the Rani of Jhansi Gender, History, and Fable in India

Harleen Singh Brandeis University Cambridge House, 4381/4 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi 110002, India Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107042803 © Harleen Singh 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in India A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Singh, Harleen. The Rani of Jhansi : gender, history and fable in India / Harleen Singh. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-04280-3 (hardback) 1. Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, 1828-1858--Military leadership. 2. India--History--Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-1858--Historiography. 3. Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, 1828-1858--In literature. 4. Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, 1828-1858--In motion pictures. 5. Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, 1828-1858--Legends. 6. Women revolutionaries--India--Biography. 7. Masculinity--Political aspects--India--History. 8. Nationalism--India--History. 9. India--Colonization--History. 10. India--History--British occupation, 1765-1947. I. Title. DS475.2.L34S55 2014 954.03’17--dc23 [B] 2014003924

ISBN 978-1-107-04280-3 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Acknowledgements iii

This book is dedicated to my mother, Purnima Singh (1954–1980), whose rebellion ended too soon, and to my four-year-old daughter, Meher Rai, whose rebellion has begun much earlier than expected. iv Acknowledgements Acknowledgementsâv

Contents

List of Figures vii Acknowledgements ix I. Introduction 1 II. Enslaving Masculinity: Rape Scripts and the Erotics of Power 33 III. India’s Aryan Queen: Colonial Ambivalence and Race in the Mutiny 67 IV. Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 95 V. Unmaking the Nationalist Archive: Gender and 135 Dalit Historiography Afterword 163 Bibliography 169 Index 181 vi Acknowledgements Acknowledgements vii

List of Figures

1. Congress Party poster from 2007 4 2. Examples of cover art from books on the Rani of Jhansi 5 3. Illustration from Lachmi Bai of Jhansi: The Jeanne D’Arc of 75 India (1901) 4. Mehtab and Sohrab Modi in Jhansi ki Rani (1953) 123 5. Cover art from the Amar Chitra Katha series comic Rani of Jhansi 163

Acknowledgements

y schoolteachers in India, Mrs Jaspreet Grewal and the late Mrs Biba MBakshi, nurtured my early forays into literature, history, and writing— encouraged me to speak up when most times I was being told to quiet down. I was fortunate to receive a university education in the United States. Professor Cheryl Mares continues to inspire me with the quality of her teaching and curiosity. I thank her here for never allowing me to turn in work that was not revised and rethought. She had a higher ambition for me than I had for myself, and my debt to her can never be repaid. My professors and lifelong friends Ella Magruder and Mark Magruder ensured my equal attention to the body in their dance courses. They gave me a home, sage advice, and taught me what it meant to live with love and joy. I could not have made it through college without them. My dissertation advisor, Professor Rosemary Marangoly George, who tragically passed away in 2013, envisioned the book in my research and writing long before I could. She was gently stern and kept me focused when distractions abounded. I learnt from her scholarship, her pedagogy, and from her indefatigable spirit; I remember her with a deep regard and warmth. In the Literature Department at UCSD, Lisa Lowe, J. Jack Halberstam, Masao Miyoshi, Vicente Rafael, and Kathryn Shevlow provided seminars and conversations that have greatly informed my work. Inderpal Grewal has been a mentor and friend for many years, who cannot be thanked enough for the conversations in Punjabi and for a meaningful solidarity. Vasudha Dalmia graciously shared her vast knowledge of Hindi literature and took a special interest in my work. My years at Brandeis University have been filled with warmth and collegiality in the department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature. Robin Feuer Miller and Stephen Dowden protected and nurtured a young scholar, sharing with me their experience and wonderful humour. My friend x Acknowledgements

Sabine Von Mering enthusiastically welcomed me into this diverse community and I thank her for the many years of generous friendship; I am delighted that my daughter has a Tante Bine. Matthew Fraleigh and I went through the tenure process together and were able to share our anxieties and our eventual celebration. The Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Brandeis provided a set of colleagues who inspire me with their stellar academic achievements and their continued commitment to social justice. Susan S. Lanser read more drafts of my work than anyone should ever have to—no better mentor exists. I have learned incredibly much from her as a feminist academic and aspire to the high standards she has set in the field. Sarah Lamb has been a special friend and colleague and I cannot thank her enough for being a caring didi. Faith Smith and Chae Ran Freeze read drafts and were a reservoir of support through all these years. My friends and colleagues at Brandeis have spanned many departments and offices: I thank Daniel Terris for his support; Fernando Rosenberg for Tango and conversation; Joseph Wardwell for wine and BBQ, Govind Sreenivasan for talks on Indian parenting; and Anita Hill for her commitment to women of color in the academy. I thank Robert Young for reading my work and providing valuable commentary even though I was not his student. Mala Pandurang and Sujata Mody helped greatly by reading drafts of individual chapters. Arvind Mandair, Pal Ahluwalia, Jasbir Puar, Virinder Kalra, and Tej Purewal have supported my work for many years. I am indebted to Anjali Arondekar, Christian Novetzke, and Andy Rotman for the immense support I received from them in this crucial year. Jyoti Puri read chapters from the book, looked out for me, and welcomed me into the South Asian feminist community in Boston. Rohin Mhatre prevented me from taking myself too seriously and provided friendship and laughter in good doses. I thank Lucy Rhymer, Suvadip Bhattacharjee, and the editorial team at Cambridge University Press for their faith in the book. Encouraging and incisive comments from the anonymous reviewers greatly helped in revising the manuscript. My friends David Morrow and Stephen Cope were special allies in San Diego. I thank them for fond memories of soccer, movies, food, and graduate school. Jason Stanyek—the drive back from Los Angeles, noodle soup on cold days, ceviche on Friday, and imaginary sandstorms. Sharad Chaudhary made the anxiety-ridden years of graduate school seem so romantic—it was a brilliant bit of false advertising that resulted in the scholar I am today. How can I put in Acknowledgements xi words our shared love for the Bull Durham Blues Festival, Little Willie John, Asterix, and Sandman? My childhood friends Vinit Jensen and Kimi Bhomia have stood by me through thick and thin—it is a wonder to now share the experience of watching our daughters grow. Japjit Singh Bagga, Shivjit Singh Bagga, Aditya Trehan, Sai Kiran Chaudhuri, Ajay Rangray, and Rajiv Madhok have been up to no good since we were ten years old, and thankfully nothing is changing that soon. Jasspreet Singh Rai and Simarjit Singh Bagga left us too early—they are missed. I thank Anu and Kush Singh, and their lovely children, Udai Bir and Saloni, for allowing me to be a part of their family. I have shared a special relationship with Nazm and Kudrat Singh, just as our mothers did. A large and loving group of people constitutes my family in Canada, the United States, England, and India: Kiran and Rajinder Roy, Dr Saranjit and Dr Gursharan Nahl, Amrit and Harjinder Singh, Rewa and Deepak Dharni. Thank you Guddi Bhua for more than I can say here; thank you Cuckoo Masi for all your songs; thank you Deepak Mamu for all your love; and thank you Ginni Chachu for “Bhoot Singh Shaitan.” My grandmothers, Sharda Bhardwaj and Prakash Kaur, and my grandfathers, Captain Gopal Krishna Dharni and Major Harbhajan Singh, left a legacy of love and resilience. I thank my loving cousins for an irreplaceable sisterhood: Lovleen Sagar for a shared childhood; Simran Roy for sharing her mother with me; and Prerna Dharni for a heartfelt love. You make me proud everyday, Preru. My father, Sarabjit Singh, taught me how to read and spent time reading with me—it is his truest gift. My in- laws, Major Charanjit Singh Rai and Mrs Baljit Kaur Rai, gave me a home, love, and unconditional support for my life as a scholar. No parents could have done more. They are deeply loved. I have shared a long journey with my brother, Shamsheer Singh, and my sisters, Nanki Singh and Tripti Singh—their love sustains me. No bond could be stronger. My husband, Avinash Singh Rai, is my north, my south, my east, my west—I would be lost without him. Our daughter, Meher Rai, has brought a meaning and measure to my life that is beyond words—she is my best work.

Introduction 1

I Introduction

‘The Rani of Jhansi asks me from the grave / Are we free and equal at last?’ Sujata Venkatraman1

ani Lakshmi Bai, the Queen of Jhansi, led her army against the British in R1857. The death of the king, Gangadhar Rao, had left the throne without a natural heir. The East India Company denied recognition to the adopted prince, or to the Queen as his regent and annexed the kingdom. Undeterred, Rani Lakshmi Bai took the reins of government, reorganised her forces and fought the colonialists. A figure of loss but not of defeat, the Rani lost her family, her kingdom and died in battle, but she also became a legendary figure in Indian history. The 1857 rebellion is a watershed event in Indo-British colonial history that marked India’s transformation from a mercantile colony to a dominion of the British crown and has since occupied an inordinately contested space in both British and Indian cultural mythology. Considered the ‘First War of Independence’ by nationalists and derided merely as a ‘Mutiny’ by colonial historiography, the rebellion has continued to provide a fraught terrain for the opposing transactions of British imperialism and Indian nationalism. On that discursive battlefield, the Rani herself, as the subject of numerous English romance novels, as a topic of debate in historical narratives, as the mobilising spirit in the rhetoric of Indian patriotism and as a celebrated figure in folk ballads and theatre, embodies an enduring enigma. Doubly articulated as history and metaphor, the Rani is crucial to disciplinary discourses that produce the historical subject within the colonial and postcolonial conceptualisations of gender, political power and resistance. The exigencies of ideology and genre impinge on the numerous stories about the Rani, yet each account represents her both in the certainties of history and in the mythical modalities of legend. For example, a sensational anecdote claims that the Rani jumped, while astride her horse, from the ramparts of the Jhansi 2 The Rani of Jhansi fort, preferring death to surrender. In fact, most historical accounts affirm that she was killed in a pivotal battle against forces commanded by Sir Hugh Rose and presumably cremated by her soldiers before the English could retrieve the body. While British narratives foster the victorious notion of her obliteration, a sign of Britain’s inevitable triumph, the absence of corporeal proof allows Indian accounts to construct her, and by extension the nation, as an undefeated figure. The Rani’s story was tempered for the Victorian reading masses through scores of popular romance novels and colonial historical accounts. In India, tales of the warrior queen remain emblematic of the anti-colonial struggle, which celebrates her as a harbinger of freedom. The details of her life remain ancillary to the dominant ideology of nineteenth century colonialism and twentieth century nationalism, which produce either a rebel without a justified cause or an ardent patriot. In both cases, competing discourses produce an unproblematic, unified version of the Rani. Yet, a study of these appropriations provides insight into a complex colonial episteme of the self and other and into the often-complicit postcolonial figurations, which are not bereft of contradiction or conflation. Inevitably, however, the figure of the warrior queen, jarring in the traditionally masculine spheres of war and politics, profoundly affects the very processes of cultural and literary narrative that strive to modulate her significance. These textual figurations of the Rani, ostensibly used to bolster British and Indian political stance, question the very assumption of unifying national principles that naturalise colonial and later postcolonial rule. British Colonialism in India undertook many different and often contradictory, administrative and cultural strategies: the reformist impulses of the early nineteenth century gave way to draconian policies after 1857; Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 gave Indians a stronger claim to the benefits of British rule as her majesty’s subjects, yet the increased participation of Indians in public affairs and political office brought upon legislation in 1913 to protect ‘the mystique of the (British) race’; the mutiny had brought to the fore the consequences of interfering with traditional culture and yet it was also evidence that categories of caste, religion and royal decree had to be reframed to better serve the colonial capitalist machinery.2 The fictive restructuring of the Rani, from Aryan royalty to Indian whore, from worthy foe to bloodthirsty murderer, mirrors the ambivalent impulses of imperial policy and provides a site of convergence for the grid of colonial urgency invested in stabilising the empire after 1857. Victorian narratives about the Rani of Jhansi, whether extolling her courage or reviling her behaviour, reflect a crisis of authority that had to be resolved both through the continuity of links to the past but also through a recently energised and revamped template of governance for the future. Introduction 3

Viewed as a primal site of violence, India could no longer be represented as the land of the ‘mild-hindoos’ and colonial administration was restructured to manage racial, cultural and religious characterisations of the populace.3 Amidst the taxonomies of loyal races and barbaric despots, a recurring gendered demarcation of masculine and effeminate stereotypes, regional and religious, gained credence. Primarily a move to restore order to a disrupted social and racial hierarchy, the transfer of power from the East India Company to the British maternal monarch elevated her from queen to empress. The story of an Indian queen who rode into battle against the British, retold during Victoria’s reign, was as much an allegory of disobedient subjects as it was of unruly queens—displacing unto the colonial other the anxiety regarding a female monarch. Maria Jerinic reads the many colonial stories of the Rani of Jhansi as indicating a ‘British discomfort with ruling women and consequently with their own queen. This interest in the Rani is tied to an imperialist vision, one that looks with suspicion on all female political involvement, British as well as Indian’.4 Nationalist concerns in postcolonial narratives follow a similarly gendered trajectory in creating a textual self for the Rani. She is not anomalous in the Hindu tradition where female warrior deities like Durga and Ambika are revered and the Hindi word for power, Shakti, is a linguistically feminine embodiment of the goddess. But the same rationale also relegates the Rani and similar historical figures to the space of myth and legend. Many other female rulers like Ahilya Bai Holkar, Rani Avantibai, Kitturu Rani Chennamma and Rani Durgavati are a part of Indian lore—yet, as the postcolonial nation prolifically recast her as a forerunner of Indian freedom, Rani Lakshmi Bai, the young, charismatic leader of the rebellion against the British, surpasses them all in public memory. This celebration of female power in the service of the nation is complicated, however, by the Hindutva politics in which women have played a significant role militating against other religious and cultural minorities. Amrita Basu’s work on women in Hindu nationalism uncovers some of the complex interplay of factors behind women’s participation in these chauvinist politics of religion and the nation, which do not challenge ‘patriarchy in male-dominated societies’.5 Similarly, the high degree of exposure accorded to the Rani of Jhansi is not at odds with the dictates of patriarchal nationalism. Tales of Hindu women in India, whether as military leaders or inspiring mothers, are foundational in the nationalist formations of gender.6 As recently as 2007, Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party, was depicted on a poster as the Rani of Jhansi, holding a sword and riding a horse with her son Rahul Gandhi on her back. 4 The Rani of Jhansi

It was a telling moment in national politics and historical recasting when the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi was reconfigured as yet another incarnation of the Rani: ‘The one who fought bravely was the queen of 10 Janpath, Delhi’. [khoob lari mardaani woh to 10 Janpath Delhi waali Rani.]

Figure 1: Congress Party poster from 2007

The political and military acumen of the national female leader remains secondary to her gendered identity. The many stories of Rani Lakshmi Bai do not extol women’s aptitude to lead but are rather exemplary tales of women’s ability to serve, in the tradition of the ‘national family romance’, the private and the public sphere as mothers, wives, daughters, sisters or even queens.7 Recent scholarship on South Asia, informed by postcolonial theory, has undertaken a nuanced comprehension of the dialogue between history and memory, of the continuities and disruptions of the oral and literary tradition in creating and preserving historical icons and of the reinvigoration of religious figures in public debates.8 In a similar vein, this book is attentive to an archive of texts and practices – predicated on imperial designs and nationalist concerns – that literalise Rani Lakshmi Bai to contiguously present gender, history and fable in colonial and independent India. Fact and fiction, rationality and imagination, are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate them from the Rani’s life; fiction, in this case, has literally formed the historical. She continues to be a figure whose provenance is debated to this day, but the aim of this project is not to uncover the pure historical subject or to clear the Rani Introduction 5 of contaminating discourses. Instead, I investigate these narrative contexts to demonstrate the assimilative strategies and social formations that emerge around the figure of the colonial rebel woman and thus indicate the larger mapping of gender, nation, empire, literature and historiography. I use fictional, cinematic and popular representations to read an established feminist icon against the reification imposed by colonial and postcolonial modernity. Always a bit out of reach, jumping over the precipice at any discursive attempt to subdue her, the Rani’s presence disrupts habits of literary historical narration, which restrict and codify even as they imagine this heroic legend. As Homi Bhabha points out: ‘[C]ultural strategy and political confrontation (are often) constituted in obscure, enigmatic symbols’—thus representations of Rani Lakshmi Bai serve as symbolic figurations through which displaced and not entirely coherent, anxieties about imperial and national interests are articulated, linking the past not only to the present but also to the future.9 In short, this book engages with the Rani of Jhansi as a representational archive.

Figure 2: Examples of cover art from books on the Rani of Jhansi

1857

It was alleged that, this being a mere military mutiny, all we had to do was to put it down…Now, I humbly think that the question of whether it is a mere military mutiny is one of primary importance. Is it a military mutiny or is it a national revolt? …The decline and fall of empires are not affairs of greased cartridges. Such results are occasioned by adequate causes and by the accumulation of adequate causes. Benjamin Disraeli10 6 The Rani of Jhansi

The East India Company gained a substantial foothold in India with the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and extended its influence through conquest, treaty, legislation and reform in the hundred years till the revolt. While a combination of battle, alliance and annexation garnered valuable territory, a series of amendments to Indian religious, patriarchal, agricultural and military culture proclaimed the long-term colonial ambitions. The abolition of female infanticide in 1804 and of sati in 1829, the legalisation of remarriage for Hindu widows under the Hindu Marriage Act of 1856 and the growing emphasis on female education instilled resentment amongst various class and castes of the populace. Landowners disliked the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793 that changed the Indian system of taxation; land owning shifted from the elite aristocracy to new Indian bureaucrats and merchants, thereby changing the social structure and validity of the zamindari. 11 The General Service Enlistment Act of 1856 took away the exemption sepoys enjoyed from taxation and also forced them to serve outside the geographic reach of their homeland.12 Lord Dalhousie, the Governor General of India (1847–1856), began to enforce the infamous ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ and annexed the kingdom of Satara in 1849, Nagpur in 1853 and eventually the pivotal territory of Jhansi in 1854.13 Despite this steady accumulation of grievances, both British and Indian scholars agree that the immediate cause of the rebellion was the Enfield rifle: the ends of the cartridges had to be bitten-off before the rifles could be loaded and rumour spread that these were greased with beef and pork lard. Panic and protest among Hindu and Muslim Sepoys, who viewed this as a defilement of their faiths, led to the insubordination of soldiers at Meerut in May 1857; and their subsequent punishment resulted in the ‘mutiny’ that sparked a large-scale rebellion. Thus, a combination of factors led distressed sepoys, displaced farmers and demoted rulers, independently and sometimes collectively, to different moments of insurgency that finally coalesced in the rebellion. Much has been written about the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ and India’s ‘Uprising’ on both sides of the divide; I offer here a few notable examples of nineteenth century colonial historiography to provide the political and popular coordinates of this variegated narrative. Alexander Duff, the first missionary sent to India by the Church of Scotland, wrote one of the most frequently quoted contemporary accounts of the war, The Indian Mutiny – Its Causes and Results (1858) and insisted on the deep-seated hostility of the Indians to the British race. He wrote: ‘The cartridge affair and its alleged caste-breaking tendencies were a mere shallow but plausible pretext in the hands of evil-minded, designing men and the real originating cause of the whole mischief would be found of a purely political character’.14 Though he seeks to dissuade the reader from the view that unchecked conversions were the reason for the rebellion, this feint Introduction 7 falls short as Duff calls for a renewed missionary zeal to change ‘[T]he fiendish howl, which fosters and honours the degrading superstitions of Brahma and Mohammad, into millennial songs of gratitude and praise from the hearts of ransomed myriads’.15 Thus, religion and race remain intertwined in Duff’s account and while the colonialists are absolved of deliberately defiling Hindus and Muslims with the Enfield cartridges, the occasion becomes one more call to arms for the Christian crusade. The most quoted contemporary account of the rebellion, Sir John Kaye’s A History of the Sepoy War in India (1864), cast the war as dissatisfaction of the priestly class of Hindus, thus drawing attention away from what Duff termed the ‘political’. The Brahmins, Kaye wrote, were forced to defend their own privilege against the advent of British-introduced modernity – ‘Every monstrous lie exploded, every abominable practice suppressed, was a blow struck at the Priesthood; for all these monstrosities and abominations had their root in Hindooism and could not be eradicated without sore disturbance and confusion of the soil’.16 Even in A History of the Sepoy War, the dominant contentions are rooted in religious differences that form the basis for extending Britain’s ‘moral rule’. These accounts, whether they focused on an aggrieved religious caste or on the inherent malevolence of the natives, constructed an enemy that was innately brutal, ignorant, resistant to modernity and invariably rejected the ‘gifts’ of British rule. In a speech to Parliament, Benjamin Disraeli detailed the religious and political interference of the East India Company in the tradition bound lives of the Indian people and insisted that it was the ‘[U]nion of missionary enterprise with the political power of the government’ and the East India Company’s ‘principle of destroying Nationality’ that led to the revolt.17 David Urquhart, a member of Parliament in 1857, insisted, however, that the rebellion was nothing more than a Russian plot to destabilise British supremacy.18 These legislative debates were as much about the political, racial, cultural and religious affiliations of the Indian as they were about appropriate and profitable governance. For instance, the nature and form of British law could no longer rely upon the liberal view espousing equality of all peoples but had to be reframed to consider the unbridgeable divide between the races. In contrast to observers like Duff, who saw the uprising as evidence of a great conspiracy, or, like Disraeli, who believed it was occasioned by unnecessary reforms undertaken by the East India Company, most British observers insisted that it was fundamentally an army mutiny. Sir John Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner of Delhi in 1857, reported,

I have as yet neither seen nor heard anything to make me believe that any conspiracy existed beyond the army; and even in it, one can scarcely say there 8 The Rani of Jhansi

was a conspiracy. The cartridge question was to my mind, indubitably, the immediate cause of the revolt. But the army had for a long time been in an unsatisfactory state.19

Though Lawrence hones in on the Enfield cartridges, his allusion to the ‘unsatisfactory state’ of the army indicates complex and intersecting factors such as caste and regional allegiances that were often disrupted by military service, yet it relies mostly on the structural breakdown of military discipline. Regardless of the ambivalence and ambiguity that beset colonial perceptions of what led to or transpired in the rebellion, the ‘Mutiny-motif, effectively established a master-narrative of Indian unrest, a model for understanding and responding to subsequent crisis and this provided the mainspring for colonial anxieties in British India’.20 In the Kuka Uprising in Punjab in 1872, prisoners were blown from canons to reenact the brutal reprisals of 1857 and to signal what awaited those attempting insurrection. In 1919, General Dyer opened fire on an unarmed crowd in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, an event precipitated by an attack on a British woman by Indian men – Dyer invoked the precedent of the ‘mutiny’, when White women were allegedly the target of native violence, as sufficient cause. ‘From the rage and fear, of 1857 emerged a new and enduring sense of the importance of the bonds of race, in contrast to those of culture’.21 Even as it seemed predicated on colonial mismanagement, the rebellion endowed colonialists with a particular kind of experiential knowledge that translated the suppression of the mutiny into the enduring superiority of the imperial White mission. Thus, 1857 functioned as a persistent metaphor of the colonial condition, which depended on a forceful rule of British law but also evinced the vulnerability of the empire manifest in the defenselessness of its outposts, its representatives and its women. Unfortunately, Lord Canning’s ‘Control of the Press Act’ banned publication of political and historical pamphlets in 1858 and except for Charles Metcalfe’s translation of Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in Delhi (1898), the poet Mirza Ghalib’s diary Dastanbuy, Sambhu Chandra Mookerjee’s The Statements of Native Fidelity published anonymously in 1858 and the recently translated memoir by Vishnubhatt Godse Versaikar, 1857: The Real Story of the Great Uprising, scant else, in the form of Indian estimation from the nineteenth century, can be found about the war. In 1859, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan published Asbab-e-Baghawath-e-Hind (Causes of the Indian Revolt), but in a complicated series of events the text was hardly circulated in India and only a few copies were sent to England. In 1909, V.D. Savarkar published Introduction 9

The Indian War of Independence in Holland, which was immediately proscribed by the British authorities, but copies smuggled into India initiated a new series of interpretations that were pursued with greater scholarly rigour after independence in 1947.22 S.B. Chaudhari’s Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies (1957) charted the histories of civil unrest and military insubordination under the Company’s rule.23 But the rebellion, according to Chaudhari, was not mere dissatisfaction but conscious political will, as never before had civil and military portions of the populace acted in congruence against the British. S.N. Sen argued against the notion of a nationalist uprising in Eighteen Fifty-Seven, characterising the tumultuous period as the almost inevitable consequence of a system where the rulers and ruled shared no common ties and yet where the power of enforcing control was to a remarkable extent in the hands of Indian soldiers.24 R.C. Majumdar takes the realistic middle ground when he argues that ‘[T]o regard the outbreak of 1857 as a mutiny of sepoys is probably as a great an error as to look upon it as a national war of independence’.25 Taking Majumdar’s cue, it is perhaps most appropriate to term the events of 1857 a popular uprising; yet, the rebellion cannot be credited with uniform organising. A paucity of scholarship on the many communities who did not rebel, like the Gurkhas or the Sikhs, or on the majority of sepoys who kept faith with their employers and fought against their countrymen, forecloses the alternative narratives of the rebellion even on the Indian side. Thus, while social, economic, military and religious factors spurred an uprising comprised of a varied Indian demographic against an imperialist entity, it was also an occasion for the consolidation of power, military and monetary opportunism and a redistricting of traditional kingdoms to the benefit of many Indian rulers. Present-day Indian and British historiography concedes that the revolt of 1857 was the result of many different motives. The rulers, the Zamindars, the Sepoys and the common people did not share a single agenda, but fought instead for various reasons against a common foe.26 Though there was no overarching nationalist framework, the rebellion was subsequently mobilised as a moment of revolution in early twentieth century Indian nationalism. Recent scholarship from India, occasioned by the sesquicentennial of the rebellion in 2007, has undertaken both an evaluation of nomenclature (mutiny, uprising, rebellion and war of independence) as well as the recovery of primary Indian sources.27 Scholars have focused on evaluating key historical texts; for example, K.C. Yadav has analysed J.W. Kaye’s celebrated work A History of the Sepoy War in India (1878) and the more recent and aptly timed The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty (2007) by William Dalrymple, to engage with shifts in 10 The Rani of Jhansi historiography. R.P. Singh has reread the works of Savarkar and S.N. Sen to sift through the different shards of thought that make up nationalist and postcolonial history.28 Disciplinary modifications in historiography, along with the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective, have brought to the fore reactions and roles of hitherto ignored communities and individuals who took part in the uprising.29 Studies by scholars such as Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857 (1986), have focused on historical processes rather than on significant personages – an imperative that is much needed in India where the cult of a single personality often becomes the visible mobilising factor in national and regional politics. Yet most scholarship remains governed by a geopolitical inheritance in which British and Indian opinion has mostly taken the expected stance and though 1857 sits richly caparisoned by scholarship and inquiry no definitive version or consensus has emerged. Where the colonial view perceives a lack of organisation and chaos the nationalists see a mandate of the masses and therefore the argument may never be settled. Political agency, as the dominant narrative implies, must be fixed in normative arenas of revolutionary organisations. The incredulous colonial descriptions regarding the rebels convey disbelief in the political nature of the 1857 revolt and since mutinous occasions are clearly outside civilised normal behaviour – they lose all claims to a transformative politics. But political agency in the nineteenth, or for that matter any century, is not a fixed inviolable phenomenon and must be located, in this case, in a series of contradictory and seemingly disjunctive events. As Stephen Howe points out, ‘[D]ebates on the meanings and legacies of Empire have become ever more closely intertwined with ones over national identity itself’.30 Thus, how Britain views the ‘mutiny’ and India remembers its ‘first war of independence’, are intricately woven into the national fabric – British justification for its brutal reprisals depends on characterising the rebellion as an act of treachery, betrayal and disloyalty; rewriting the history and representation of 1857 permits the postcolonial Indian nation an anachronistic claim to a sustained narrative of resistance. Nevertheless, there is irrefutable evidence that an unpredictable Indian following and British fascination emerged around key figures such as Nana Saheb, his general Tantya Tope and their comrade-in-arms Rani Lakshmi Bai, the Queen of Jhansi. The 1857 rebellion mobilised a great deal of rhetorical flourish even as it had far-reaching consequences for both countries. Characterised as a war between the Indians and the British, the blacks and the Whites, the heathens and the Introduction 11

Christians, the war had all the trappings of an ‘Epic of the Race’.31 Charles Dickens, in an essay written with Wilkie Collins in the Christmas 1857 issue of Household Words, went so far as to say

I wish I were a commander in chief in India…I should do my utmost to exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested…with merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth.32

In 1897, Hilda Gregg rightly observed that ‘Of all the great events of this century, as they are reflected in fiction, the Indian Mutiny has taken the firmest hold on the popular imagination’.33 The validity of her claim is borne out by the outpouring of colonial and postcolonial literature and analysis on the revolt.34 As early as August 1857, Punch was running a full-page cartoon in which the British lion sought vengeance by attacking the Bengal tiger that had killed a woman and child.35 There was a heady circulation of print around the rebellion, ranging from survivor journals like Mrs Harris’s Lady’s Diary (1858), historical first person accounts such as A Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow: From its Commencement to its Relief by Sir Colin Campbell (1858) by L.E. Rees, to a plethora of fiction. Various exhibitions representing key events of the uprising traveled widely in England; even Madam Tussaud had a ‘Nana Sahib’ in her horde of villains until 1878: ‘[A] terrific embodiment of matted hair, rolling eyes and cruel teeth’.36 A range of colonial texts used these supposedly horrific images of barbarism, death and destruction from the mutiny to great effect – The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868), Seeta by Philip Meadows Taylor (1872), On the Face of the Waters by Flora Annie Steel (1896), The Nightrunners of Bengal (1951) and The Deceivers (1952) by John Masters – are but a few examples of the literary and cultural implications of the colonial fear after 1857. Accused of the Jhansi Massacre, a discussion of which follows later in the chapter, Rani Lakshmi Bai gained notoriety in the Victorian public imaginary as the real life representation of the bloodthirsty Indian goddess Kali. The British public was already familiar with practices such as Thugi that worshipped the goddess and even Queen Victoria was said to have read Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (1839). Thus, the discourse around 1857 must contend with a simultaneous occupation of rhetoric and material reality in both England and India. A new novel based on the Rani’s life, Rani by Jaishree Mishra, was published by Penguin-India in December 2007 and promptly banned in Uttar Pradesh 12 The Rani of Jhansi for what the state government deemed was a scurrilous representation of an interracial romance between the Rani and a British political officer. The mere suggestion that the Rani could have had anything but an antagonistic relationship with British men is as unimaginable to the nation’s public discourse as the woman in combat was to British sensibility. As national narratives concentrate on what is desired of women in private and public life and nation and spatiality is thus gendered, the coercive burden of representation, in this case of India’s most famous historic female figure, provides a rationale for discussing the elastic, unpredictable tracts of power that are contested to this day. Time magazine carried a photographic montage of history’s ‘Top Ten Bad-Ass Wives’ in the July issue of 2011 – the Rani of Jhansi came in at number eight. Her story continues to be retold, albeit in the crass metaphors of tabloid headlines.

