{"id":105720,"date":"2026-11-05T05:00:23","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T10:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=105720"},"modified":"2026-11-05T10:53:38","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T15:53:38","slug":"lakshmibai-rani-of-jhansi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/lakshmibai-rani-of-jhansi\/","title":{"rendered":"Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi – “the Indian Mutiny had produced but one man, and that man was a woman”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first encountered the name of Rani Lakshmibai in the fictional exploits of Sir Harry Flashman, in Flashman in the Great Game<\/em>. Fraser’s portrayal of the Rani certainly left me with the sense that she was one of the best leaders of the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Robert Lyman<\/a> is currently touring some of the significant locations of the Mutiny — restyled by Hindu nationalists the “First War of Independence” two generations later — including Jhansi:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The wall of Jhansi Fort over which the Rani escaped, with her horse, on 4th April 1858.<\/em>
Photo by Dr. Robert Lyman<\/p><\/div>\n

I am currently enjoying a perambulation with Sampan across the battlefields of 1857 and 1858, a series of unplanned but probably predictable events in which a group of disaffected members of the Bengal Army at Meerut precipitated a rebellion against the British East India Company (EIC) across the Gangetic Plain (mainly). This rebellion saw as many as 300,000 people take up arms against the Company. The story is far less well known now in the UK than it once was, although in India what began as a mutiny of aggrieved high class Brahmin sepoys is universally considered to be a war of nationalism, the “First War of Independence”. It is taught to all, and embraced as a core part of being a modern Indian. The term was first used by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his 1909 book The Indian War of Independence<\/em>, reframing the mutiny into a planned, national struggle against British rule. Savarkar was something of a Hindu ideologue, developing the nationalist political ideology of Hindutva in his 1923 pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva<\/em>, written while a prisoner of the government. This is a subject well known to current observers of the Indian political scene. <\/p>\n

One of the most fascinating characters to emerge on the rebel side of the conflict was Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi. I have followed her story for many years, and enjoyed visiting her fort, and palace, at Jhansi. The Rani was one of the first state leaders to decide to side with the rebels. She had every reason to be angry with the EIC. In 1854 Jhansi had suffered from Governor General Lord Dalhousie’s notorious “Doctrine of Lapse” and the old feudal kingdom transferred to the ownership of the Company. This was a policy that insisted that every state without a biological heir (an adopted heir wouldn’t cut it) would “lapse” to the EIC. The Rani’s husband died without leaving a surviving heir and because Dalhousie did not accept the rights of the adopted son the ownership of Jhansi accordingly transferred to the Company. Outrageous? Certainly. It challenged not only accepted Mughal practice, but also the old Hindu law that allowed a ruler to appoint an heir. Neither cut much ice with the EIC. The fact that Dalhousie may have wished to avoid uncertainty or even fratricide or civil war following the death of an heirless feudal leader did not remove the fact that this bureaucratic mechanism to seize power (and therefore income) was a ruthless stratagem for power, storing up (along with the annexation of Oudh, and others) a level of resentment that would one day burst into flames of rebellion and war. In 1854 Lakshmibai thus lost the kingdom in exchange for an EIC pension, losing any chance of being able to hand Jhansi over to an heir of her choosing. She had plenty to be aggrieved about, therefore, and in the recovery of her feudal privileges one can understand her motivation for agreeing first to join the rebellion and then to take a leading role in military opposition to Company rule. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update<\/strong>: I’m told it’s a good thing to actually include the URL<\/a> to the content … who knew?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first encountered the name of Rani Lakshmibai in the fictional exploits of Sir Harry Flashman, in Flashman in the Great Game. Fraser’s portrayal of the Rani certainly left me with the sense that she was one of the best leaders of the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Robert Lyman is currently touring some of the significant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,7,23,5],"tags":[31,1011,1149,1272,838,47,1605],"class_list":["post-105720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","category-india","category-military","tag-army","tag-colonialism","tag-eastindiacompany","tag-feudalism","tag-hinduism","tag-islam","tag-mughalempire"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-rva","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105720"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105741,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105720\/revisions\/105741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}