This Above alL
Story of the valiant queen
Khushwant Singh

Some years ago, I spent two days and nights at Orchha in Madhya Pradesh. It is a small town comprising mainly a fort-palace complex on side of river Betwa and a market built round a square with temples and small shops on the other. It is redolent with myth and legend of historic romances. The crystal-clear Betwa runs through jungles past Jhansi on its way to joining the Yamuna. I am tempted to say if you haven’t seen Orchha you haven’t seen India.

On my way back, I had a whole day to spend in Jhansi before catching the evening train to Delhi. All I knew about Jhansi was that Rani Lakshmi Bai, who fought a losing battle against British rapacity, ruled over it for many years till the sepoy mutiny of 1857 which Pandit Nehru and other patriots call the First war of Independence. They made Lakshmi Bai its valiant lead er in Central India. Netaji Subhas Bose raised a regiment of his Indian National Army named after her. During British rule it became an important cantonment with a sizeable community of Anglo-Indians. John Naster’s novel Bhowani Junction was later made into a film. He based his work of fiction on Jhansi.

Jaishree Misra

I went on a guided tour of the town. The highpoint was the castle-cum-palace on top of a hill in which Lakshmi Bai had spent her married life and as a widow. There is little left of the palace but the walls are intact. I was shown the spot on the ramparts from where she is said to have jumped on horseback to a mound below and escaped. It gave a splendid bird’s eyeview of the cantonment and cluster of bazaars below.

One look convinced me that story of her escape could not be true: a fall from that height would have killed both rider and horse. I was eager to know how she had eluded the British encirclement to continue the fight for freedom and how she died. I was eager to read what Jaishree Misra had to say about it in her recently published novel Rani (Penguin).

Jaishree Misra lives in London and works for the BBC. She researched material available in England and the National Archives in Delhi. She made several visits to Jhansi and Orchha to get a feel of these places. She takes no liberties with historical facts or personalities but fills in the gaps using her own imagination. She weaves a fascinating tale of fact and fiction of the Rani’s life. She describes it as a romantic novel.

The story begins with Lakshmi Bai’s childhood in Banaras in the household of the exiled Peshwa. Besides many other sbjects, she learns to speak and write English. At 14 she is married off to the widowed Raja of Jhansi who is in his mid-forties. It is a happy marriage shorn of sex for over 10 years. As her husband begins to turn senile, she takes over the administration of the state, holding court, training her troops and dealing with the British representative Captain Robert Ellis, a handsome bachelor. She rides out every early morning and meets Ellis who comes from his cantonment. They fall in love. She bears a son to her husband who dies after a few months. She adopts a boy and proclaims him as heir apparent. Ellis has the unpleasant duty of informing her that powers that be in Calcutta or London will not accept adoption and Jhansi, like many other princely states will lapse and be absorbed as British territory. Disgusted with British hunger for an Indian empire, Ellis resigns his commission and returns to England.

The Sepoy Mutiny breaks out in 1857 — first at Barrackpore, then Meerut. It spreads across the Indo-Gangetic plain. Rulers of erstwhile Indian states, including Bahadur Shah Zafar, nominal Mughal Emperor, the Peshwa in Uttar Pradesh, Begum Hazrat Mahal of Avadh in Lucknow, Nana Phadnavis, Tantia Topi and Lakshmi Bai in Jhansi join the rebels. Terrible atrocities take place in which women and children who were promised safety are butchered in cold blood.

The British do worse by burning down whole villages, bayoneting men and women or hanging men at random. One thing is clear that motives of the populace who threw in their lot with rebellious sepoys were different from the princelays who joined them. For the latter, it was not patriotism but property.

These are the bare bones of Jaishree Misra’s Rani. She fleshes out her tale of tragedy with vivid descriptions of the countryside, profiles of principal characters and makes her narrative highly readable. Lakshmi Bai did not jump from ramparts of her fort on horseback but found her way out through a subterranean passage. She fell in battle sword in hand. Rani is excellent material for a Bollywood film.

In 1563, A.P. Cessare Cederici left his native Venice "very desirous to see eastern parts of the world." Four years later he arrived in Vijayanagar. He spent three years in India, mainly in Portuguese possession of Goa and Mangalore and Cochin. Besides noting lawlessness created by gangs of robbers, he gave a vivid account of Sati.

He writes: "When there is any nobleman or woman dead, they burn their bodies, and if a married man die, his wife must burn herself alive for the love of her husband and with the body of her husband. As in other parts of India where this savage custom prevailed, the widow decked herself in bridal attire and was taken in procession to the husband’s funeral pyre. And when dieth any great man, his wife and his slaves with whom he hath carried copulation burn themselves together with him."

(From Beyond the Three Seas. Ed M.H. Fisher, Random House)

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