Rani Lakshmi Bai, the Queen of Jhansi

Manakarnika, known in her childhood by the diminutive Manu and upon her marriage to Gangadhar Rao, the King of Jhansi, as Rani Lakshmi Bai, was born to the family of Moropant Tambe, a Maharashtrian Brahmin who served the Peshwa Baji Rao II. Most Indian sources give her date of birth as 1835, which would make her seven at the time of her marriage and twenty two in 1857.37 However, various British records place her birth in 1827 and refer to the Rani as a woman in her thirties.38 Much of this is conjecture as there was no reason, before the events in Jhansi, to record the life of the Rani. Therefore, all biographies are hampered by the absence of factual evidence and rely almost completely on anecdotal details such as the popularly celebrated, but uncorroborated, friendship of the young girl Manu and the adopted son of the Peshwa, Nana Saheb. This detail adds drama to the origins of her ‘tomboyish’ nature – and novels and biographies focus on her early and as yet unconfirmed, military training with Nana Saheb and Tantya Tope, who both appear, in history and in fiction, as her comrades.39 Though not of a royal or aristocratic background and merely the daughter of a Brahmin associated with the court of the Peshwa, Manu was married to Gangadhar Rao, the Raja of Jhansi in 1842. Some accounts give his age at the time of the wedding as thirty and others as between ‘forty and fifty’. It may have been the king’s advanced years, his status as a widower and the lack of a natural heir that allowed Manu, a girl of humble background and also perhaps older than usual, to be accepted as a royal wife. However, Gangadhar Rao is rarely ever described as a competent ruler or husband. Many British Introduction 13 texts give evidence of the king’s ‘debauched’ lifestyle and elaborate upon his penchant for playing the female lead in his plays; a depiction bestowed upon many other Indian rulers as well.40 Indian accounts, however, view the king’s patronage of the arts as a cultured pursuit. In both discourses, this detail casts the king in an apolitical role and paves the way for the Rani as the only viable leader of Jhansi.41 A son was born to the Rani and Gangadhar Rao in 1851 but survived only for a few months and so the king adopted a five-year-old, Damodar Rao, as his heir. The king’s health deteriorated rapidly and, fearing the worst, he wrote a letter to the East India Company on 19 November 1853, translated by Major Ellis, the political assistant at Jhansi:

God willing I still hope to recover and regain my health. I am not too old, so I may still father children. In case that happens, I will take the proper measures concerning my adopted son. But if I fail to live, please take my previous loyalty into account and show kindness to my son. Please acknowledge my widow as the mother of this boy during her lifetime. May the government approve of her as the queen and ruler of this kingdom as long as the boy is still under age. Please take care that no injustice is done to her.42

The letter expressly stated the king’s request that the Company recognise his adopted son as the heir to the throne and the Rani as his regent. The Political Agent at Gwalior, Major D.A. Malcolm, wrote back to say, however, that ‘[T] he adoption cannot be allowed or recognized without the special authority of the Government of India’.43 The matter was then referred to the Governor- General, Lord Dalhousie, who quoted Sir Charles Metcalfe’s words from 1837: ‘Chiefs who hold grants of land or public revenue by gift from a sovereign or paramount power…the Power which made the grant, or that which by conquest or otherwise has succeeded to its rights, is entitled to limit succession…(and to) resume on failure of direct heirs’.44 With this precedent, Lord Dalhousie argued that since Jhansi had been a vassal state of the Peshwas, whose holdings had fallen to the East India Company, the British held the authority, as the ‘paramount power’ to end the line of succession,45 and the ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ took effect for Jhansi in 1854.46 In the ensuing years, the Rani carried out a protracted campaign of diplomacy by writing several letters to the Company and by engaging a European lawyer named John Lang to argue her case. She invoked Jhansi’s long-standing loyalty to the British and sought permission, according to the rights of the Hindu Shastras (laws), for her adopted son to be recognised as the rightful petitioner 14 The Rani of Jhansi to the throne. In her invaluable Kharita (letter) dated 16 February 1854 the Rani initially employed the position of a supplicant in her interactions with the Company:

I am listing a few precedents of allowing adoption to the widowed queens after the king dies without leaving an heir in various states of Bundelkhand. Because of this permission, their bond of loyalty to the British Government has become stronger. They are totally happy and at peace. After looking at these examples with your kind consideration, I hope that you would allow the same right also to the widowed daughter-in-law of Shivarao Bhau. Please have sympathy with her helplessness.47 (Signed and Sealed by Maharani Lakshmi Bai, Translated and signed by R.R. Ellis)

The letter is evidence that the Rani explored diplomatic channels that were open to her and neither acquiesced obsequiously to the annexation nor jumped impatiently into rebellion. This is not to say that the Rani was a reluctant participant in 1857, which she may have been, but rather to clarify that in 1854 she was, in fact, carrying on the administrative and diplomatic duties that befell her as a ruler well before she rose to prominence as a rebel leader. The Company, however, ignored the Rani’s pleas and stationed a garrison in her kingdom to oversee the administration of the state. In 1857, when the sepoys of Jhansi threw in their lot with the rebellion, the Rani was once again thrust into the limelight. She is infamous in colonial narratives for the Jhansi massacre of more than 60 British men, women and children. Barricaded in a portion of the fort, the English beseeched the Rani for help, who apparently promised them safe passage. They were taken instead to the infamous Jokhan Bagh (garden) and slaughtered. In a letter dated 21 August 1857, S. Thornton, the deputy collector of the area, wrote that he had an eyewitness account from a Mr Crawford who had escaped the massacre:

It is the general impression that the mutineers after killing some of their own officers and plundering the town, were going off and it was only at the instigation of the Jhansie Ranee with the object of her obtaining possession of Jhansie state that they attacked the fort the next day together with other armed men furnished by her. The town people are said to have also joined. For this act the mutinees are said to have received Rs. 35,000 in cash, two elephants and five horses from the Rani. 48 Introduction 15

More sympathetic accounts state that the Sepoys had mutinied and even threatened the Rani; she was thus unable to help the British and even had to pay a sort of ‘ransom’ to make the sepoys leave her kingdom. In 1943, C.A. Kincaid first raised his doubts about the Rani’s complicity in the massacre in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. A response followed in the next year, written by R. Burn and Patrick Cadell, which relied solely on the Official Mutiny Narratives for evidence of the Rani’s involvement.49 Kincaid claims the Rani is held responsible for the massacre because of two supposed eyewitness accounts. Mrs Mutlow, a Eurasian, survived the massacre and saw a note from the Rani promising them safe passage, which was interpreted as proof that the Rani had reneged on her word. However, most historians dismiss her testimony, as they find it highly unlikely that someone not connected to political affairs in any way would have seen a note from the Rani to the British. The other account by Captain Pinknay speaks of three Englishman, Messrs. Andrew, Scott and Purcell, who went out of the fort to ask the Rani for help, but she dismissed them as ‘English swine’ and ordered their execution. It remains unclear how Pinknay knew about this or where he was during the events. Kincaid, however, also refers to an undated letter written to the Rani’s adopted son Damodar Rao by a Mr Martin who had been in Jhansi in 1857; it states, ‘[Y]our poor mother was very unjustly and cruelly dealt with – and no one knows her case as I do. The poor thing took no part in the massacre of the European residents of Jhansi in June 1857’.50 The Rani’s own words give some insight into the complex negotiations underway during this time. In a letter to Major Erskine dated 14 June 1857, she explained that she had been forced by the sepoys to shelter them and that she was administering the kingdom only until the Company Raj was restored. She then carried on the affairs of government, including the collections of taxes, repair of the fort and the re-establishment of the army. During this time, she effectively repulsed an attack by the late Raja’s cousin, Sadashiv Rao and also defeated an incursion from the neighboring kingdom of Orchha. There is a large gap in the historical record between the Rani’s assurances in June 1857 that she held Jhansi in trust for the Company and the attack by Sir Hugh Rose’s army in April 1858. It remains unclear whether the Rani changed her mind and refused to give up the mantle of leadership or if she was forced into a confrontation because the Company rejected negotiations with the alleged perpetrator of the Jhansi massacre.51 In March 1858, despite a valiant effort by the Rani and her army, the British gained entry into the fort 16 The Rani of Jhansi and carried out an indiscriminate carnage in which more than three thousand people were killed:

In Jhansi we burned and buried upwards of a thousand bodies and if we take into account the constant fighting carried on since the investment and the battle of the Betwa, I fancy I am not far wrong when I say I believe we must have slain nearly 3,000 of the enemy. Such was the retribution meted out to this Jezebel Ranee and her people for the heinous crimes done by them in Jhansi.52

This account, from the journal of Dr Thomas Lowe, a member of Rose’s contingent, bears testimony to what took place in Jhansi: the loss of 60 British civilians amounted to the Jhansi massacre, whereas ‘[A] thousand [Indian] bodies’, merit simply the descriptive – ‘retribution’. The Governor-General declared the Rani a rebel leader in June 1858 and an award of 20,000 rupees was offered for her capture: ‘His Lordship, however, authorises you to offer such rewards as you think fitting for the capture of these persons, provided that the sum offered for the Nawab does not exceed 10,000 Rs. & that for the Baee53 is not more than 20,000 Rs.’54 By the time the reward was offered, Sir Hugh Rose had taken Jhansi and the Rani had fled to Kalpi to join Nana Saheb and Tantya Tope. She regrouped with other rebel leaders and captured Gwalior; but the celebrations were cut short by the British attack.55 The Rani’s death during this battle effectively brought the 1857 rebellion to an end. The British captured Tantya Tope, but little is known of what befell Nana Saheb. There are many versions of the Rani’s death, but all agree that she died in combat against the British in the battlefield outside Gwalior. The import of the battle against the Queen of Jhansi and its significance in ultimately suppressing the rebellion, was recognized by the titles given to Sir Hugh Rose in 1866 – he was raised to the peerage as Baron of Strathnairn and of Jhansi in the East Indies.

Colonial Policy and Indian Women

Recent studies of imperialism remain critically concerned with gendered categories that sustained the moral integrity of the Empire and the prominence of Rani Lakshmi Bai in Victorian print culture indicates some of the contradictions and apprehensions regarding native and colonial women in India. The figure of the British woman, besieged by native lasciviousness, became the rallying cry for retribution and dominated ‘mutiny’ narratives.56 This principal metaphor erased grievances about annexation, taxation, livelihood and Introduction 17 revenue, religious and familial matters, to create instead a chivalric narrative of rescue and revenge. The coalescing of a complicated national and regional politics in the Indian male’s supposed pathological desire for the White woman allocated a singular moral justification for the suppression of the uprising and the concomitant reprisals. But colonial policy before and after 1857 was also inextricably bound to concerns over the condition of Indian women. Although the Englishwoman’s vulnerability could be deployed as the raison d’être for the brutal punishment meted out to the rebels, the moral legitimisation for continued colonial rule in India was in no small measure built upon the perceived state of persecution faced by native women, from which only colonial British presence could save them.57

The idea that the British were saving Indian women from the barbarities of their archaic world and that this was a necessary precondition for modernizing India, became a critical tool in the legitimation, whether amongst colonial officials, missionaries, or social reforms, whether utilitarian or evangelical, of their country’s right to rule.58

Indian women, as Indrani Sen’s work shows, largely fell under the few available colonial rubrics: the domestic ayah (nanny), the sati (the burning widow), the tawaif (the courtesan) and the purdahnashin rani (the indolent and protected royal woman).59 The oppression of Indian women remained the dominant and connecting theme as the vigorous reform movements undertaken by colonial administrators brought to the fore ‘[T]he woman question’ in the popular colonial imagination.60 The various debates concerning sati, widow remarriage and female education acquired centrestage in Britain and India, with active participation from colonial and Indian administrators, intellectuals, missionaries and social workers. A complex narrative of collusion and control surfaced in response to the status of the native woman in colonial politics. Constantly in need of rescue, yet symbolising an ever-present threat to colonial domesticity and therefore to the propagation of the Empire, the Indian woman’s presence demanded a legislative, social, cultural and racial containment in the imperial project.61 Though the radical impulse celebrated widow remarriage and their inheritance of property, such alterations interfered with the easy transfer of revenue and property to the British.62 The reforms, promulgated to make Indian women conform to Victorian models of femininity, also became vital to Britain’s own gender arrangements as the feminist movement began to threaten the core criteria of English femininity. Native women in the colonies, supposedly licentious and unfeminine and as yet uncivilized, became 18 The Rani of Jhansi an example of the ‘fall’ that awaited Englishwomen outside the patriarchal yoke.

The shift from the liberal humanitarian idea of the educable potential of all men to a harsher view of the ineradicable nature of racial difference (after 1857)… meant that forms of Britishness, ways of being a White man or woman in India, had to be remade.63

Civility had to be imposed to eradicate the havoc and barbarism of the rebellion and this was done most effectively through the proliferation of the White colonial family; the empire had to be rebuilt on a gendered order predicated on post-1857 notions of racial and cultural difference. Even as the native woman’s labour maintained the colonial home, she was also an example of the continual corruption faced by British domesticity in India. The Rani embodied these colonial contradictions in her life and complicated the ‘rule of colonial difference’.64 As an Indian woman relegated to a life of purdah, the Rani may have garnered sympathy, but as an Indian Queen who came out of the veil in rebellion against the British, she posed an interminable problem of representation and comprehension. As an Indian widow who had become sati or shaved her head and dedicated herself to a life of hardship, she may have excited a chivalric response, but as a royal widow who commanded troops and took British lives, she defied both rescue and reform. Thus, representations of the Rani complicate the often default reading of the native woman as a domestic matter relegated to the colonial context; she poses a real and symbolic threat to the nation, Britain, undermining both material and ideological foundations of the imperial project. Within the warring impulses of reform and containment, the Rani of Jhansi, the anomalous insurrectionary subaltern, unbalanced the moral core of the imperialist enterprise and prompted concerns about the concomitant civil destabilisation – and imperial literary culture, in the form of popular fiction, newspapers and religious pamphlets, was pressed into service to render the Rani assailable. As an embodiment of Indian sexuality, femininity, race and cultural identity, the colonial rebel woman may yet be restrained. Whereas colonial texts characterised British women as the besieged targets of rape and murder, the Rani’s constant avoidance of censure, erasure, or containment required a different and more nuanced project of representation in Victorian England as well as in the opposing, yet often syncretic, trajectories of nationalist Indian narratives. Introduction 19

As Mrinalini Sinha’s compelling scholarship points out, the political categories of gender were crafted in a concatenation of colonial policies during the large span of British rule in India. An integral component of the ‘[C] ommunities constituted by castes, tribes, races and religious groups’, the Indian woman was rarely interpolated outside the stereotypical registers of Hindu or Muslim identifications. Yet, legal and legislative reforms constructed her as a sovereign self who was subject to administrative surveillance but also had a right to British protection, thus creating ‘[A]n opening for the recognition of women as individuals’. Colonial difference, often managed through categories of cultural and racial difference, acquired in the case of the native woman a further level of complexity – that rationalised the colonial dependence on communal politics alongside the benevolent model of ‘[W]omen themselves as right-bearing subjects’.65

The Woman Question in India

With Indian women as the main focus, increased British interference imperiled masculinist Indian cultures, which purported to defend Indian femininity from these polluting modern impulses even as they drew inspiration from the Shakti of various female deities – a dichotomy glimpsed in the many narratives about the warrior queen. The metaphoric linking of gendered and national destinies was represented in Gandhi’s deployment of Indian femininity and in its consequent formulations of masculinity: ‘India cannot be free until its women are free and women cannot be free until India is free. The female sex is not the weaker sex; it is the nobler of the two: for it is even today the embodiment of sacrifice, silent suffering, humility, faith and knowledge’.66 Ketu Katrak points out that most of Gandhi’s nationally unifying symbols, such as the charkha (spinning wheel) and Khadi (home-spun cloth), were deliberately gendered:

These nationalist symbols were also strategically gendered through his evocation of mythological figures like Sati, Draupadi and Savitri which embodied roles for women in the nationalist struggle. Further since it is ‘the mother’s duty to look after children, to dress them’, Gandhi commented, ‘it is necessary that women should be fired with the spirit of Swadeshi’.67

‘Being used to passive forms of resistance in their daily lives, [women] could more effectively participate in socially organized passive resistance and non- cooperation’.68 Gandhi referred to female archetypes of suffering and humility, 20 The Rani of Jhansi but not to powerful goddesses such as Durga, or to historical figures like Bhima Bai Holkar who fought the British in 1817, or even to Rani Chennamma who fought the East India Company in 1824. On the other hand, the Indian National Army (INA), under the leadership of Subhash Chandra Bose, created a women’s militia in the early 1940s – The Rani of Jhansi Women’s Regiment led by Captain Lakshmi Sahgal.69 Rani Lakshmi Bai, who was already celebrated in poetry and song and recognised as a leader of the ‘first war of independence’, found no mention in Gandhi’s list of female figures to emulate. Nehru, however, wrote glowingly about the Rani of Jhansi as the

[O]ne bright spot against the dark background of 1857…Laskshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, a girl-widow, twenty years of age, who donned a man’s dress and came out to lead her people against the British. Many a story is told of her spirit and ability and undaunted courage.70

The particularly gendered nationalist rhetoric reflected passive resistance and the commitment to Gandhi’s non-violent struggle, but it also had its roots in mythology, religion, history, colonial policies and the eventual amalgamation of these categories in postcolonial politics. Though the first women’s organisations set up in India by Englishwomen such as Margaret Cousins, Annie Besant and Lady Aberdeen were effective in raising gendered issues with the British government, they remained, in the eyes of the Indians, a colonial ploy to interfere with Indian culture.71 These concerns became paramount in the nationalist struggle where the private and the public sphere were reconciled in the gendered construction of the nation: Bharat Mata, or Mother India. As Sumathi Ramaswamy has pointed out, ‘The Bharat Mata of their [the nationalists’] imagination was the “serene” and “self-reliant” mother who presided over the Indian “home” rather than the warrior-deity who strapped on weapons to lead her devotees into war against the colonial state’.72 Indian women personified an Indian culture that had to be protected from the metaphoric rape imposed by colonialism. The British, on the other hand, used the model of the oppressed and abused Indian woman as an example of native depravity that could only be corrected through colonial rule. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak has argued that the voice of the colonized female is thus lost between the object-constitution of imperialism, ‘[M]arked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind’ and the subject-constitution of patriarchal nationalism, which ‘apparently grants the woman free choice as subject’.73 Introduction 21

Women’s issues came to the forefront as the nationalist movement was forced to acknowledge the ‘woman question’ in the face of increasing accusations incriminating Indian culture for the subjugation of women.

Debates about Indian womanhood were central to the fundamental problem of national identity in the discourse of official nationalism. The central contradiction confronting Indian nationalism was to modernize indigenous society to keep pace with the West while at the same time avow a unique and distinctive cultural identity for the nation, on the basis of which the political claim to nationhood could be made.74

Indian nationalists responded to British imperialism, clothed in the garb of social reform, by placing Indian women in the centre of their claim for independence. By assimilating the women’s movement into the nationalist movement, Gandhi garnered support from liberals in Britain and the rest of the Western world, while assuaging conservative sentiment in India by arguing that Indian women were not oppressed. Instead, Gandhi theorised, women had been successful in progressing with changing times even while adhering to traditional Indian (Hindu) notions of femininity. By representing the nation as Bharat Mata, Mother India, nationalists successfully reconfigured patriarchal control to maintain the Indian male’s dominance in the personal sphere as a counter to his subordinate status in the colonial political sphere – it also deftly sidestepped the issues of women’s emancipation by elevating a synthesis of tradition and modernity. This leadership inhibited women’s progress even as it called for reform. National propaganda cultivated the image of a modernised nation in which both sexes were equal under the law, but the social implications of this constitutional equality remained unrealised. The formulation of laws was and is, of little advantage in a ‘[S]ociocultural environment that systematically denies women such equality in society, the family and the workplace’.75 In the interest of the nationalist agenda and often in response to colonial imperatives, it was politically astute to focus on heinous practices; while sati, child marriage and the remarriage of widows were seamlessly adapted from colonial to anti-colonial to postcolonial politics, the obvious ease with which inequality, patriarchal restrictions and traditional stereotypes were ignored retarded any progress towards an egalitarian gendered equation. Indian women were and are, caught between the idealised constitutionalised version of their roles as equal citizens and their traditional religious stereotypes in a society that elevates a particular characterisation of Hindu north-Indian femininity as the 22 The Rani of Jhansi norm. In nationalist rhetoric and literature, the Rani is invoked in celebratory assertion, but these theorisations oblige the creation of and make normative, a particularly male, Hindu, upper-caste public sphere. She is famous as a national icon, variously appearing on postage stamps, the names of streets and buildings and in historical and literary texts. But that also makes her irrelevant; to paraphrase Parama Roy, the Rani is that which male nationalists constantly remember in order to forget.76 Packaged in the annals of history and nation, who the Rani was, or what she stands for, or how she complicates concepts of gender and leadership, are questions that the national narrative has seldom been prepared to answer. The following chapters delve into the literary and the popular in a quest to sift through some of the unstable matrices that retell the story of this iconic woman from India and thus gesture towards the complex ideological trajectories that rely upon the personal, the home, the family and the woman to craft national narratives of authority.

A Woman’s Place in Literature and History

It is, rather, that, both as object of colonialist historiography and subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak77

History in popular culture, especially in India where the historic intersects with the religious and the mythological in infinite manners, is fraught with missteps and controversies. In its traditionally understood discursive and disciplinary ability, history is a legitimating narrative – one that sets antecedents, creates a material and political dialectic and in some narrowly defined quarters authorises the state. But these multiple impulses are not enacted within a homogeneous frame, even though the cultural production of a given time channels the synaptic links of empire, power, history and representation to often produce a monolithic parable of the past; yet what has elapsed is variously defined in the prevailing trends of culture. Partha Chatterjee has called for an ‘analytic of the popular’ in the reframing of historical debates – ‘[T]he domain of the popular had many narrative and performative strategies through which it could tell the story of conquest and tell it to the satisfaction of both victor and the vanquished’.78 This book investigates the print cultures of England and India, as the ‘domain of the popular’, that continue to reinvent the Rani of Jhansi in manifestations Introduction 23 that are ‘never ideologically or cognitively neutral’.79 Unlike the usual suspects of colonial and nationalist enterprise – i.e., the subaltern, the prostitute, or the persecuted wife – the Rani is an elite colonial subject whose refusal to be restrained within the available paradigms necessitates a larger, multilevel project of representation. Neither entirely victim, nor agent, the Rani is objectified by colonial and nationalist discourse to perpetuate sexually, culturally and politically viable modes of traditional femininity. I rephrase and rework Shahid Amin’s concept in typifying the Rani as a ‘recalcitrant figure’ – not because there is a paucity of narrative about her, but because the innumerable ways in which she is textually articulated defy any attempt to uncover a singular historical archive or literary figure.80 Thus, the Rani is a collective subject, albeit amongst contesting authorities, around whom collects a ‘commonwealth’ public sphere – a shared discursive figure through which nation, sovereignty and race are negotiated and claimed. Gender and power operate on a slippery, and often ambivalent, field and this is perhaps most accentuated when power is mobilized through a particularly gendered narrative of the state and disseminated through popular fiction. Dipesh Chakrabarty shows how history is often marginal in key national debates where the larger more compelling notion of ‘belief’ bests analytic history every time.81 Belief, however, is propelled by practices, literary and cultural, that map the imagination and actualise its conditions of possibility. If history functions as an active agent and account of the lived experience of the people, then literature allows for a glimpse into the human measure of history by providing the imaginative, the subdued and the subverted occularity. Anxiety and unrest are often expressed through literature – a form of collective interpretation that makes the most egregious and destabilising historical events ‘readable’. In colonial narratives, while her stories function as allegories for what it meant to be Victorian in the context of the Empire, the Rani becomes a hysterical body expressed through aberrations of femininity, symbolizing a chaotic India in need of colonial governance. Similarly, though she may provide an indelible historical blueprint for the nationalist project, the Rani’s disturbance of the largely masculine Indian public sphere requires remoulding, in nationalist texts, into an acceptable model of symbolic power. Dipesh Chakravarty argues that besides the rigour of history and the popularity of a given debate, one must be able to harness a persuasive rhetoric to compel people’s interests. The stories of Rani Lakshmi Bai, in British and Indian literatures, become the vehicles for precisely such persuasion. 24 The Rani of Jhansi

I have undertaken to pursue representations of Rani Lakshmi Bai in an effort to flesh out the varying registers of colonial and postcolonial preoccupation with the female colonial rebel. This is comparative to the extent that the opposing discourses of colonialism and nationalism demonstrate how each facilitates its particular directives. By moving, as Shahid Amin exhorts, ‘[B]eyond the territory of the contested fact, the unseen record, from the history of evidence into the realm of narration’, I read this symbolic idiom to demonstrate how the textual sweep of the Rani’s story trumps the actual military and political history of 1857, thus indicating the significant manner in which historiography of this period is understood through the prism of gender and literature.82 The manifold, complex and unstable portraitures of the Rani are not merely varying perspectives, but are, in fact, distillations and active agents, often incidental though not therefore unimportant, of the policies and agendas that constitute political and cultural discourses. Finally, the attention to gender in this literary historical retelling leads to a reformulation of the constitutive elements of nation, independence, governance and history. The figure of the Rani, a ‘public woman’, signifies eloquently and assertively on a multivalent network of narrative, discourse, history and subjectivity. While the debate over Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ continues unabated in postcolonial and feminist scholarship, Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy ask ‘Can we approach the gendered subaltern more productively if our project is to recover not “lost voices” but rather lost texts?’83 The figure of the Rani is especially significant because it is clamorous in textual and cultural practice. Thus, my project seeks not to uncover the historical voice of Rani Lakshmi Bai, but rather to extend the discussion on what constitutes the gendered subaltern historical archive. What kinds of vexed figures are produced, within the competing ideologies of colonial and nationalist patriarchy, in the narrative arc of the Rani’s story? What kinds of theoretical interventions are possible if one approaches such key historical figures not as lost voices but rather ‘lost texts’, that remain eclipsed, elided, or erased even within a prolific retelling? As feminist scholarship has raised the level of scrutiny for gender and gendered relations within South Asia, a critical evaluation of this figure contributes to larger questions of women’s participation in the public sphere, of the continuance of gender as a category of subalternity, of the dominance of domestic metaphors as identifying markers of gender and of the continued reliance on sexuality as the primary epistemological grid of intelligibility for women in power. Introduction 25 Overview of the Chapters

In popular novels and newspapers, the uprising of 1857 was most sensationally depicted as a set of atrocities committed by Indian men against British women and thus classified as the pathology of a degenerate masculinity. In this ‘rape script’, popularised by the nineteenth century British colonial novel, an English woman is besieged by rapacious Indian men and then rescued by the White colonial male in the eventual triumph of British masculinity. In Chapter II ‘Enslaving Masculinity: Rape Scripts and the Erotics of Power’, I consider four novels that create a different rape script: Gillean’s The Rane: A Legend of the Indian Mutiny (1887), Hume Nesbit’s The Queen’s Desire (1893), Philip Cox’s play The Rani of Jhansi (1933) and George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman in the Great Game (1975) depict the Rani in sexually coercive tropes, effectively ‘raping’ the White British male. Colonial constructions of Indian masculinity – effeminate and heterosexual Bengali versus excessively masculine but homosexual Punjabi and Pathan – are juxtaposed with sexualised representations of the colonised woman. The multiplicities of gender relations further complicate this equation and I argue that the Rani’s sexual pursuit of British manhood, a portrayal parallel to her military prowess, is posited as her eventual submission to colonial virility. In order to demonstrate the varying agendas of colonial gender formations, I place the eroticisation of power within these texts at the intersection of an inertly feminine Indian masculinity, a sexually aggressive Indian femininity and the eventual dominion of British manhood over both. Chapter III ‘India’s Aryan Queen: Colonial Ambivalence and Race in the Mutiny’, engages with the emergence of Aryanism in Europe and its effects on colonial policies in India. To contain the threat of organised political resistance, the British maximised the divisions between India’s varied regional groups and ethnicities by organising subdivisions such as ‘martial and non-martial’, or ‘Aryan and non-Aryan’. Alexander Rogers’ novel in verse, The Rani of Jhansi, or The Widowed Queen (1895), Michael White’s novel Lachmi Bai of Jhansi, The Jeanne D’Arc of India (1901) and Flow Red the Ganges, a novel written by Norman Partington and published in 1972, offer seemingly benevolent readings of Rani Lakshmi Bai as an Aryan model of heroic womanhood comparable to Joan of Arc. By casting the Rani as an Aryan, these narratives divert attention from her national and regional alliances to subsume her within a larger European hagiography in which race is determined as much by valour and leadership as by religion, language and skin colour. Rogers’ novel, focused on her interaction with representatives of the East India Company, presents the Rani as a heroic 26 The Rani of Jhansi figure surrounded by incompetent Indian men, while Partington’s more recent invocation offers an unexpected enmeshing of British and Indian femininity. This surprising literary ‘Aryanisation’ of the Rani exemplifies the unstable context of nineteenth century racial politics. The contradictions of Victorian representations, from lascivious seductress to worthy foe, construct a particular framework of ambivalence for the rebel woman. However, nationalist or Indian representations are not entirely without paradox or incongruity. Chapter IV ‘Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film’ analyses this particular celebration of the Rani as a patriotic figure. Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s iconic poem ‘Jhansi ki Rani’ (1930) is arguably the most familiar textual reference for Rani Lakshmi Bai and I analyse it alongside a national geography presented in Rabindranath Tagore’s song and now India’s national anthem, ‘Jan Gan Man’ (1911). A nationally acclaimed novel by Hindi literature’s foremost historical novelist Vrindavanlal Varma, Jhansi Ki Rani (1946), published at the cusp of India’s independence, is complicated by the contradictory notions of Indian womanhood to which nationalism must adhere in order to present the Rani’s struggle as a seamless commitment to the national cause. The novel’s canonisation within the auspices of India’s ‘national’ and ‘secular’ literature indicates the role Hindi literature plays in the historical validation and reconstruction of the colonial past. I use the first Indian film made in technicolour, Sohrab Modi’s Jhansi ki Rani (1953), to analyse how cinematic representation intervenes in the ambivalent relationship between tradition and modernity and consequently reframes the historical ‘real’ in ‘reel’. The film was notable for its authenticity in delineating historical events, but even in the midst of a great outpouring of scholarship on Indian cinema it remains neglected. Chapter V ‘Unmaking the Nationalist Archive: Gender and Dalit Historiography’ focuses on a biography, The Queen of Jhansi, published in 1956. Engaging multiple literary and biographical paradigms, this text by Mahasweta Devi engages with colonialist and nationalist archives to craft the Rani’s story as a narrative of the people. Using memory and folklore as authoritative documentation, Mahasweta forces a reconsideration of the constitutive elements of history, biography, femininity, citizenship and nation. She supplements the frame of colonial relations with a network of patriarchy, caste, religion and linguistic boundaries and resists recasting the gendered subject as a supplicant to male, upper-caste historiography. Instead, by aligning the Rani with Dalit communities and by intertwining their participation in 1857, Mahasweta forces a paradigmatic displacement redefining the biographical form and unsettling Introduction 27 the historical record – thus reworking the concept of the text, the expected characterisation of its reader and raising questions about the shared heritage of the postcolonial nation. Portrayals of the Rani reinforce not only her status as a mythic icon in Indo- British colonial and postcolonial discourse, but also the power wielded through the body of the native woman. She is variously represented as a heroic Aryan, a sexually promiscuous Indian whore, a Hindu goddess of nationalism and as a folk symbol of indigenous resistance. These elaborate cultural productions expose their respective colonial and nationalist agendas by employing culturally accessible tropes of femininity to bolster a range of positions. Whereas a monstrous rendering of the Rani aided the British colonial project, Indian nationalist machinery diametrically overturned such representations to apotheosise her as a national symbol. My reading of these texts, produced from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, pays careful attention to the ways in which the rebel queen unhinges official narratives. Thus, I do not seek to fix the Rani in historical or literary discourse even within the context of my interpretation. Instead, I explore the emergence of an uneven relationship of economic and political agendas, societal norms and gender stratifications within the allegedly neat demarcation between colonial and postcolonial representation to ask why the Rani’s life lends itself to these particularly national stories. Why is she reduced in magnitude, to colonial and postcolonial concerns, when she ought to serve as the primary figure for her own story? These sexual, racial, linguistic and caste-based formations of the Rani continue to be the provenance of debate and contestation and portray the nature and administration of authority – colonial, monarchical and nationalist. My study encompasses historical novels that purport to give accurate accounts, popular fictions that ride upon sensationalised memories of historical events and cinematic representations that configure history through the screen; thus providing a literary and feminist, but also methodological, contribution to the probing of gender, sexuality, race and religion. This book engages a theory of power, which remains attentive to gender as its main category of articulation and to the intersection of the ‘public woman’ with the ‘public life’ of history, as enunciated by the written text and the popular image. Though several historical, religious and cultural examples of women in power prevail, the militant woman of colonial and postcolonial description reveals the scarcity of scope in such representation. An identification with violent resistance necessitates a cultural re-imagining that can characterise such figures in more readily assimilated modes of femininity, lest they be constant reminders of the damage that can 28 The Rani of Jhansi be wrought by a mere woman. Defiant of a singular theoretical articulation, the woman in the public sphere, elite monarch or nationalist military leader, disrupts the available epistemologies of representation and power is accessed here through a complex and contradictory matrix of sexuality, race, language and caste. If, as Spivak famously argued, feminist thought must return to ‘measuring silences’, then this book seeks a measure of the noise surrounding Rani Lakshmi Bai, the Queen of Jhansi.84

