much less romantic figure, but is intriguing in his own right. Regarded as the first Australian-born novelist, he left his native land for good in 1840, settling in India and founding a newspaper, in which he published his novel Mazarine (1845).
Lakshmibai’s husband, heir to a proud tradition of Maratha rulers, had died in 1853, and their only child was also dead. They adopted a child; the Rajah formally acknowledged him as heir before he died. but the Governor-General annexed the state anyway. Lakshmibai decided to fight the British at their own game and hired John Lang in 1854 to fight her case in the courts. Lang’s enthralling account of their meeting was first published in Dickens’ Household Words and then in Wanderings in India (1859).
Lang was delivered into Jhansi in an ‘enormous carriage’ escorted by a large escort of spear-bearing cavalry, and then led on a white elephant to the palace. In the palace, Lang sat in a room with a curtain at the end, and spoke briefly to the ‘pretty child’ who was to inherit Jhansi, and who – perhaps accidentally – opened the curtain to reveal the Rani expressing her grievances to Lang. He only saw her for a moment, but she clearly made an impression: the Rani was ‘rather stout, but not too stout. Her face must have been very handsome when she was younger [she was actually about 25 at the time], and even now had many charms – though, according to my idea of beauty, it was too round. The expression also was very good, and very intelligent. The eyes were particularly fine, and the nose very delicately shaped. She was not very fair, though she was far from black’.
The next 10 minutes passed with agreeable compliments from Lang to Lakshmibai – if the Governor-General could only see her, Lang felt ‘quite sure that he would at once give Jhansi back again to be ruled by its beautiful Queen’. The ‘beautiful Queen’ stuck to the matter at hand, and declined Lang’s suggestion that she take a British pension, saying in words that would resonate in Indian history: ‘Mera Jhansi nahin dengee’ (I will not give up my Jhansi).
What Happened Next
Lang argued her case in London, but to no avail, and when rebellion broke out in 1857 Jhansi became a centre of the revolt. Lakshmibai encouraged women as well as men to take up arms against the cow-killing imperialists, and fell in battle against the British at Gwalior in 1858. The wrapper of the first edition of Flashman in the Great Game (1975), has an appealing image (by Barbosa) of Lakshmibai on her swing – the swing was found in her battlefield tent after Gwalior, along with her books and pictures.