This is the name of Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi, a girl-widow, twenty years of age, who donned a man’s dress and came out to lead her people against the British.* Many a story is told of her spirit and ability and undaunted courage. Even the English general who opposed her has called her the “best and bravest” of the rebel leaders.* She died while fighting.
The Revolt of 1857-58 was the last flicker of feudal India. It ended many things. It ended the line of the Great Moghal, for Bahadur Shah’s two sons* and a grandson were shot down in cold blood, without any reason or provocation, by an English officer, Hodson, as he was carrying them away to Delhi. Thus, ignominiously, ended the line of Timur* and Babar and Akbar.
The Revolt also put an end to the rule of the East India Company in India. The British Government now took direct charge, and the British Governor-General blossomed out into a Viceroy. Nineteen years later, in 1877, the Queen of England took the title of “Kaiser-i-Hind”, the old title of the Caesars and of the Byzantine Empire, adapted to India. The Moghal dynasty was no more. But the spirit and even symbols of autocracy remained, and another Great Moghal sat in England.
* Lakshmi Bai was Queen of Jhansi from 1843 to 1853, as wife of Maharaja Gangadhar Rao. Jhansi was a small city-state located in what is now the southwest corner of Uttar Pradesh in northern India.
* This was Field Marshal Hugh Henry Rose (1801-1885), 1st Baron Strathnairn. “Rani Laxmibai is personable, clever and beautiful” he is recorded as saying. “Above it, she is the most dangerous of all Indian leaders.” That being the case, it might have been wiser to leave Jhansi in her capable hands.
* This should read ‘two of Bahadur Shah’s sons’, since he had many sons by many women though he had only one wife, Zeenat Mahal (1823-1886). When he went into exile after the Mutiny, two of his surviving sons and his wife went with him. The rebels had themselves treated him very badly, enacting their own policies in his name; but the British took a high-minded line with him which their own actions did not come close to justifying.
* Timur (1336-1405) is the Tamerlane of English literature, a ferocious fourteenth-century warlord from Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan, who ravaged India and whose descendants sat on the throne of Delhi. See posts tagged Timur (Tamerlane).