Endnotes

1. Sujata Venkatraman, ‘Where do we go from here?’, http://www.sawf.org/newedit/ edit03202000/iwday.asp 2. For a larger consideration of these imperatives, see David Washbrook’s ‘After the Mutiny’, 10–17. 3. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 58. 4. Maria Jerinic, ‘How We Lost the Empire’, 123–139. 5. Amrita Basu, ‘Women’s Activism and the Vicissitudes of Hindu Nationalism’, 104–120. 6. Manisha Sethi, ‘Avenging Angels and Nurturing Mothers: Women in Hindu Nationalism’, 1545–1552; Kalyani Devaki Menon, ‘We will become Jijabai’, 103–126. 7. Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Nations in an Imperial Crucible’, 191. 8. Shahid Amin’s book Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (1995), Ramya Sreenivasan’s The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India C. 1500–1900 (2007), Christian Lee Novetzke’s Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Sant Namdev in India (2008). 9. Bhabha’s ‘By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ and ‘Signs taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817’. in The Location of Culture. 10. Parliamentary Debates, 3rd Series, 27 July 1857, vol. 14, 440–472; speech by Benjamin Disraeli, 442, 474. 11. Landlords with large landholdings who gave their land out on tenancy basis and held not just monetary but also political and military supremacy in their localities. 12. Rev. J. Cave-Brown, The Punjab and Delhi in 1857 28–29. 13. Situated in the geographically hostile region of Bundelkhand, though Jhansi was not among the most prosperous of Indian kingdoms its strategic position in the centre of the country and in a key area of new imperial expansion, shored up its status as a valuable colonial dominion. The ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ also included principalities where the ruler was judged ineffectual and the state of Awadh was brought under the ‘guidance’ of the East India Company in 1856, after the ruler Wajid Ali Shah had been deemed ‘unfit to rule’. 14. Alexander Duff, The Indian Rebellion, 46. 15. Ibid. Introduction 29

16. Sir John Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India 1857–58, 184. 17. Disraeli’s speech from British Parliamentary Debates, 1857. 18. David Urquhart, The Rebellion of India. 19. R. Bosworth Smith, Life of Lord Lawrence, 314. 20. Kim A. Wagner, ‘Treading Upon Fires’, 170. 21. Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 44. 22. Savarkar, V.D. The Indian War of Independence of 1857. Though Savarkar’s was the first Indian book to take issue with British accounts of the rebellion, it is greatly complicated by his fundamentalist notions of a homogenous religious and racial Hindu nation. 23. There is evidence of a mutiny in the Bengal army in 1764. The First Regiment claimed that they were being denied their share of a bonus paid to the army by the Nawab of Bengal. They imprisoned their officers and marched off to camp in a grove near the barracks. Seized by other Sepoys under British command, 50 were selected for punishment and 24 were blown from cannons. 24. S.N. Sen, Eighteen Fifty-Seven. 25. R.C. Majumdar, Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857, iii. 26. Seema Alaavi, The Sepoys and the Company. 27. The Indian Council of Historical Research, through conferences and seminars, has undertaken a large project to recover testimonies, journals and other writings from the Indian side. 28. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Rethinking 1857. 29. See Gautam Bhadra’s article ‘Four Rebels of 1857’, 129–178. 30. Stephen Howe, ‘Colonising and Exterminating? Memories of Imperial Violence in Britain and France’, www.cairn.info/revue-histoire-politique-2010-2-page-12.htm. Accessed on February 19, 2012. 31. The British historian, Sir Charles Crostwaithe, a contemporary of 1857, termed the rebellion an ‘Epic of the Race’. This characterisation points to the shift in colonial social politics after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species published in 1859. Before the publication of Darwin’s theories, the emphasis in colonial relations was on religious and social difference, not so much on race. 32. As quoted in Schultz and Felter, ‘Contemporary Perspectives of the Sepoy Mutiny’ http:/www.cayuga-cc.edy/about/facultypages/felter/sepoy.html 33. Hilda Gregg, ‘The Indian Mutiny in Fiction’, 218. 34. Patrick Brantlinger in Rule of Darkness (1990), Jenny Sharpe in Allegories of Empire (1993), Nancy Paxton in Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947 (1999) and Gautam Chakravarty in The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (2006) quote Gregg at the onset of their respective discussions of the rebellion. 35. The British Lion’s vengeance on the Bengal Tiger, Punch, 22 August 1857. 36. Andrew Ward, Our Bones are Scattered, 531. 37. Mahasweta Devi, The Queen of Jhansi.Trans. Mandira and Sagaree Sengupta (originally published in Bengali as Jhansir Rani in 1956). Vrindavan Lal Varma, 30 The Rani of Jhansi

Lakshmi Bai, The Rani of Jhansi (trans. Amita Sahaya. Originally published in 1946 in Hindi as Jhansi ki Rani). D.B. Prasnis, Jhansi ki Rani Lakshmi Bai (in Hindi, trans. From original in Marathi). Siriniwas Balajee Hardikar. Rani Laxmibai. E. Jaiwant Paul. Rani of Jhansi, Lakshmi Bai. 38. D.V. Tahmankar, The Ranee of Jhansi. S.N. Sinha. Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi. 39. This is considered highly improbable in R.C. Majumdar’s An Advanced History of India as his chronology places Nana Saheb as 18 years older than Manu. Also referred to in Devi’s Queen of Jhansi (19). 40. ‘As the outfits and ornaments for the actresses of his theatre were executed under his supervision, Captain Gordon once asked him, “Is what wicked people say true, that you occupy yourself in your free time with women’s clothing?” Gangadhar replied, “You come from distant shores and took over all the kingdoms of India. We have no other responsibilities, so why can’t we wear jewelry if we feel like it?”’ (28). From Mahasweta Devi’s Queen of Jhansi. ‘ “She’s damned bitter, you see—when her husband died, old Raja Gangadhar, he left no children of his own—well, he was an odd bird, really” and Skene blushed furiously and avoided my eye. “Used to go about in female dress most of the time and wore bangles and…perfume, you see….” “No wonder she was bitter”, says I.’ (66). From George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman in the Great Game. These are only two of the similar incidents and anecdotes related in various other literary and historical texts. Tapti Roy in Raj of the Rani (2006) takes great pains to point out that this cross-dressing occurs because women did not act on stage at that time. 41. G.W. Forrest, Selections from the Letters Despatches and Other State Papers Preserved in the Military Department of the Government of India 1857–58. Selections from the Central Indian Gazetteer. (Publication Details not available). 42. India Office Library, Foreign Political Consultations, 2 December 1853. Nos. 362/5. 43. Quoted in Joyce Lebra-Chapman’s The Rani of Jhansi, A Study in Female Heroism in India, 24. 44. Referenced in Kaye and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny, 66. 45. Excerpts from that earlier treaty read: ‘…[T]o declare the territory of Jhansi to be hereditary in the family of the late Sheo Rao Bhau and to perpetuate his heirs the treaty concluded with the late Bhao’. Quoted in Kaye and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny, 64. 46. Though not formulated by Lord Dalhousie, the infamous ‘Doctrine of Lapse’, whereby a kingdom with an unfit ruler or no natural heir fell under the command of the East India Company, was primarily implemented under his rule (1848–856). In his words, Indian kingdoms ‘lapsed to the sovereign power by total failure of heirs natural’. Michael H. Fisher, ed. The Politics of the British Annexation of India 1757–1857. The Rani was awarded an annual pension of 60,000 rupees, asked to vacate the fort and even asked to pay the King’s debts from her own pocket. An amount of 6 lakhs (600,000 rupees) was deposited in trust for Damodar Rao to be given to him when he came of age, a promise that was never realised. Introduction 31

47. National Archives of India (NAI) New Delhi: Ranee of Jhansi to the Agent for the Governor-General for Central India. Translation of Khareeta. Recorded 1 June 1859. 48. S. Thornton, ‘Jhansi rani instigated soldiers to attack the Fort’, 8–9. 49. C.A. Kincaid, ‘Lakshmibai Rani of Jhansi’, 100–104, 76–78. R. Burn and Patrick Cadell, ‘Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi’ 76–78. 50. As quoted by Kincaid and referenced in D.B. Prasnis’ Maharani Lakshmi Bai Saheb, Hyanche Charita, 1894. 51. E. Jaiwant Paul, Rani of Jhansi Lakshmi Bai, 114–115. 52. Thomas Lowe, Central India During the Rebellion of 1857 and 1858, 261. 53. ‘Baee’ is the Anglicisation of the ‘Bai’ of Lakshmi Bai’s name and is also the usual Maratha honorific accorded to women. 54. National Archives of India, New Delhi. Papers of the Foreign Department of the Government of India, 1858, 11 June 1858. 55. ‘Because she did not have an army of her own, she requested that Rao Saheb give her one. With Rao’s permission, I fought in Kunch under her leadership’. Tantya Tope’s confession of 10 April 1858. Quoted in G.W. Forrest’s History of the Indian Mutiny 1857–58. 56. This issue is dealt with at length in Chapter Two. Examples of work on this issue are: Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire; Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj; Patrick Bratlinger, Rule of Darkness, British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914; Deirdre David, Rule Britannia. 57. Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi. Daughters of Independence; Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Reading Mother India’; 6.Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Tradition’. 58. Catherine Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire’, 46–76, 52. 59. Indrani Sen, Woman and Empire. 60. The abolition of Sati in 1829, the legalisation of remarriage of Hindu widows under the Hindu Marriage Act of 1856, the abolition of female infanticide under the Act passed in 1804 and the growing emphasis on female education furthered the gap between the Company and the Hindu dominant Indian population. 61. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Robert J.C. Young. Colonial Desire, Hubridity in Theory, Culture and Race. 62. ‘For example, in Haryana (then the south-east part of the Punjab province), as Prem Chowdhary points out, the British while granting certain rights to widows in the interest of revenue extraction, were anxious to discourage them from availing of those very rights’. Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 7. Referring to ‘Customs in a Peasant Economy: Women in Colonial Haryana’ by Prem Chowdhary in the same book, 302–306.Of course, the case of Rani Lakshmi Bai is indicative of this trend and the concern of this project. 63. Catherine Hall, 72. 64. Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 10. 65. Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Historically Speaking, Gender and Citizenship in Colonial India, 88’. 32 The Rani of Jhansi

66. Quoted in Madhu Kishwar’s ‘Gandhi on Women’, 1691–1702. 67. Ketu Katrak, ‘Indian Nationalists, Gandhian “Satyagrapha” and Representation of Female Sexuality’, 397. 68. Kumari Jayawarden, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World., 97. 69. In the Presidential elections of India in 2002, Dr Lakshmi Sahgal was the candidate fielded by the Left parties. Though supported in large numbers by women’s organisations and socialist parties, she could not garner enough votes against the strategic candidature of Abdul Kalam, who was nominated by the coalition of the ruling parties. 70. Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History, 428. 71. Ania Loomba emphasises the complicity of colonial reform movements in the civilising impetus of imperialism to argue that ‘British feminists of the nineteenth century invoked sisterhood and…offered a gendered version of the white man’s burden in colonial India’. Ania Loomba, ‘Tangled Histories: Indian Feminism and Anglo-American Feminist Criticism’. 72. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation, 258. 73. Gayatri Charavorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 70. 74. Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Reading Mother India’, 6. 75. Suresht Ranjen Bald, ‘From Satyarth to Manushi: An Overview of the Women’s Movement in India’, 18. 76. Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India, 9. 77. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 287. 78. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Introduction: History and the Present’, 16. 79. Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’, 6. 80. Shahid Amin, ‘Writing the Recalcitrant Event’. 81. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Public Life of History, 143–168’. 82. Ibid. 83. Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, ‘Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever’, 25. 84. Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’. Enslaving Masculinity 33

II Enslaving Masculinity Rape Scripts and the Erotics of Power

In the British imagination, the ‘Mutiny’ never ended. Kim A. Wagner

n ‘An Interesting Condition’ written for The Pioneer in 1888, Rudyard IKipling personified India as a licentious woman available to every intruder:

The East intrigued with Alexander. It was a liaison passenger. With the Toorkh. It was an affaire militaire only… With the Rajput; with the Hindu. It was to pass the time… With the Portuguese. It was an aberration erratic. With the Frenchman. It was an affair of the heart. But she was a woman. The Englishman came… The Englishman believes he has married her… These things are the marks of the husband English. But…ask her. She has seen many lovers. A woman who has seen many lovers will see more…

The poem imagines the country as a woman indiscriminate in her choice of lovers and unforgiving in her promiscuity. While the men are identified by geography or culture, the woman is adrift of such mooring and wholly given to sexual mobility. The British believe they have entered an honourable union, but the Englishman’s confidence, buttressed by his naïveté, is betrayed. Whereas earlier narratives rehearsed European colonialism in heteronormative metaphors as the providential dominance of man over woman, thus Britain over India, a hundred years of colonial rule also exposed the anxiety and instability of such binaries. For Kipling, India was not a passive femininity, but rather an avaricious and perfidious sexual being – actively seeking the demise of the lover. This 34 The Rani of Jhansi representation of India as a disloyal wife to the English husband, or a prostitute available to the highest bidder, is a prevalent sexual trope in colonial literature; and the mutiny is often understood through these opposing prisms as betrayal by one who had once seemed pliable or as the habitual behaviour of a wanton woman.1 An abiding aspect of the mutiny that was integral to the colonial understanding of the rebellion is the ‘rape-script’ concerning the alleged ruin of British women by Indian rebels. Although later proven by judicial probes to have been exaggerated or even completely fabricated, stories of the besieged English woman became the most enduring and horrifying image of 1857.2 In such colonial formations two gendered and mutually constitutive narratives coexist: one in which India is an unfaithful wife and the other in which India is a site for the violation of the faithful British wife. Newspaper reports about the massacres at Kanpur and Jhansi and articles about English women enslaved in Indian zenanas contributed to a colonial imaginary in which ‘atrocities, actual and alleged, committed against the memsahibs constituted violations not only of their bodies, but also of the imperial body politic’ and the revolt manifested as the savage Indian’s pursuit of lascivious dominion over British women.3 Thus, the uneven and multi- faceted trajectories of rebellion are represented in the singular figuration of sexual revenge. In Allegories of Empire, a landmark study of this 1857 ‘rape- script’, Jenny Sharpe argues that stories of rape tend to emerge during periods of political instability: ‘During the 1857 revolt, the idea of rebellion was so closely imbricated with the violation of English womanhood that the Mutiny was remembered as a barbaric attack on innocent white women’.4 Sharpe documents the ‘rape-script’ as a persistent trope that surfaced not only in 1857 but also in the days of the Ilbert Bill in 1883 and the Punjab disturbances of 1919.5 Whereas Sharpe locates the inception of this gendered rationale in the aftermath of 1857, Nancy Paxton argues that the hysteria about the rape of English women by Indian men was a modified iteration of an eighteenth century colonial discourse in which India represented the violated woman while the East India Company served as the rapist. In describing ‘the colonial relationship of India poised between courtship and rape’, Paxton quotes Edmund Burke’s ‘A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’ in 1772:

Administration discovered that the East India Company were guardians to a very handsome and rich lady in Hindostan. Accordingly, they set parliament in motion; and parliament…directly became a suitor and took the lady into its tender, fond, grasping arms, pretending all the while that it meant nothing Enslaving Masculinity 35

but what was fair and honourable; that no rape or violence was intended; that its sole aim was to rescue her and her fortune out of pilfering hands of a set of rapacious stewards, who had let her estate run to waste and had committed various depredations. 6

In his extended litany of excesses committed by the East India Company, Burke shifts emphasis from the “courtship” of India to her “ravishment” at the hands of the Company and criticises Hastings for endorsing the rape, dishonour and destruction of Indian womanhood. 7

Virgins, who had never seen the sun, were dragged from the inmost sanctuaries of their houses and in the open court of justice…publicly were violated by the lowest and wickedest of the human race. Wives were torn from the arms of their husbands and suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the bottoms of the dungeons in which their honour and their liberty were buried together.8

Burke’s comments roused enough ire to force an impeachment trial in the House of Lords for Sir Warren Hastings, who had served as the Governor-General of Bengal from 1774–1785. Paxton argues that this earlier rape-script concerning the British male and the Indian woman changes character after 1857. The Indian male rebel and the besieged White woman then occupy the role of the rapist and victim respectively—evoking the colonial anxiety of miscegenation. However, this was not a metaphoric transference suddenly apparent in colonial policy and literature, but rather the offshoot of an administrative, cultural and military overhaul that coalesced around the rebellion. The period following the mutiny was shaped not by the supposedly benevolent and symbiotic style of government first espoused by the colonialists, but rather by a severe military and administrative hand that was essential to control a volatile mix of religious, cultural, linguistic and ethnic differences. The barbaric savage replaced the ‘mild Hindoo’ and the image of India devolved into the chaos of an uncivilized jungle.9 The ‘rape-script’ also took attention away from the ruthless reprisals that were being imposed by British men by emphasising the brutality faced by British women; a move from the ‘concept of vengeance to that of justice’. Thus, retaliation was cast as redress for the Englishwoman and ‘removed any notion that the British may have betrayed the trust of their colonial subjects or compromised their own position as protectors of women’.10 British fiction in the later nineteenth century furthered this mutiny rape- script with a prolific outpouring of Romance novels centred on Englishwomen 36 The Rani of Jhansi who are subjected to gross injustices during the rebellion and then rescued by dashing young Englishmen. Much of this literature abounds with descriptions of the Jhansi massacre and of the Rani of Jhansi as a bloodthirsty ‘murderous whore’.11 Whereas the rape-script was primarily understood after 1857 as the assault on British women by Indian men, Rani Lakshmi Bai’s coercive sexual relations with British men in nineteenth century romance novels signals yet another iteration. Romantic or sexual union between the colonialists and the colonized followed three accepted trajectories: the barbaric pursuit of the Englishwoman by the Indian male; the charitable love of the Englishman for the dispossessed Indian woman; or the accidental empathy that arose between the Indian prostitute and the sahib. There are no models for the sexual pursuit of the British male by the Indian woman, save these narratives centred on Rani Lakshmi Bai. The rape-script involving the Indian male is based on subjugating and sullying English womanhood; and British masculinity is rendered inferior for not protecting its women. The Rani’s interaction with the Englishman is prompted by ‘love’, a recognisable and universalised female malady she cannot control in her desire for the superior English male. The emphasis shifts from the defilement of British femininity to inescapable recognition of, and submission to, British masculine authority – and thus colonial masculinity is made viable through the colonised female, a necessity to reinsert imperial control as heterosexual patriarchal conquest, especially in the face of the Rani’s rebellion. Victorian post-mutiny novels grapple with the unbalancing of colonial agenda by focusing on the smallest representative measure of the empire – the English home. While the damage from the rebellion still involves the calculus of profit and loss to the colonial enterprise and is suffered mostly by the ruling class, the disruption of British domesticity strikes at a universal emotional flashpoint for all English society. Thus, in many colonial novels, the defense of the home and of the heterosexual couple that anchor it provides a comprehensible and logical counterpoint to the anarchy of the rebellion and the Rani, as the widowed, authoritative female rebel, is represented consequently as the very antithesis of the British family. The Afghan Knife (1879) by Robert Armitage Sterndale, Star of Fortune, a Story of the Indian Mutiny (1895) by J.E. Muddock and The Rani of Jhansi or, The Widowed Queen (1895) by Sir Edwin Arnold all deploy this stereotype of destructive Indian femininity. In the twentieth century, The Rani of Jhansi (1933) by Philip Cox, Flow Red the Ganges (1972) by Norman Partington, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) by J.G. Farrell and Flashman in the Great Game (1975) by George MacDonald Fraser use yet another rendition of this disruptive model by depicting the Rani as the Enslaving Masculinity 37 desperate pursuer of British men. Of these, Gillean’s (Major J.N.H. MacLean) novel The Rane (1887) and Hume Nesbit’s text The Queen’s Desire (1893) are particularly significant as they subordinate the story of the rebellion to the sexual relationship between the Rani and an Englishman and complicate the mutiny rape-script by exchanging the Rani for the rapist and the Englishman for the victim.12 Yet, here sexuality is not a straightforward transfer point intersecting between metaphor and reality. Desire must be reined in even as it is produced and sexual intercourse, consensual or forced, between the colonial male and the native woman traverses a complicated crisis of imagination that often renders visible the false coherence of imperial ideology. The Rane follows the fortunes of Major Gordon, a liberal Deputy Commissioner of Ranepore married to an Indian woman, and is a chronological account of the rebellion in Jhansi (here called Ranepore, the Rani’s town).13 Thus, the novel begins as a reformist narrative with an avowed belief in the possibility of mutual love between the British and the Indians. Expectedly, this utopian agenda is rapidly disassembled with the onset of the rebellion. The reader first encounters the Rani in disguise as she seduces a political officer named Shakespear. Emblematic of the worst colonial stereotypes, the Rani is an unpopular monarch; a tyrant who forces her kingdom into confrontation with a legitimate and just British authority. Neither popular nor chaste, she plots the end of the British in Ranepore and brings death and deprivation to her kingdom. Gillean’s novel also details a fictional meeting between the dying king of Jhansi and the British representative at his court: the king objects to having the Rani serve as regent after his demise. Thus, the novel displaces the history of the succession and the Rani stands indicted by both British and Indian patriarchy as a bad wife, seductress, murderer and whore. In The Queen’s Desire, Rani Lakshmi Bai is involved in numerous conspiratorial meetings before the outbreak of the mutiny in Meerut.14 Named only the ‘Ranee’, she makes multiple forays into Delhi and kidnaps and seduces George Jackson, a sergeant in the Company’s army. As he emerges from the intoxicating effect of having the Queen for a lover (Jackson’s level of consent remains unclear as he is drugged), he resists this emasculation and persuades the Rani to free him. The novel culminates with the Rani’s death at his hands. Rani Lakshmi Bai’s character in The Queen’s Desire is in control of her self and sexuality, pursues the object of her affections, disabuses notions of oppressed Indian womanhood and embodies an atypical tale of colonial desire. In these stories, the Rani of Jhansi embodies Kipling’s version, in ‘An Interesting Condition’, of an India that is, at its very depth, a ‘whore’ dependent 38 The Rani of Jhansi on her most recent benefactor, yet disloyal and cunning; the vision of an askance femininity outside the rational dictates of British patriarchy while the colonialist is a ‘vulnerable figure ensnared by the temptress India’.15 I suggest that Kipling’s dire reading of this colonial relationship is precisely what these nineteenth century Anglo-Indian novels resolve by killing off the native woman and restoring British domesticity. Rani Lakshmi Bai and India, the whore and the jungle, are set up against Victoria and England, the mother and the motherland. India thus emerges as a complex site of colonial desire; one that is far more contradictory than is perhaps accounted for by the ideological underpinning of empire. Although these overtly and overly sexualised depictions of the Rani of Jhansi translate the militant/aggressive political Indian woman into a force of excessive sexuality, this particular rendition is arrived at by a convergence of trajectories more numerous than are accounted for by the simple equation of female militancy with hyper-sexuality. Gillean’s The Rane and Hume Nesbit’s The Queen’s Desire and many of the novels that follow, embody not only the historical moment of 1857 but also late nineteenth century imperial policy and gender in India. I chart the ‘rape-script’ involving Rani Lakshmi Bai and British men on a grid composed of divergent ‘grammars of difference’: late nineteenth-century Indian masculinity (Bengali effeminacy versus Punjabi virility); the shift in Imperial style from Bengal-based administration to the Punjab-style of frontier subjugation; the growing fascination with the murderous cult of Thugi and the Tantric sects; and the increased presence of the British woman in India after 1857.16 These varied and intersecting colonial trajectories produce an affective knowledge that refracts the mutiny, and consequently India, as a site of horror and perfidy. It is at a juncture of these narratives of masculinity, imperialism, sexuality and domesticity in what Mary Louise Pratt has called ‘the contact zone – space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, racial inequality and intractable conflict’—that The Queen’s Desire and The Rane resolve the unsettled and unsettling fissions of colonial history in the narrative closure of heterosexual conquest.17

From Bengal’s Residency to the Punjab Frontier18

Colonial gender formations are interwoven into Britain’s occupation of India and the two ends of the gender spectrum are most visibly identified, after 1857, by the demarcations of Bengali and Punjabi masculinity.19 The East India Enslaving Masculinity 39

Company’s rule was established with the Battle of Plassey in 1757, when the company gained direct commercial and military control of the Bengal Provinces. As a result, Bengal and specifically the city of Calcutta, became the seat of the Company’s rule and it was perhaps more profoundly affected by social and educational reform than any other location. Although the Company’s affairs proceeded virtually unchecked until the end of the eighteenth century, by 1813 the Charter Act renewing the East India’s Company’s contract forced it to ‘assume a new responsibility toward native education and …relaxed controls over missionary activity in India’.20 Bengal’s educated class, fluent in both its own and the colonizer’s culture and language, were regarded as mediators between the Company and the vast multitude of natives under its governance. Known by the derogatory term ‘Babu’, the Bengali exemplified, in British eyes, Macaulay’s famous and most often quoted, ‘Minute on Indian Education’ delivered to Parliament on 2 February 1835: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions, whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’.21 As the epicentre of the Company’s governance, Bengal fostered a large administration heavily reliant on the English-educated Bengali class. The reformist and evangelical agendas begun by Lord William Bentinck, the Governor General from 1828–1835, also first took root in this area. Though once considered the prime recipient of colonial beneficence, Bengal’s status as a model state was eroded by 1857. Rather than ensure his position as a loyal subject in British eyes, the virtual non-participation of the Bengali in the revolt denigrated his ‘inability’ to fight and marked him as an effeminate aesthete in post-mutiny discourse. In, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Mrinalini Sinha traces the gradual transformation of the Bengali in colonial discourse from a model subject before the Revolt to a hyper-effeminate stereotype. In her discussion of the Ilbert Bill of 1883, which created grave unrest by proposing to allow Indian judges to pass judgment on British persons and the Native Volunteer Movement of 1885, which purported to raise a corps of Indian volunteers for the army but was rescinded amidst fears of uniting the natives and thus undermining the ethos of Divide et Impera, Sinha connects the respective controversies and the classification of India’s races into martial and non-martial castes, to the complex discourse of feminization associated with the Bengali.22 The eventual ‘enlightened’ demand of the educated Bengalis for access to the rights of Commonwealth citizens also contributed greatly to the caricature, for it represented to the 40 The Rani of Jhansi colonialists an ungrateful and opportunistic feminised nature more interested in selfish individual gains than in the glory of the collective – the empire. In the masculine arena of colonialism, the apportioning of rights and privileges was understood as the just reward of battle, while the demand for freedom, without the accompanying hardship of war, was read as petulant feminine entitlement. The elevation of Punjabi masculinity ran parallel to an increasing virulent discourse of Bengali effeminacy. The failure of the Bengal-based East India Company to avert or contain the 1857 revolt prompted a change in governance. Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858 brought India under the direct control of Parliament and the Crown. The success of the British army in the Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845–1849) had given them parts of Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and territory bordering Afghanistan. The Sikh kingdoms, unforgiving of the sepoys who had fought for the British in the Anglo-Sikh wars, did not support the 1857 rebellion. In The Martial Races of India, Sir George Macmunn asserts that ‘in fact the Mutiny of the Hindustani troops was largely suppressed by the Punjabi soldiery and when the reconstruction came, no longer was the old soldier class of Hindustan to predominate. The monopoly was broken and the job was to go largely to the Punjabi and the Gurkha’.23 The prominent role of the ‘Punjabi soldiery’ in suppressing the revolt brought Punjab onto the central stage. Hitherto remanded to the margins of colonial politics, Punjab and its population began to form the focus of imperial administration after 1857. The earlier plan of Anglicisation and Christian conversion had failed in its inclusive liberality and focus moved now to a strategy of military control.24 The ethos of Macaulay’s Minute resided in the supposedly altruistic motive of elevating the native man to a level at which he could participate in the superior administration of the ‘civilized’ West in his own country.25 But the large-scale revolt, impelled by those serving in the Company, prompted a radical change in policy. The emphasis was now on importing a group of Oxbridge-style civil servants to govern the land and on reinforcing the might of the British army with religiously and ethnically segregated native regiments. As the mainstay of the army, the Sikh (Punjabi) regiments now embodied the ideal of masculine behaviour and the wild but eventually subjugated area of Punjab and the Afghan border provided the idealised blueprint of British imperialism in the late nineteenth century – often depicted so in the works of Kipling and other colonial writers. Ironically, the difficulty in conquering Punjab, as opposed to the seemingly simple annexation of Bengal, praised the Punjabi martial spirit and denigrated the educated Bengali, but most stridently reaffirmed the imperialist English masculinity that had been able to subdue a ‘worthy foe’.26 The Rane and Enslaving Masculinity 41

The Queen’s Desire continue this reaffirmation by using the sexualised Rani to fashion an effeminate and degenerate Indian masculinity that leaves only the British male capable of ruling India.

