The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  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 on 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 Commander 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 taken 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 similarly 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 his ‘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 prot
ect 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.