On every parapet a gun she set
Raining fire of hell,
How well like a man fought the Rani of Jhansi
How valiantly and well!
Indian folk song of ‘1857’
The story of the Rani of Jhansi, which ended with her death leading her men in the course of the Indian Rebellion, or ‘Mutiny’, began like that of Boadicea, with an injustice. In this case, however, the injustice was British, not Roman.
In Britain itself – two or three months away even by steamer – preparations were already under way for that huge ceremonial sculpture commemorating Boadicea and her daughters which stands today on the Embankment of the Thames. The sculptor Thomas Thornycroft and his wife – also a sculptress – were favourites of the British royal family. She had immortalized the young Princess Alice as ‘Spring’ and the Prince of Wales as ‘Winter’; he had produced public pieces such as ‘Alfred the Great encouraged to the pursuit of learning by his mother’ and an equestrian statue of the Queen. In 1856, under the patronage of Albert, the Prince Consort, who lent horses from his own stable as models and often visited the sculptor’s studio to measure progress, Thornycroft embarked on the Boadicean group.1
Although, as we shall see, it was to be half a century before Boadicea, her daughters and her chariot achieved their present resting place (the Prince Consort had envisaged the central arch of the entrance to Hyde Park) the accession of another queen regnant in the shape of Victoria had had its predictable effect in drawing attention to Boadicea’s fortunes. In the winter of 1859 the Poet Laureate Lord Tennyson read aloud to his wife what he described as ‘a fiercely brilliant poem’, constructed in an unusual and extremely difficult metre adapted from the Latin of Catullus.2 That poem was Boadicea:
So the Queen Boadicea, standing loftily charioted,
Brandishing in her hand a dart and rolling glances lioness-like,
Yell’d and shriek’d between her daughters in her fierce volubility
Till her people all around the royal chariot agitated …
The poem ended with a sombre picture of the Roman colony awaiting the British holocaust and reflecting in silence on their misdeeds which had brought it about:
Out of evil evil flourishes, out of tyranny tyranny buds.
Ran the land with Roman slaughter, multitudinous agonies.
Perish’d many a maid and matron, many a valorous legionary,
Fell the colony, city, and citadel, London, Verulam, Cámulodúne.
In truth, there was little real parallel to be drawn between Tennyson’s ‘loftily charioted’, yelling and shrieking Boadicea, and Victoria, whose own conception of being a Warrior Queen was more that of Maria Theresa. On the one hand Queen Victoria displayed throughout her long reign a real affection for her ordinary soldiers and devotion to what she perceived as their interests; on the other hand, despite bursts of emotion – ‘Oh, if the Queen were a man!’ – she was in no sense a warmonger. When she urged on Mr Gladstone in 1871 over the Franco-Prussian war ‘the necessity for great prudence and for not departing from our neutral position’,3 above all not to take action alone, one can sense the cautious shade of Queen Elizabeth I at her shoulder.
Yet ironically enough, within Queen Victoria’s increasingly vast dominions – that ‘empire … on us bestow’d’ celebrated by Cowper – a situation had arisen which did parallel, almost exactly, that of Boadicea and the Romans. At the time the Rani of Jhansi was compared, not to Boadicea, but to another very different warrior-woman, Joan of Arc. Sir Hugh Rose, the British commander who finally defeated her at Gwalior, himself used the phrase ‘a sort of Indian Joan of Arc’ to the Commander-in-Chief of the army, the Duke of Cambridge.4 Since Boadicea had now become a patriotic symbol of British rule on the one hand and an established queen regnant on the other, it was perhaps scarcely surprising that British contemporaries of the Rani did not note the similarities of their two stories.
The parallels however were and remain remarkable. The injustice with which the story of the Rani of Jhansi began was not only dealt out to her by a dominant ‘occupying’ power of another race, but was also dealt out to her as a young or youngish widow. (As with Boadicea, the Rani’s exact date of birth is unknown.) This was not a case of physical brutality – scourging or rape; but there was a clear element of violation, according to Hindu law, in the way the Rani’s claims to rule Jhansi in the name of her late husband’s adopted son were ignored.
‘I have always considered Jhansi among the native states of the Bundelkhand as a kind of oasis in the desert’: this was the verdict (in his memoirs) of Sir William Sleeman, long stationed at the court of the Rani’s husband, Gangadhar Rao.5 It is important to realize that the small Mahratta principality of Jhansi, in the Bundelkhand hill country of northern India, had a history of friendship towards the British interest, just as the Iceni’s resentment at their treatment was fuelled by memories of their voluntary submission to Caesar. Jhansi had been raised by the British to princely status by that treaty of 1817 which brought the Mahratta Confederacy to an end although its dynasty had in fact been sovereign for nearly a hundred years. Thereafter the Rajah of Jhansi considered himself to be its independent and hereditary ruler; but he also inherited a tradition of benevolence towards and dependence upon the British government. In 1825 Gangadhar Rao’s grandfather, Ramachandra Rao, was granted the title of maharajah and ‘devoted servant of the glorious King of England’ (George IV) for aiding the British against some rebels. When Gangadhar Rao’s own succession in 1838 was disputed within the family, the British backed his claim.6
Prosperity and peace followed for Jhansi, in both cases assured by the efficient supervision of British officials. Gangadhar Rao himself liked to spend his time in the theatre, both directing and acting: he played female parts and was reputed to wear female dress offstage as well. Not necessarily for these reasons alone, Gangadhar Rao was believed to be homosexual. Be that as it might, it was more to the point that he did not manage to produce an heir: his first wife died childless. In 1842 Gangadhar Rao married again. His bride was she who would be known to history as Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi.
Lakshmi Bai was probably born in about 1830: estimates vary between 1827 and 1835, with the British authorities tending to go for the earlier and the Indians for the later figure.7 Her original name was Manukarnika – one of the many names of the holy river Ganges – and she was brought up in the wing of a palace in Benares on the south bank of the great river itself. This was because her father, Moropant Tambe, a brahmin official, acted as chief political adviser to the brother of the last Peshwa of Bithur, whose court had come to rest in Benares after his deposition.