Women and Colonial Literature

The small and isolated number of colonial settlements in India were blamed for the revolt and changes in administrative and military policy were accompanied by an unmistakable agenda to establish a larger British presence anchored by the British home. However, a dramatic boost in the migration of White British men, but more importantly and in far larger numbers than before of British women, was brought about by the change in status from a mostly Company-run fiscal enterprise to a dominion of the Crown (and therefore a part of the British Commonwealth). The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made travel to India from England simpler and shorter and female relatives of Englishman serving in India, as well as missionaries and suffragists, came with increased frequency to the colony.27 The amplified and protected presence of the Englishwoman was a salve to imperial psychology and signified a renewed confidence in the ability of the Raj to protect them. Victorian literature reflected this by portraying India as a site of British domestic space and by espousing the centrality of the British home in the colonial order. As scholarship on empire and its relationship to home has shown, domesticity was an overarching influence in shaping colonial and colonised identities. Thus, an analysis of the disruptive element in British households in India, namely such sensational literary configurations of the Rani of Jhansi as in The Rane and The Queen’s Desire, is vital to the story of British colonisation and Indian resistance. Gillean’s preface to The Rane claims that the author witnessed the rebellion and ‘took an active part in many of the adventures and tragic scenes of the Indian Mutiny’. Hume Nesbit’s preface to The Queen’s Desire refers to it as a ‘romance, for romance it is in the most literal sense’ (i), even as he advocates his attempt at having ‘gone into many books for my facts’, among which he lists ‘Col. C.B. Mallison’s, C.S.I., work the “Indian Mutiny,” and “Col. M. Taylor’s “Confessions of a Thug,” and “Pandurang Hugi”’ (ii). Since Malleson’s account of the rebellion and Taylor’s novels are considered the mainstays of Victorian history and literature, these references allow Nesbit a degree of legitimacy for his book, while Gillean claims to have witnessed what he has fictionalised. Thus, the novels are underwritten by the authors’ tenuous claims in blurring the distinction between history and fiction. Anjali Arondekar reads this erasure 42 The Rani of Jhansi in mutiny texts as ‘an enabling condition’ that allows the inconsistency of historical texts and the ‘truth effects’ of mutiny fiction to collaborate in a symbiotic process of narrativization’.”28 Thus, narrative conciliates between historical disruption and imperial reconsolidation as these old ‘India hands’ position themselves as guardians of a ‘real’ knowledge, imbuing their stories with an authentic potency that in turn intersects with the affective strategies of literature. The Rane and The Queen’s Desire harness the genre of the imperial romance by presenting both a popular male adventure story, with its accompanying elements of heroism, treachery and victory over evil, and a popular love story with a consummate lover and warrior in the figure of the Englishman. Romance narratives serve as political allegories in the British colonial context to suggest a utopian resolution of an insurmountable antagonism. The supposed naturalness of (heterosexual) union between colonised and colonizer, as represented by the British male and the Indian woman, glosses over the obvious inequality in the colonial encounter; yet the inequality is smoothed over by the presence of the Rani, whose status as queen elevates her above other native women. Though conceivable, such desire iterates its availability only as aberration. Shuchi Kapila asserts that ‘casting political conflicts as romance narratives smoothes out historical tangles, creating unlikely alliances and attempting sentimental closures to unresolved problems’.29 Doris Somner, writing about Latin American fiction, agrees ‘romantic passion…gave a rhetoric for the hegemonic projects in Gramsci’s sense of conquering the antagonist through mutual interest, or “love”, rather than through coercion’, as if to convince the colonised that her or his ‘needs’ can only be realised or expressed through the coloniser.30 This scenario is aptly played out in The Queen’s Desire, where the Rani immediately recognises her ‘need’ for the British colonialist but dies soon after and thus the novel never has to contend with the interracial romance in perpetuity. In The Rane it is Major Gordon’s Indian wife who sacrifices herself to facilitate her husband’s escape from the mutineers and heralds the absolute submission of the colonial subject to colonial authority – a metaphoric and literal erasure of the native to ensure the survival of the coloniser. Though fiction in the first half of the nineteenth century was hardly ignorant of the empire’s expanse, the references to the business or the entity of the empire were rarely overt. As postcolonial scholarship has demonstrated, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) is underwritten by the ideologies of imperialism. Bertha is the insane product of miscegenation in Jamaica and the novel employs the cultural metaphor of sati in the eventual pyrotechnic climax. In Austen’s Enslaving Masculinity 43

Mansfield Park (1814), Sir Thomas’s estate prospers due to his plantations in Antigua. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847) is sprinkled with casual references to the products of empire – hot pickles, cashmere scarves and turquoise jewellery. Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861) relies on the happenstance of a fortune made in the colonies and in David Copperfield (1849) Emily’s move to Australia allows her to escape her tarnished reputation.31 Thus, the colonial imaginary plays a crucially constitutive role in the period’s literature. The middle and, then more prominently, the end of the nineteenth century witness a plethora of literary and figurative representations of 1857. Patrick Brantlinger in Rule of Darkness observes, ‘[A]t least fifty (mutiny novels) were written before 1900 and at least thirty more before World War II. There was also a deluge of eyewitness accounts, journals articles, histories, poems and plays dealing with the 1857–58 rebellion’.32 Elleke Boehmer suggests ‘at the time of high imperialism in the late nineteenth century, most British imperialists cherished an unambiguously heroic image of themselves as conquerors and civilizers of the world’.33 Along with Morgan Stanley’s How I found Livingstone (1872) and In Darkest Africa (1890), she mentions the astronomic rise in the sale of G.A. Henty’s militaristic boys’ adventure tales. Running parallel to this trend, as evinced by Boehmer and other scholars, was also an increased output and sale of novels depicting Anglo-Indian domestic life. The unprecedented domestication of India by British families and more importantly the increased presence of the English woman, gave rise to a genre of novels written by women and directed towards an increasingly literate female population. Rosemary Marangoly George argues that the empire was one of the ‘primary arenas’ for the emergence of this ‘authoritative self’ associated with the modern female subject. ‘It is in the colonies that nineteenth and early twentieth century English women become the “full individual…” This authoritative self was defined against a racial Other (Indian woman) in encounters that were located in space that was paradoxically domestic as well as public: The English home in the colonies’.34 Similarly, Alison Sainsbury traces the literary genealogy of the genre to the ‘domestic’ output of experiences and its encounter with the ‘exoticism’ of the Empire.

The literary descent of the genre can be traced to two lines, one English and the other Anglo-Indian. Its English heritage can be found in the ‘domestic novel’, focused on women’s activities in the home, the sentimental novel, with its defense of virginity and the gothic novel, whose ‘exotic’ settings betoken threat.35 44 The Rani of Jhansi

Representing a new type of genre, underpinned by historical and imperial imperatives, the late nineteenth century popular novels discussed in this chapter, though largely contained within the nomenclature of ‘romance,’ form their narrative around the tripartite conjunction of the sentimental love story, the domestic colonial novel and the heroic tale of colonial adventure.36 As suggested earlier, the ‘Mutiny’ novels are particularly illustrative of this mixture as they invariably portray the disruption of colonial domesticity, the abduction of the colonial female, the defeat of the rebels and the eventual rescue of the beleaguered Englishwoman by the White colonial hero. Though Kipling’s unfaithful wife (India) had let down her honourable husband (England) and the rebellion could thus be read as infidelity in a disintegrating marriage, the post-mutiny romance novels rehabilitated imperial claims by upholding the sanctity of English marriages in the colonial land.

The Rane: ‘An unscrupulous and badly disposed woman’

The Rane begins with the colonials in Jhansi discussing, with rising trepidation, the mutinous politics overtaking the country and it ends with the protagonist Major Gordon safely ensconced in Scotland with his wife and child. The geographic and ideological shift from national politics to the individual’s quest for familial bliss bypasses the colonial, eugenic and capitalist agenda of the British state while apotheosizing heterosexual domesticity. Between these two chronological markers lie Rani Lakshmi Bai’s rebellion, the massacre of Europeans in Jhansi and an account of the life of Major Gordon and his Indian wife Elsie, whom he had once rescued from becoming a human sacrifice to the goddess ‘Bhowani’ (13). The events of 1857 follow the expected linearity in the novel and frame a narrative about inter-racial love, about sexual and political machinations in pursuit of power and about the inviolability of British marriage. Unlike many other novels in which Rani Lakshmi Bai’s dead husband Gangadhar Rao is only mentioned as the deceased king of Jhansi, The Rane enacts a conversation between the king and Shakespear, a British political officer, at a pivotal juncture in the book. In his last words to Shakespear, Gangadhar Rao warns him never to let the kingdom fall into the hands of his wife ‘Luchmie Bhie’. He goes so far as to wish that his estate, should his adopted son not be recognized as the heir, be given to the ‘Honourable East India Company Bahadur’:

Should, however, the Company Bahadur not think right to acknowledge the adoption, I then wish it to be clearly understood that I leave my estate – excepting my personal property, jewels and such like, which I wish my adopted son to Enslaving Masculinity 45

inherit – to the Honourable East India Company Bahadur – may their Rajh continue for ever – and not to my wife, who, I believe would tyrannize over and ill-treat the people whom I have endeavoured, by God’s help, to govern with justice and kindness and who, I believe, love me well and will regret my death. You will perhaps think, sahib, this my last request an unnatural one, for, as you are aware, there have been instances known of women succeeding a Rajah in the petty states of Bundlekund and governing with judgment and success too; but my wife is not one who could be trusted with power. (18)

In this paragraph the dying king of Jhansi entreats the British to take over his kingdom. This is an astutely situated ploy and a blatant fiction, for most historical documents verify that the king adopted a son to ensure just the opposite. Gangadhar’s depiction as a concerned monarch contrasts greatly with historical British and Indian accounts that represent his profligate penchant for theatre and his ineptitude for governance. The king’s insistence that his warning be understood not as a lack of faith in women’s ability to rule but as a shrewd understanding of the Rani’s malicious nature reinstates the author’s faith in Victoria’s rule and protects him from possible charges of sedition. Though the paragraph alludes to the ‘petty states of Bundlekund’ where women have ruled successfully, the reference to women rulers is a sign of allegiance and faith in the British monarch. This interaction between the king and the British political officer justifies the annexation by framing it as a benevolent act desired by the true ruler and patriarch of Jhansi. The king, instantiating Kipling’s marital allegory, bluntly urges that the Rani not be appointed Regent as he ‘know (s) her to be an unscrupulous, badly disposed woman and I have reason even to suspect her fidelity to me as a wife’ – a description borne out by the salacious nature of the events that follow (18). A meeting between Shakespear, the British political assistant and the Rani in the soon-to-be infamous ‘Joken Bagh’ corroborates the King’s suspicions about his wife’s promiscuity. This is a significant location for the seduction, as Shakespear, like the English victims of the massacre, does not survive his encounter with the Rani, who is unveiled, literally and figuratively, through the Englishman’s perspective:

It was a face which, when once seen, it would be difficult to forget, with jet-black liquid eyes, fringed with long sweeping eyelashes; a forehead giving promise of intelligence and determination; a beautifully chiseled aquiline nose and a small exquisitely shaped mouth, but one which, if closely observed and studied, would give the idea that its possessor could be cruel and unsparing under circumstance where she was opposed or thwarted. 46 The Rani of Jhansi

The standard exotic description of the Rani is a prelude to the innate malice and vengeance of her nature. Shakespear’s seduction begins with the Rani’s appeal that ‘among the Hindoos there is little consideration shown to the feelings of a woman in connection with marriage’ and that ‘I (she) was married to Rajah Gungadhar Row when quite a child and when he was of an age at which he might have been my great grandfather’ (23). The Rani’s entreaties to Shakespear reference both child marriage and the ill-treatment of women, thereby giving the reform-minded Shakespear the justification to treat her sympathetically; at which juncture the Rani takes advantage of this chivalry: ‘The Rane here paused and stepping closer to Shakespear placed her delicately-formed, warm, trembling hand on that of her companion, which was lying on the table before him and letting her other rest gently on his shoulder, she stooped over him until her breath fanned his cheek…’ (24). The adjective-laden language of this narrative accentuates the sensuality of the encounter and suggests the future intimacies that are to follow. The question of Shakespear’s character – for a representative of the British government must remain incorruptible – is neatly abbreviated by subordinating it to the logic of English gallantry. Shakespear is absolved of fornication as he has simply acceded to the larger, natural logic of masculinity: ‘Shakespear was but a man – for even political officer are, after all, but men – and the state of affairs he felt to be both critical and trying… His beautiful companion’s touch and near proximity sent a thrill of feeling through his whole body and she was, as it appeared to him, fast gaining a magnetic influence over him’ (25). Shakespear’s attempts to resist the Rani’s charms are futile:

A sudden gust of wind extinguished the solitary lamp, which was burning on the table and Shakespear and the lady were left in darkness to pursue their conversation and to cultivate their newly and so strangely-formed acquaintance, which, although we cannot speak positively on the question, we have a strong belief that they did, to their mutual satisfaction (26).

The ‘mutual satisfaction’ of the participants cements the Rani’s reputation as a wanton woman negligent in morality and well-versed in the Machiavellian art of securing power. On the morning after the rendezvous and before he can send the government the recommendations of the dying king, Shakespear is gravely wounded while hunting a ‘man-eating tigress’ (29). An oft-repeated caricature of the Rani in Victorian fiction, the ‘man-eating tigress’ is both a threat to civilization and a convenient prop for colonial virility. Shakespear’s unsuccessful attempt to Enslaving Masculinity 47 kill the tigress is symbolic of his fall from grace and ‘after a month’s suffering, during which time he hovered between life and death, he left India for his native country on sick leave, having been relieved…in his official capacity as political office in charge of Ranepore’ (41). Thus, the novel unequivocally conveys the debilitating effects of such sexual encounters that cross the racial and colonial line. Though this interaction remains the only clearly enunciated sexual engagement in The Rane between the Rani and an Englishman, the rest of the novel is peppered with allusions to her various sexual liaisons. Unlike The Queen’s Desire, in which her English lover mistakenly kills the Rani, in The Rane it is the Rani’s spurned Indian paramour who becomes the instrument of her death suggesting, of course, that her volatility as a figure outside patriarchal constraints imperils both British and Indian masculinity. The Rani is a successful negotiator of sexual contracts to ensure her rule, but she is thwarted in her attempts by the steadfast resilience of the English colonial male, whose loyalties lie with his family, his Queen and the empire. Thus, while Shakespear is sapped of vigour and removed from the masculine space of colonial governance after his seduction by the Rani, Major Gordon distrusts and resists her and is rewarded for it by surviving the siege of Ranepore (Jhansi), reestablishing British rule and rehabilitating British domesticity in the colony and the metropole. In Philip Meadows Taylor’s novel Seeta (1872), the mutiny of 1857 recedes into the background for the real rebellion: a revolution through which seemingly incompatible and hostile civilizations unite in the love between Cyril Brandon, the Company bureaucrat and Seeta, an Indian widow. Seeta represents the ideal colonised Indian woman who, mistreated by her own society, recognises the superiority of British civilisation and readily submits to the project of colonial education and social emancipation at the hands of her British husband. In an important episode in this novel, Rani Lakshmi Bai is sympathetically portrayed as a rebel with a just cause, but nevertheless as a sexually masculinised and horrific Indian woman. Yet, when the devoted Seeta fights the Indian rebels dressed as a man on the British side, she is the epitome of protective feminine behaviour – a devoted wife and mother. Seeta sacrifices her life to save Cyril and the end of the novel finds him safe at home in England with Grace, a British woman who has survived the rebellion with him and their child. In a striking reproduction of Taylor’s novel, Major Gordon in The Rane also rescues his Indian wife Elsie, teaches her to ‘read and write English’ (102) and marries her. Elsie in turn rescues him when Gordon is injured and sacrifices her life to save him from the rebels. The devoted Indian wife is the foil to the 48 The Rani of Jhansi fiendish and predatory Rani. But it is Kate, the daughter of another English officer from Ranepore, to whom Gordon is eventually married. In both novels, the protagonists Cyril Brandon and Major Gordon are members of the aristocracy driven to India by debts incurred by their fathers and are both rewarded handsomely for their toil and suffering in the masculine sphere of empire and war. In The Queen’s Desire, in The Rane and in many other novels, the death of the Rani of Jhansi and the reenactment of colonial domesticity are often complementary. Thus, while the Rani signifies the threat of India’s unruliness without masculine British stewardship, her death, like the death of the witch or the monster in children’s stories, signals the beginning of the new and happy era. The Rane ends with Major Gordon, his English wife and their child safely cloistered in their home in Scotland. Thus, the British family, a supposedly resilient and formidable unit unto itself, survives the mutiny. Major Gordon’s Indian first wife blesses this union before she dies and vanishes into the meaningless detritus of Indian acquaintances and servants that accompany colonial life – she becomes in many ways the colonial ayah, receding into the background once the English family has been served. Neither Seeta nor The Rane can sustain the inter-racial marriage between a British officer and an Indian woman beyond the crisis of 1857. The legal and political implications of such a union are never addressed, as there are no children from these mixed marriage to raise questions of property, family and race; though poised as the utopian union of the two races, the interracial marriage is ultimately neither biologically, culturally, nor politically viable. In the early more ideologically radical phase of the novels, the potential of the Indian woman to replace the Englishwoman and thus redefine British domesticity, is touted as a marker of liberal British inclusiveness. But the marriage is predicated on the continuation of a transient series of crises from which British women must be protected and with which the British male must contend. In the sentimental closing scene of the novel, Gordon and Kate stand in a ‘turret room’ of their estate and agree to name their child Elsie after Gordon’s first wife – the naming is a paean to English reform rather than an homage to the dead Indian wife. Elsie’s sacrifice grants Gordon the freedom to marry Kate and produce a requisite inheritor of his lineage; a family that can participate in a British society wrought prosperous by the colonial adventure in India. While the monstrous Rani seeks to strike a decisive blow by destroying the British home in India, the submissive and true Indian woman, Elsie, opposes the Rani to resurrect British domesticity and to validate British rule. Enslaving Masculinity 49 The Queen’s Desire: ‘Prison Amoureuse’ and 1857

In her first appearance in The Queen’s Desire, the Rani is improbably carried within a ‘palankeen’ through the streets of Delhi, a city to which the Rani actually never travelled and is accosted by a group of British soldiers who mistake her for a ‘nautch-girl’.37 The encounter turns out to be the soldiers’ undoing, as the Rani emerges with a sword in hand and decapitates one aggressor. The scene exemplifies the varied cultural trajectories that converge in this textual landscape:

With a leap like a tigress the leader, however, bounds from her seat in the palankeen into the full glare of the moonlight, with her head still muffled and in her shapely hand, her arm bare to the elbow, glitters a naked tulwar….A striking figure she is in her rich nautch-dress with its flashing jewels and the gold-spangled gauze veil which floats about her on the night air; tall, lithe, rounded and youthful, with perfect symmetry of outline and majestic even in her rapid motions, she does not speak a word as she stands the centre of that admiring circle….Next instant his headless trunk falls almost at her feet, while the head spins like a foot-ball some yards away…(9–10).

The Rani, in her first mistaken appearance as a ‘nautch-girl’, is depicted as a prostitute, a sexually mobile and aggressive figure. The Orientalist representation of seductive femininity is juxtaposed with the phallic ‘naked tulwar’ (sword), equating sexual power with violence. I read the Rani’s emerging from the ‘palankeen’, an instrument of patriarchal protection, as symbolic of her emergence from the confines of Hindu married life, a move from a bereaved and dispossessed widow to a warrior of the rebellion.38 The description of her as a ‘tigress’ bounding from her repose, with a gleaming sword in her hand, at the centre of a circle of men decapitating one of them – conjures up depictions of the goddess Kali. The subject of veneration for the male Thugi cults, ‘centre of that admiring circle’, Kali is also pictured riding a tiger as Durga and carrying a decapitated head in one hand and a sword in the other. The Rani’s defence of her ‘honour’ in the face of a marauding and drunken group of soldiers evokes, though she is not heroic in the same way, the depiction of Miss Wheeler in English newspaper and novels.39 The daughter of Sir Hugh Wheeler, this ‘Judith of Cawnpore’ is reported to have shot five sepoys with a revolver and then jumped into a well to save herself from ‘outrage’ during the events in Kanpur. In defence of her honour, as observed by Jenny Sharpe in Allegories of Empire, ‘Miss Wheeler is remembered for her courage and patriotism, but above all else her chastity’ and all accounts, uncorroborated 50 The Rani of Jhansi as they may be, emphasise that Miss Wheeler acted as an ‘English Lady and gentlewoman’.40 Violence enacted by White women in the same historical context reaffirms British femininity. Yet, the Rani is cast not only in a masculine mould (with the phallic symbol of the sword), but also as a hypersexual creature symbolizing both temptation as a ‘nautch-girl’ and unrestrained sexual violence in the ‘naked tulwar’. This scene is Sergeant Jackson’s introduction to the Rani. Intervening after the decapitation of the soldier, the Sergeant, who happens to be passing along, is able to rein in the other soldiers with a few well-placed punches. In appreciation, the Rani gives him her royal signet as a sign of protection; ‘[W] hen the time comes, I shall remember this night and you; wear this for me as a sign of my gratitude’ (11). The Rani’s readiness to reward the Sergeant and her flirtatious promise to remember the ‘night and you’ imply her inability to resist such a show of British masculinity. Even though her sexualised and violent depiction dominates the narrative, it does not detract from Sergeant Jackson’s masculinity or from subtly turning the scuffle into a familiar scenario of chivalric rescue. The Rani and Jackson continue their flirtation and the Rani allows Jackson to kiss her but not to open his eyes:

He went with her to the side furthest from where they had entered and in another moment the dewy lips met his, while with his free hand he was feeling the features that he could not see. Yes, she was beautiful, he was sure, with tresses like silk as they fell over his fingers and breath which laved his cheek with the fragrance of the pomegranate’ (42).

Unable to resist the temptation to view his benefactress, who by now had bestowed multiple rings on him, Jackson lights a match. This roguish quality, for which he is severely repudiated by the Queen, endears him in the narrative as an adventure-seeking imperialist prone to minor perfidies but none the worse for it. Not apologetic in the least, he only bemoans his inability to identify his patron and perhaps exact more from her in ardour as well as wealth. Jackson, in this and other respects, represents the cavalier brigand of colonial men whose atrocities in the mutiny were muted by British narratives. The historical figure of Major Wilson Hodson provides an interpretative historical model for this assertion. Known for his unsavoury character and his arbitrary execution of the Mughal Emperor’s sons, Hodson is described by George Malleson as ‘daring, courting danger, reckless, he was a condotteri of the hills, a free-lance of the Middle Ages. He joyed in the life of the Enslaving Masculinity 51 camps and revelled in the clash of arms’.41 Celebrated for his ‘on-the-spot’ judgments against the rebels, he was praised for his retributive zeal. Reflecting the celebrated arrogant attitude of the military, the conversation between two officers of Sergeant Jackson’s regiment proceeds like this:

[B]y Jove! Your eyes will open at the fabulous wealth laid out on each of these dusky carcasses, which we are here to protect when we might be better employed easing them of some of that useless extravagance. ‘Yes’, responded Lieutenant Green, fervently, ‘I could manage with a little square looting, as an eking out of my present penurious income’ (5).

The ethos of the British officers and troops at this juncture, depicted uncritically in the novel, is that of entrepreneurs seeking their next profit-garnering venture. The entry for Hodson in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica reads ‘On the whole, it can hardly be doubted that he was somewhat unscrupulous in his private character, but he was a splendid soldier and rendered inestimable service to the Empire’.42 It is the supposedly meta-heroic demonstration of martial valour by White masculinity that remains dominant in the formulation of the mutiny narrative, even if it came at the expense of a few moral lapses. With the usual business of the empire disrupted by the rebellion, Sergeant Jackson, along with a group of widowed women and children, is forced to flee the Delhi cantonment. One night, an Indian woman approaches Jackson to tell him: ‘One who loves you sent me here; you have not smoked Havildar, lately; smoke now, while I tell you her message’ (156). In a scenario reminiscent of oriental opium-induced seduction, the Sergeant is drugged by whatever he smokes and ferried away to the Rani’s abode; he awakens, still drugged, in a chapter aptly titled ‘Sergeant Jackson in Heaven’ (171). In a complex interweaving of class narratives, the royal Indian Brahmin woman falls in love with an enlisted man. Jackson wakes up in the luxurious dungeon prepared for him by the Rani and proclaims, ‘Have I been carried by mistake into the officers’ mess bar?’ (173). The empire and the empire’s women, ferry the imperialist through the hierarchies of race and class in a landscape more amenable to class mobility. This vertical move through class signifies what was at stake for Jackson, who is sometimes compared to a Scot, as an enlisted man from the working class. But in his interaction with the Rani, Jackson’s antecedents are erased to promote an uncomplicated version of the imperialist equation. Liveried up in the clothes provided for him (Jackson)

[G]lanced at that (his) gorgeous reflection and gave a final twist to his golden moustache, his ruddy cheeks flushed with gratified vanity, which his keen blue 52 The Rani of Jhansi

eyes glittered like sapphires, for he felt himself on a par with the Queen of England, far less the tawny princess of a little province in India (183).

The Queen’s Desire, like The Rane, cannot help but invoke Queen Victoria. Jackson’s daring comparison questions the sacrosanct authority of the British monarch and is emblematic of the instantly aristocratic status adopted by the colonialists in India. The attentions of the Rani are able to transfer the Sergeant to a rank worthy of the Queen of England. The Rani is, once again, Kipling’s metaphoric India whose ‘favours’ turn her current ‘lover’ into a prosperous claimant of the empire. The description of the dungeon where Jackson is imprisoned is replete with sexual, as well as architectural, orientalised imagery that is echoed in other Victorian novels:

A heavy fragrance of otto of roses and other flower essences filled his nostrils…a rosy glow from many-shaded lamps dazzled his eyes…and then he saw a chamber which, for Oriental splendour and radiant colour of drapery, surpassed all…as from a nest of silk and velvet cushions, sprang up a vision of Oriental loveliness and expectation, a flashing tiara upon her luxuriant blue-black tresses and a glow of passion on her unveiled face… ‘Aga Jau! my love, my king, my life’. 43 (185)

In this prison amoureuse, British masculinity is incarcerated by the perverse sexual proclivities of the Oriental woman and Sergeant Jackson is transformed into an ‘Orientalized’ White man, a ‘modern Sardanapalus’.44 He is attired in ‘radiant trousers of brocaded sky-blue silk’ with ‘a tunic of cream tinted cashmere’ and ‘Indian slippers made from crimson satin with sown pearls for his feet’ (182). The change in clothes, from the coarse Khaki cotton uniform and boots of the army to the softness of silk, cashmere and satin, symbolise Jackson’s emasculation. As the earlier passages from Burke detail, sexual dominion over Indian women had been considered the requisite by-product of conquest. But this scenario dislodges that particular idiom by suggesting instead that carnal relations with the Indian woman are actually the means through which colonial loot is secured. Separated from battle and caged by an Indian woman, Jackson is effectively shrunk from a stanch soldier to an opium-weakened denizen of the Rani’s prison. The material artefacts of colonial life in India – cashmere, silk, jewelled weapon – are symbolic of the complex changes in the novel’s narrative. The descriptions of the sword and daggers that Jackson wears on his person – the ‘tulwar with damascened blade, velvet and gold scabbard, ivory and diamond Enslaving Masculinity 53 hilt and the daggers equally beautiful and priceless’ (182) – are contrasted with the description of the gleaming ‘naked tulwar’ wielded by the Rani in the earlier scene. The weapons worn by Jackson are merely ornamental, fetishised as the masculine weapons of the empire but clearly worn as the jewellery of conquest. These are also contrasted with the coarse, erect bayonets of the British soldiers and officers who, separated from Jackson, continue to make a stand against the rebels. This narrative of emasculation is carried further in a direct reference to their sexual encounters:

Sergeant Jackson had, in his own heart, a wholesome dread of the little demon, who, as we have seen, was nearly as tall as himself, of a most splendid physique and with such savage energy even in her love-making, that he did not half care to consider what she might appear like if lashed in to a fury…she was at present the woman in possession of him (210).

The incarceration in the dungeon, the opium, possession by a woman and the libidinous enthusiasm are characteristic descriptions of Tantric cults and the Thugs. This is a particularly important classification of the Rani as it aligns her with the monstrous goddess Kali, who was purportedly worshipped by sects like the Thugs and allegedly inspired them to commit murder in her name. This image of Kali became a readily accessible mythological and literary framework for the Rani of Jhansi in colonial literature. It marginalises the Rani as the leader of the Thugs or the rebels – groups considered peripheral in both British colonial and Indian society. The fascination with Thuggi and its accompanying ‘hidden cults’ is present in numerous nineteenth century novels. Even when not intrinsic to the plot, references to Thugs are almost unavoidable.45 Sir George MacMunn, an army veteran and writer on military and cultural matters of India in the age of high imperialism, in his book Religion and Hidden Cults of India, described the religious foundation of Thuggi, Saktism, as a cult worshipping Shiva’s consort, more specifically, the female genitalia and sexual power:

The Saktas are the worshippers then of Sakti, the wife of Siva, the female essence, power and force of life. They have the complex that is sometimes to be met in the writing of the somewhat dotty super-feminist, that the female is the superior and the dominating force in the world and must be allowed to control it.46

This sarcastic rendering of ‘women’s power’ in Hinduism is central to sexually violent caricatures of the Rani and equally denunciatory in terms of the British female monarch, Queen Victoria. The increase in the Englishwoman’s mobility 54 The Rani of Jhansi in the empire brought with it an increased fear of her possible decline into degeneracy, ‘that utter disregard of all womanly reserve and propriety which some Englishwomen learn so quickly in the East’ (32). Chased by a group of Thugs, the wandering band of English men and woman in Nesbit’s novel, uprooted from their home by the rebellion and fleeing for their lives, come across abandoned temples, which they occupy for shelter. But before doing so, they must clean and purify them of the human ‘blood and sacrifice’, the ‘rank rituals’ of the Thuggi practices. Descriptions of the Rani, in this and other novels, deploy these motifs of Thuggi and the worship of Kali indiscriminately. In being able to dominate the British male and command Indian men, the Rani in her embodiment as the sexual, bloodthirsty avatar of the goddess Kali, disrupts British domesticity in multiple ways. She poses a greater threat than the Indian male, whose racially motivated libido is viewed more as pathology than as power.47 The Rani inverses the colonial rape-script with her abduction of the Sergeant and with the embedded denunciation of British domesticity. Yet, the narrative specifies at the outset that the Sergeant had a sweetheart of his own race ‘who lived at Lucknow with her father and mother and whom he had not seen for the past seven months’. The Sergeant’s reluctance, in the face of the Rani’s unflagging efforts to ensnare him, is evidence of his faithfulness as a good husband, according to the novel, to his ‘own race’ and consequently as a good subject to his own country and queen (22). The unshakeable foundations of the English household, in these novels, stands in for the endurance of the British empire – thus, allegiance to the ‘true’ wife and by extension to the ‘true’ queen, trumps the Rani’s machinations at every juncture. The Rani’s intrusion into British colonial domesticity is also rendered in a similarly poignant mode in Christina Rossetti’s poem, ‘In the Round Tower at Jhansi, 8 June 1857’. Rossetti’s poem describes Alexander Skene and his wife, imprisoned in the fort at Jhansi, who commit suicide when they realise the ‘swarming howling wretches’ are bent on rape and murder. The poem describes their last moments.

Close his arm about her now, Close her cheek to his, Close the pistol to her brow – God forgive them this! ‘Will it hurt much?’—‘No, mine own: I wish I could bear the pang for both.’— ‘I wish I could bear the pang alone: Courage, dear, I am not loth.’ Kiss and kiss: ‘It is not pain Enslaving Masculinity 55

Thus to kiss and die. One kiss more.’–‘And yet one again.’– ‘Good-bye.’–‘Good-bye.’48

The poem depicts the incarcerated couple in the tower, a vision of colonial conjugality, cruelly interrupted by the machinations of the Rani, who purportedly ordered their massacre and the abduction of Englishwomen for ‘the sake of variety in our zenanas’ (49). This example, taken from the diary of L.E. Ruutz Rees, A Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow, bespeaks a similar travesty that befalls a young man:

Our men found his body still warm and the blood oozing from his wounds, when they came to him. Poor fellow! What makes his end sadder is, that the unfortunate young officer – he was only 17 – had joined the regiment but three days before. A lock of hair of some young ladylove, to whom perhaps he had plighted his faith, was found round his neck. One of his fingers, on which there has been a ring, was cut off.49

A young man had lost his life; a death made more regrettable since the young man is presumed betrothed in some capacity to a ‘lady love’. Contemporary English accounts of the rebellion are rife with such reiterations of disrupted domesticities; the rebellion interrupts not just the present homes of the English in India but also the establishment of such homes in the future. A member of the fleeing band in the The Queen’s Desire, Mrs. Finch, a young widow, is derided at the beginning of the novel for transacting her favours with the officers for a sufficient price. But the events of the rebellion suspend worries about character, reputation, or class and the resolute character of the British man and woman fighting against the rebels is the lasting historical and literary image. Mrs Finch is transformed by the rebellion into a maternal creature, a symbol of nurturing femininity even in disarray:

On this night, after she had almost disrobed herself to furnish bandages for the person of that very reckless young heir to a baronetcy and ten thousand per annum, she (Mrs. Finch) sat beside him within the shadow of the fallen monster Kali, gentle, tender-hearted and soothing, while he lay languid, but grateful and loving (219).

