Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  One legend concerns Lakshmi Bai’s actual wedding day. When the priest – according to tradition – tied the ends of her various gowns together, the bride shocked those present with her boldness. ‘Make the knot very firm’, she said. But whatever the state of the knot, the new Rani did not succeed in presenting Gangadhar Rao with an heir, although a baby boy was said to have died at the age of three months. Then in 1853 Gangadhar Rao fell seriously ill. In the absence of an existing heir, one was adopted. Damodar Rao, as he became known, was five years old: a descendant of Gangadhar’s grandfather and thus a member of the royal family.

  The ruler now proceeded to dictate his will and have it read aloud to Major Ellis, the British Political Agent in Jhansi: ‘Should I not survive, I trust that in consideration of the fidelity I have evinced towards the British government, favour may be shown to this child and that my widow during her lifetime may be considered the Regent of the State (Malika) and mother of this child, and that she may not be molested in any way.’ Major Ellis replied that he would do everything possible to bring this about. The substance of this will was then repeated in a letter to Major Malcolm, the Political Agent for Gwalior and the Bundelkhand, in which Gangadhar Rao referred once more to that treaty which had guaranteed the throne of Jhansi to Ramachandra Rao ‘and his heirs and successors’.14

  Gangadhar Rao died on 21 November 1853. Not long afterwards the Governor-General of India, the Marquess of Dalhousie, announced that under the policy of ‘lapse’, Jhansi was to be annexed by the British government. That is, since Gangadhar Rao had left no heir or successor – adoption did not count – the state of Jhansi reverted by treaty to the East India Company (no longer an independent corporation but largely under governmental control).

  The only possible defence of Dalhousie’s ‘policy of lapse’, in this instance, is that of expediency, if defence it be. Certainly expediency had long been the watchword of the East India Company when the possibility of annexation arose; to that extent it could be argued that Dalhousie was only implementing a policy which others had conceived.15 But if Dalhousie’s policy had its roots in the past, it was also to cast its black shadow upon the future.

  Dalhousie had already annexed Satara in 1848, the year of his arrival in India, on the same grounds of ‘lapse’ (once again there was the question of an adopted heir). This move too had aroused deep resentment – and also bewilderment. The resentment was due to the unfair prohibition of a practice – adoption – allowed by Hindu law. The bewilderment sprang from the known religious significance of adoption in the Hindu religion. The sacrifices of a son were an essential duty, if the father was not to be condemned to punishment – the hell called Put – after death. But an adopted son could perform these vital sacrifices equally with a natural one.

  Colonel, later Major-General Sir John Low, who had been Political Agent at Gwalior and Lucknow, reported in his memoirs this general anguish which followed the annexation of Satara. ‘What crime did the late Rajah commit that his country should be seized by the Company?’ was the one question which every Indian put to him.16 Similarly in Jhansi in 1853 little Damodar Rao was unarguably the late ruler’s ‘son’ in Hindu law; as such he was surely his ‘successor’ under the terms of the earlier treaty. To regard him otherwise was ‘so ungenerous, and being so ungenerous, so unwise’. These were the terms which would be used by the distinguished British military historian Sir John Kaye (who worked for the East India Company and later the India Office) in his History of the Sepoy War in India 1857–1858, published in 1880.17 Significantly, Dalhousie’s wiser successor Lord Canning – derisively nicknamed ‘Clemency’ at the time, a name he has since borne with honour in the roll of history – explicitly stressed the Indian rulers’ right of adoption at his healing durbar of 1859.18

  Meanwhile in 1856, the year of his own departure from India, Dalhousie would go further and annex the much larger state of Oudh: as early as 1848 he had described it as being ‘on the highroad to be taken under our management’. On this occasion, the pretext was not the lack of heirs to the Nawab – there was an heir – but the Nawab’s numerous transgressions against his subjects. It was a rather more sympathetic excuse. Nevertheless an Indian ruler had once again been removed. A leading Indian historian of the events of 1857 has judged Dalhousie’s policy of annexation as one of the main contributory facts to the rebellion and ‘perhaps the decisive one’.19

  We return to Lakshmi Bai, she who had expected to rule Jhansi during the boyhood of Damodar Rao and was now consigned to the unenviable fate of a childless Hindu widow. Was she perhaps inadequate to the task of the regency, at least in the view of the British? But only a week after Gangadhar Rao’s death, the Political Agent Major Malcolm wrote that his widow, ‘in whose hands he has expressed a wish that the government should be placed during her lifetime, is a woman highly respected and esteemed, and I believe fully capable of doing justice to such a charge’. Other witnesses confirm that the Rani comported herself as ‘a brave-minded woman had to do in her position’, being in herself ‘quite capable of discussing her affairs with a Committee or a government’.20

  Moreover her behaviour was perfectly discreet: she kept purdah where the British were concerned, although not at home (later she would indeed encourage women to take part in the defence of Jhansi). Her life was disciplined in the extreme: she would rise at 3 a.m., supervise work in the political and military offices, and then at her court listen to religious readings. One is reminded indeed of the application and austerity of another female ruler called from a secluded life to greatness: Isabella of Spain.