A web of legends surrounds the childhood of little ‘Manu’. Her horoscope is said to have indicated an important marriage. It is also scarcely surprising to find that many of these legends feature her one way or another as a tomboy. Here once again are the familiar stories of the future Warrior Queen wrestling with boys and disdaining the company of girls (except to insist on always playing the role of leader among them). A favourite if probably apocryphal tale has ‘Manu’ demanding a seat on the howdah of an elephant when playing with the adopted son of the Peshwa, Dhondu Pant, later known as Nana Sahib (he was surely too old to have acted as her playmate in childhood, despite the dramatic destiny which would one day link their names). The little girl was rebuked for her presumption: ‘You were not born to ride on an elephant.’ At which the future Rani shouted at the future Nana Sahib: ‘I’ll show you! For your one elephant, I will have ten. Remember my words.’
On a more elevated level, Lakshmi Bai’s convenient birth in the very ‘lap of Mother Ganges’ meant that her birth could later be imbued with a religious significance: here was the pure incarnation of the sacred river, come to save India by destroying the heathen British. On this level, she was said to have been an assiduous attender at the Temple of Vishweshwar with her parents. Future places of pilgrimage were being provided, her pride in the Hindu religion underlined. A typical story, told of the Rani at the height of her triumph, had her encountering a brahmin by a well and, in spite of her thirst, refusing to let him pull up the clay pot for her: ‘You are a learned brahmin and it does not befit you to do this. I will do it myself.’ Concerning the Hindu religion, she informed the brahmin: ‘for this I have sacrificed all attachment for wealth, life, everything’.8
For all the curtailed freedoms – both sexual and social – of the female in the Hindu religion, as laid down by its brahmin lawgivers, little ‘Manu’, she who had boldly demanded a seat upon the elephant, came from a culture where powerful intelligent women were not unknown.9 Some of these belonged to history: there were folk memories of well-educated Hindu princesses and intrepid women at the Indian courts in the past who had ridden armed with the men. After her death, the Rani would indeed be described to Queen Victoria by Lady Canning, her former lady-in-waiting, now wife of the Governor-General of India, as having kept up the tradition of the Mahratta women for being both ‘brave and clever’ (although this particular Mahratta woman had been ‘wicked’ as well).10
Even within the confines of the Hindu religion itself, there were sundry menacing goddesses, whose mythical behaviour hinted at a very different female nature from that of the gentle and unselfish Sita. This was the heroine of the Ramayana epic who, having been abducted forcibly, was repudiated by her husband, only to prove her continuing love for him (and her virtue) by immolating herself in fire.11 The goddess Durga, for example, wife of Siva, although seen as basically benevolent and maternal and endowed with a serenely beautiful face, also displayed a remarkable capacity for aggression, with the help of her ten arms, each bearing a different weapon, and her eight accompanying demonesses. (It was to Durga, riding on her tiger, that Mrs Ghandi in her turn would sometimes be picturesquely compared.) As for another version of Siva’s wife, the much-venerated goddess Kali, the black one, here was the force of destruction represented in its most terrifying form: four arms ending in bloodstained hands, fang-like teeth and protruding blood-dripping tongue.
Where the powers of women were concerned, the unconscious influence of Hindu mythology was underlined by public Indian example. Moreover, roughly contemporary with the Rani herself were two remarkable Indian Muslim female rulers. One of these, the Begum of Bhopal, was described to Queen Victoria by Lady Canning in 1861 as ‘A really clever upright character’: she looked after the affairs of her country herself and ruled it admirably. ‘No one disputes her power or her justice.’ When the Order of the Star of India was founded, the Begum of Bhopal was one of the twenty-five ‘Knights’ appointed to it.
Hazrat Mahal, the Begum of Oudh, on the other hand, was also formidably clever – but not morally upright. John Low of the East India Company called her ‘one of those tigress women, more virile than their husbands, who when finding themselves in a position to gratify their lust for power, have played a considerable part in oriental history’. Yet the courageous part played by the Begum as Queen Regent, in the defence of Lucknow against British attack, could not be denied. The Times correspondent, W. H. Russell, referred to her as ‘Penthesilea’, an Amazonian image confirmed by the female sepoys who guarded the entrance to the Begum’s harem, wearing military jackets and white duck trousers, with muskets and bayonets, cross-belts and cartridge boxes. Russell reflected: ‘it appears from the energetic characters of these Ranees and Begums that they acquire in their zenanas and harems a considerable amount of actual mental power …’.12
After her enthronement, the Begum of Oudh was received by Queen Victoria in England. It was a development greeted with angry cynicism by Ernest Jones, the Chartist poet and leader (whose father, in contrast or perhaps in explanation, had been a royal equerry). Despite the Begum’s notorious ‘peccadilloes’, once she had been dethroned, he exclaimed, moral scruples had been thrown out of the window in face of her rank: ‘and the dusky royalty hobnobs with the pallid’.13 One might look at it from another angle and see in Queen Victoria’s persistent welcome to various Indian royalties her attractive lack of racism, in the sense that so many British people of the time practised it.
There is yet another possible angle. The career of Hazrat Mahal, long-reigning Queen Cartimandua to the Rani’s more dramatic Boadicea, reminds one how differently matters might have gone for Lakshmi Bai … Given her energy, courage and determination, given that female rule was not of its nature inimical at this point to the British, how might she not have fared under another set of stars – another horoscope? As it was, Manukarnika, who took on her marriage the name of Lakshmi, the lovely goddess of fortune and prosperity, would one day be transformed further into powerful Durga riding upon her tiger – and even, maybe, bloodstained Kali herself.
One legend concerns Lakshmi Bai’s actual wedding day. When the priest – according to tradition – tied the ends of her various gowns together, the bride shocked those present with her boldness. ‘Make the knot very firm’, she said. But whatever the state of the knot, the new Rani did not succeed in presenting Gangadhar Rao with an heir, although a baby boy was said to have died at the age of three months. Then in 1853 Gangadhar Rao fell seriously ill. In the absence of an existing heir, one was adopted. Damodar Rao, as he became known, was five years old: a descendant of Gangadhar’s grandfather and thus a member of the royal family.