Though Mrs Finch is ‘disrobed’, this has been undertaken to furnish bandages and though she once pursued Lieutenant Green for his wealth, she now nurses him as a ‘gentle, tender-hearted and soothing’ figure. The officer, injured and 56 The Rani of Jhansi prostate in her lap, is ‘grateful and loving’ for her attention. By reimagining the relations between the sexes, no longer simply social or domestic but rather as the camaraderie of a shared struggle against the natives, novels such as The Queen’s Desire help reconfigure colonial society in the post-mutiny era. In comparison, the Rani, signified by the ‘fallen monster Kali’, had drugged Jackson to abduct him and Jackson, surrounded by comforts in his dungeon, is neither grateful nor loving. Resentful of his ‘lover’ who has ‘everlastingly pawed’ over him and forced him ‘to pretend he liked it better than liberty and action’ (209), Jackson yearns instead to ‘go to the front and take my chance with the others’ (213). British domestic and racial order is restored when Jackson is released from the Rani’s dungeon to join the fleeing band of colonialists to make his way to Lucknow and his ‘sweetheart’ Maggie Wilson. In the ensuing action, the armies of Sir Colin Campbell rescue Lucknow. Characteristic of the cultural mooring of the novel, the military victory is capped with a restoration of British domesticity in the weddings of Sergeant Jackson to Maggie Wilson and of Mrs Finch to Lieutenant Green. The decisive battle of Gwalior in 1858 becomes the site of a final meeting between Jackson and the Rani. A resurrected Jackson, back in the military and with his rightful wife, was in the thick of it as usual, ‘distinguishing himself with his sword and agile strength of wrist as well as the managing of his horse’ (304). Jackson notices a richly caparisoned horse and the jewels worn by its rider on his armour: ‘[H]e took notice of the golden ornaments and gems and resolved that they should become his property by right of conquest’ (305). Jackson fights his way through the field to challenge the rider as he is drawn as much by the notion of a worthy foe as by the lure of jewels. In the ensuing combat, Jackson inflicts a mortal wound. It is the rider’s ‘shrill shriek like a woman’s’ that causes Jackson to dismount and assist the enemy and Jackson realises he has killed the Rani. In this climatic scene, the Rani thanks Jackson – ‘…for I have got all my desire. Your sword has tasted my heart’ (306). These words invoke the Rani’s first meeting with Jackson when it was she who stood with a sword that had ‘tasted’ British blood. The phallic sword, however, has changed hands by now and Jackson has penetrated her. The Rani bequeaths Jackson her treasure and is simultaneously a good Hindu wife, thankful that she will not outlive her husband as a widow, and an abject colonial subject, whose conduct is absolved by the empire’s representative. In leaving her treasure trove to Jackson, the Rani acts as an agent of imperial destiny, allowing the White male colonialist to emerge safely ensconced in domesticity and justifiably endowed with the wealth of his conquest. In the Enslaving Masculinity 57 manner typical of inter-racial Victorian romances, the Rani must die to maintain the feasibility of such a plot. Dying for the husband is framed within two opposing culturally specific narratives of sati and sacrifice – while becoming sati for the Indian man evokes barbarism and cruelty and constitutes persecution, dying for the Englishman is inspired by duty, true love, honour and is freedom of choice.50 In Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947, Nancy Paxton reads this particular ‘death’ of the Rani as Nesbit’s catering to the confines of his genre.

In converting the Rani’s heroic sacrifice for the cause of Indian nationalism into this implausible love sacrifice, Nesbit reduces the Rani to fit the narrower gender conventions that prevail in these male romances, although he also acknowledges some of the powers that Hindu nationalists recognized in an extraordinary woman like the Rani.51

Thus, the novel would have us believe the Rani fought because of a broken heart rather than an annexed kingdom.

Rani Lakshmi Bai and Colonial Masculinities

In killing the Rani, who is as yet in male clothing, Jackson is able to avenge his ‘rape’. Jackson’s chivalry is thwarted by the Rani’s disguise and he is able to enact an essentially homosocial encounter in which, once again, British masculinity emerges with retributive supremacy. In Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s seminal work Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, she argues, ‘the image of male rape…became more articulately available in foreign siting, in imperialist literature’.52 The Queen’s Desire is representative of that notion as it enacts and thus displaces, male rape unto the colonised landscape of mutiny- ridden India. Jackson’s abduction by the Rani displaces the narrative of male homosexual rape, for heteronormative encounters are read in this regard as essentially dominated by men and in killing her in male disguise Jackson regains the phallic colonial ‘sword’. However, the Sikhs and the Pathans exemplified such tenacious military prowess in the post-mutiny era and their virility was interposed with their ability to ‘penetrate men’. Jackson’s rape and the Rani’s death are adroitly recast to prevent the conjoining of British masculinity with colonial masculine stereotypes. Though I remain concerned mostly with how the colonial gaze structured Indian masculinity, it is important to note here that the work of scholars such as Radhika Chopra, Sikata Banerjee, Rosalind O’Hanlon and others have 58 The Rani of Jhansi contributed significant critiques of colonial masculinity, which offer a ‘somewhat simplified view …to the effect that Asians under empire were felt to be and felt themselves to be, unmanly and effeminate’.53 As these scholars have shown, regional and nationalist contexts often intersected with colonial constructs in these formations and continue to do so even within the postcolonial period. However, my argument is focused on the British institutional reorganisation of the army along racial and religious lines that discriminated widely between the ‘virile and the effeminate’ masculinities of India as a direct consequence of 1857 and on the ways in which these filtered through to representations of the Rani of Jhansi in literary narratives. Constructions of colonial masculinity, even if they are imprecise and constantly in flux, remain intrinsic to these stories of the warrior queen as colonial formations of gender, historically prejudiced towards the construction of woman and the nation (India or England), are beholden to the concomitant and connected trajectories of masculinity. The move to Punjab and the North-West Frontier Provinces and the ‘forward policy’ of the 1890s pursued by the Viceroys Lansdowne and Elgin, brought into play an increased aggressiveness in the administration and the military. The post-mutiny government in India emphasized a rule of force best exemplified as the ‘Punjab Style’. As scholars such as Thomas Metcalfe and C.A. Bayly have shown, the shift from a reformist to a conservative posture in India was determined in part by the politics of imperial expansion after 1857. This geographic reorienting represented the disenchantment of the British with the earlier phase of colonisation – and in classic colonial ambivalence, the non- participation of the Bengali in the revolt marked him as effeminate and figures like the Rani of Jhansi and other rebels, were read literally and figuratively, as failures of this earlier colonial policy. According to Lewis Wurgaft:

The open expanses of the Punjab and the Northwest frontier provided an outlet for the civil and military officers, disillusioned with the Indian middle classes, who felt hemmed in by the bureaucratic fetter imposed upon them in the more developed regions of Bengal and elsewhere in India.54

In the midst of this amplified homosocial military presence and the absence of women at the frontier, anxiety about homosexual practices become apparent in the literature, newspapers and administrative policies of the area and a figure like the Rani, who symbolically penetrated not just military space but also British men, represented a complex intersection of these gendered formations. ‘The British expressed repugnance at the homosexual practices, such as pederasty, that they believed common among the Pathans in the mountains and among Enslaving Masculinity 59 the Sikh aristocracy’.55 But surprisingly, though the overly libidanised Bengali is feminized, homosexual degeneracy is patterned on a model of excessive masculinity. George MacMunn, in The Underworld Of India, postulates:

One remarkable fact remains that needs accounting for. While in the West homo-sexuality or pederasty is the sign of the degenerate or mentally unstable and accompanies the disappearance of manliness and self-respect, in Asia it is often the vice of the most resolute characters. The frontier outlaw-in-chief, the last word in daring and reckless courage, is often an eager addict.56

Within the two dominant and opposing discourses of Bengali and Punjabi masculinity the Rani embodies, in colonialist narratives, Indian women’s sexuality, which cannot be reigned in by Indian men. Unlike the suffering woman figure of the reformist agenda, the Rani symbolises a rampant and destructive sexuality that serves as an ideal justification for belligerent British colonialism. The Rani’s masculinisation and sexual prowess serve to collectively emasculate the diverse male populations of the colony. It is against this demonic version of the Rani and in support of the ‘idealized purity’ of the White British woman, that a case is made for the masculine colonial control of India. Placed among the discourses of aberrant Indian masculinities, the Rani’s ardour for rebellion marks her as the ‘worthy foe’ and the British male emerges as the reinvigorated representative of the Empire by defeating her. The description of the Rani, in texts such as The Queen’s Desire or The Rane, is as involved in defining a particular version of colonial masculinity as it is in structuring nineteenth century colonial femininity. The Rani is inescapably drawn to British men, whether as political necessity or romantic attraction. In Alexander Rogers’ The Rani of Jhansi or, The Widowed Queen, published in 1895, the Rani covets British men and lays aside her ‘modesty, / that we may look into each other’s eyes’. But in this scenario of seduction, the British man is loath to enter into such a union, desire notwithstanding: ‘And what a man might for himself desire, / But not the lust of beauty shall seduce / An Englishman from doing right’.57 The Rani is rejected by Englishman who do not fritter away their time when they are required ‘doing right’ in the battlefield. The Rani’s subjugation by Jackson – at once homosexual (Jackson’s mortal wounding of the ‘warrior’ who raped him) and heterosexual (the Rani’s submission, in life and property, to her mate) allows the British male to convert such challenges into a triumph of British manhood. As Maria Jerinic notes: ‘The Rani then, in these English-language texts, becomes a signifier for the assertion of British male power at the very historical moments when that power is threatened’.58 60 The Rani of Jhansi

The sexualised Rani as a trope continues well into the twentieth century. Phillip Cox’s 1933 play The Rani of Jhansi portrays the Rani in amiable relations with even Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India, who confesses to the Rani in a meeting, ‘I am a very sick and lonely man, Rani Sahiba’. The Rani is depicted, once again, as a willing participant in sexual relations with British men, a behaviour tempered only by the fact that she is ready to sacrifice her honour for Jhansi: ‘You are an unmarried man. Perhaps the soft body of an undefiled Hindu widoe may tempt you, if money cannot. I live only to save my Jhansi now – and for her I can sacrifice anything’.59 The depictions of Rani Lakshmi Bai in sexual relationships with Englishmen are likewise continued in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman in the Great Game (1975), a series about the exploits of the fictitious bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Flashman is sent to India to investigate the rumours of sedition reported in the province of Jhansi. During his stay, Flashman meets the Rani, who comes to him wearing ‘a little gold girdle round her hips and some kind of metal headdress from which a flimsy veil descended from just beneath her eyes to her chin – not another stich’. His flirtation with the Rani eventually culminates in a night about which Flashman declares, ‘what these Indians don’t know about the refinements of romping isn’t worth knowing’. Quoted in an issue of Playboy magazine as a striking example of ‘historical erotica’, the description of Flashman and the Rani ‘romping’ portrays the Rani as fiendishly sexual, ‘thrusting up and down like a demented monkey on a stick, raking me with her nails and giving little shrieks into my mouth’.60 At one level, these sexualised depictions of the Rani, follow chauvinist logic in equating a rebellious, strong woman with a destructive sexuality. However, in the case of the colonial woman, such logic is interlaced with ideologies of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and religion. As a historical figure writ large on the tableau of the 1857 rebellion, the Rani’s colonial depictions form indelible literary figures whose power can only be read through other accesses. The Rani mobilizes dominance because she has knowledge and power above and beyond sexuality, yet the conflation between what she is not (a literal prostitute) and the literary invocation of her as one indicates the limitedness of her intelligibility. It is precisely her unsanctioned and autonomous sexual waywardness that requires control, for submissive Indian wives must remain within the permissible sexual and spatial domain of British patriarchy. These portrayals channel gender and sexuality to restore faith in British masculinity and the Empire while transforming, in no small measure, the Indians into colonial subjects ripe for colonial rule and intervention. Thus, whereas Kipling’s Enslaving Masculinity 61 poem and much of his other work, is infused with a sense of unease about the dissipating energies of men in India, these stories work to reconsolidate the empire’s ideological inherence in Victorian masculinity as the colonial male defends the home – domestic, national and colonial. There is an ideological attempt in The Rane and The Queen’s Desire and other late nineteenth century popular colonial fiction, to reorient the gaze and reconstruct the colonised as the spectacle.61 The horrors of the mutiny occupied vast representational space in both literature and public discourse:

Mothers with their families slaughtered and pitched carelessly one over the other, young girls and wives lying stark and naked, with the headless bodies of their brothers and husbands beside them and the forked flames spouting out of the houses from which they had been dragged, lit up the horrid spectacle (116).

Descriptions such as this one from Nesbit’s novel are de rigueur in the reports of the mutiny. It is precisely this aggrandised presence of the mutilated British body that is remapped by the post-mutiny colonial gaze, which is able to construct, once again, native sexualities and identities as adequate recompense for the affront to the empire. The historical shame, of ‘young girls and wives lying stark and naked’, is restructured onto the shamelessness of the wanton and underdressed Rani, thereby displacing notice away from the bodies proximate to home and in the British home. Whereas colonial narrative had once extolled the reformist need for benevolent British imperialism, most post-mutiny narratives centred on violent subjugation, thus substituting the figure of the massacred, surrendering, weakened colonial male with a triumphant return of domestic and military manhood. ‘In this discursive redirection from the Mutiny as a site of horror…the story displaces the focus of colonial panic from the military threat posed by the native population in general to the possible sexual threat posed by the native woman’.62 Rani Lakshmi Bai provided just such a distillate of sexual and military malevolence in need of British marital and martial rule. Thus, to subdue the Rani, these narratives would have us believe, is to subdue India.

Endnotes

1. Teresa Hubel, ‘The Bride of His Country: Love, Marriage and the Imperialist Paradox in the Indian fiction of Sara Jeannette Duncan and Rudyard Kipling’. 2. ‘Yet Magistrates commissioned to investigate the so-called eye-witness reports could find no evidence to substantiate the rumours of rebels raping, torturing and mutilating English women’, Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 2. 62 The Rani of Jhansi

3. Andrea Kaston Tange, ‘Maternity Betrayed: Circulating Images of English Motherhood in India, 1857–1858’, 194. 4. Sharpe, Allegories of Empire, 2. 5. The Ilbert Bill caused great controversy in 1883 over its proposition to allow native ‘Indian’ judges to try cases and pass sentences involving the British colonial population. In 1919 the attack on an English woman in Punjab prompted martial law and led General Dyer to open fire on an unarmed crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh, resulting in a death toll of over a thousand people. 6. Nancy Paxton, Writing Under the Raj, 1.British Parliamentary Papers (1771–1774) as referenced by Paxton. 7. For a more detailed investigation into Edmund Burke’s involvement with colonial politics and his ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’, see Sara Suleri’s ‘Burke and the Indian Sublime’, in her Rhetoric of English India. 8. Edmund Burke, ‘Speech in Opening the Imperial Impeachment, 19 February 1788,” The Complete Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke and as quoted in Paxton, Writing Under the Raj, 2. 9. Don Randall’s excellent article on Kipling’s Jungle Book as a post-mutiny allegory illustrates this pointedly. ‘Post-Mutiny Allegories of Empire in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books’, 97–120. 97. 10. Tange, ‘Maternity Betrayed’, 211. 11. British officials at Jhansi, their wives and their children, allegedly promised sanctuary and safe passage by Rani Lakshmi Bai, were killed in the infamous Jokhanbagh massacre. A discussion of this event is in the ‘Introduction’. 12. The Afghan Knife has a Rani as its central instigator, but she is not identified as the Rani of Jhansi though it is clear that she is modelled after her. In Muddock’s Star of Fortune, the Rani functions only as a character who keeps the English lovers apart and does not achieve the status of the protagonist as she does in Gillean’s The Rane or in Hume Nesbit’s The Queen’s Desire. 13. Gillean, The Rane: A Legend of the The Indian Mutiny, i–ii. 14. Historically, this would have been virtually impossible. Though there is evidence that the Rani had been communicating with Nana Sahib and the Peshwa Baji Rao during 1858, the likelihood of her having travelled outside Jhansi to attend meetings in Delhi is miniscule. 15. Anindyo Roy, Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India 1822–1922, 104. 16. The phrase ‘grammars of difference’ was coined by Ann Laura Stoler in her edited collection Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeoisie World. 17. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6. 18. ‘Punjab’, in the context of this chapter, signifies the Punjab of the British Empire – extending from the land of the five rivers of Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum to the Afghan border. This territory included the state of Punjab in India now, as well as the current states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and some parts of Rajasthan. It also included most of what is now Northern Pakistan. Enslaving Masculinity 63

19. A range of texts on Maratha masculinity, especially derived from the historical figure of Shivaji, form a part of this dichotomization of gender, but the Bengal and Punjab narratives are the dominant ones for 1857. 20. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 23. 21. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches, with the Minute on Indian Education, 359. 22. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. 23. Sir George MacMunn, The Martial Races of India, 257 The publisher indicates that the first edition was published sometime in the early twentieth century, but has no accurate date. 24. Thomas Metcalfe, The Aftermath of Revolt. 25. Gauri Viswanathan’s ‘Currying Favor: The Politics of British Educational and Cultural Policy in India, 1813–54’, delineates the various institutionalised policies that adopted ‘voluntary cultural assimilation as the most effective form of political rule’. She quotes from the Bombay records of the minutes of J. Farish dated 28 August 1838, ‘The Natives must either be kept down by a sense of our power, or they must willingly submit from a convictions that we are more wise, more just, more humane and more anxious to improve their condition than any other rules they could possibly have’., 113. Also see Masks of Conquest. 26. Sir George MacMunn, in his The Martial Races of India, recounts a conversation he had with Sir Michael O’Dwyer that exemplifies, in its anecdotal ideology, the complex relationship between the Sikhs, the Hindustani (Bengal and Awadhi) troops and the British officers. I had mentioned to Sir Micheal O’Dwyer that the Indian Regiments of the company’s Army had nominally twenty-four British officers and though many of the seniors would be away there was always a host of young officers doing training who would go into the field. ‘Ah’ said he, ‘that explains what has always puzzled me. I once asked an old Sikh who had been in the Sikh War, how it was the Hindustani troops beat the trained Sikhs. “Sahib” he said, “It was the chota sahibs, the young officers”. I never quite followed that, now I see’. There were lots of daring boys with the Bengal regiments who led and insisted. There is something romantic about these ‘Chota Sahibs,’ the boys just from school and college and in those days they went out at 16. (215). 27. Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden. 28. Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, 144. 29. Shuchi Kapila, ‘Educating Seeta: Philip Meadows Taylor’s Romances of Empire’, 211. 30. Doris Somner, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, 58. 31. But although the anxiety of colonisation was represented as far back as the eighteenth century in texts such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), these representations were limited to transitory encounters and visits that do not mature into a lasting relationship between the colonial traveller and the foreign people. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816) and Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions 64 The Rani of Jhansi

of a Thug (1839) reflect apprehensions about the ‘other’ as characterised by the figure of the monster or the practice of Thuggi. 32. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914, 199. 33. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 23. 34. Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home, 36. 35. Alison Sainsbury, ‘Married to the Empire: The Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel’, 163. 36. Nancy Paxton names this genre a ‘male romance’. 37. The ‘palankeen’ is a form of transport in which a box-like apparatus, carrying someone, is lifted by servants. ‘Nautch girls’ is a term that strictly translates into dancing girls, however it was also used to denote prostitutes, a profession many of the ‘nautch girls’ were either engaged in or driven to as their livelihood as dancers withered under colonial rule. 38. I interpret this as ‘patriarchal protection’ because upper caste Hindu women were often concealed from the public and transported in these ‘palankeen’ (palkis). 39. The daughter of Major General Wheeler, the Anglo-Indian Miss Wheeler was apparently kidnapped during the Kanpur massacre. The English newspapers reported that she had killed her kidnappers and jumped into a well to commit suicide. But Christopher Hibbert in The Great Mutiny India 1857 claims, from his research of the Morrison family papers, that ‘Many years later a Roman Catholic priest in Cawnpore came upon an old lady in the bazaar who told him on her deathbed that she was Miss Wheeler. She said she had married the sepoy who had saved her from massacre, that he had been good to her and that she did not want to get in touch with the British authorities’. Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny India 1857, 195. 40. Sharpe, 71–72. 41. Quoted in Sashi Bhusan Chaudhari’s English Historical Writings on the Indian Mutiny 1857–1859, 122. 42. Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 9th Edition, 1911, 559. 43. I am at a loss for translation here. The closest Hindi/Urdu endearment this could be approximated to would be ‘Jaan’, (my life), or ‘Aa Jao’, which translates to ‘come here’. 44. The ‘prison amoureuse’ refers to the emotional turmoil and ‘confinement’ of a courtly lover in literature. An example occurs in Chaucer’s ‘Knight's Tale’, where Palamon and Arcita have been imprisoned by Theseus at the beginning of the poem. They then see Emily strolling in the garden outside and immediately fall in love, their actual prison now becoming metaphorical. The source for this idea probably comes from Boethius, who at the beginning of ‘The Consolation’ is in prison both actually and emotionally, even though his emotion has nothing to do with courtly love. 45. Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug is perhaps the foremost example of this genre. But countless references to Thuggi are found in his other novels as well (Seeta) and in Kipling’s work (Kim). Enslaving Masculinity 65

46. Sir George MacMunn, Religions and Hidden Cults of India, 69. 47. ‘It was not the phallic god Shiva who most commanded British attention, however, but rather the mercurial mother goddess Kali – associated with debauchery, violence and death – who seemed to inspire paralysing fear among her devotees and to the threaten then with spiritual possession or annihilation’. Lewis D. Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India, 49. 48. Christina Rossetti, ‘In the Round Tower at Jhansi, 8 June 1857’, in Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems. 49. L.E. Ruutz Rees, A Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow: From its commencement to its relief by Sir Colin Campbell, 19. 50. Laura Fairchild Brodie, ‘Society and the Superfluous Female: Jane Austen's Treatment of Widowhood’., See also Monika Fludernik, ‘Suttee Revisited: From the Iconography of Martyrdom to the Burkean Sublime’., 411–437. Pompa Banerjee, ‘Burning Questions: Widows, Witches and Early Modern European Travel Narratives of India’, 529–61.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, ‘The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives’, 268 traces the political discourse on the part of the East India Company’s officials to construct the Rani of Sirmur as the ‘object of political instrumentality’. Though Spivak contends that it is possible the Rani was strongly dissuaded by the Company against Sati, she argues that once the Rani was thought to have decided to become Sati, she became the object of competing Brahminical and Colonial discourses. The self-immolation of widows was not invariable ritual prescription. If however the widow does decide thus to exceed the letter of ritual, to turn back is transgression for which a particular type of penance s prescribed. When before the era of abolition, a petty British police officer was obliged to be present at each widow-sacrifice to ascertain its ‘legality’, to be dissuaded by him after a decision was, by contrast, a mark of real free choice, a choice of freedom. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur’. 51. Paxton, 159. 52. Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Between Men English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 193. 53. Radhika Chopra, Carolina Osella and Filippo Osella, South Asian Masculinities: Context of Change, Sites of Continuity, 14. 54. Wurgaft, 44. 55. Wurgaft, 50. 56. Sir George MacMunn, The Underworld of India, 202. 57. Alexander Rogers, The Rani of Jhansi Or, The Widowed Queen, 45. 58. Maria Jerinic, 127. 59. Philip Cox, The Rani of Jhansi, 49. 60. George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman in the Great Game, 113. 61. Foucault’s seminal work on punishment reiterates the effectiveness of a ‘public- shaming’ as well as the ‘spectacle’ in enforcing ‘punishment as a complex social 66 The Rani of Jhansi

function’. Similarly, as other scholars have shown, imperial cultural and administrative policies frequently used the ‘spectacle’ of punishment to reinforce their authority and power over colonial subjects. The events of 1857, however, displaced the body of the public ‘spectacle’ body of the colonial subject, with the mutilated body of the colonialist. The imperative to extricate the colonialist’s body and reinsert the colonial subject, as the ‘public’ spectacle informs the popular colonial rendering of 1857 in the later nineteenth century. 62. Arondekar, 151. India’s Aryan Queen 67

III India’s Aryan Queen Colonial Ambivalence and Race in the Mutiny

s discussed in the previous chapter, representations of 1857 often cohered Ain the metaphors of a disintegrating marriage. Yet, there was another narrative – a disjunctive love story of sorts that in some literary portrayals gave the Rani of Jhansi, variously vilified as a ‘murderous whore’ and ‘India’s Jezebel’, a heroic aspect. Published in 1901, Michael White’s novel Lachmi Bai Rani of Jhansi: The Jeanne D’Arc of India places the Rani within the structural imperatives of a hagiography by smoothing over her anti-colonial sentiments and comparing her to a European model of heroic and saintly womanhood, Joan of Arc. Victorian narratives oscillated between the Rani’s characterisation as the sexually voracious and deranged architect of mayhem and her depiction as a worthy foe, the Indian rendition of Boadicea.1 Representations of her cruelty were also countervailed by the commentary of such luminaries as General Hugh Rose who described the Rani as ‘remarkable for her beauty, cleverness and perseverance’.2 The Hindu Brahmin Rani, recast in White’s novel as an Aryan, is one such manifestation of colonial ambivalence. The notion of the ‘Aryan’, though perhaps most closely associated with Nazi Germany now, was once a concept rooted in the Sanskrit tradition of India – an amalgamation of linguistic and cultural inquiry that construed India as the point of origin for the white races of Europe. Western intellectual thought in the early nineteenth century, with its strong undercurrent of anti-Semitism, was receptive to the idea of the Aryan origin in India. 3

Many scholars such as Kant and Herder began to draw analogies between the myths and philosophies of ancient India and the West. In their attempt to 68 The Rani of Jhansi

separate Western European culture from its Judaic heritage, many scholars were convinced that the origin of Western culture was to be found in India rather than in the ancient Near East.4

However, 1857 brought to the fore questions of legitimacy for imperial rule and widened the racial, cultural and religious divide between Britain and India. Thus, whereas earlier versions of the Aryan race theory had posited India as the source for the European race, post-mutiny scholarship dismantled such notions by constructing India as a primeval site of conquest/invasion by the Europeans. Administrative and military measures implemented to salvage India as a British dominion were supported by the popular emergence of the Aryan invasion theory, which fostered an ancient precedence for British presence in India and thus conjoined the Sanskrit/Indic scholar with the colonial administrator.5 Similarly, colonial writers were often products of military or civil service in the colony and dexterously combined the imaginative with the historical, the actual and the mythological. Thus, quite like Gillean, Hume Nesbit and many other colonial writers, White prefaces his own experience in India as the ‘truth’ of his fiction. Michael White grew up listening to first-hand accounts of the mutiny, as many generations of his family had served in the British India army and later gained knowledge of the country during his military service there. He published Lachmi Bai Rani of Jhansi (1901) and The Garden of Indra (1912) while living in the United States. The later book features another fictional Rani who is left a young widow by her much older husband and finds solace in the arms of an American working to bring electricity to her kingdom. The contradictory notions of Aryanism influenced the framing of the rebellion and discourse surrounding the Aryan theory was greatly impacted by 1857. Neither accidental nor particularly liberal, White’s text is, in fact, a contemporary literary implication of Aryan race theory, of its particular application to the discourse on 1857 and another example of the popular novel as a vehicle of instruction in the policies and logic of Empire. Emblematic of the colonial imperatives under which both scientific and literary production functioned, this text reflects the contradictory impulses of colonial strategy and imperial consolidation. White’s novel celebrates the individualism embodied by a woman confronting the might of the East India Company, but it must then typify the Rani as a heroic Aryan to reinforce a satisfactory social taxonomy for imperial India. In Critical Terrains, Lisa Lowe argues for a more multi-layered understanding of Edward Said’s theory of ‘orientalism’ by stating ‘in the case of orientalism, the misapprehension of uniformity prohibits a consideration of the plural and inconstant referents of both terms, Occident and Orient’.6 Taking my cue from India’s Aryan Queen 69

Lowe, I argue that the process of ‘othering’ is not a singular notion reliant only on accentuating difference and distance.7 It might also utilise a certain strategic notion of similarities as ‘plural and inconstant referents’. The Aryan Theory, in representations of Rani Lakshmi Bai, modulates difference, rebellion and resistance by reasserting comparison and affiliation. The dauntless widowed queen fractured gendered and ethnic colonial assumptions about India. Thus, representations of her as an Aryan reassume familiarity with the colonial subject and allow discursive space for the rebel queen in colonial formations of knowledge. The imperatives of Empire, however, did not manifest monolithically in theological, literary or scientific discourse. Even though religion had served as the predominant marker of difference, race became the foundational difference between the British and the Indians after 1857. What had transpired in the mutiny could no longer be accommodated under the rubric of cultural distinction – the barbarity of it, according to the British imagination, lay outside civilisational paradigms. Thus, imperial policy and racial politics worked symbiotically in the post-mutiny era to highlight racial difference. But, as Peter van der Veer and others have demonstrated, ‘the crucial link between race and morality never leaves religion entirely out of the equation’.8 Thus, colonial understanding of Christianity, Hinduism and Islam become key factors in the analysis of native rebellion and also in the literary configurations of the Rani. In White’s novel, race and religion are enmeshed categories that characterise cultural affiliation. The outrageous figure of the rebel queen from India, often depicted riding her horse with the reins in her mouth and a sword in each hand, exceeded rational dictates. Depicting her as an ideal of heroic Aryan womanhood voids this transgression of femininity and culture. Far from serving as a threat to the Empire, the Aryan Rani becomes instead a blueprint for British notions of a ruling race.

Aryan Theory and Colonial Policy

‘We were niggers at one time. We now become brethren’. (Unknown author, Calcutta Indian Mirror, 20 September 1874.)

