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 then 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 similar 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 this ‘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 protect 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.
A typical comment was that of Ellen C. Clayton (author of Celebrated Women, Notable Women, etc.) in her omnibus study Female Warriors published in 1879, the year before Sir John’s own more judicious work: ‘All agreed as to the extreme licentiousness and immorality of her [the Rani’s] habits; and the rooms in her palace are said to have been hung with pictures “such as pleased Tiberius at Capri” ’ – the delicate Victorian allusion is to pornographic art, although the Rani’s keen detractor Lowe, who actually saw her apartments, mentioned no such titillatory detail in his own full description. One of the most damning – but equally quite unsupported – judgements was that of George W. Forrest in A History of the Indian Mutiny, published between 1904 and 1912, since his former position as the Director of Records for the government of India naturally carried weight. Picking eagerly on the phrase ‘the Jezebel of India’, he wrote that ‘to speak of her [the Rani], as some have done, as “The Indian Joan of Arc” is indeed a libel on the fair name of the Maid of Orleans’. (Given Forrest’s nationality, a somewhat self-righteous comment in any case.)49
He who had so described her – Sir Hugh Rose in two letters back to his royal Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Cambridge – and had just spared her life, was granted no similar mercy by the lady in question. He watched the Rani first firing in his direction and then peering through a telescope to see what harm she had done. ‘Like the 3rd Europeans and the 86th she requires a good deal of drilling,’ commented Rose sardonically, ‘nobody having been able to discover where the Ranee’s shot went.’50 But these days of mutual observation and raining fire could not last forever. The British assault upon Jhansi, which was to be both fierce and final, took place on 3 April. It may have been prompted by knowledge of a weakness in the defence supplied from inside: all accounts agree that the Rani herself was in the thick of the fighting.
At some point that night, however, the Rani escaped with about four followers, including her father. It is sometimes supposed that Rose laid a trap for her by allowing her to escape: but if there was a trap, she certainly eluded that too.51 Riding hard, outdistancing her pursuers, in particular one Lieutenant Bowker, she succeeded by stages in reaching the fortress of Kalpi. She had travelled over one hundred miles in twenty-four hours. Here were congregated, among Indian rulers who had joined the rebels, not only Nana Sahib but the Nana’s nephew, Pandurang Rao, known as Rao Sahib, as well as Tatya Tope.
Lieutenant Bowker’s own story has him perceiving the Rani aloft on her celebrated grey (or white) horse and pursuing her with Rose’s permission. A shot – possibly but not certainly fired by the Rani herself – disabled him, and so ‘the lady escaped for the time being’. Indian sources have the Rani wounding the Lieutenant in a sword fight at Bhander, a small village where she stopped for food; some of these accounts take on already the heady quality of incantation, as in this one written by a barrister and published in Calcutta in 1930: ‘But Lakshmi, put your horse now into a gallop. For Lieutenant Bowker is galloping behind, followed by select horsemen, in order to capture you. And you, O Horse, fortunate on account of the sacred treasure you carry, gallop on!… The dawn has now broken. So, heroic goddess, flying all night on the wings of the wind, test thee!’52
There can be no question that Lakshmi Bai was right to escape both from her own point of view and that of her cause. The vengeance taken in Jhansi was frightful by any standards; some British historians have suggested that while four to five thousand died in battle, the civilians were spared. But Vishnu Godse, a priest from Bombay who was present, recalled four days of fire, pillage, murder and looting without distinction; it was difficult to breathe, he wrote, for the stink of burning flesh. Lowe’s words, that the enemy were slain in their ‘puffed up thousands … such was the retribution meted out to this Jezebel Ranee and her people …’ do not suggest there was much of a distinction between soldiers and civilians.53
In his description of the vanished Rani’s personal apartments, however, Lowe dipped his pen into the ink of Sir Walter Scott, as he described the palace doors inlaid with plate-glass, mirrors, chandeliers, velvet and satin beds, bedsteads with silver feet, velvet cushioned chairs, brazen throne, gold- and silver-handled tulwars, spears, silver bird cages, ivory footstools, dozens of shawls, silver candlesticks ‘and a thousand other things such as a luxurious woman would have’ (although there is no mention of pictures ‘such as pleased Tiberius’). All these accoutrements, as well as the works of Horace, Longfellow and Browning said to have belonged to the dead officers, ‘lay here and there in chaotic confusion in every part of the building’. ‘The soldiery went to and fro tramping over and through these things and kicking them about as they would any heap of rubbish’, wrote Lowe, ‘until order
was somewhat restored.’ Meanwhile the rebels fought like tigers ‘so the bayonetting went on till after sunset’. The fate of the Rani might not have been so summary as that of her luxurious belongings but it is difficult to believe she would in the end have fared much better.54
While the Union Jack flew once more over Jhansi, in Kalpi, in contrast, the Rani was given an honoured reception by Rao Sahib, with a special parade of his soldiers. The next engagement which followed, that of Kalpi itself, to which Sir Hugh Rose and his army patiently slogged their way in heat so great that big tears trickled down the cheeks of the patient elephants and the very camels groaned. It is sometimes suggested that if Rao Sahib had given the command to the Rani, not to Tatya Tope, the result of the battle – another total defeat for the Indians – might have been different.55 Another expression of the general admiration for the Rani is the widespread belief that she was responsible, as ‘their most determined, spirited and influential head’, for the Indians’ next plan, one of extreme daring, to seize the fortress of Gwalior (although Tatya Tope, with contacts inside Gwalior, is perhaps a more likely author).56 As a manoeuvre it was certainly remarkably successful, at a time when the rebel fortunes were badly in need of some coup to rally them. Gwalior was seized, and there the coronation of Rao Sahib took place. From the great regalia of Scindia, which resided in the Treasury at Gwalior, the Rani was granted by Rao Sahib a fabulous pearl necklace. Like the torc of Boadicea, it was to prove an ornament of ritual significance.
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