The ruler now proceeded to dictate his will and have it read aloud to Major Ellis, the British Political Agent in Jhansi: ‘Should I not survive, I trust that in consideration of the fidelity I have evinced towards the British government, favour may be shown to this child and that my widow during her lifetime may be considered the Regent of the State (Malika) and mother of this child, and that she may not be molested in any way.’ Major Ellis replied that he would do everything possible to bring this about. The substance of this will was then repeated in a letter to Major Malcolm, the Political Agent for Gwalior and the Bundelkhand, in which Gangadhar Rao referred once more to that treaty which had guaranteed the throne of Jhansi to Ramachandra Rao ‘and his heirs and successors’.14
Gangadhar Rao died on 21 November 1853. Not long afterwards the Governor-General of India, the Marquess of Dalhousie, announced that under the policy of ‘lapse’, Jhansi was to be annexed by the British government. That is, since Gangadhar Rao had left no heir or successor – adoption did not count – the state of Jhansi reverted by treaty to the East India Company (no longer an independent corporation but largely under governmental control).
The only possible defence of Dalhousie’s ‘policy of lapse’, in this instance, is that of expediency, if defence it be. Certainly expediency had long been the watchword of the East India Company when the possibility of annexation arose; to that extent it could be argued that Dalhousie was only implementing a policy which others had conceived.15 But if Dalhousie’s policy had its roots in the past, it was also to cast its black shadow upon the future.
Dalhousie had already annexed Satara in 1848, the year of his arrival in India, on the same grounds of ‘lapse’ (once again there was the question of an adopted heir). This move too had aroused deep resentment – and also bewilderment. The resentment was due to the unfair prohibition of a practice – adoption – allowed by Hindu law. The bewilderment sprang from the known religious significance of adoption in the Hindu religion. The sacrifices of a son were an essential duty, if the father was not to be condemned to punishment – the hell called Put – after death. But an adopted son could perform these vital sacrifices equally with a natural one.
Colonel, later Major-General Sir John Low, who had been Political Agent at Gwalior and Lucknow, reported in his memoirs this general anguish which followed the annexation of Satara. ‘What crime did the late Rajah commit that his country should be seized by the Company?’ was the one question which every Indian put to him.16 Similarly in Jhansi in 1853 little Damodar Rao was unarguably the late ruler’s ‘son’ in Hindu law; as such he was surely his ‘successor’ under the terms of the earlier treaty. To regard him otherwise was ‘so ungenerous, and being so ungenerous, so unwise’. These were the terms which would be used by the distinguished British military historian Sir John Kaye (who worked for the East India Company and later the India Office) in his History of the Sepoy War in India 1857–1858, published in 1880.17 Significantly, Dalhousie’s wiser successor Lord Canning – derisively nicknamed ‘Clemency’ at the time, a name he has since borne with honour in the roll of history – explicitly stressed the Indian rulers’ right of adoption at his healing durbar of 1859.18
Meanwhile in 1856, the year of his own departure from India, Dalhousie would go further and annex the much larger state of Oudh: as early as 1848 he had described it as being ‘on the highroad to be taken under our management’. On this occasion, the pretext was not the lack of heirs to the Nawab – there was an heir – but the Nawab’s numerous transgressions against his subjects. It was a rather more sympathetic excuse. Nevertheless an Indian ruler had once again been removed. A leading Indian historian of the events of 1857 has judged Dalhousie’s policy of annexation as one of the main contributory facts to the rebellion and ‘perhaps the decisive one’.19
We return to Lakshmi Bai, she who had expected to rule Jhansi during the boyhood of Damodar Rao and was now consigned to the unenviable fate of a childless Hindu widow. Was she perhaps inadequate to the task of the regency, at least in the view of the British? But only a week after Gangadhar Rao’s death, the Political Agent Major Malcolm wrote that his widow, ‘in whose hands he has expressed a wish that the government should be placed during her lifetime, is a woman highly respected and esteemed, and I believe fully capable of doing justice to such a charge’. Other witnesses confirm that the Rani comported herself as ‘a brave-minded woman had to do in her position’, being in herself ‘quite capable of discussing her affairs with a Committee or a government’.20
Moreover her behaviour was perfectly discreet: she kept purdah where the British were concerned, although not at home (later she would indeed encourage women to take part in the defence of Jhansi). Her life was disciplined in the extreme: she would rise at 3 a.m., supervise work in the political and military offices, and then at her court listen to religious readings. One is reminded indeed of the application and austerity of another female ruler called from a secluded life to greatness: Isabella of Spain.
All this time, the Rani was hoping – even perhaps expecting – that the terms of Gangadhar Rao’s will would be allowed to prevail. Two petitions appealing against Dalhousie’s decision were sent, in late 1853 and early 1854, the Rani herself being credited with composing them.21 Attention was drawn to the position of the adopted son in the Hindu religion, his ability to make sacrifices on behalf of his late father, equal to that of a natural son. In the second petition, the difference between ‘heirs’ and ‘successors’ in the original treaty was argued; for if Damodar Rao was not one, he was certainly the other. It was significant of the justice of the Rani’s case that Major Ellis, the Political Agent at Jhansi, himself endorsed her petition. Unfortunately – or possibly due to malevolence – this vital letter was not forwarded to Dalhousie. For Major Malcolm, who did not choose to forward it, now believed the petition should be refused. Dalhousie’s decision was dated 27 February 1854. Adoption, he considered, was valid only in the case of sovereign princes, and he held firmly to Jhansi’s dependent status (an argument which has since been convincingly demolished by Indian writers).
When the document was read to the Rani on 15 March 1854, she cried out loudly: ‘Mera Jhansi Nahin Denge.’ (I will not give up my Jhansi.) Then she shut herself away, refusing food or water. But if the Rani despaired, it was only a temporary state. With remarkable pertinacity, she continued to argue her cause, employing a British counsel, John Lang, who advised her to appeal to London. It was not until 1854 that the appeal too was turned down. At Malcolm’s suggestion, the Rani was granted a pension of five thousand rupees monthly from the Treasury at Jhansi; the palace and the state jewels and funds which her husband had willed to her were also to be handed over. Even at this point, the British administration managed to arouse further resentment: with what Sir John Kaye described as ‘extraordinary meanness’, it was now laid down that the Rani should pay her husband’s debts before receiving her emoluments.22
So the Rani, with no other choice before her, fell back for the next three years into private life. Dalhousie left India. He once told a correspondent in England – whom he termed his ‘safety valve’ – of his feelings about the great subcontinent he ruled: ‘I don’t deny that I detest the country and many of the people in it. I don’t proclaim it; but I don’t doubt that my face does not conceal it from those I have to do with.’ It was not likely that such a man – one who would come out of his dying coma in order to learn the score in the Eton and Harrow cricket match – would spare much thought for the feelings or resolves of an obscure Hindu widow.23
Jhansi itself, like its Rani, was judged unimportant for the future. Its prosperity inevitably declined with the disappearance of the princely court. Another brisk British judgement from the centre was the discontinuance of the state revenues paid to the Temple of Lakshmi, just outside the city; although once again Major Ellis, the man on the spot, had suggested that the practice should be maintained. As to the garrison of such an important place, a few hundred soldiers were surely all that were necessary nowadays. A safe farewell could be bidden to the thousands of troops who had once added to the lustre of Jhansi’s princely ruler – could it not?