As early as 1786, Sir William Jones had observed that Sanskrit, Persian, the languages of Greece and Rome and the languages of the Celts and Germans were all closely connected.9 Thomas Young had used the term ‘Indo-European’ in 1813 to designate Eurasian languages thought to be related to Sanskrit.10 But until the work of Christian Charles Josias Bunsen11 and his better-known 70 The Rani of Jhansi protégé Friedrich Max Muller, the usage of the ‘Indo’ prefix relied on the comparative vocabularies of a few British and German scholars.12 Max Muller’s History of Ancient Sanskrit appeared in 1859, in the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species and just a year after the end of the ‘mutiny’, and became pivotal in nineteenth century theories of race. Linguistic criteria, as posited by Muller and others, established ancient connections between India and Europe that superseded notions of racial, cultural, religious and geographic difference. In 1853, Max Muller asserted, ‘the historian may shake his head, though the physiologist may doubt and the poet scorn the idea, all must yield before the facts furnished by language’.13 Other theorists, however, including E.B. Cowell, Muller’s student and close professional friend, were hesitant to adopt the racial connection wholeheartedly. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge, Cowell asserted that comparative philology proved only political ties and not racial unity. He advocated the study of Sanskrit texts, but with a view toward furthering a ‘benevolent’ colonialism through which ‘India, may under her [England’s] rule share the blessing of Western Civilization and Christianity’.14 Muller too was not so far removed from nineteenth century colonial compulsions. The Education Board chaired by Thomas Babington Macaulay even sponsored his work. Macaulay was instrumental in establishing educational policies in India and wrote in a letter to his father in 1836:

It is my firm belief that, if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be effected without any efforts to proselytize; without the smallest interference with any religious liberty; merely by the natural operation of knowledge and reflection. I heartily rejoice in this project.15

Macualay’s ‘project’ was a vast undertaking of Vedic textual translations. It was his belief that the translated ‘lies’ of the ancient texts would naturally urge the Hindus to convert to Christianity. He approached Max Muller in 1854 and was prepared to offer him a hundred thousand rupees (then worth 10,000 pounds) to translate the Rig Veda on behalf of the East India Company. Though the entire amount was never paid because of the dissolution of the Company after 1857 and Muller obtained funds from other sources, this remained the genesis of his edited series of translation Sacred Books of the East (1879-1910). Muller maintained that he had forwarded no racial theory, but often unguardedly invoked familial connections to the Aryans of the past while maintaining the slave-master dialectic of the present: ‘…it is curious to see how the descendants India’s Aryan Queen 71 of the same race, to which the first conquerors and masters of India belonged, return…to accomplish the glorious work of civilization, which had been left unfinished by their Arian brethren’.16 Muller’s formulation imagines these ‘Arian brethren’ as the ‘first conquerors and masters of India’ and not its indigenous inhabitants. Later theorists of the nineteenth century began to concentrate more on proving that the Aryans had, in fact, invaded (migrated to) India. Navratna S. Rajaram’s book The Politics of History: Aryan invasion Theory and the Subversion of Scholarship argues that the idea of the proposed ‘origin’ of the Aryans in India was simply not tolerated after 1857.17 Though the theorists mentioned so far belong mostly to the field of linguistics, theologians were also instrumental in the framing of this debate much earlier in the century. Rev. William Ward’s influential polemic, The History, Literature and Religion of the Hindus (1817-20), ‘…sought to explode the sympathetic myth-making of Jones and his supporters with a lurid account of the “human depravity”, “oppression”, “degradation” and “immorality” of contemporary Hindi society’.18 Ward emphasised the role of the Brahmin as a despot and labelled Hindu society as one chaffing under Brahmannical tyranny:

Ward’s vision of an immoral Brahman despotism clearly drew on the period’s popular Protestant mythology of a priest-ridden, tyrannized papist Europe, awaiting liberation by the triumph of the Reformation spirit. A marked feature of such didacticism was the insistence on factors such as ‘freedom’, with the Indians being portrayed by Ward as those who ‘know nothing of patriotism’ and ‘lack political will’.19

In an article titled ‘Race in Legislation and Political Economy’, published in 1866, Robert Knox discusses the role of ethnic and racial characteristics in the British colonies to term Asia as ‘immemorially the seat of despotism’ with ‘its codes the successive edicts of absolute sovereigns’.20 Arguments such as these justified Lord Dalhousie’s annexations under the ‘Doctrine of Lapse’.21 On the other hand, Sir Henry Summer Maine, a law member of the Government of India (1862-9) and vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta in 1863, considered India one of the oldest and purest remains of culture in the comparative development of supposedly peculiarly Indo-European institutions such as property, patriarchy and free municipal government in ‘village republics’.22 This classification is significant as it moves from race to the field of polity. For Maine the markers of an advanced civilisation were certain legal and constitutional forms that indicated free ‘citizenries’. Indians, according to 72 The Rani of Jhansi

Maine, were bound to recognise the ‘egalitarian’ and ‘republican’ highlights of British colonialism as similar to their own concepts; as E.B Havell phrased it –

…they recognize that the present rulers of India…are generally animated by that same love of justice and fair play, the same high principles of conduct and respect for humanitarian laws which guided the ancient Aryan statesman and law givers in their relations with the Indian masses.23

The lofty aspiration of the Aryan theory could not, however, destabilise British imperialism in India. Rather, the Aryan theory proved British rule was not an imposition as it was merely the continuation of Britain’s governance for what Maine had described as a ‘visit (to) a member of one common family’.24 This familial rhetoric is echoed in a lecture titled ‘On the Indo-European Languages and Races’, by Samuel Laing. He characterised the Negro and the Chinese as inferior and argued for the separation of the Indian Hindu from such ranks. Though the Indians were now in decline, he argued that the mark of the Aryan was the ever present potential for regeneration, which needed the kinesis of British colonialism: ‘…we are here…on a sacred mission…to stretch out our hand to the weaker brother, who once far outstripped us, but has now fallen behind in the race’.25 These theories of Britain’s moral imperative, as well as of Indian Aryanism, gained ground after 1857 as it became clear that England meant to keep the colony rather than beat the proverbial retreat. In the end, as Joan Leopold shows in her enlightening essay ‘British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India: 1850–70’, even the Aryan theory, scientifically and culturally speaking, could place the Indians and the British on an equal footing only in the empire’s ‘past and the future, though not in the present’.26 Such empathetic gestures of ancient solidarity took on another visage as some scholars blamed the rebellion on the East India Company’s ineptitude and found reason to stress their common Aryan bond with the Brahmins.27 Since the Brahmins comprised a majority in the armies that took part in the revolt, Aryan kinship was propagated in the hope of cultivating allegiance. In his 1881 Bengal Survey of Races, H.H. Risley, a well-known ethnographer of India allotted Aryan heritage to groups that were dominant in the British Army – Rajputs, Punjabi Jats and Brahmins.28 Susan Bayly details the varied and contradictory results of ethnographers like B.H. Hodgson, John Briggs and the Rev. R. Caldwell to prove that no singular version of race emerged in the 1850s and 1860s. She draws on H.M. Elliot’s Memoirs of the History, Folklore and Distribution of the Races of the North Western Provinces of India (1866) to demonstrate that ideas of Aryan supremacy were not the sole narrative of India’s Aryan Queen 73 difference. Elliot paid attention to the vagaries of the ‘caste’ system and insisted on the non-Aryan nature of the populations he worked with, going so far as to argue that after the 1857 rebellion ‘simple, truth-telling, free and casteless peoples of South India should be recruited more widely into the army and administration, in preference to the now widely distrusted “wily” North Indian Brahmans and others of high “Aryan” caste’.29 Whether the discourse veered towards the admirable qualities of the Hindu or not, the directive against the Muslims of India emerged as a by-product of 1857. Unlike the Hindus, whose books and civilisation accorded them the enviable status of ancients, adherents to Islam continued to be portrayed in deplorable images. By the middle of the nineteenth century India had witnessed an onslaught of European rule (the Portuguese, the French and the British) for more than a hundred years and there was a greater visibility of colonial and pre-colonial societal structures. In The Concept of Race in South Asia, Peter Robb argues that European taxonomies involving ‘race’ often provided a certain ‘vocabulary’ for racial concepts in India: ‘…heightened awareness of the Other through greater contact with Europeans and their culture; there were new ideas of the “rational”, the “scientific” and the “modern”’.30 Though religious debates within India had centred on ideas of inferior and superior members of society, this kind of reliance on ‘caste’ as a version of ‘race’ was less visible. Indian religious and philosophical debates often responded to the renewed inquiry into India as a viable, controllable colony by deploying the same criteria being used to scrutinize them. Taking his cue from Vasudha Dalmia’s work on Hariscandra of Banaras,31 Robb argues that Hindu reformers like Rammohan Roy were often citing Western Orientalists to bolster their claims for the ‘historicity of the texts’.32 Reason was cited as the qualifying arbiter of reform: Rammohan Roy and Dayananda Saraswati relied upon the ‘truth’ of monotheism and evil of image-worship (as espoused by Christianity) and allied themselves with Western notions that privileged the accuracy and survival of the written text over tradition, custom and indigenous understanding.33 Thus, social and religious debates took on a greater complexity and became far more nuanced than allowed for by the simple binaries of British/Indian, colonial/anti-colonial, Christian/Hindu. In The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (2001), Edwin Bryant divides the Indian response to the Aryan race theory into two chronological periods marked by colonial suppression and the rise of Indian nationalism.34 Indian criticism of the Aryan theory in the nineteenth century was scarce, largely due to the retributive climate after 1857.35 However, in their own slanted acquiescence to the Aryan race theory, nationalist formulations in the early twentieth century 74 The Rani of Jhansi privileged Hinduism as the prominent mode of conduct and religion for all Indians. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Dayananda Saraswati and V.D. Savarkar contributed to a Hindu revivalism in which Hindus were posited as the first race on earth.36 Tilak’s book, The Arctic home in the Vedas (1903), claimed the Aryans belonged to the North Pole and had migrated south; it privileged the Hindu as the Aryan and negated the idea of European conquest. V.D. Savarkar’s book Hindutva – Who is a Hindu? prompted the creation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and called for all Hindus, irrespective of caste or sect, Aryan or non-Aryan, to come together under the umbrella of ‘Hindu blood’.37 Jaffrelot analyses this shying away from Aryan and non-Aryan categories as Savarkar’s recognition that splitting the Hindus into Aryan and non-Aryan was not nationalistic enough to propel an anti-colonial movement.38 Yet, a particularly gendered and raced narrative of Indian womanhood arose even within these nationalist versions of the Aryan theory. As Uma Chakravarti and Kumkum Roy have shown, historical work on early India was greatly impeded by this focus on ‘Aryanism’ which set up the Vedic Aryan woman as the model for Indian womanhood and promulgated sati and purdah as practices of lower caste communities.39 Notions of Aryan superiority lent themselves to nationalist politics of Hindutva, which conveniently bypassed criticism by relegating the ‘woman question’ to lower caste and non-Hindu populations. Thus, this notion of the shared and contested Aryan past was taken up on both sides of the imperial divide. Thomas Trautmann’s offers a particular paradigm of decipherability for the Aryan theory in the colonial past with his all-encompassing ‘love story’:

Not only erotic love but also such forms of human solidarity as familial love… friendship, the affection of master to servant and the loyalty of servant to master…This is an Aryan story of love in several senses. In the first place it inquires into the relation of Briton and Indian to each other and gives unexpected news: We are long-lost kin; we are Aryan brethren…The colonial encounter of the two nations thereupon takes on the sense of…the Aryan love story as family reunion. 40

According to Trautmann, the scientific researches of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in the early nineteenth century, led by Sir William Jones, went from focusing on the discovery of linguistic kinship to a more racially based criteria that formulated Indian civilization to have been the cause of intermarriage between lighter skinned Aryans and the original inhabitant dark skinned Dravidians.41 However, the postulation of ancient blood ties did not negate India’s Aryan Queen 75 the oppressive colonial relationship; the ‘love story’ served instead, as many interracial romances do, as a cautionary tale against the pitfalls of miscegenation. This raised another concern – if the Indian Aryans had fallen into a state of degeneracy following their mingling with the Dravidians, could intermarriage between the British and the Indians now revive them?42 These conjugal issues ran counter to the policy adopted by the British colonists after 1857 as once accepted practices of concubines and prostitutes attached to military cantonments were censured.43 The chaotic, though temporary, dismantling of British authority in 1857 and the loss of British lives reinforced the impetus for an unbridgeable division and strict mandates against miscegenation were rigidly adopted by the civil services and the military. Colonial policy, after the rebellion, sought to suppress flexible and mobile structures of affiliation and kinship with British authority.

Figure 3: Illlustration from Lachmi Bai of Jhansi: The Jeanne D’Arc of India (1901)

Though Thomas Trautmann reframes the ‘Aryan story…of love in several senses’ between his notions of ‘Indomania’, an earlier more intellectually curious stage during which colonial scholars engaged with the Sanskrit archive and ‘Indophobia’, the post-‘mutiny’ period with its dire representations of native malice, the archive of comprehensibility is littered with the paradoxical offshoots of colonial policy.44 Michael White’s representation of Rani Lakshmi Bai is 76 The Rani of Jhansi underwritten by the assimilative impulses of the Aryan theory, but it also indicates the multiple tiers of contradiction inherent in the imperial project. Portrayed as an Aryan Queen fighting to save her kingdom, the Rani’s similarity mutes the tenor of her insurrection to produce a persona derivative of British superiority. Thus, the ‘mutiny’ is reframed as the breakdown of the ‘love-story’ between the colonialist and the colonised, the Rani becomes a misplaced member of England’s ‘same great family’ and the rhetoric subsumes an uprising under the harmless rubric of familial misunderstanding.

The Aryan Rani

Within no peerless Taj Mahal her body lies, No gilded dome, nor fairy minarets against the azure skies, Proclaim the place, where she, called by her foes, the ‘bravest and the best’, Was laid by reverential hands to her victorious rest: But in the eternal sanctuary of her race, The holy river, holy Mother Ganges, that coveted her embrace, Doth hold her ashes and for a monument to her name, Suffice it, that in the people’s heart, her fame, Doth shine immortal. For she was deeply loved, this Queen, The beauteous, valiant Rani, India’s great heroine.

This elegiac poem, the epigraph to Michael White’s novel Lachmi Bai of Jhansi: The Jeanne D’Arc of India (1901), takes a generous view of Rani Lakshmi Bai’s antipathy towards the East India Company. A ‘deeply loved’ monarch driven to revolt by the suffering of her people, she is given the same saintly status as ‘Jeanne D’Arc’. White’s novel follows the traditionally accepted story of her life, from the annexation of her kingdom by the East India Company to the Rebellion of 1857, and relies on her Hindu Brahmin antecedents to ‘Aryanise’ the Rani. Stressing her popularity as an object of romantic interest for men and her rigid adherence to the ‘decorum’ demanded of a royal Aryan woman, the novel offsets the Rani’s supposed masculinity as a warrior. This Aryanisation subdues her threat to the empire and disciplines aspects of her personality that might detract from an unproblematic assimilation. As an Aryan, the Rani cannot lay claim to the same privileges afforded her European brethren, which would ultimately dismantle the imperial project, but her similarity must still be rendered normative in the ethnographic categories of the empire. Though fashioned largely as a colonial historical novel, the text transgresses the usual boundaries of adventure or romance. Most popular colonial adventure India’s Aryan Queen 77 novels have a male protagonist who overcomes great physical odds to emerge triumphant both physically and morally and is thus able to win the favours of the proverbial damsel in distress. Romance novels tend to centre on the travails of a female protagonist in pursuit of her heterosexual romantic destiny. In the adventure novels, the romance is a subsidiary issue, just as in romance novels the element of adventure merely presents the lovers with an obstacle they must overcome. According to John Cawelti,

While the specific characterization of the hero [in romance novels] depends on the cultural motifs…there are in general two primary ways in which the hero can be characterized: as a superhero with exceptional strength or ability or as ‘one of us’, a figure marked, at least at the beginning of the story, by flawed abilities and attitudes shared by the audience.45

White’s novel traverses the contradictory geography of both these genres by keeping a woman as its central character while depicting her mostly in the male arena of battle and governance. Rani Lakshmi Bai, in White’s novel, is presented as ‘one of us’ for the Indians, while simultaneously depicted as an Aryan and therefore ‘one of us’ for the Europeans. Though she may be considered flawed for rebelling and White’s novel takes great pains to dissuade the reader of that, she is inevitably redeemed by her courage – an integral Aryan trait. The narrative navigates the contradictory impetus, which impels both a popular understanding of the mutiny as a horrific native uprising and the representation of the Rani as a heroic ideal, by focusing on her as a valourous Aryan.46 The novel begins in June 1857, a month after the outbreak of the Sepoy Mutiny in Meerut. In her first spoken words, the Rani proclaims, ‘When, in heaven’s name, is Dundhu Panth, the Peshwa going to send us the signal to rise in Jhansi?’ (3). She is impatient to rebel, but she must first deal with the men surrounding her. Her effeminate cousin Sadescheo bids for the throne of Jhansi and one of her own army commanders, a Muslim Pathan, sometimes referred to as an Afghan, named Ahmad Khan wishes to wrest control of the kingdom. Khan also endeavours to seduce her while the Rani spurns his advances and shrewdly retains him for his military experience. Prasad, a high-caste Brahmin messenger from the Peshwa, the Maratha sovereign to whom Jhansi owes its loyalty, is the Rani’s true romantic counterpart in the novel. Interestingly, neither the complexity of her role as a Hindu widow or the fate of her adopted child is ever addressed.47 Unlike Indian versions of Rani Lakshmi Bai’s story, which often chart a preordained future of greatness from her childhood to maturity, colonial narratives remain unconcerned with 78 The Rani of Jhansi her life before the mutiny and proceed in medias res with her rise as a rebel leader of 1857. The beginning of the novel conveys the usual ominous atmosphere of unbearable summer heat and as if to pose a counterpoint, the narrative moves to a physical description of Lakshmi Bai that relies on her pleasing ‘Aryan’ features.

It was not only the majestic pose, nor the beautiful contour of her face, crowned by a mass of dark hair, ornamented with a chaplet of pearls, that quickly confirmed the Commissioner’s previous impression that Lachmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi, was far removed from the generally accepted type of her countrywomen. But there was a strength of character emphasized in every line of her distinctly Aryan features, a force of will, a mystical power in every flash of her lustrous eyes, in every movement, in every word, however gently spoken, warning him at the outset that he had to deal with no shrinking, simple, zanana maiden. (11)

The Aryanism White ascribes to the Rani does not build on a physical description alone, though being ‘beautiful’ with ‘distinctly Aryan features’ and ‘far removed from her countrywomen’ is helpful. Rani Lakshmi Bai’s claim to Aryanism rests on the ‘ruler-like’ qualities she displays and the ‘force of will’ that distinguishes her from other ‘shrinking, simple, zanana’ women. The Rani is not restricted to domestic confines but is rather a participant in the public sphere of governance and administration. Reverend Alexander Duff, a well-known theologian who wrote floridly about the mutiny, differentiated between Aryans and non-Aryans on similar criteria: ‘…(they) have no will, no liberty, no conscience of their own. They are passive instruments, moulded into shape by external influences – mere machines, blindly stimulated, at the bidding of another, to pursuits the most unworthy of immortal creatures. In them reason is laid prostrate’.48 The emphasis in White’s description on the Rani’s ‘force of will’ and her ‘ruler-like’ qualities serves to separate her from the marauding, conscience-less, ‘passive instruments’ Duff qualifies Indians to be. White’s novel justifies the Rani’s rebellion as the actions of an Aryan and thus legitimises her as an individual without taking a political stand on the 1857 rebellion. The Rani’s insurgent Aryanism, unlike the actions of ‘mere machines’, distances her grievances from the native rebel and casts her in a particularly modern and individual frame of resistance. Similarly, since her Aryanism justifies her actions, it serves also to legitimate the British as the conquering Aryan presence in India. The Aryan theory, in White’s novel, works in a counter-intuitive way to ‘naturalize’ both Rani Lakshmi Bai’s resistance (as Aryan and royal) and British colonialism (as also Aryan and divinely ordained to rule). The narrative smoothens the India’s Aryan Queen 79 obvious inequalities of both these ‘naturalizations’ by crafting a theoretical framework that ostensibly puts the Rani and British colonialism on the same ‘cultural’ side, albeit with opposing political agendas – thus elevating her above the site of ‘unnatural horrors’ (India) while conforming to the larger narrative of colonialism. British notions of Aryanism and Indian versions of caste did not emerge in isolation. In fact, as has been previously shown, these theories often betook liberally of each other’s research to further their own agenda. In Arya Kirti (Glorious Deeds of the Aryans) published in 1887, Rajnikanta Gupta extols the Rajputs as the true inheritors of the Aryan legacy. A martial temperament in these warrior clans from India, according to Gupta, symbolised not just masculinity but an Aryan disposition that was not inherently belligerent but had the capacity and courage to fight. Gupta’s glorification was not limited to Aryan males:

The dauntless daughters of Aryavarta did not hesitate to defend the land against the enemies of their fathers or their husbands. At times they took up arms like the heroic Karmadevi, while at others they welcomed death, ascending to the funeral pyre like Queen Padmini rather than surrender to the enemy. In either case, the heroism of war, which could be achieved through a patriotic death, was not seen as a male privilege.49

White’s text is cognizant of both British and Indian lineages in the history of the Aryans and the Rani appears, like Kim and Mowgli from Kipling’s oeuvre, as a liminal character. Interestingly, a letter from Michael White to The New York Times Saturday Review of Books in March 1902, probably in response to a comparison between Lachmi Bai and Kim, stresses the fact that he had no knowledge of Kipling’s book since his ‘manuscript in fact was in the hands of the publishers before “Kim” came out.’ However, in a startling revelation, White writes that he received ‘valuable assistance of an Indian gentleman – the Babu Bhim Roy, a Brahmin of the Raj Bhart caste. Mr Bhim Roy has Boer letters from Mr Kipling of a complimentary nature, from which I gathered he had rendered assistance in the production of Kim’. 50 The nature of this ‘assistance’ is lost to history, as scholarship neither on Kipling nor on White mentions Babu Bhim Roy and one can only conjecture the extent to which White’s insights based on his own experience in India are perhaps also heavily dependent on his native informant. The insistence on highlighting his Brahmin name, however, does reveal the extent to which White had adopted the colonial classification of caste. 80 The Rani of Jhansi

In Kim and the Jungle Book, the misplaced British/Aryan character engages in a just fight, even if unknowingly so. And the narrative rewards that innate faithfulness with victory. In a skewed, though not necessarily far-fetched manner, White’s novel does the same. The Rani is rewarded with a story of valour and victory because her death in battle marks her as a worthy foe. Unlike her fellow rebels Nana Saheb who runs away and Tantya Tope who is captured and hanged to death, the Rani dies in battle against the British – taking her cause to its just conclusion. This fate allows for her inclusion in the annals of the heroic dead and she is rewarded thus for her steadfast resistance to subjugation. The Rani is depicted in the heroic legacy of Rajput and Maratha warriors, who fall incidentally within the Aryan castes of India, but the narrative is able to sustain this adulation because her death removes her as a threat to colonial femininity, to the masculine control of public space and to the absolute subjugation sought by the empire after 1857. Nancy Armstrong’s work on gender and the Victorian novel offers a corroborative view:

Once a novel relocated the cause of the economic inequity and the exploitation of labour in the female body, it was a relatively simple matter to resolve those problems symbolically by bringing that body under control, whether through that woman’s reform, her incarceration, or her banishment from the text.51

Though the Rani, as an elite subaltern subject, is not a body marked by economic exploitation, her involvement in the rebellion confounds a seamless inclusion into the imperial social matrix. An Indian woman dressed as a man, high-caste as she might be, inflicting misery on the British is not a palatable Victorian character. In accord with Armstrong’s formula, the novel ends with the Rani’s death, a fortuitous factual necessity that allows the narrative to flirt with these heroic aspects of the Rani’s story without having to approach the opprobrium that besets her historical presence. The narrative attempts to wrest control of the Rani by removing the stigma of native rebellion and by elevating her to the status of possible emulation. She is a figure of reform and her refusal to adhere to the conventional mode of Hindu widowhood that was decried volubly by the imperial reformist movements, furthers her assimilation into Aryanism. As a widow who did not retire to Varanasi or shave her head and came out of purdah to mingle with her subjects, Rani Lakshmi Bai is a sterling example of the reformist agenda. Her romantic interest in Prasad even promotes the notion of widow remarriage. In concordance with the Aryan theory of race, the reformist ideals of the Rani are cast in opposition to Muslim practices regarding gender. The Rani India’s Aryan Queen 81 even orders the curtains be removed from her carriage and states ‘I am not a Mohammedan but a Hindu Rani in my own right’ (82). Contrasted with the supposed incarceration of Muslim women, the Rani is a proud declarative of Hindu, Aryan womanhood. It was hardly surprising that the Aryan counterparts for the British in India would be the highest echelon of the Hindu society – the Brahmins.52 Though the colonialists denigrated Hindu practices for their ‘cruelty’ to women, the British were content to keep the larger structure and practice of the Hindu caste system in place as a buffer against inter-caste alliances. After the 1857 rebellion, this cultural polity was further reinforced to advance the Brahmins, denigrate the Muslims and foster the policy of ‘divide and rule’. Peter Robb contextualizes the complex caste politics of the post-1857 colonial era in The Concept of Race in South Asia (1997):

Hence – a lesson drawn also from the 1857 uprising – social authority, including caste hierarchy, was a necessary bulwark against anarchy. Another functional explanation appeared: caste and social difference had originated to preserve the race purity of the Aryans and were necessary to keep the ‘primitive’ (irrational and volatile) Indians under control. Hierarchy, including princely houses and a largely invented aristocracy, could be seen as maintaining stability and defining Hinduism and, very often, Indianness.53

White’s novel follows this formula pointedly as the legitimate rule of the Aryan Rani is set off against the innate treachery of the Muslim Ahmad Khan, who is characterised at the outset as ‘blood-thirsty’ and disloyal. Ahmad seemingly follows the Rani, hoping to bed her and to wrest political power from her, but her inescapable Aryan beauty subverts his plot by making him fall in love with her. Ahmad Khan is described as ‘A tall powerfully built man, whose swarthy irregular features indicated a mingling of low caste blood’ and ‘the expression of his mouth and chin denoted cruelty and treachery’ (26). In certain texts of the nineteenth century, converts to Islam and Christianity were often denoted as lower-caste Hindus. Colonial proponents of the Aryan theory and Hindu supremacists wholeheartedly adopted this notion to further their respective and often related agendas. The reference to Ahmad Khan’s ‘low caste blood’ and his ‘swarthy irregular features’ contrasts with the symmetry of the Rani’s physical description and renders the horrific aspects of the rebellion a largely ‘lower caste’ endeavour. The massacre of the British in Jhansi is thus blamed in the novel on the ‘low- caste’ Ahmad Khan, while the Rani is absolved as, on account of ‘her womanly 82 The Rani of Jhansi repugnance to ruthless slaughter, she clearly perceived the advantage she would gain by holding the Europeans as prisoners to exchange for her right to the throne. To kill the innocent, the already defeated, did not occupy a thought in her mind’ (25). Similarly, Sir John Smyth, has argued for the Rani’s innocence by referring to her eyes, which are ‘full of character’ and ‘warm, generous and open’ – superseding a racial description denoting the colour of the eyes in favour of Aryan qualities.54 White clarifies that the Rani assured British men and women safe passage, but Ahmad Khan, who had earlier ‘sworn on the Koran’ that no harm would befall them, proved otherwise; here the very validity of the Koran is questioned as the basis for a binding oath. Tricked by assurances in the name of the Rani, the colonialists are marched out and ‘…beside a clump of trees all were ruthlessly butchered…Ahmad Khan was elated almost to a condition of intoxication by the final successful act of revolt’ (24). Thus, the ‘elated…intoxication’ fabricates the atrocity as the deed of a ‘crime frenzied Mohammedan band, bearing upon the points of their bayonets ghastly trophies of the recent massacre’ (24). White acquits the Aryan Rani of any bent towards cruelty and voids the integrity of Islam as a morally binding religious force. The rebels’ adoption of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal Emperor of India, as their liege slant the rebellion as a mostly Muslim effort in the popular imagination. A contemporary account, the memoirs of Harriet Tytler – English Woman in India (n.d.), offers just such a perfunctory understanding:

At the time of the Indian Mutiny, the reigning emperor was Bahadur Shah, an old man…who lived…on a generous pension provided by the East India Company. His two sons, along with the old man, had evidently but one idea and that of regaining their power as soon as an opportunity should occur… until ’57. But when the order for the use of the Enfield rifles was issued, they at once set to work to poison the minds of the Hindus soldiery, who thoroughly believed them and nothing could convince that we had no desire to destroy their caste….So all the Mohammedans had to do to drive us out of the country was to poison the minds of the gullible Hindus. Now the time had come to do this and they succeeded to their heart’s content.55

The sentiments of this first-person account are echoed in the novel. Ahmad Khan justifies his actions and his challenge to the Rani’s authority, in the name of the Emperor: ‘But, my lady Lachmi Bai’, he protested, ‘a higher authority, the Emperor of Delhi, had commanded me to spare none of them. Further his Majesty hath been pleased to place the government of the State of Jhansi in my hands until more settled times’ (27). The Rani similarly exploits this India’s Aryan Queen 83 religious divide by exhorting the people to her side because ‘enemies, too, may rise from within as rapacious and as hateful of your religion’ (32). When the populace of Jhansi convey their verdict in favour of the Rani they cry out ‘…no stranger, no Mohammedan…Lachmi Bai Rani of Jhansi’ (32). The Muslim in White’s novel, true to the by-product of the Aryan theory, is portrayed as the ‘stranger’, the alien. As indicated before, the Aryan theory could encompass only the high-caste Brahmin Hindu inhabitants of India and other lower castes were relegated to positions of degeneracy and subservience. The depiction of the Muslims as the perpetrators of 1857 and the disruptors of an otherwise symbiotic relationship between the British and the upper caste Brahmins, coalesces in the figure of the treacherous and violent Ahmad Khan. The Rani of Jhansi or, The Widowed Queen, a play by Alexander Rogers, published in 1895, echoes the anti-Muslim sentiments by once again blaming the Jhansi massacre on the Muslim advisor to the throne.56 Though not favourable to Rani Lakshmi Bai, the play traces her resentment against the East India Company as a legitimate dissatisfaction. Written in blank verse, it is framed by the dialogue between a Muslim advisor to the Queen and her royal Brahmin priest. The inclusion of children in the massacre at Delhi is so described by Mirza, the Muslim advisor: ‘Nay, they slew them, too / Thus be the cursed Kafirs rooted out’ (7). The Brahmin’s reaction, on the other hand, is one of repugnance and assures Mirza of British retribution: ‘I see it written on this fearful scroll, / How that the slaughter of these helpless babes/Shall to the skies aloud for vengeance cry’ (7). In a similar gesture as the one attributed to Ahmad Khan, Mirza swears on the Koran to spare the British colonialists in Jhansi, only to trick them into coming out and being killed – ‘On the Koran itself I lay my hand, / The holiest of books in Moslem eyes, / And swear no fraud nor treachery is meant’ (50). Once again, the Koran is sullied as a touchstone for lies and Muslims are marked as the perpetrators of the worst atrocities of 1857. The persistence of this stereotype, even in twentieth century texts, is testified to by another play published in 1933, The Rani of Jhansi by Philip Cox.57 In this play, the Rani is forced into rebellion by the machinations of her Muslim jail daroga (warden) named Bakshish Ali. His insubordination forces her to accept the mutineers help in securing Jhansi and taking up arms against the British. As a foil to the high qualities ascribed to the Aryan Rani, the Muslim in these texts embodies the multiple failings of his caste, his race and his religion. Ahmad Khan’s degeneracy is even crafted into his desire for the Rani. Though her Aryan beauty enchants him, it is her masculine predilection to war that proves more seductive: ‘…but this Rani of ours seems rather to prefer 84 The Rani of Jhansi the smell of powder to the most delicate perfume in Teheran…what a treasure! What an houri’ (72). The Rani’s preference for the smell of gunpowder arouses him. This desirable masculinising of the Rani in Ahmad’s gaze renders the attraction homoerotic as it plays on the degenerate homosexual stereotype of the Afghan (Pathan) Ahmad Khan.58 The Rani fosters her attraction for the martial in declaring, ‘…that in the peril of a desperate situation, there lies more charm than can be gained from watching yonder seductive natch’ (152). The ‘seduction’ of a ‘natch’ (dance performed usually by a courtesan) is set up in opposition to the masculine ‘charm’ of battle. The Rani’s disregard of the ‘natch’ is also a dismissal of colonial characterisation which often sets up the Rani as just another courtesan. In response to the Rani’s remark, Ahmad Khan muses that ‘though he realized it not, it was this force of her being that held him bound to her service, in a sense, a comrade, as much as a lover’ (152). This sense of comradeship, predicated on the sphere of masculinity (battle) and his desire for the Rani ‘as a lover’, writes Ahmad Khan into the script of homosexual desire. However, Ahmad Khan is not an effeminate Indian male, as may be the case for the Bengali.59 Rather, the Muslim Ahmad Khan is cast as an ‘other’ to the more moderately sexed Hindu male and as one with a predilection for homosexual practices within a strictly heterosexual framework. Dressed in men’s clothing, Lakshmi Bai successfully passes as an ‘attractive’ man whom other nobles observe admirably. Yet, the novel must mitigate this tableau of homoerotic attraction to the cross-dressing Rani to adhere to its tenets of Aryan femininity. For a masculinised queen cannot epitomise Aryan women. The reaction to her entrance at the war council dressed as a man is described thus: ‘For a space the eyes of the Rao Sahib could discover no other object save her form to gaze upon’ (213). The Rao Sahib, a fellow leader of the coalition against the British, after the war council, ‘…regarded himself as an aspirant to her favour’ (219). White’s purpose in making the Rani desirable to men, I believe, is to render her increasingly feminine, but desire for the Rani in her masculine attire disrupts the heterosexual paradigm and places her instead as the object of homoerotic desire. In her role as the political leader and commander of the army and in her attire and conduct, the Rani serves as an incarnation of female masculinity. But White’s depiction contains her danger to Victorian femininity and restrains her impact. Her wish to lead troops in battle and to be a part of the masculine arena of warfare, is expressed not in a political speech, but as part of a wistful musing. ‘Ah! How I would like to be one of them. To be a man and ride forth sword in hand, to battle; to hear the cannon road and mingle with clash of arms. India’s Aryan Queen 85