  All this time, the Rani was hoping – even perhaps expecting – that the terms of Gangadhar Rao’s will would be allowed to prevail. Two petitions appealing against Dalhousie’s decision were sent, in late 1853 and early 1854, the Rani herself being credited with composing them.21 Attention was drawn to the position of the adopted son in the Hindu religion, his ability to make sacrifices on behalf of his late father, equal to that of a natural son. In the second petition, the difference between ‘heirs’ and ‘successors’ in the original treaty was argued; for if Damodar Rao was not one, he was certainly the other. It was significant of the justice of the Rani’s case that Major Ellis, the Political Agent at Jhansi, himself endorsed her petition. Unfortunately – or possibly due to malevolence – this vital letter was not forwarded to Dalhousie. For Major Malcolm, who did not choose to forward it, now believed the petition should be refused. Dalhousie’s decision was dated 27 February 1854. Adoption, he considered, was valid only in the case of sovereign princes, and he held firmly to Jhansi’s dependent status (an argument which has since been convincingly demolished by Indian writers).

  When the document was read to the Rani on 15 March 1854, she cried out loudly: ‘Mera Jhansi Nahin Denge.’ (I will not give up my Jhansi.) Then she shut herself away, refusing food or water. But if the Rani despaired, it was only a temporary state. With remarkable pertinacity, she continued to argue her cause, employing a British counsel, John Lang, who advised her to appeal to London. It was not until 1854 that the appeal too was turned down. At Malcolm’s suggestion, the Rani was granted a pension of five thousand rupees monthly from the Treasury at Jhansi; the palace and the state jewels and funds which her husband had willed to her were also to be handed over. Even at this point, the British administration managed to arouse further resentment: with what Sir John Kaye described as ‘extraordinary meanness’, it was now laid down that the Rani should pay her husband’s debts before receiving her emoluments.22

  So the Rani, with no other choice before her, fell back for the next three years into private life. Dalhousie left India. He once told a correspondent in England – whom he termed his ‘safety valve’ – of his feelings about the great subcontinent he ruled: ‘I don’t deny that I detest the country and many of the people in it. I don’t proclaim it; but I don’t doubt that my face does not conceal it from those I have to do with.’ It was not likely that such a man – one who would come ou
t of his dying coma in order to learn the score in the Eton and Harrow cricket match – would spare much thought for the feelings or resolves of an obscure Hindu widow.23

  Jhansi itself, like its Rani, was judged unimportant for the future. Its prosperity inevitably declined with the disappearance of the princely court. Another brisk British judgement from the centre was the discontinuance of the state revenues paid to the Temple of Lakshmi, just outside the city; although once again Major Ellis, the man on the spot, had suggested that the practice should be maintained. As to the garrison of such an important place, a few hundred soldiers were surely all that were necessary nowadays. A safe farewell could be bidden to the thousands of troops who had once added to the lustre of Jhansi’s princely ruler – could it not?

  In 1855, the year before Lord Canning arrived in India to replace Dalhousie, he gave a speech in London to the Court of Directors of the East India Company. It contained this remarkably prophetic passage: ‘We must not forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a cloud may arise, at first no bigger than a man’s hand, but which growing bigger and bigger, may at last threaten to overwhelm us with ruin.’24 By the summer of 1857, that cloud had indeed arisen.

  The causes of the Indian Rebellion – or Mutiny – are not the subject of the present work; suffice it to say that on the Indian side, the case of the Rani of Jhansi, the mixture of injustice, insensitivity and indifference displayed by the British administration towards entrenched Indian customs and interests, might perhaps stand as a microcosm of the whole. On the British side, the case of Jhansi itself, the unexpected uprising of supposedly loyal troops, coupled with the treacherous slaughter of British women and children (as well as soldiers and officials) might equally stand for what was most dreadful in India wherever the Mutiny occurred.

  Canning’s words were prophetic. They had not however prepared him for the event itself. In April 1857 Lady Canning was happily telling Queen Victoria of the ‘ridiculous stories’ being circulated that the Governor-General had signed a bond saying that he would make all the Indians into Christians within three years. She added that there was ‘an odd mysterious thing going on, still unexplained’, by which she referred to the circulation of some native chupatties or biscuits from district to district (a strange episode whose precise relevance to the events of 1857 – were the chupatties coded signals? – has never been totally explained). Only five months later Queen Victoria would write in her turn to the King of the Belgians, ‘we are in sad anxiety about India, which engrosses all our attention’; although even now, characteristically, she spared a thought for the feelings of her protégé, the dispossessed Indian Prince Duleep Singh, who had been virtually raised with her own sons: ‘What can it be for him to hear his fellow countrymen called fiends and monsters?’25

  In keeping with its reputation for pro-British tranquillity, Jhansi was not in the forefront of the rebellion. As late as 18 May, following the first weeks of disruption elsewhere, Captain Skene, the Political and Administrative Officer of Jhansi, was able to write, ‘I do not think there is any cause for alarm about this neighbourhood.’26 It was not until 4 June that some of the garrison at Jhansi (drawn from the Twelfth Bengal Native Infantry and the Fourteenth Irregular Cavalry and commanded by a Captain Gordon) actually mutinied. Under a rebel sergeant, Gurbash Singh, they invaded the Star Fort; in the battle to seize it, they killed all the British officers they found there except a Lieutenant Taylor, who, despite being badly wounded, managed to escape to the City Fort. This was the place appointed by Captain Skene for some British and Eurasians in Jhansi – some sixty people all told, over half of them women and children – to take refuge.

  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 of 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 protecti
on. 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 Commissioner 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’.