In 1855, the year before Lord Canning arrived in India to replace Dalhousie, he gave a speech in London to the Court of Directors of the East India Company. It contained this remarkably prophetic passage: ‘We must not forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a cloud may arise, at first no bigger than a man’s hand, but which growing bigger and bigger, may at last threaten to overwhelm us with ruin.’24 By the summer of 1857, that cloud had indeed arisen.
The causes of the Indian Rebellion – or Mutiny – are not the subject of the present work; suffice it to say that on the Indian side, the case of the Rani of Jhansi, the mixture of injustice, insensitivity and indifference displayed by the British administration towards entrenched Indian customs and interests, might perhaps stand as a microcosm of the whole. On the British side, the case of Jhansi itself, the unexpected uprising of supposedly loyal troops, coupled with the treacherous slaughter of British women and children (as well as soldiers and officials) might equally stand for what was most dreadful in India wherever the Mutiny occurred.
Canning’s words were prophetic. They had not however prepared him for the event itself. In April 1857 Lady Canning was happily telling Queen Victoria of the ‘ridiculous stories’ being circulated that the Governor-General had signed a bond saying that he would make all the Indians into Christians within three years. She added that there was ‘an odd mysterious thing going on, still unexplained’, by which she referred to the circulation of some native chupatties or biscuits from district to district (a strange episode whose precise relevance to the events of 1857 – were the chupatties coded signals? – has never been totally explained). Only five months later Queen Victoria would write in her turn to the King of the Belgians, ‘we are in sad anxiety about India, which engrosses all our attention’; although even now, characteristically, she spared a thought for the feelings of her protégé, the dispossessed Indian Prince Duleep Singh, who had been virtually raised with her own sons: ‘What can it be for him to hear his fellow countrymen called fiends and monsters?’25
In keeping with its reputation for pro-British tranquillity, Jhansi was not in the forefront of the rebellion. As late as 18 May, following the first weeks of disruption elsewhere, Captain Skene, the Political and Administrative Officer of Jhansi, was able to write, ‘I do not think there is any cause for alarm about this neighbourhood.’26 It was not until 4 June that some of the garrison at Jhansi (drawn from the Twelfth Bengal Native Infantry and the Fourteenth Irregular Cavalry and commanded by a Captain Gordon) actually mutinied. Under a rebel sergeant, Gurbash Singh, they invaded the Star Fort; in the battle to seize it, they killed all the British officers they found there except a Lieutenant Taylor, who, despite being badly wounded, managed to escape to the City Fort. This was the place appointed by Captain Skene for some British and Eurasians in Jhansi – some sixty people all told, over half of them women and children – to take refuge.
With the mutineers seemingly impregnable in the vastly superior Star Fort (which contained Jhansi’s magazine as well as its treasure chest), who would now come to the aid of this vulnerable fragment of humanity? Ironically enough, the only possible bastion for the Europeans at this point against the rage of the sepoys was none other than the deposed Rani herself. She had earlier been allowed a few troops of her own as security against the disturbances which were sweeping across India. Now Captain Gordon appealed to her in the following terms. Given the extreme danger to the European and Eurasian community, who might all be killed by the mutineers the next day, ‘we suggest’, he wrote, ‘that you take your kingdom [sic – shades of Lord Dalhousie] and hold it, along with the adjoining territory, until the British authority is established’. He added, ‘We shall be eternally grateful if you will also protect our lives.’27
It cannot be known for certain what if anything the Rani replied to this appeal. The most plausible version, given her circumstances, has her answering, ‘What can I do?… If you wish to save yourself, abandon the fort, no one will injure you.’ The most damning version has the Rani promising a safe conduct which she had no intention of carrying out.28 Whatever the Rani’s reactions – for there are numerous contradictory versions, mainly based on hearsay – the tragedy which followed is not in dispute.
On 7 July the City Fort was duly besieged by the mutineers, and Captain Gordon, the commander of the garrison, killed in the assault. Captain Skene, the Political Agent, then gave the signal of surrender. A safe retreat from the fort itself was now promised to the remaining Europeans inside if they would lay down their arms. This they agreed to do. So the British, defenceless but hopeful, filed out of the City Fort. A little column was just outside the walls of Jhansi itself, when the rebel leader, Risaldar Kala Khan, ordered them all to be killed. One of the Europeans still surviving in Jhansi (who had not gone to the fort) was a Mrs Mutlow, who by her own account was concealed by her Indian ayah in the native quarter, and by another account was able to adopt Indian dress successfully since she was herself a Eurasian, although her husband and brother went to the fort and were killed. (We shall return to the testimony of Mrs Mutlow.) For the moment it is enough to say that a frightful massacre had just been carried out by the rebel sepoys: their victims were mainly civilians, and the majority of them of course women or children.