Perhaps, who can tell, some day the Rani may command her troops in person’ (60). But the Rani’s wish ‘to be a man’, a monarch and a military commander, is occluded by masculine desire for her, even and especially, in her male attire. Ahmad Khan, the all-purpose villain, plots his intrigue by convincing Prasad that the Rani desires him, ‘…to stand so high in the beautiful Rani’s favour. What man could desire more?’ (69). As one desiring her male Aryan counterpart and being desired by him, Lakshmi Bai is rendered devoid of any ‘unnatural’ sexually gendered identification. She defends her Aryan heritage in the masculine arena of war but does not become masculine. The emphasis on the Rani’s supposedly feminine qualities is another track the novel employs to make her acceptable as an Aryan woman. She is described as exceptionally beautiful and with the ability to use her feminine wiles to her political advantage. When Ahmad Khan storms her palace to overthrow her, she gains the advantage by offering herself up to him as a prize, ‘O my Lord, thou must see how poorly I am attired in honor of so great an event. I would retire for a short space, to adorn my neck with jewels and my hair with flowers; so that I may appear worthy of the noble Ahmad Khan’s approval’ (29). When she reappears, the Rani is beautifully adorned and Ahmad Khan is besotted into obedience. When thinking of a successor to the post of military commander of Jhansi, the Rani bypasses many nobles of superior military intelligence and seniority to settle on a younger man she may be able to manipulate easily, ‘A younger man, susceptible to her personal charms, would, she thought, be more likely to follow, unhesitatingly, the dictates of her will’ (79). According to the novel, part of the Rani’s strength lies in her ability to persuade, cajole and coax the men around her to do her bidding. The emphasis on her womanliness balances the focus on her ‘masculine’ political acumen and military knowledge. Rani Lakshmi Bai’s conversations with Prasad are frequently laced with their mutual attraction. The Rani, though careful to not cross the lines of decorum, shows favour towards Prasad and expresses her disappointment after an altercation by emphasizing how he has hurt her, ‘Thou art surely out of thy mind to speak thus to me. Thou hast forgotten that although I am the Rani, I am still a woman. I did not think this of thee’ (54). The Rani abdicates her royal right to complete submission from Prasad in favor of speaking her hurt as ‘a woman’. White’s reiteration of the Rani’s femininity serves to mitigate the possible stigma of masculinity and her love story additionally constructs her as a womanly figure. Female agency outside patriarchal norms is seldom outside the confines of male fantasy – thus, the strength and character of the Rani is disarticulated by transforming her into an object of men’s desires. 86 The Rani of Jhansi

The British, embodied in the novel as Sir Hugh Rose, recognise the heroism of the Rani – ‘To the credit of the chivalrous spirit of the Foreign general, he enjoined that yonder heroic girl should not suffer harm knowingly by his guns’ (191). But Hindu and Muslim men comprehend her either as an incitement to lust or as a threat to their masculinities. As a consequence, Indian men are characterised as either effeminate unfit rulers, or degenerate disloyal erstwhile servants who face moral and physical disfigurement. The Rani’s scheming cousin Sadescheo is described as one whose ‘weak features bore evidence of a life of sexual debauchery’ (65). Ahmad Khan, an ‘accursed Afghan lion in leash at her side’ (226), is portrayed as a tamed beast. While the Rani declares the battlefield a ‘scene (which is) mine as a birthright’, Ahmad Khan, on the other hand, is disfigured by battle and appears with ‘one of his arms suspended in a sling, his turbanless head bandaged to close the wound caused by the flying splinter of a rock, his stern visage dirt begrimes, his beard matted with congealed blood’ (191). Even Prasad, the Rani’s romantic interest, is portrayed as a debilitated lover, weakened by his jealousy of men around the Rani. Thus, while the Rani stands whole and solid, the men around her are mere remnants of masculinity, culture and courage. In the tradition of characters such as Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Eugene Wrayburn in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1865), both Ahmad and Prasad must be dealt incapacitating physical and emotional trauma before being offered redemption by the feminine ideal – in this case, the Aryan Rani whose life is forfeit by ineffectual men who die or flee from battle and can offer neither appropriate leadership nor requisite sacrifice. The Rani, in this example, is an extension of the land itself, which cannot be protected by the defunct masculinities of Indian men. Most colonial novels, in following the dictates of Victorian society, tend to depict the Rani only in conversation with Indian or British men – participants in a public sphere from which women would have been effectively and appropriately absent. However, the condition of Indian women in the colony and of this one extraordinary woman in colonial history, intersected greatly with British women’s concerns in the post-mutiny period. In an unusual scenario, Norman Partington’s novel Flow Red the Ganges (1972) charts the Rani’s rise as a rebel alongside the fortitude of British women in the rebellion. The mutiny is experienced through the many humiliations faced by the Englishwoman Bertha Dawson, who manages somehow to make her way to every noteworthy site of the mutiny’s actions (Delhi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Jhansi, Gwalior) in her flight from the rebels. The novel is remarkable in its inclusion of figures from India’s Aryan Queen 87

1857: Sir Hugh Rose, The Lawrence Brothers, Nana Saheb, Tantya Tope, Sir Wheeler, the Rani of Jhansi and more. But it is the narrative of authoritative emergence for the Englishwoman that is of most significance. Bertha Dawson and Mrs Wheeler, General Wheeler’s wife, are sent by the British to negotiate the terms of their release with Nana Sahib, but Tantya Tope spectacularly interrupts the meeting:

Tantia Tope blazed with anger at this impudence. He moved swiftly across the room and with the back of his hand, struck her across the face. She winced, but stood her ground, then turned to him and uttered with deadly effect, an Indian phrase which meant ‘fighter of women’. The hook-nosed man stiffened with outrage. One claw-like hand reached out to Bertha, grasped her dress near the breast and tore it viciously. The other hand followed in a frenzy of rage…She stayed there for only a few moments, but in those seconds began a profound psychological change. When she stood up again she was no longer weeping. She faced Tantia Tope, her breasts thrust out proudly and then she struck him full across the face – and waited, challenging him to stab her too. (83)

Though the Indian man is indicted by his own cultural idiom as an ungallant ‘fighter of women’, Bertha undergoes a radical emotional shift to emerge a fighter herself. Forced to walk back to the British cantonment disrobed and dishevelled, Bertha does not retreat from life after this ordeal. Instead, she joins the medical corps to provide relief to British soldiers, finds physical and emotional comfort with a young British officer and gains a talismanic reputation for the British troops. In this novel, the ‘mutiny’ provides new conditions for asserting womanhood – through a permissive attitude towards sex and through active work in the public sphere. Bertha’s resurgence also serves as a critique of British womanhood, even of titular queens – while Victoria remains far from the scene of battle, Bertha, like the Rani, is in the midst of it. In this class- based reinvention of imperial geography, the regenerative power of the empire is placed in the colonial woman and not in a distant monarch. The parallel narrative about the Rani of Jhansi, who emerges likewise from the confines of domesticity and widowhood to lead an army, matches this phoenix-like rise of the Englishwoman. The Rani of Jhansi, in the novel ‘conformed to few concepts of an Indian woman—and to none of an Indian widow’. She is described as:

[L]ight-skinned, with almond eyes and jet black hair…a woman of exceptional beauty. Her voluminous silk robes and silk pantaloons disguised the vigorous strength of a formidable person. As tall as most men, she had the courage and 88 The Rani of Jhansi

the skill of a warrior and was revered (as much as feared) by her subjects. But she had been deprived of Hindu right to commit suttee on the funeral pyre of her husband – by British interference; prevented from allowing infanticide in her state – by British watchfulness; deprived of her state on the claim of mismanagement – by British annexation; dispossessed of authority to give land to her favorites, irrespective of true title – by British law. This she sat brooding in magnificent isolation, her thoughts smoldering with hatred for the British, her mind teeming with plans for revenge. (231–232)

This representation begins by following the usual dictates of Aryan portrayal – a focus on physical features followed by quirks of character. Yet, the beauty and strength of the warrior queen are then offset by the variety of ways in which the East India Company, through ‘interference’, ‘watchfulness’, ‘annexation’ and ‘law’, subverts her backward and arrogant directives. She is not, at this early point in the story, a subject of emulation. Surprisingly, however, this narrative superimposes Bertha and the Rani by the end of the novel into one image, one person – thus creating a conjoined tale of female bravery. When the male protagonist, Lieutenant Hodges, finally faces the Rani of Jhansi in battle he does not realise he is fighting a woman. And when he does – she is no longer just the Rani of Jhansi but also his lover Bertha Dawson, another valiant woman who has withstood the ravages of the rebellion:

He knew it was a woman despite her warrior’s clothes. But it was someone other than the Rani. He realized it was Bertha Dawson. Quite unlike, yet exactly her. Bertha’s proud features emerged from that brown, glittering-eyed face in front of him – and his sword remained suspended above her. He could no more kill her than he could destroy the woman he loved. (27)

In this twist of identities, Aryan strength trumps national affiliations. While Lieutenant Hodge is duty-bound to kill the rebel queen, he is honour-bound to respect women. In that split moment between raised sword and decisive blow, racial and colonial differences yield to the overarching narrative of a valiant, resilient, admirable womanhood. The Rani and Bertha dissolve into one personage as they embody the idolised qualities of Aryan femininity. Thus, the atrocities and crimes of culture (sati, despotism, female foeticide) mentioned in the Rani’s first description are overtaken by the sterling example of the individual, and Rani Lakshmi Bai melds into the figure of all heroic women, Joan of Arc, Boadecia or Bertha Dawson. At this crucial juncture in Partington’s India’s Aryan Queen 89 text, the opposing trajectories of British and Indian femininity are reconciled in Hodges admiration and chivalry towards all Aryan women. Imperial civility is maintained in the face of native barbarity as a newly enlightened masculinity is compelled rather than repelled by such femininity. It is an expansion of the imperial masculine self that can once again adapt to a new setting. Far from disrupting the business of empire, the Rani facilitates a new colonial masculinity, a liberalised relationship between the Englishman and the Englishwoman, a different but compatible social hierarchy and thereby also the production of a new colonial era. The intersections between the Aryan Race Theory, colonial administration, representation and scholarship form, as mentioned earlier, one strand of a complex cultural and historical imaginary. While more attention has been paid to the narratives of difference and denigration, these fictional accounts of affinity and congruence gesture towards the infinitely mobile nature of colonial discourse. Rani Lakshmi Bai is often termed by colonial historians and novelists as the most dangerous rebel of 1857. In White’s novel, her representation as an emblem of Aryan superiority allows for her assimilation and invalidation as a threat and Partington’s text superimposes the story of a strong Englishwoman upon the Rani’s tale within a larger structure of strength and femininity. In these texts being Aryan stands in for specific notions of gender and civility that mark the parameters of colonial society. In this aspect, the Rani is mutable as either an adventure or a romance story in the imperial literary landscape, the topography of which is fashioned by the events of 1857. Her eventual death and textual ‘banishment’ facilitates this rendition. The Aryan queen of India, a figure of cohesion rather than division, is an enabling narrative that brings both English and Indian lineages together in a safe fantasy about the integrative power of British colonialism, ‘a civilization of the heart’. 60

Endnotes

1. In a chapter titled ‘Love-Mad Women and Political Insurrection in Regency Fiction’ Helen Small argues that the French revolution had necessitated a medical and political discourse in Europe linking ‘madness’ in women with the current political upheaval. ‘The scenes that were passing suspended in the women hysterical and different complaints and produced many other. Similar effects on the female sex were observed during the rebellion in Scotland, in 1745. The siege of Paris by the Allies in 1814 occasioned the female inhabitants much irregularity in the menstrual flux; and apoplexy and mania were generally more frequent’ (109). Small also argues that nineteenth-century European fiction was drawing on a large repository of ‘rebellion 90 The Rani of Jhansi

and women’ – for example Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) was ‘kept alive by eighteenth century opera and its thematic interweaving of war and destructive sexual passion make it a highly charged precursor for much early nineteenth century Romantic writing on women and revolution’ (113). I want to add, however, that Small’s argument in this chapter and largely in the book, is based almost entirely on the representations of European women in the nineteenth century. Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel and Female Insanity 1800–1865. 2. Saul David, The Indian Mutiny: 1857, 367. 3. L. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth. 4. J.G. Shaffer, ‘Indo-Aryan Invasions: Cultural Myth and Archaeological Reality’., 78. 5. Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, ‘Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever’, 25, 3. 6. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains French and British Orientalisms, 7. The argument Lowe makes in her book is more complicated than the quoting of one sentence may make it out to be. I use her work as a point from which to allude to the often erroneous labelling of colonialist discourse as one in which a clearly defined system of ‘inferiors and superiors’ is the social, scientific, economic and cultural more of the nineteenth century. 7. ‘What is denied is any knowledge of cultural otherness as a differential sign, implicated in specific historical and discursive conditions, requiring construction in different practices or reading. The place of otherness is fixed in the West as a subversion of Western metaphysics and is finally appropriated by the West as its limit-text, anti- West’. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism, 90’. 8. Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, Religion and Modernity in India and Britain, 135. 9. Nripendra Kumar Dutt, The Aryanisation of India. 10. Review of J.C. Adelung and J.S. Vater, Mithridates, i, ii, iii, part I, The Quarterly Review, x (October 1813) 255–256, 265. Thomas Young (1773–1829), an English physician also known for his work in optics, made important attempts to decipher the Rosetta stone’s hieroglyphics. As a Quaker adolescent he had taught himself French, Italian, Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. 11. Max Muller, Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, applied toLanguage and Religion. 12. British – Sir William Jones, H.T. Colebrooke, J.C. Adelung; German – Franz Bopp, Jacob Grimm, A.F. Pott and Dane Rasmus Rask. 13. Max Muller, ‘The Last Results of the Sanskrit Researches in Comparative Philology’, Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, 130. 14. E.B. Cowell, An Inaugural Lecture, delivered 23 October 1867, 8. 15. John Clive, Macaula:, The Shaping of the Historian, 411. 16. Max Muller, ‘On the Relation of the Bengali to the Arian and Aboriginal Languages of India’, Report of the British Association for the advancement of Science, 349. India’s Aryan Queen 91

17. Rajaram, Navaratna S. The Politics of History: Aryan invasion Theory and the Subversion of Scholarship. Rajaram does not just argue against a notion of Aryan (European) invasion of India, but also argues fervently for a scholarly conviction in the Aryans being indigenous to India. Clearly marking his book as nationalist (Hindu) – in so much as it elevates Vedic texts and ancient Indian History to have been the story of the Aryans (Vedic Hindus). 18. Susan Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography of India, 176’. 19. Ibid, 177. 20. Joan Leopold, ‘British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India, 1850– 1870,’ 593. 21. Though this section is dealing primarily with the scientific, theological and colonial fostering and use of the Aryan race theory and its implications for colonial rule in India, I do not want to rule out the role of other factors. D.A. Lorimer’s book Colour, Class and the Victorians (1978) is a study of the role of class in the formulation and popular dissemination of race theories. Also cited in Peter Robb’s The Concept of Race in South Asia. 22. Maine, Henry Summer as quoted in Beatrice S.B. Pulgram ‘The Myth of Anglo- Saxon in Nineteenth Century England’, unpublished PhD thesis referenced in Joan Leopold’s ‘British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India, 1850–70’. 23. E.B. Havell, The History of Aryan Rule in India, 472. 24. Ibid, 472. 25. Quoted in Martin Maw’s Visions of India, 37. 26. Joan Leopold, ‘British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India, 1850– 1870’, 602. 27. Devendra Swarup ‘Genesis of the Aryan Race Theory and its Applications to Indian History’, 30–39. 28. Chakrabarti, D.K. Colonial Indology: The Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past. New Delhi: Munshiram Monoharlal, 1997. 29. Bayly,‘Caste and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography of India’, 197. 30. Robb, The Concept of Race in South Asia. 31. ‘Hariscandra of Banaras, for example, developed an argument querying the provenance of the vedic texts as revelation; if they contained commentary, he asked, why should later traditions and practices be invalid? He also pointed out the risk of abandoning the living authority of tradition, such as was implied in a modern reliance on reason and the individual conscience….’ (Robb, The Concept of Race in South Asia, 38). 32. Robb, The Concept of Race in South Asia, 6. 33. Dayananda refused to acknowledge any notion of Aryans invading India, he remained staunchly entrenched in the idea that all ‘knowledge’ and ‘learning’ had spread to ‘… Egypt, Greece or the continent of Europe…’ from India. Dayananda familiarized himself with Muller’s work by hiring a Bengali to read it to him in 1860. Dayananda maintained that British intellectual power could not be relied upon when faced with the scriptural integrity of the Vedas. But the aim of his organisation, the Arya Samaj, was to reestablish the superiority of the early Vedic culture. One of the prevalent 92 The Rani of Jhansi

reactions to the Aryan race theory is manifested in Swami Vivekananda’s use of it. He converted it to imply national and race pride in being a Hindu Aryan. His reaction to the Aryan theory was also one of misplaced benevolence. He believed that Western Aryans were being given a chance to learn from their Hindu Aryan fraternity. ‘Which of us ever dreamt that a descendant of the old Indian Aryans, by dint of Tapas, would prove to the learned people of England and America the superiority of the ancient Indian religion over other creeds’ (Robb, The Concept of Race in South Asia, 38). 34. Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of the Vedic Culture:The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. 35. In 1879, Bhaktivinode Thakur, a High Court judge, outlined his version of Shastra (scriptural) historicism. According to Shukavak Das, Bhaktivinode’s reaction to the Aryan race theory is the earliest religious orthodox Vedic historicism. Bhaktivinode cites Western authorities such as Wilford, Davis and Playfair and acknowledges the incursion of the Aryans into India. But he then goes on to divide the Vedas into two groups – (1) arthaprada – knowledge which deals with history, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology (2) paramarthaprada – knowledge that deals with transcendence. He postulates that arthaprada is open to human scrutiny and analysis, but paramarthaprada cannot be questioned and is ‘inaccessible to human reason’. Bhaktivinode aimed his polemic at the nineteenth century Bengali intelligentsia whom he feared as being swayed away from the Vedic path. Bhaktivinode epitomized the orthodox religious scholar who was willing to acknowledge and engage with Western thought to scrutinise certain historical aspects of the Vedas, but continued to uphold the sacredness of the Vedas as above such investigation. This was Bhaktivinode’s way of rescuing what he believed to be essential to the Vedas in the face of Western rational thought. Shukavak Das, ‘Bhaktivinode and the problem of Modernity’. 36. For more on this see Vasudha Dalmia’s The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions. 37. A fundamentalist Hindu organization committed to spreading the notion of Hindutva and the idea of India as a Hindu nation. 38. Indian reactions to the Aryan theories remained entrenched in recovering the supremacy and integrity of the Hindu scriptural texts, or finding ways by which notions of Aryanism could serve the Hindu nationalist project. It is not till the latter half of the twentieth century that secular Indian theorists have attempted to grapple with the Aryan problem. C. Jaffrelot, ‘The Idea of the Hindu Race in the Writings of Hindu Nationalist Ideologues in the 1920s and 1930s: A Concept between Two Cultures’. 39. Uma Chakravarti and Kumkum Roy, ‘In Search of Our Past: A Review of the Limitations and Possibilities of the Historiography of Women in Early India, 2–10’. 40. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 15. 41. William Jones, Sixth Discourse. 42. Ibid, 48. 43. In David’s Arnold’s extensively researched work he details the acceptance of prostitution in the British Military cantonments. These prostitutes were certified India’s Aryan Queen 93

free of disease by the military doctors and the soldiery was directed to go to those who could furnish those certifications on demand. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India. 44. Thomas Trautmann, Aryan and British India, 15. 45. John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance, 40. 46. Popular novelists who had been primed by sensationalised practices such as sati and Thugi, shifted perceptibly to accommodate a plethora of stories that could be spun off the thrilling events of 1857. Patrick Brantlinger in his essay, ‘Race and the Victorian Novel’ writes, ‘…the Mutiny took central stage as the atrocity that seemed to prove the necessity of British imperial control over the subcontinent’. Brantlinger mostly discusses works that deploy the horrifying and monstrous depictions of the ‘mutiny’ and though White’s novel helps itself to many of those apocryphal stories, his emphasis veers more towards the Rani’s heroism rather than towards the horror of 1857, 144. 47. As discussed in the Introduction, these are crucial social issues in the social reform discourse of British colonialism. Hindu widowhood is a central concern of this discourse with the possibility of Sati, or the accompanying stigma of ‘widowhood’ and no recourse to remarriage. 48. Alexander Duff, The Indian Rebellion: Its Causes and Results, 46. 49. Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, ‘The Effeminate and the Masculine: Nationalism and the Concept of Race in Colonial Bengal’, 292. 50. New York Times (1857–1922); 8 Mar 1902. 51. Armstrong, Nancy. ‘Gender and the Victorian Novel’, 100. 52. There were very few objections to it, except a few satirical anonymous articles in which the writer suggested that if the Brahmins were as much the invaders as the British and not part of indigenous Indian society then perhaps they should leave with the British. 53. Robb, The Concept of Race in South Asia, 31. 54. Sir John Smyth, The Rebellious Rani, 14–15. 55. Discussed in Suleri’s chapter on ‘The Feminine Picturesque’ in Rhetoric of English India, 109. 56. Alexander Rogers, The Rani of Jhansi or, The Widowed Queen. 57. Philip Cox, The Rani of Jhansi. 58. This issue is dealt with in more detail in Chapter II. The stereotype of the ‘homosexual’ Pathan was a widely prevalent trope in the military atmosphere of the frontier regions of Punjab and the North Western Frontier Province. Persian and Urdu poetry from the Mughal era also provides evidence of the acceptance of homosexual lifestyle, which was later suppressed under colonial rule to conform to colonial masculinity. See Scott Kugle’s ‘Sultan Mahmud’s Makeover: Colonial Homophobia and the Persian Urdu Literary Tradition’. 59. In her article on the racialisation of policies in colonial India, Indira Chowdhary- Sengupta details the rise of the stereotype of the effeminate Bengali male as a response 94 The Rani of Jhansi

to their non-participation and public denunciation of the 1857 revolt. According to Sengupta, the reorganisation of the Indian Army after 1857 led to the classification of some ethnic groups as ‘martial races’ and their exclusion from this coveted list ostracised the Bengalis further. Indian and British authors particularly celebrated the Aryan qualities embodied by these ‘martial races’. Sengupta refers to contemporary nineteenth century accounts to demonstrate how certain ethnic groups were closer to being Aryan than others. 60. J.G. Farrell, The Seige of Krishnapur, 125.

Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 95

IV Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film

ictorian fiction often strove to curtail Rani Lakshmi Bai’s significance Vby relegating her to domestic and familial scenarios in which she, as the widowed and barren wife, sought revenge by disrupting colonial homes but was then inevitably subdued by the British male. Expectedly, twentieth century Indian representations of the Rani are steadfast in their adherence to a larger political project signifying a unified national impetus towards independence since 1857.1 These accounts represent the Rani and Indian women by extension, as valued members of the new nation-state, but also as an embodiment of India’s tenacious allegiance to tradition. In creating a nation out of an obviously disparate linguistic, cultural, ethnic and social landscape, nationalist history often finds recourse in the certainty of a coherent past and women play a constitutive role in constructing this historical precedent. Indian formations of gender signify the ambivalence of modernity and tradition: while the modernizing processes of the nation must define themselves as respectful of a venerable past, tradition must anticipate the demands and forces of a new age. While colonialist narratives often portrayed her as a volatile individual representing the chaos of 1857, nationalist stories depict the Rani as a stabilising figure – bringing order, purpose and unity to the rebellion and the nation. In this chapter, I analyse seminal examples of the historical poem, novel and film in Hindi: Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s poem ‘Jhansi ki Rani’ (1930), Vrindavan Lal Varma’s novel Jhansi ki Rani Lakshmi Bai (1946) and Sohrab Modi’s film Jhansi ki Rani (1953). All three appeared in the years leading up to or just after independence and retell the Rani’s story within the lens of Indian nationalism, albeit with variance in form and content. Thus, representational ideology woven into the formal dictates of genre – poetry, prose and film – creates public narratives of the Rani’s life within the cultural, cinematic, or literary form for affect and endurance. Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s rousing 96 The Rani of Jhansi ballad is arguably the best known poem in Hindi; every Hindi-speaking Indian has read or heard of it. Chauhan was amongst a handful of women in a field dominated by male authors before independence and her poem is both homage to a legend and a challenge to men’s writing. Vrindavanlal Varma’s novel, published on the eve of India’s independence, is a fictionalised biography. A seminal contribution to the field of historical literature in Hindi, the novel portrays the sacrifice and valour of the Rani and forwards a reformist agenda against the ‘social evils’ of twentieth century India. Though secular in its approach, the novel uses models of Hindu society interchangeably with an Indian social environment and presents a past that is, in no small measure, key to rewriting a history of the newly independent nation. India’s first film in technicolour, Jhansi ki Rani was produced and directed by Sohrab Modi and featured the well-known Mehtab as the Rani of Jhansi and Modi himself as her advisor, Rajguru. The film is largely understood as a cinematic version of Varma’s novel.2 All three examples have become a part of the nation’s cultural heritage in Hindi, which, as the official language, occupies a position in the literary, political and cultural matrix that is marked by a particular rendering of India as a Hindi-speaking nation. Political proponents of Hindi continue their efforts to legislate it as a national language in the Indian constitution.3 Besides their representational import as early nationalist evocations of the Rani’s story, these narratives are significant examples of the ways in which this particular crafting of the nation’s history intersects with the history of the Hindi language.

History in Hindi and the History of Hindi

In this section, I discuss the emergence of Hindi as the unofficial national language in relation to the literary and cinematic reconstruction of Indian history. Modern Hindi, also referred to as khari boli (the standard speech), is the present-day language of government, education, literature and public life in the six central states of North India, which ironically makes the national language not so national. A Sanskritised form has been evolving since the early nineteenth century and is currently the dominant literary language for the northern Hindi-speaking areas. The national position is not a continuation of the linguistic choice of India’s people, who speak a wide range of primary languages, but shares instead a politically complex path with the emergence of Indian nationalism. Vasudha Dalmia demarcates ‘British imperialist’ and later ‘Hindu nationalist’ as the ‘two primary ideological constructs’ involved in the evolution of Hindi as Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 97 a national language and in the increasing friction between supporters of Hindi and its primary rival, Urdu.4 Medieval Hindi dialects differed greatly over the northern expanse of India and the primary style of Hindi from the late fifteenth century onwards is based on the western Hindi dialect of Brij Bhasa.5 Mughal rule brought the Persian language in contact with the languages of Northern India and a commingling of these gave rise to Urdu, often known as the ‘camp language’.6 By the time British colonialism gained hold of India, both Urdu and the two leading modes of Hindi (Brij Bhasa and Khari Boli) dominated the north, were used interchangeably by the educated classes as literary languages, became the basis for the linguistic mixture commonly understood by the urban populations in everyday communication, were written in both the Urdu Persian and the Hindi Devanagari script and gained credibility in colonial parlance as ‘Hindustani’.7 The ‘concept of a national language’ was introduced by the British, who claimed responsibility for standardising and fostering Hindi as a language – an assertion volubly decried by Hindu nationalists to whom the notion of Hindi being ‘constructed’ or ‘fostered’ denied its ‘ancient’ and ‘natural’ status. Thus, the use of Hindi, a fairly new idiom, to give credence to the ancient and to assimilate it into the modern, embodies just one of the many contradictions of the nationalist moment. In her study of various colonial administrative promulgations and the nationalist organising along linguistic lines, Dalmia concludes ‘a new homogenization was being asked for, so that the territorial communication became a source of national solidarity and finally, economical and political emancipation’.8 Ironically, what had begun as a supposedly unifying anti-imperialist endeavor in language later drew charges of ‘Hindi Imperialism’.9 Amrit Rai argues, however, that a ‘naturally evolving’ split of Hindustani into Urdu and Hindi was ‘already a fait accompli when the British arrived upon the scene’ and only finalised administratively by the British and that ‘in the given situation, which they had little reason to question or rectify, they found it advisable to follow a result-oriented practical policy’.10 This ‘practical policy’ refers to the procedures followed in the College of Fort William in Calcutta, where words of ‘foreign’ origin were systematically removed from the texts studied by young civil servants to foster the emergence of uniformity in Hindi.11 However, most scholars begin the story of standardised Hindi in 1867–1868, when the Hindi-speaking populace of northern India demanded that Hindi in the Devanagari script be recognised as an official language of local colonial administration. Though it was put forth as the democratic claim of a linguistic majority, the common perception that Hindi was the language 98 The Rani of Jhansi of the Hindus and Urdu that of the Muslims set up a complex and communally identified conflict. Harish Trivedi refers to a startling demographic statistic in his explanation:

The charge of monopolization of government jobs by Muslims was amply borne out by the governments’ own statistics, according to which the Muslims (14 percent of the population) held 63.9 percent of these positions in 1857 and 45.8 percent even in 1886–1887, by which time a substantial number of Hindus had learned Urdu in order to have a share of the spoils.12

Thus, linguistic policies were linked to the unevenness of colonial employment along communal lines. The colonial government legitimatised the use of Hindi in the Nagari script in 1900 alongside Urdu in the Persian script for local governance. However, the initiative to foster standardised Hindi as a literary medium is largely credited to Bharatendu Hariscandra (1850–1885); the Nagari Pracarini Sabha (Society for the Propagation of Nagari) built upon his efforts by endorsing the important literary journal Saraswati, which was launched by Chintamani Ghosh in 1900 and gained renown under the stewardship of Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi who became its editor in 1903.13 It is not inconsequential that Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were members of the Nagari Pracarini Sabha. The Hindu–Muslim conflict of the anti-colonial struggle was girded by the language debate and manifested in local and national representations of anti-colonial ideology. The Swadeshi (belonging to the home country) ideal adopted by the Congress was dedicated to shunning foreign goods in order to protest against the economic exploitation of Indian labour and industry.14 The transmutation of this impetus into the sphere of language, however, replicated the communal divide. Though the Congress was led by Jawahar Lal Nehru and the Muslim League by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, both of them Anglicised men most comfortable with English, a renewed vigour and pride in their language became an incendiary motivation for the masses mobilised by the Swadeshi movement. For a while, Hindi and Urdu literature flourished in producing nationalist works that spoke in a ‘unified’ voice of anti-colonial struggle, yet the underlying tension between proponents of both languages, vying for national prominence, eventually resulted in a linguistic, aesthetic and political split. Francesca Orsini considers this historical confluence of linguistics, national politics and literary form

