India's warrior queen of 1857 first fought the British with lawyers and letters
Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi is remembered as a sword-wielding rebel who died in battle in 1858. Before any fighting, she spent years challenging Britain on paper, hiring an Australian lawyer and citing old treaties to save her adopted son's throne. Even her birth year is disputed, and much of her girlhood is legend.
She was born Manikarnika Tambe in Varanasi, daughter of a Brahmin in service to Maratha nobility. British sources favoured 1827 for her birth and Indian sources 1835; the historians Tapti Roy and Rudrangshu Mukherjee argue for between 1828 and 1830. Popular stories claim that after losing her mother at four she learned riding, swordplay and even firearms alongside boys at the court in Bithur, but these tales are uncorroborated. Little was written down about her before 1857.
She married Gangadhar Rao, the childless raja of Jhansi, taking the name Lakshmibai after the goddess Lakshmi. Their son, born in 1851, died within months. On his deathbed in November 1853 the raja adopted a five-year-old relative, renamed Damodar Rao, and asked the East India Company to accept him as heir with the Rani as regent. Governor-General Lord Dalhousie instead applied the doctrine of lapse, under which Hindu states without a natural heir were absorbed.
The Rani's response was legal. She engaged the Australian lawyer John Lang, courted a sympathetic officer, Major Ellis, and sent repeated appeals invoking treaties of 1803, 1817 and 1842 and Hindu scriptural tradition. Dalhousie rejected them without answering her arguments, and Jhansi passed to the Company in May 1854. She received a pension but lost the fort, and quarrels followed over debts, a temple and the lifting of a ban on slaughtering cattle.
When Indian troops at Jhansi rebelled in June 1857, most of the British in the town were killed after surrendering. Whether she had any part remains contested; she wrote that the mutineers had coerced her. The British ultimately treated her as an enemy. Major General Hugh Rose captured Jhansi in the spring of 1858, she escaped on horseback, and after defeat at Kalpi she died fighting at Gwalior on 18 June 1858. Indian nationalists made her a heroine, though Dalit communities tend to view her negatively.
Source: Rani of Jhansi