It is inconceivable that the Rani encouraged this piece of wanton mayhem. Leaving aside her actions at a later stage, the Rani in these first days of mutiny at Jhansi rightly considered the sepoys to be a frightening force outside her own control, and indeed outside anyone else’s. It may well be that she did give the rebels money – 35,000 rupees – as well as two elephants and five horses. She probably had little choice. According to one report, the rebels threatened to execute her if she did not comply. The charge of aiding the sepoys in this manner was made against the Rani by Mr Thornton, the Deputy-Collector of Jhansi, on 18 August, and it does have a ring of truth; but in the wake of the bloodbath Thornton went further and added the post hoc propter hoc remark that the slaughter had taken place ‘wholly at the instigation’ of the Rani of Jhansi. It was this statement, incorporated in the official British report of 20 November 1858, which was to prove damaging to the Rani’s reputation in the estimates of British historians (some of whom further embellished Thornton’s statement to make the Rani responsible for the original mutiny of 5/6 June – which Thornton had not even suggested).29
An important part of this myth of the Rani’s responsibility for the Jhansi massacre was the treachery she was said to have displayed in that false promise of a safe conduct. But the existence of this safe conduct rests either on hearsay or on the testimony of Mrs Mutlow; as has been pointed out by Dr Surendra Nath Sen, who sifted through the mass of evidence in the National Archives of India for his authoritative centenary study 1857, the document which Mrs Mutlow is supposed to have seen, written in the first person and signed by the Rani personally, is quite implausible.30
Although Mrs Mutlow would not have known this, the Rani, as an Indian ruler, would never write in the first person and in any case invariably signed her official documents with a seal. Another colourful piece of the myth had the Rani exclaiming that she would have nothing to do with those ‘swine’ the British, when Captain Skene implored her protection. But as the (nameless) clerk who provided the evidence obviously did not know, the Rani’s language was Maratti, not English, and in Maratti the word ‘swine’ was not one of abuse. Thirty years after these bloodstained happenings, one T. A. Martin, a resident of Jhansi who escaped the siege, wrote a letter to the Rani’s adopted son Damodar Rao in the Rani’s defence: ‘Your poor mother was very unjustly and cruelly dealt with – and no one knows her true case as I do.’31 Unfortunately – by a further piece of irony in a career already marked by such – it was the Rani’s alleged implication in the massacre, her guilt in the eyes of the British authorities which finally persuaded her many months later that she had nothing to lose by siding against the British.
For the moment however the Rani in Jhansi was seen – including by the British – as bringing order into a disorderly situation. She formed a government which included her own father. She also wrote an account of the whole ghastly business of the massacre to Major Erskine, the Commissioner at Sagar, in two letters of 12 and 14 June. The Rani roundly condemned the ‘faithlessness, cruelty and violence’ which the troops had displayed towards the Europeans and regretted that she had not had sufficient soldiers and guns of her own to help them (thanks, of course, to the withdrawal of the previous strong garrison). The Rani explained that the sepoys had threatened to blow up her own palace and for this, to save her ‘life and honour’, she had given them sums of money to depart. Since then, in the absence of any British officer (they had all been killed, although some civilians survived by one means and another in the town) she had taken over the government.32
There is no reason to doubt the truth of this account nor did Erskine himself do so. He forwarded the letters to the central government with the covering note that their content ‘agrees with what I have heard from other sources’. On 2 July he asked the Rani to continue to manage the district including collecting revenues and recruiting police, until a new supervisor should arrive.33 For a few halcyon months, interrupted only by certain successful military campaigns against the neighbouring states (in which all parties claimed to be supporting the British in paying off old scores), the Rani was able at last to enjoy what she had so long desired, the rulership of ‘my Jhansi’.
Her court was conducted with traditional splendour and dignity. The Rani herself would be seated behind a curtain on a raised seat. Previously she had worn a plain white muslin dress drawn about her tightly to reveal her figure: ‘and a remarkably fine figure she had’, commented her lawyer John Lang. Now, somewhat stouter – ‘but not too stout’ – she adopted a costume which symbolically combined the elements of a warrior with those of a queen: jodhpurs, a silk blouse with a low-cut bodice, a red silk cap with a loose turban (or puggree) round it. She wore diamond bangles and large diamond rings on her small hands: but a short bejewelled sword and two silver pistols were stuck into her cummerbund.34
‘A woman of about middle size’, the Rani must have been quite beautiful when she was younger, thought Lang: she was at this point around thirty. Even now her ‘particularly fine’ expressive eyes and a nose ‘very delicately shaped’ gave her countenance many charms. Lang added: what spoiled her was her voice. This was later described as ‘somewhere between a whine and a croak’ – but then, as has been noted, Warrior Queens have always had trouble with their voices, either from their enemies or from those of another race (to her fellow Indians, the Rani’s voice was on the contrary ‘melodious’). Other estimates described the Rani without qualification as ‘a very handsome woman’, although her complexion (‘not very fair but far from black’, according to Lang) had been marred by smallpox. Her grace in particular impressed the British.35
For the moment the Rani – with her diamonds but also her pistols – was free to enact Lakshmi, rather than Durga or Kali. A library was formed, plays once more encouraged. But either from natural inclination since her tomboy childhood or from prescience, she also studied the martial arts. Her daily round included shooting at a target with a rifle and a pistol, and of course riding. Lady Canning heard later that her riding was ‘wonderful’. In an interesting link with history, one Turab Ali, who was then in Jhansi and who died in 1943 aged 113, survived long enough to tell tales of his youth when he had watched the Rani practising the art of managing her horse with the reins in her teeth and two swords in her hands.36
There was however a cloud on the Rani’s horizon, as there had once been on the horizon of the British in India. As the latter gradually pressed back the rebels into submission, recapturing Delhi and Oudh, still no official proclamation had come to Jhansi confirming that the Rani had been put in charge of the district in July. The arrival of Sir Robert Hamilton from England, to resume his work as Political Agent for Central India, prompted the Rani to write to him on 1 January 1858, giving once again her side of the story. This was a nervous communication; the Rani was well aware that the recapture of Delhi and Oudh meant that Jhansi would not be tolerated much longer as a kind of unofficial rebel state – or was it? She was anxious to make it clear that it was not. On the other hand she was equally anxious to maintain her own position of power.
In any case it was too late; perhaps it had always been too late. Despite Erskine’s judgement, despite the Rani’s own pleas, despite Sir Robert Hamilton’s confidence in the veracity of one of the rebels under sentence of death – ‘she was obliged to yield’ – the Rani was already believed to be guilty of complicity in the massacre. Her official guilt was even now in the process of being established. (One of the pieces of damning evidence cited to Erskine, who was ‘forgiven’ for originally crediting the Rani’s story, was a telegraphic message from Major Ellis, dated 26 June; but he actually referred to the mutineers as ‘having at last forced the Ranee to assist them with Guns and Elephants’ – evidence surely of duress rather than complicity.)37
There is cause to believe that the Rani’s reputation also suffered from guilt by association. Later, as we shall see, she would join forces with ‘that fiend’ Nana Sahib, he who was held responsible for another frightful massacre, that of Cawnpore, which took place on 27 June.38 Nana Sahib was another with a grievance against the British: as the adopted son of the last Peshwa of Bithur, he was allowed to be styled maharajah as a courtesy, but not to enjoy the Peshwa’s pension.
