Rani Lakshmibai

Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, was the widowed queen of a small Maratha-ruled state in central India who became one of the leading figures of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. After the British East India Company annexed Jhansi on her husband's death, she ruled it again during the rising, defended it against a British siege in 1858 and died fighting near Gwalior a few months later. Few facts of her early life are certain, but her story became one of the most powerful legends of Indian nationalism.

She was born Manikarnika Tambe in Varanasi, the daughter of Moropant Tambe, a Marathi Brahmin in the service of the brother of Baji Rao II, the last peshwa of the Maratha Empire, whom the British had deposed in 1818. Her birth year is uncertain: British sources leaned towards 1827, many Indian accounts give 1835, and the historians Tapti Roy and Rudrangshu Mukherjee place it between about 1828 and 1830. Her mother died when she was about four, and her father moved to Baji Rao's exile court at Bithur, near Kanpur. Popular tradition says she grew up there riding, fencing and studying alongside boys, among them Nana Sahib, Baji Rao's adopted son, and Tatya Tope, later rebel leaders. These stories are plausible but uncorroborated.

In 1842 she married Gangadhar Rao, the much older raja of Jhansi, and took the name Lakshmibai, after the goddess Lakshmi. Jhansi was a small state in Bundelkhand that had been under British protection since 1817. A son born in 1851 died within months. On his deathbed in November 1853, Gangadhar Rao adopted a five-year-old relative, renamed Damodar Rao, and asked the Company to recognise him as heir with the Rani as regent.

The governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, was then applying what became known as the doctrine of lapse, under which a dependent Hindu state whose ruler died without a natural heir passed to the Company. He refused to recognise the adoption and Jhansi was annexed in 1854. The Rani protested vigorously and with legal skill, hiring a lawyer, John Lang, and citing earlier treaties and Hindu law in a series of petitions. They were rejected. She was given a pension, allowed to keep her palace in the town but not the fort, and held liable for her husband's debts. Resentment in Jhansi was increased when the British lifted the local ban on cattle slaughter.

In May 1857 Indian soldiers of the Company's army mutinied at Meerut, and the rising spread quickly across northern India, with rebels proclaiming the aged Mughal emperor in Delhi as their sovereign. In early June the troops at Jhansi rose, and the British officials and their families, some sixty people, took refuge in the fort. On 8 June they surrendered on a promise of safe conduct and were almost all killed.

The Rani's part in the massacre has been argued over ever since. Some contemporary British accounts accused her of encouraging the mutineers or of offering false promises of safety; others, including the local commissioner, accepted her own statement that the soldiers had threatened her and that she could do nothing. The official inquiry reached no firm conclusion, and historians still disagree; items belonging to the victims were later found in her palace, but no reliable evidence shows that she ordered the killings.

After the mutineers left for Delhi, the Rani took over the government of Jhansi, with the commissioner's written authority to rule until the British returned. She collected taxes, raised troops and cast cannon, and defeated a rival claimant and the neighbouring states of Orchha and Datia, which tried to partition Jhansi. Through the autumn she kept writing to the British, but her appeals for help went unanswered, and they came to regard her as a rebel leader.

In early 1858 Major General Hugh Rose's Central India Field Force advanced on Jhansi, and the siege began on 22 March. The Rani directed the defence from the fort and walls. When Tatya Tope approached with a large relief army, Rose detached part of his force and defeated it on the Betwa river on 1 April. Two days later the British stormed the town, and in the street fighting that followed some thousands of defenders and inhabitants were killed. During the night of 4 April the Rani escaped from the fort with a small escort, her adopted son tied to her, and rode to the rebel base at Kalpi, more than 100 miles away. The story that she leapt from the fort walls on horseback is a legend.

At Kalpi she joined Tatya Tope and Rao Sahib, Nana Sahib's nephew, but the rebel command went to Tatya Tope, and her advice on tactics was often ignored. Rose defeated them at Kunch and then near Kalpi in May. The rebel leaders then marched on Gwalior, whose ruler was loyal to the British; his troops went over to the rebels, and at the start of June the rebels occupied the city and its great fort.

Rose arrived in mid-June. On 17 June the Rani was leading cavalry at Kotah-ki-Serai, south-east of Gwalior, when a charge by British hussars broke her force. Accounts of exactly how she died differ, but all agree that she was killed fighting, on 17 or 18 June 1858; her followers are said to have cremated her body. Gwalior fell days later. Rose wrote that she was the most dangerous of the rebel leaders and, in his report, "the best and bravest". Tatya Tope was captured and hanged in 1859. The rebellion led the British Crown to take over from the Company, beginning the British Raj under Queen Victoria.

Because so little is firmly known, Lakshmibai's life was easily reshaped into legend in ballads and folk tales, which linked her to Hindu goddesses such as Durga. For the Indian independence movement she became a heroine to stand beside Shivaji, and Subhadra Kumari Chauhan's Hindi poem "Jhansi ki Rani" of 1930 became one of the best-known poems in India. In the Second World War Subhas Chandra Bose named the women's regiment of his Indian National Army after her. Streets, colleges and statues across India honour her, and she has been portrayed in many novels and films.

Historians stress how much of the popular story rests on later tradition, and that her conduct for much of 1857 was cautious, combining resistance with attempts to reach terms with the British. Her memory has also been contested within India: some Dalit writers have promoted Jhalkaribai, a woman of lower caste said to have fought beside her, as a counterweight to a story they see as celebrating the upper castes. Whatever the details, her refusal to accept the annexation of Jhansi and her death in battle made her the best-remembered figure of the rebellion of 1857.