It is not clear exactly at what point the Nana joined forces with the rebels within Cawnpore, a wealthy city lying about 260 miles east of Delhi, guarding the road to Lucknow; subsequently many of the British would believe that the Nana had been ‘at the races and sipping coffee etc. with our officers and all the time planning the mutiny’. That may not be quite how it happened. Possibly a character of mysterious origins who went under the pseudonym Tatya Tope was actually the ‘master butcher’, as one later British investigation suggested, the Nana being offered an even starker choice than was the Rani by the sepoys: a kingdom if he joined them, death if he didn’t.39 But if that was the case, Nana Sahib certainly did not hesitate. The massacre of Europeans and Eurasians at Cawnpore took place in roughly similar circumstances to that of Jhansi, with all the indications of treachery, captives going trusting and all unknowing to their deaths.
It is impossible to exaggerate the feelings of horror aroused by this grisly episode in the hearts and minds of the British community not only then but long afterwards; quite regardless of the fact, as Indian historians have pointed out, that in the meantime they themselves had performed acts of equal savagery in retaliation. For the Indian men, women and children who died subsequently in Cawnpore, ten times the number of the slaughtered Europeans, are hardly registered in the British consciousness.40 A parallel may once again be drawn between the Britons’ rampant slaughter of the Romans at Colchester – vividly reported by the Roman Tacitus – and his bald account of the extinction of the Britons, including their womenfolk, at the final battle.
Many years later the British Field-Marshal, Lord Roberts, described his feelings as a young soldier on returning to Cawnpore in the autumn of 1857. As ever, the small things were the most poignant: ‘tresses of hair, pieces of ladies’ dresses, books crumpled and torn, bits of work and scraps of music, just as they had been left that fatal morning …’. It is easy to believe Roberts’s verdict: ‘the sights which met our eyes, and the reflections they gave rise to, were quite maddening’. In vain Queen Victoria spoke out against ‘any retribution’ which ‘I should deeply deprecate’: officers and men, by abandoning the prospect, should show ‘the difference between Christians and Hindoos or Musselmen’. G. O. Trevelyan, in a study, Cawnpore, published in 1865, compared the British soldiers’ behaviour to that of Telemachus slaughtering his mother’s maids and he added the comment that it was ‘curious’ that this ‘Pagan’ act should be revived by ‘a Christian warrior’ (Brigadier-General Neill) after twenty-five centuries.41
The recapture of Jhansi lay ahead; but it was not to be expected that the British behaviour there would be marked by any ‘maudlin clemency’. These were the words with which Dr Thomas Lowe, who was present as the Medical Officer to the Corps of Sappers and Miners, would choose to dismiss the quality of mercy, pace his sovereign, in an account of it all published in 1860. As for the Rani herself, once officially implicated in the Jhansi massacre, her likely fate, were she to be captured, was death (her father, who was captured, was hanged). To Lowe, as to many others not imbued with the spirit of Queen Victoria, the Rani had become ‘the Jezebel of India … the young, energetic, proud, unbending, uncompromising Ranee, and upon her head rested the blood of the slain, and a punishment as awful awaited her’.42
Perhaps Tennyson’s sad verdict in Boädicea is the fairest on the state of India during the frenzied months of the Rebellion, when the land certainly ran with slaughter – Indian as well as British – and ‘many a maid and matron’ of both races did suffer ‘multitudinous agonies’ before perishing: ‘Out of evil evil flourishes, out of tyranny tyranny buds.’
In the new year, Sir Hugh Rose, in the process of mopping up the remaining rebel encampments, set off for Jhansi. It was time for the Rani to put aside the peaceful mien of Lakshmi and mount the tiger of Durga. To this end she began to recruit a large army of her own, securing fourteen thousand volunteers from a population of some two hundred and twenty thousand, as well as fifteen hundred sepoys. She also strengthened the defences of the city itself. The siege of Jhansi began on 20 March 1858. One eyewitness, an Indian, told of the fierce British fire, including ‘red-hot balls’ which thundered over the city walls ‘like the rains in autumn’.43
An attempt by Tatya Tope to relieve Jhansi from Kalpi, ended in a disastrous defeat at the Betwa river, with many Indian casualties, or as Thomas Lowe put it: ‘a bloody day for not a man of the enemy asked for quarter or received it’.44 Jhansi, it seemed, stood alone, with Rose determined not to allow the rebels to escape (as had happened at certain other fortresses en route) and the Rani, supported by the inhabitants, determined not to surrender.
On the British side, the energetic quality of the defence, Indian soldiers scurrying about with more vigour than they had ever been seen to display under British orders, was especially noted. ‘They worked like bees’, wrote Lowe, apparently surprised. The women of Jhansi, organized by the Rani, joined in; they were seen by the British working the batteries, carrying ammunition and otherwise bringing food and water to the soldiers.45
As for the Rani herself, whose standard flew proudly from one white turret, she was constantly visible both to her own followers and to the enemy. To the one she was a source of encouragement, to the other not entirely a source of abhorrence for all the mutterings of ‘Jezebel’: for already the strange double standard which could sometimes protect a Warrior Queen, where it would not protect her male counterpart, was in operation. There was wonderment and even admiration there too.
It is said that one of the bombardiers told Rose that ‘he had covered the Queen and her ladies with his gun’; he asked permission to fire. To this Rose chivalrously replied that he did not approve of that kind of warfare.46 Yet this was a woman who, it is suggested, would have been executed if she had been captured. There is certainly, from this point on, a dichotomy between the reactions of the soldiers who fought against her – who, in sum, admired her for her pluck, ‘a perfect Amazon in bravery … just the sort of daredevil woman soldiers admire’, as the historical records of the 14th Light Dragoons described her47 – and those who preferred to write about her in the vivid terms of the Voracity Syndrome, recalling those charges of sexual licence which Semiramis, Cleopatra and other Warrior Queens in the past had incurred. Both these types of judgement were of course directly inspired by her sex, and for better or for worse would not have been applied to a man.
Afterwards Sir John Kaye summarily dismissed the tradition of the Rani’s ‘intemperance’, as he phrased it, as ‘a myth’ based on contemporary prejudice. It is true that tales of the hot-blooded Indian, avid to lay his fingers upon Anglo-Saxon womanhood, widely embellished the true horrors of the Mutiny with further not-quite-unspeakable (and untrue) details. For the coming of the white womenfolk to British India had brought to an end those jolly eighteenth-century days when a young Englishman would happily set his heart on ‘A lass and a lakh a day’ – to adapt the conventional lament – a lakh being 100,000 rupees and the lass being Indian. As the races drew apart, the customs of child marriage and polygamy seemed to give credence to the notion of Indian lustfulness.48 Once again the Rani, for all the discretion of her personal behaviour, suffered by association.
A typical comment was that of Ellen C. Clayton (author of Celebrated Women, Notable Women, etc.) in her omnibus study Female Warriors published in 1879, the year before Sir John’s own more judicious work: ‘All agreed as to the extreme licentiousness and immorality of her [the Rani’s] habits; and the rooms in her palace are said to have been hung with pictures “such as pleased Tiberius at Capri” ’ – the delicate Victorian allusion is to pornographic art, although the Rani’s keen detractor Lowe, who actually saw her apartments, mentioned no such titillatory detail in his own full description. One of the most damning – but equally quite unsupported – judgements was that of George W. Forrest in A History of the Indian Mutiny, published between 1904 and 1912, since his former position as the Director of Records for the government of India naturally carried weight. Picking eagerly on the phrase ‘the Jezebel of India’, he wrote that ‘to speak of her [the Rani], as some have done, as “The Indian Joan of Arc” is indeed a libel on the fair name of the Maid of Orleans’. (Given Forrest’s nationality, a somewhat self-righteous comment in any case.)49
He who had so described her – Sir Hugh Rose in two letters back to his royal Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Cambridge – and had just spared her life, was granted no similar mercy by the lady in question. He watched the Rani first firing in his direction and then peering through a telescope to see what harm she had done. ‘Like the 3rd Europeans and the 86th she requires a good deal of drilling,’ commented Rose sardonically, ‘nobody having been able to discover where the Ranee’s shot went.’50 But these days of mutual observation and raining fire could not last forever. The British assault upon Jhansi, which was to be both fierce and final, took place on 3 April. It may have been prompted by knowledge of a weakness in the defence supplied from inside: all accounts agree that the Rani herself was in the thick of the fighting.
At some point that night, however, the Rani escaped with about four followers, including her father. It is sometimes supposed that Rose laid a trap for her by allowing her to escape: but if there was a trap, she certainly eluded that too.51 Riding hard, outdistancing her pursuers, in particular one Lieutenant Bowker, she succeeded by stages in reaching the fortress of Kalpi. She had travelled over one hundred miles in twenty-four hours. Here were congregated, among Indian rulers who had joined the rebels, not only Nana Sahib but the Nana’s nephew, Pandurang Rao, known as Rao Sahib, as well as Tatya Tope.
Lieutenant Bowker’s own story has him perceiving the Rani aloft on her celebrated grey (or white) horse and pursuing her with Rose’s permission. A shot – possibly but not certainly fired by the Rani herself – disabled him, and so ‘the lady escaped for the time being’. Indian sources have the Rani wounding the Lieutenant in a sword fight at Bhander, a small village where she stopped for food; some of these accounts take on already the heady quality of incantation, as in this one written by a barrister and published in Calcutta in 1930: ‘But Lakshmi, put your horse now into a gallop. For Lieutenant Bowker is galloping behind, followed by select horsemen, in order to capture you. And you, O Horse, fortunate on account of the sacred treasure you carry, gallop on!… The dawn has now broken. So, heroic goddess, flying all night on the wings of the wind, test thee!’52
There can be no question that Lakshmi Bai was right to escape both from her own point of view and that of her cause. The vengeance taken in Jhansi was frightful by any standards; some British historians have suggested that while four to five thousand died in battle, the civilians were spared. But Vishnu Godse, a priest from Bombay who was present, recalled four days of fire, pillage, murder and looting without distinction; it was difficult to breathe, he wrote, for the stink of burning flesh. Lowe’s words, that the enemy were slain in their ‘puffed up thousands … such was the retribution meted out to this Jezebel Ranee and her people …’ do not suggest there was much of a distinction between soldiers and civilians.53
In his description of the vanished Rani’s personal apartments, however, Lowe dipped his pen into the ink of Sir Walter Scott, as he described the palace doors inlaid with plate-glass, mirrors, chandeliers, velvet and satin beds, bedsteads with silver feet, velvet cushioned chairs, brazen throne, gold- and silver-handled tulwars, spears, silver bird cages, ivory footstools, dozens of shawls, silver candlesticks ‘and a thousand other things such as a luxurious woman would have’ (although there is no mention of pictures ‘such as pleased Tiberius’). All these accoutrements, as well as the works of Horace, Longfellow and Browning said to have belonged to the dead officers, ‘lay here and there in chaotic confusion in every part of the building’. ‘The soldiery went to and fro tramping over and through these things and kicking them about as they would any heap of rubbish’, wrote Lowe, ‘until order was somewhat restored.’ Meanwhile the rebels fought like tigers ‘so the bayonetting went on till after sunset’. The fate of the Rani might not have been so summary as that of her luxurious belongings but it is difficult to believe she would in the end have fared much better.54
While the Union Jack flew once more over Jhansi, in Kalpi, in contrast, the Rani was given an honoured reception by Rao Sahib, with a special parade of his soldiers. The next engagement which followed, that of Kalpi itself, to which Sir Hugh Rose and his army patiently slogged their way in heat so great that big tears trickled down the cheeks of the patient elephants and the very camels groaned. It is sometimes suggested that if Rao Sahib had given the command to the Rani, not to Tatya Tope, the result of the battle – another total defeat for the Indians – might have been different.55 Another expression of the general admiration for the Rani is the widespread belief that she was responsible, as ‘their most determined, spirited and influential head’, for the Indians’ next plan, one of extreme daring, to seize the fortress of Gwalior (although Tatya Tope, with contacts inside Gwalior, is perhaps a more likely author).56 As a manoeuvre it was certainly remarkably successful, at a time when the rebel fortunes were badly in need of some coup to rally them. Gwalior was seized, and there the coronation of Rao Sahib took place. From the great regalia of Scindia, which resided in the Treasury at Gwalior, the Rani was granted by Rao Sahib a fabulous pearl necklace. Like the torc of Boadicea, it was to prove an ornament of ritual significance.
For all the daring which had attended its seizure, Gwalior could not expect to remain long immune from reprisal. When that attack came, the Rani was said to have been put in charge of the eastern side of the defence. She wore her armour, her sword with its jewelled scabbard – and her wonderful new acquisition, the pearl necklace. According to tradition, she took as her motto on this occasion, the celebrated verse: ‘If killed in battle we enter the heaven and if victorious, we rule the earth.’
Of the two alternatives, it seemed that the Rani of Jhansi was not destined to rule the earth. She was killed at some point in the fierce but ultimately unsuccessful battle to defend Gwalior: the most likely date being 17 June – the second day of the fighting. As Boadicea’s daughters traditionally died with their mother, two of the Rani’s ‘maids of honour’ – in the British phrase – were said to have died with her: Indian sources give their names as Mandar and Kashi. One was described as ‘most beautiful’ and in her last agony stripped off her clothes.57
The exact manner of the Rani’s death is not known for certain, nor who actually killed her. The British clearly took some trouble afterwards to find out. Three independent accounts written within a week of her death agree that she was mortally wounded as a result of a blow received during hand-to-hand fighting.58 As J. Henry Sylvester, who was present, wrote: ‘the gallant Queen of Jhansi fell from a carbine wound, and was carried to the rear, where she expired, and was burnt according to the custom of the Hindoos’. This is probably the truth although some local Indian ballads and songs have the Rani carried by faithful servants to the nearby monastery of Baba Gangadas and whispering to the Baba as he put the Ganges water in her mouth: ‘I leave my [son] Damodar in your charge.’
A small locked notebook was found among Lord Canning’s papers after his death (in 1862: like Lord Dalhousie, who died in 1860, he did not long survive his Indian experience). Canning had jotted down the following observations:59 ‘Ranee of Jhansi. Killed by a trooper of 8th Hussars, who was never discovered. Shot in the back, her horse baulked. She then fired at the man and he passed his sword through her … She used to wear gold anklets, and Sindia’s pearl necklace, plundered from Gwalior. (Sindia says its value is untold.) These when dying she distributed among the soldiery, when taken to die under the mango clump.’ (Sir Hugh Rose told the Duke of Cambridge, apropos ‘these ornaments’, that Tatya Tope had ‘intercepted’ the necklace.)60
Lord Canning went on: ‘The army mourned her for two days.’ But even in this terse report he paid tribute by implication to the Rani’s gallantry – and to her continued femininity: ‘The Infantry attacked the Cavalry for allowing her to be killed. The Cavalry said she would ride too far in front.’ He added: ‘Her tent was very coquettish.’
At the time, Sir Hugh Rose’s report back to the Duke of Cambridge in England confirmed the story of the Rani’s speedy immolation. After burning, she was buried ‘with great ceremony, under a tamarind tree under the Rock of Gwalior, where I saw her bones and ashes’. His own epitaph contained the generous tribute of one soldier to another: ‘The Ranee was remarkable for her bravery, cleverness and perseverance; her generosity to her Subordinates was unbounded. These qualities, combined with her rank, rendered her the most dangerous of all the rebel leaders.’ In its regimental history, the 8th Hussars, at whose hands the Rani probably died (the squadron commander was granted a VC for his conduct in the course of that charge) reiterated Sir Hugh Rose’s praise: ‘in her death the rebels lost their bravest and best military leader’.61
The Rani’s epitaph at the hands of her own people was to be nobler yet. The verdict of Colonel Malleson, who continued the work of Sir John Kaye in his own history of the mutiny published in 1896, proved correct: ‘Whatever her [the Rani’s] faults in British eyes may have been, her countrymen will ever remember that she was driven by ill-treatment into rebellion and that she lived and died for her country.’62
Nana Sahib, that master of ‘ferocity and slaughter’, escaped to Nepal where his legendary adventures as a wandering fakir inspired Jules Verne. Since his exact date of death was unknown, false Nanas were to reappear throughout the nineteenth century.63 The Rani’s adopted son Damodar Rao had a more prosaic but happier fate: he surrendered to the British in March 1860 and was subsequently granted a pension.* But the Rani’s reputation passed into the airy world of ballad and song. There are statues of the Rani – at Gwalior as well as Jhansi – and nowadays innumerable highly coloured pictorial representations of the celebrated Warrior Queen. Nevertheless, it is by the ballads that the Rani of Jhansi is preserved in the Indian folk memory. A study by P. C. Joshi – Folk Songs of ‘1857’ – published as part of a symposium in 1957 to mark the centenary,65 explains why: ‘The Rani’s noble example and supreme sacrifice have blazed the path for countless sons and daughters of India to join the freedom struggle. She is one of the immortals of our national movement and such songs have kept her alive in our memory.’
The song of joy, the song of freedom rises
In every corner of the land this song is heard
Here fought Lakshmi Bai and Peshwa Nana …66
Some of these songs have a fairy-tale quality: the Rani moulds her army from clay and stones, she makes swords from mere wood. Others dwell on the loyalty of her followers: the chief gunner guarding the main gates of Jhansi who tells his companion that ‘we have to die one day, brother’ and ‘I shall choose today, For our Queen I shall lay down my life’. The old names ride again, but in a different guise. Here is ‘Proud Hugh Rose’ begging for ‘one pot of water’ to quench his thirst. The heroism of the Rani is however a constant element:
Old India was filled again with the bloom of youth …
wrote Subhadra Kumari Chauhan,
The old sword flashed once more in fifty-seven
This is the story we have heard
From the Bundelas who worship Shiva
The Rani of Jhansi fought valorously and well.
One popular ballad in particular calls attention to the salient characteristic of a heroine who, like Boadicea, will never be forgotten by her own people: that, for all the apparent weakness of her sex, she was in fact in courage the equivalent of any hero:
How valiantly like a man fought she,
The Rani of Jhansi
On every parapet a gun she set
Raining fire of hell,
How well like a man fought the Rani of Jhansi
How valiantly and well!