[O]f great consequence in the twentieth century; it evolved into a very successful rhetoric for political mobilization; other histories, e.g. that of literature were Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 99

grafted on to this stem; finally this history helped crystallize modern ‘Indian’ identity as being essentially the same as modern ‘Hindu’ identity.15

The identification of Hindi with Hindus and of Urdu with Muslims has a complicated colonial, nationalist and postcolonial history in India that is linked directly to the partition. By 1935, when Jinnah assumed leadership of the Muslim League and the stipulate to privilege Hindi as the national language became insistent, the Urdu–Hindi divide came to dominate the differences between the nationalist parties. In their detailed study of Hindi and Urdu in India, Shackle and Snell suggest that, ‘Gandhi himself a native speaker of Gujarati, educated in English, was insistent that the answer to the language problem lay in a compromise between Hindu and Muslim interests. His advocacy of a middle-of-the-road Hindustani seems at first glance to have been eminently reasonable’.16 Yet, Gandhi also naively suggested that this version of Hindustani be written in the Nagari script rather than in Perso-Arabic script.17 Furthermore, the accelerating claim for Pakistan by the Muslim League amplified the oppositional demand, of the Hindi loyalists, for the adoption of Hindi as a national language to offset the ‘loss’ of territory to Pakistan. Forwarded as the rationale for a language spoken by the majority of India, this argument failed to take into account that Urdu remained the dominant language shared by the largest minority in India – the Muslims. It also ignored the many other languages of India. In an ironic and sad turn, Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, accused Gandhi of having been ‘opposed to Sanskritised “Hindi”’.18 Though the devastating effects of Godse’s beliefs were visible to the larger public sphere, such inflammatory sentiments were not restricted to fundamentalists and ideologues. Lajjaram Mehta (1863–1931), a writer in Hindi, celebrated the explosion of Hindi on the national scene in 1926 by writing:

…[T]he public drum of Hindi will resound from one corner to the other and Indians speaking different languages, while improving their own languages, will perform aarti (worship) for Hindi with clasped hands and bowed heads and Hindi’s younger sister, or, if anyone objects to that name, Hindi’s elder sister, Urdu will sacrifice herself standing at her side and the language of the Raj, English with all its pomp and pride, with its genius and terror, will garland Hindi with flowers.19

An exemplary conflation of Hinduism with Hindi, Mehta’s dictum for Hindi’s dominance on the Indian linguistic register is a prescient corollary of 100 The Rani of Jhansi post-independence language policies. Though acknowledging that Indians could be ‘speaking different languages’, Mehta employs a clearly Hindu mode of worship in which aarti is performed as an obeisance to Hindi.20 Urdu is unhesitatingly ascribed the subservient and eventually self-regulated sacrificial role. On the other hand English, the language of colonial subjugation ‘with all its pomp and pride’, will participate in the traditional congratulatory ceremony of garlanding Hindi. It is a curiously unguarded metaphor that also invokes the Hindu wedding ritual in which the groom and the bride garland each other. The marriage of the two dominant linguistic modes, Hindi and English, is facilitated, however, by the graceful and willing deracination of Urdu. This example also gestures towards the perceived gendered identities of the languages. As Alok Rai notes in Hindi Nationalism, the ‘making of modern “Hindi” and the making of the “Hindu community” are related in complex ways’ that include a particularly gendered rendering of khari boli (standard Hindi) as a virile (erect) construct, in contrast to brij bhasa (another popular form of Hindi) as a pari boli (the supine form).21 This contrast between the ‘erect’ and ‘supine’ forms of Hindi were further implicated in charges that brij bhasa was old, effeminate, wary of change while khari boli had taken on a nationalist fervour, masculinity and youth. These definitions of language devolved quickly into misogynist descriptions of Hindi- and Urdu-speaking women, as tropes of polygamy, promiscuity and immorality were woven into the linguistics politics. Amrit Rai quotes the poetry of Hindi poets such as Sohan Prasad and Bharatendu to make this point. For instance, in his poem from 1866 ‘Hindi Urdu ki Larai’ (the fight between Hindi and Urdu), Prasad likens Sanskritised Hindi to the faithful wife and Urdu to the courtesan. ‘Bharatendu had called Urdu, a language in which he boasted writing poetry under the nom de plume “Rasa”, the language of the dancing girls and prostitutes’.22 This division into the domestic and political sphere, the respectable wife versus the disreputable harlot, also reflected the widespread belief that while Hindi was the language of the home, Urdu was the language of state and governance that had devolved into ‘the language of male licentiousness, as against Hindi’s high-minded virtuousness…it stood for rampant, uncontrolled maleness, gradually …rendered limp and unvigorous, by its promiscuity’.23 Thus, a complicated and gendered linguistic topography is refracted through the lens of contemporary communal sentiment and nationalist imperatives. The once bloodthirsty and forceful Muslims blamed for 1857 by the colonial masters are ‘rendered limp’ through their choice of language, whereas the once effeminate and mild Hindu male of colonial descriptions gains a masculine upright status. As Sujata S. Mody has suggested, this complex Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 101 imbroglio of gender, language, literature and nation ‘provides further insight into processes underlying the consolidation of identity, be it the formation of a literary canon, the articulation of boundaries for an emergent nation, or, more appropriately, the interconnected growth and development of both literature and nation’.24 Such issues were not restricted to the domain of political linguistic wrangling, but also pervaded the world of literary innovations and ideals. In 1936, when the All India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA) was founded in Lucknow, the presiding President of the meeting, Munshi Premchand was an idealistic proponent of Hindustani, which would be neither ‘high Urdu’ nor ‘high Hindi’. But the brief entanglement of both Hindi and Urdu under the shared banner of Hindustani, from the time of the Lucknow Pact in 1916 until the Baharatiya Sahitya Parisad (Indian literary Council) in 1936, came to a virtual halt when Gandhi advocated for ‘Hindi or Hindustani’ in his address to the Parisad. Gandhi’s omission of Urdu sounded its death knell. His reference to Hindi, the supposedly uncorrupted idiom, or Hindustani, the colloquial amalgamation of Muslim and Hindu culture, was understood as a language written in the Devanagari script – Hindustani, or Urdu, in the Persian script was, Gandhi emphasised, never his objective. Premchand’s own idealistic effort to bridge this linguistic gap between Hindi and Urdu was interlaced with the improbability of the endeavour. ‘Premchand…like Gandhi, believed that ideally [Hindustani] should exist and that every right-minded person should work toward it’, but Premchand also stated ‘that if such a language already existed, where would be the need for an institution such as this Academy (Hindustani Academy)’.25 The tension between an idealism that advocated a common language for all Indians and the pragmatics of its linguistic coherence were evident even in Premchand’s own work; he is arguably the most famous example in Hindi literature of a writer who moved from writing in Urdu to writing in Hindi. Premchand’s notions of adarshonmukh yatharthvad (principled realism) as the objective of literature ran parallel to Gandhian notions of justice and societal reform. Premchand exhorted the writers of his generation to reflect a social purpose in their writing, thus literature was to be rooted in the lived experience of the present rather than in the escapist tendencies of fantasy and history. Yet, in 1915 and in contrast to the idealistic notion of secular literature, Premchand had already written, ‘I am now practicing to write in Hindi as well. Urdu will no longer do. Has any Hindu ever made a success of writing Urdu, that I will?’26 Even as a generation of writers in Hindi and Urdu were influenced by Premchand’s exhortation for a principled realism, for writers of historical 102 The Rani of Jhansi literature, in their unwavering affirmation of a national mission, aesthetic dimensions were often surpassed by the political potential of their texts. Sisir Kumar Das has argued that the ‘rise of the historical novels in Indian languages were more or less simultaneous with that of the writings of Indian history itself’.27 The interest in Indian history in the nineteenth and the twentieth century, however, has antecedents in both colonial and nationalist scholarship and the expected conflation of Indian historical scholarship and of the nationalist movement is not as seamless as it is often made out to be. Even as British (Orientalist) scholarship was underwritten by less than altruistic motives, the translations of classical Sanskrit texts and of Persian and Arabic scripture and literature, created a larger economy of publication and circulation in an otherwise regionally anchored intellectual tradition. Nationalist writing of history and of historical novels was influenced by colonial scholarship even as it resisted its paradigms. And the writing of the historical novel in India was also an explication of the mythic and the legendary and not without its pitfalls. The rendering of heroic figures such as Shivaji or the Rani of Jhansi had to contend with a nationalist imagination that was unwilling to see its emblems subjected to contesting ideologies. Thus, reconstructing the past according to contemporary compulsions took on a varied template, as aspects of morality and history, as well as of the regional and the national, were reconciled. The modern historical novel in Hindi emerged in an environment beholden to distinct, but not unrelated, imperatives – rewriting colonial historiography, nationalism and an accelerated literary development in Hindi. ‘Historical novels were critical to the normalization of nationalist pasts into historical common sense. Straddling historiographical and literary sphere, many novel simultaneously created the narratives they firmly believed existed outside the available archival record’.28 A rendering of history as a cohesive narrative for the nation intersected with the use of a modern literary idiom and Hindi was thus imbued with transformative potential as the site of consonance for Indian history, politics and language. Harish Trivedi has argued that ‘the growth of the novel in India provides as richly complex a literary instance as one can expect to find anywhere of reception as resistance’.29 Though arguably European in antecedent, the novel form in India is a particularly hybridised entity building on plural referents – one in which European literary influences (English, French, Russian) commingle with regional narratives and familiarity with European literature is offset by indigenous revolutionary fervor. Trivedi argues that these ‘cross-genre mutations’ question the assumptions implicit in the transference of the novel from the European to the Indian literary mélange. Thus, while Macaulay may Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 103 have toasted ‘the literature of Britain… (for exercising) an influence wider than that of our commerce and mightier than that of our arms’, Priya Joshi refutes that boast by stating: ‘Finally, while the form of the British novel may have “colonized” the other forms of narrative flourishing in India, it was in turn colonized by those forms and refashioned in the twentieth century’.30 Thus, European forms of historical fiction refashioned in Indian hands, according to Joshi, had a particular allure for Indian novelists as it allowed them to imagine a past without, or resistant to, British rule. This linkage of anti-colonial sentiment and literary impulses signifies that ‘the consolidation of the novel as a genre in regional languages coincided with the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885…early Indian novels began to have…a mission, namely, creating a national consciousness’.31 Representations of 1857 in Hindi literature have a manifold resonance and are key to imagining Joshi’s version of a ‘national consciousness’. Some Hindi scholars go so far as to consider the rebellion responsible for the Hindi Navjagran (Hindi Renaissance), a term describing the accelerated developments of literary form and its engagement with revolution and politics. ‘Hindi Renaissance was distinct from other apparently similar phenomenon witnessed in the rest of the country and for this 1857 was held to be responsible. In the Hindi region, 1857 gave to Renaissance an indigenous character that was not found elsewhere’.32 Though this view is no longer a popular one, it did sway critical scholarship to the extent that the rise of modern Hindi literature was often seen as a corollary to a newfound national identity – one that in actuality had not always been constructed in opposition to the British. In fact, Indian nineteenth century writers asserted a so-called pan-Hindi distinctiveness often ‘with a hostile view towards pre-British regimes. Invariably every one of them has depicted “Muslim rule” as a “curse” and British rule as a boon, being indeed a veritable “Ram Rajya….”’33 As Sumit Sarkar has argued, ‘In the latter part of the 19th century incipient Hindu patriotic fervor so often sought safer literary expression through eulogizing “freedom movements” directed again medieval Muslim Kings (the Muslim literati counterpart here being the evocation of the glory of the medieval Islamic world)’.34 The Hindu nationalist need, therefore, to edify figures such as the Hindu Rani of Jhansi as opposed to the Muslim Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was adopted by the rebels in 1857 as a titular monarch, became a significant factor in regional non-Muslim literature. The figure of the Rani, a monarch under whom both Muslim and Hindu subjects united in the past, becomes a particularly potent symbol of secularism in Hindi literature, which seemingly resolves Hindi and Urdu contestations of 104 The Rani of Jhansi the historical and literary past through the figure of an undisputed heroine of India. Thus, the simple conflation of nationalism with literary developments in Hindi does not always follow the expected route of opposition to British rule; regional and religious difference is often the dominant motif. However, anti-colonial sentiment was readily expressed in literary works appearing in the seminal Hindi journal Saraswati under the stewardship of Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, even as it was often a complex and contradictory articulation and this kind of literature ‘came to play a pioneering role in what is now called hindi navjagran’.35 While, Dwivedi argued for a more encompassing understanding of sahitya (literature) that is also gyan, ‘knowledge in print’, the addition of itihasa (history) to this mix engendered a particularly rich literary corpus that responded to the nationalist moment ‘through a series of rejections, exclusions, suppressions and oppressions…but also through negotiation and compromise’.36 Hindi cinema is a crucial and perhaps also the most prolific contributor to a construction of the public imaginary in India. The Indian Film industry is the largest in the world and produces close to 1200 films a year, but the most prominent films come out of Mumbai’s Hindi film industry. Hindi films remain the single largest determinant of cultural perceptions in the Indian subcontinent. There is no easy way to untangle tradition from modern life in India and the supposedly ambivalent relationship between the two is managed through varying public discourses. Hindi cinema is, thus, an essential factor in negotiating and producing modernity for most Indians and the category stands in for Indian cinema even though there are many regional film industries in the country – Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi, to name a few. The language policies of pre-independence India are perhaps best interrogated through the varying discursive and political dictates of literary form, but the influence of Hindi and of its cultural forms is most evident in the dominance of Hindi film as the united cultural engagement of the nation. As Terry Eagleton and Edward Said have argued, postcolonial statehood embodies the contradictions of nationalism; it remains essential to adhere to a common history to mobilise as a group, even as the elision that takes place in such an enterprise is a cause for concern.37 Thus, India’s political and cultural philosophy has attempted to reconcile the impulse to move into a political modernity with a refusal to eschew a traditional cultural allegiance. India’s singularity, in employing its ancient culture as a signifier of difference from the typical adumbrative of colonial history, remains a crucial drawback as nationalist projects conflate the rehabilitation of indigenous history with a seemingly Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 105 unmarked version of culture that has managed to evade and thus defy colonial intervention and change. This ambivalence of nationalism carries through to the linguistic history of Hindi and to its use as a modern idiom to represent the nation. In a continued paradox, this modern language was to serve as an identifier of an unsullied past within an assimilationist narrative of Hindu India. Yet, the myth of unfettered access to the national past is also contested and promulgated in the public evocations of language and history that invoke the collective national self even as they are representing one famous woman, or a singular historical event. Subhadra Kumari Chauhan challenges patriarchal assumptions of the history even as she rearticulates a heroic narrative of the nation, Vrindavanlal Varma crafts a secular and reformist framework for his novel, which still reaffirms a particular version of the Hindu past and the use of Hindi and Urdu in Sohrab Modi’s film trenchantly indicates the hybridity that remains intrinsic to popular culture in postcolonial India.

Khoob Lari Mardaani woh to Jhansi wali Rani thi It was the Rani of Jhansi who Fought Like a Man

Subhadra Kumari Chauhan (1904–1948) was born into an orthodox Rajput family and educated at St. Crosthwaite School in Allahabad where she also met the Chayavadi poet Mahadevi Varma, another woman in the mostly male- dominated Hindi literary world, with whom she formed a lifelong friendship. Chauhan joined Gandhi’s non-violent movement, Satyagraha, and is credited as the first woman to court arrest in India’s nationalist struggle. Jailed twice for her involvement in anti-British activities, Chauhan continued to write poetry and short stories that were both women-oriented and nationalist.38 Chauhan’s poem ‘Jhansi ki Rani’ first appeared in 1930. It has, since then, become an integral part of the curriculum in Indian schools and the line quoted above has become the identifying refrain for Rani Lakshmi Bai’s story in Hindi- speaking India. Set to music and performed by the classical singer Shubha Mudgal in the Indian Parliament on 10 May 2007 during the sesquicentennial celebrations of 1857, the poem is a historical and geographic cartography of the nation’s past and a complex negotiation between material and ideological representation. It personifies the promise of independence in the figure of the Rani of Jhansi, crafts a litany of towns and regions crucial to the nationalist struggle and is a deft negotiation between the masculine and feminine attributes of the queen. The ballad functions as a parable of modernity within Indian tradition; while retaining the Rani’s story within the auspices of a mother’s 106 The Rani of Jhansi duty towards her family renders her service as a queen simply an extension of her domestic self, her commitment to her nation and to her people’s freedom frames her within such modern characteristics as individualism, citizenship and democracy. Written in ballad meter, ‘Jhansi ki Rani’ is both lyrical and evocative. Each stanza ends with the couplet ‘We heard this story from the singers of the Bundela clan / it was the Rani of Jhansi who fought like a man’ [Bundeley Harbolon key munh hamney suni kahani thi, / Khoob ladi mardani woh to Jhansi wali Rani thi].39 As the rhythmic and memorable closing refrain for each stanza, this couplet emphasises the Rani’s fame as a legend passed on through the oral tradition of the Bundelas, but the lines preceding the couplet balance the folkloric aspect by giving the reader political context. The poem sets out the story of the Rani’s life alongside a geopolitical narrative of the 1857 rebellion.

Kings and queens grew restless as their thrones shook old India awakened with the vigour of youth, The people recognized the value of the freedom they forsook And everyone resolved to throw the foreigner out of the country. It rose in 1857, but it was the spirit of an ancient sword, We heard this story from the singers of the Bundela clan, it was the Rani of Jhansi who fought like a man.

Sinhasan hil uthey raajvanshon ney bhrukuti tani thi, budhey Bharat mein aayee phir se nayi jawani thi, gumee huee azadi ki keemat sabney pehchani thi, door phirangi ko karney ki sab ney man mein thani thi. Chamak uthi san sattavan mein, yeh talwar purani thi, Bundeley Harbolon key munh hamney suni kahani thi, Khoob ladi mardani woh to Jhansi wali Rani thi.

The rebellion of 1857 infuses ‘Budhay Bharat’ (old India) with new life. The poem is, at the onset, a story of India and its people and of their undoubted yet dormant courage, told through the episodic narration of the Rani’s life. But it can also be read as a veiled reference to the old king Gangadhar and his kingdom Jhansi – one impotent and the other rudderless before the young Rani’s reign. 1857 and the Rani are thus infused with nationalist virility and vigour to shake off the emasculating effects of colonisation. The eighth stanza signifies a pivotal moment in the poem as it comes after the details of the Rani’s life but precedes the outbreak of the rebellion. The stanza interjects a ‘life-history’ of the nation alongside the Rani’s story, Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 107 subordinating, albeit limitedly, the individual helplessness of the queen to the larger degradation of the country.

They snatched the capital of Delhi and even Lucknow as an afterthought, The Peshwa was imprisoned in Bithur and Nagpur was similarly got, What could Udaipur, Tanjore, Satara, Karnatak do? When Sindh, Punjab and the Brahmaputra region were conquered too. The story of Bengal and Madras was the same.

Chheenee rajdhani Dilli ki, Lucknow chheena baaton-baat, Qaid Peshwa tha Bithur mein, hua Nagpur ka bhi ghaat, Udaipur, Tanjore, Satara, Karnatak ki kaun bisaat? jabki Sindh, Punjab Brahm par abhi hua that vajra-nipaat. Bengaaley, Madras aadi ki bhi to vahi kahani thi,

This gendered geography in Chauhan’s poem evokes ‘Jann Gann Mann’, the first stanza of a Brahmo hymn, ‘Bharata Vidhata’, composed by Rabindranath Tagore, first sung by him at a session of the Indian National Congress in 1911 and later adopted by independent India as its national anthem. The relevant lines, as translated by Tagore in 1919, read:

Thou Dispenser of India’s destiny. Thy name rouses the hearts of the Punjab, Sind, Gujrat and Maratha, Of Dravida, Orissa and Bengal. It echoes in the hills of the Vindhyas and Himalayas, Mingles in the music of the Jumna and Ganges, And is chanted by the waves of the Indian Sea.40

Bhārata bhāgya vidhātā Pañjāba Sindhu Gujarāta Marāthā Drāvida Utkala Vanga Vindhya Himāchala Yamunā Gangā Ucchala jaladhi Taranga

Chauhan’s poem re-imagines the country, in Tagore’s spirit, by naming its various regions, presaging a national unity that is yet to come. Rather than drawing attention to the nation’s fragmented self and territories, Chauhan’s poem lists these names almost as a mantra for the formidable foundational strength of the nation, which can induce national feeling or affect independent of location. While Tagore’s metaphysical and lyrical paean to the country, as a regenerative spirit flowing through its geography, celebrates the shared destiny 108 The Rani of Jhansi that is ‘India’, Chauhan uses the same names to list the colonial wrongs borne by the country. As Sumathi Ramaswamy has persuasively argued,

[T]he emergent nation cannot be just a mother/goddess but also is necessarily a geo-body defined by the calculations and contours of scientific cartography... as if a sovereign polity needs to give precedence to the cartographic form of national territory…whose borders are carefully and incontestably defined, governed and defended.

Thus, while both poems could be read as a modern, geographically positioned, making of the nation, ‘both the form and presence of the mother/goddess and the geo-body, each mutually reinforcing as well as troubling the other’, I suggest instead that this narrative of multicultural and multilocational nationhood justifies India as a historical, mythological, spiritual entity always already present; a palpable force, Shakti, that can be raised but not contained by the limiting discourses of geography, religious iconography or historical reference.41 In a complex but by now also familiar portrayal, Chauhan crafts ‘the spear, the shield, the sword and the knife’ [Barchi, Dhal, Kirpan, Katari] as the Rani’s ‘childhood friends’. Schooled in the stories of the brave Shivaji, [Veer Shivaji ki gaathayen uski yaad zabaani thi], the Rani is both an avatar of the goddesses of war [Lakshmi thi ya Durga thi who swayan veerta ki avatar] and the brave daughter of the Marathas. Thus, ‘poised at the intersection between the modern and the non-modern and looking towards heroic actions in the past, [the poem] represents the possibility of an epic resolution of history in the future’.42 In a weaving of regional and religious iconography, the Rani is chosen as the harbinger and catalyst of India’s freedom in a modern mobilisation of the state within traditional sources of power. A gendered narrative of the nation as a dishonoured woman, poised between the blasphemous violations of powerful mythological deities and the disgrace heaped upon historical women, is manifested in the various forms of shame that beset such figures as the Rani of Jhansi and the Begum of Awadh:43

The Rani cried in her royal quarters, the Begum was distraught, Their clothes and jewellery were being sold in the Calcutta Bazaars The British newspapers auctioned off without embarrassment ‘the jewels of Nagpur and the nine-tiered necklaces of Lucknow’. And thus foreign hands auctioned off the honor of the veil.

Rani royee rinvason mein, Begum gum se thi bezaar, unkey gehney kapdey biktey they Calcutta key bazaar, Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 109

sarey aam nilaam chhaptey they angrezon key akhbar, “Nagpur key zewar le lo, Lucknow key lo naulakh haar”. Yon pardey ki izzat pardesi key hath bikani thi.

This veritable disrobing of the nation prompts the men to take up arms just as their brave ancestors had done [veer sainikon key man mein tha apney purkhon ka abhimaan] and the Rani transforms from a dishonoured woman into the goddess of war [Ran-Chandi ka kar diya prakat aahvaan]. The transformation from queen to goddess of war is completed in the final incarnation as an embodiment of independence [Swatantrata]. It is also a restaging of the feudal, the queen, to the mythic, the goddess and finally to the modern, independence. The Rani functions in a complex interplay of feminine and masculine attributes; she is the very reincarnation of the goddess of war but she is also the essence of freedom, which remains within the context of Indian national politics a quality pursued and ostensibly understood best by the nation’s patriarchy. When she falls as a wounded lioness [ghayal hokar giri Sinhni], she is the most dangerous of warriors protecting her land. But in true maternal form, she is independence personified, come to the land as a woman giving life, literally and politically, to its citizens [humko jeevit karney aayee ban Swatantrata-naree thi]. Thus, even in Chauhan’s poem, the Rani, as a goddess figure, remains distant from the gendered reality of India, where women, as active shapers and participants, remain largely absent from the political life of the nation’s citizenry. The inevitable reference to the Rani, as either the goddess of war, the mother-goddess, or as the deity of independence, reinforces her exalted, yet removed status – one that accentuates the distance the ordinary women of India must travel for recognition. Pankaj Rag’s discussion of the poem with a background of folk songs and alternative traditions similarly argues that Chauhan’s poem elevates the national context above the regional; deifying the Rani within the narrative of nation and religion and thus dislocating her as a heroine of the people.44 The focus on the nation and independence leads Akshaya Kumar to read Chauhan’s poem as a case in which nationalism dominates the narrative and ‘the subaltern does not speak at all’.45 But this reading focuses on the content of the poem and not on its authorship, which in this case must be read complementarily – the Rani’s meteoric rise from the daughter of a poor Brahmin to the queen of a principality calls for a nuanced definition of her subalternity – a story that may be read in the context of the modern nation as the new promise of citizenship. It is the female poet in Hindi, Chauhan herself, as the other to both the colonial and the nationalist citizen, who is the subaltern. Though 110 The Rani of Jhansi

Kumar correctly surmises that this poem is not different from ‘mainstream (male) nationalist poetry of the Dwivedi period’, his dismissal that ‘female authorship does not make much difference to the poetics of nationalist poetry’, is rather categorical. This is not to say that the female poet must be equated with feminist concerns, but rather to point out that the poet’s own history, as well as the history of her subject matter, complicates the constitutive elements of ‘nationalism’ and ‘poetics’ by drawing attention to the silences and gaps of the nation’s history and literature. Chauhan refers to the inaudibility of women’s stories in the colonial and nationalist archive by indicating that a figure such as the Rani does not need a voice to be bestowed upon her: ‘Even if history remains silent and truth is hanged, / even if the foreigners are victorious and destroy Jhansi with their cannons. / You will be your own memorial, / you are the undying sign of our freedom’ [hovey chup itihas, lagey sachchao ko chahey phansi / ho madmaati vijay, mitaa dey golon sey chahey Jhansi. / Tera samarak tu hi hogi, tu khud amit nishani thi]. The Congress and the Gandhi-dominated national politics of pre- independence India, did not adopt the Rani of Jhansi as a symbol of resistance. It was, in fact, the stereotype of the submissive and suffering Indian woman, a far cry from the warring Rani, which was the guiding feminine principle of Gandhi’s rhetoric. Chauhan’s poem should be read then as a corrective to the masculinity of widely adopted nationalist symbols; making visible the erasure of the Rani and the gradual removal of women, as anything except for symbols, from the public sphere. Unlike the goddess of Vande Mataram or the geo-body of Jana Gana Mana, a gendered or geographic entity spurring men to action as the suffering mother figure awaiting rescue, Chauhan’s poem, by reimagining the Rani of Jhansi as Swatantrata (independence), intervenes in this gendered discourse by placing rescue and resistance in the hands of the mother herself.

Parunto rakt ki un boondiyon nay prithvi par jo itihas likh diya tha, vo amit raha But this history was written in blood and that cannot be erased. (336)

Vrindavan Lal Varma’s novel, Jhansi ki Rani Lakshmi Bai, is regularly assigned in Indian school and college curriculums and its canonical status often allows it to stand in for the historical record. Cognizant of the disproportionate influence wielded by colonial historiography on the Indian past, Varma’s narrative is a concerted effort to correct the imbalances of British historical writing. In 1909, Varma had published two stories (‘RakhiBandh Bhai’ and ‘Tatar aur ek vir Rajput’) Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 111 in the literary journal Saraswati edited by Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi and in 1910 a play entitled Senapati Udal, where he first expressed his revolutionary anti-colonial ideas, was banned by the British government. Akin to Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946), written while Nehru was in jail, Varma’s imaginative reconstruction of the past, published in the same interstitial moment of 1946, a year before India’s independence, coalesces literary aesthetic with the political to signal a historical responsibility to the nation.46 Jhansi ki Rani Lakshmi Bai established Varma as a foremost exponent of the historical novel in Hindi. In 1954, the Indian government awarded him a cash prize of two thousand rupees for the novel. He also received the Dalmia Award, the Sahatiyakar Sansad Award, the Hindustani Academy Award and the Nehru Award. In 1965, the Indian government awarded him the Padma Bushan, the highest civil decoration awarded to a citizen of India. Varma (1889 –1966) published prolifically and his works continue to be reprinted at an unprecedented rate.47 This list of accolades is essential to show the canonical and celebrated place of the author amongst Indian letters and culture; Jhansi Ki Rani Lakshmi Bai is a principal text in Indian historical fiction that has influenced generations of Indian readers and writers. Varma’s rendition of the Rani’s story is a particularly strong example of the temporal indices of the nationalist historical novel, which ascribes glory to the ancient past, but within a contemporaneous political and cultural paradigm apt for mobilization in the future of the modern nation-state. Familial sources, which may otherwise be suspect in historical investigation as biased, are particularly reliable for Varma because unlike the written word, which is primarily inherited from colonial education and so inherently suspicious, the oral chain is upheld through maternal, familial and societal links and thus beyond reproach in a societal structure that considers such linkages sacrosanct. This is a significant claim, as the same approach to oral history, as discussed in the next chapter on Mahasweta Devi, is not accorded the same respectability when deployed by a female writer. The novel relies upon a ‘secular’ representation of Hinduism that renders Hindu rituals and life interchangeable with being Indian. Popularly explained as the notion of ‘self-rule’ in the struggle for Indian independence, Swaraj came to signify Gandhi’s notion of a spiritual/disciplinary individual self-rule considered integral to any political freedom for India.48 Varma uses this particular application of Swaraj to mark the Rani unequivocally as an anti-colonial rebel dedicated, from the onset of her political consciousness, to independence for Jhansi and inevitably, for India. Thus, whereas the novel remains anchored in the immediacy of personal reminiscences and history, 112 The Rani of Jhansi which gives it a convincing emotive appeal, the overarching impulses of the text remain political, national and indisputably drawn from an understanding of Hinduism as the default identity of the nation. The nation undergoes many transformations in nationalism’s recalibration of the past. In his landmark book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson lists the many facets of the nation that mark it as a contradictory and yet often surprisingly cohesive entity mobilised in such discourse. In the following definition Anderson highlights one of the many aspects of the nation that allow it to cohere in the form of a political consciousness:

Finally, it [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited beginnings.49

Varma’s novel adheres to this ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’, in creating a microcosmic India in Jhansi with varied religious, ethnic and caste alliances that nevertheless allow it to unify as one political entity against the East India Company. The politics of a modern nationhood necessitate the vast reframing of an inclusive Indian landscape to serve as a historical grounding for the modern secular moment.50 In The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition, Vasudha Dalmia investigates the role of nineteenth-century Hindi Literature in forming a literary ‘autobiography of the nation’.51 It is in a similar twentieth-century vein that I approach Varma’s text as a unifying narrative, which reads the Rani’s life as a nationalist archetype. Within this history of the nation, however, ‘political agendas had changed from militant anticolonialism to state-formation and governance, the “Mother India” figure had to be adapted to the business of recrafting the social imaginary’ and thus even as Varma’s purposes are defined by the impetus to independence, his narrative must account for the transmutation of these ideals into relevant motifs of postcolonial India.52 The novel begins in the present tense, which is employed throughout to ensure an immediacy and a lack of rationalizing distance, with an incident from the Rani’s childhood; Manu (the diminutive she was known by before her marriage) races the young Nana Saheb on horseback. He falls and cuts himself and she lets him ride home on her horse while she guides it. Nana Saheb, ‘frightened at the sight of so much blood’, cries out ‘“Manu I am dying”’ (25).53 Manu, characterised as a ‘tom-boy’, is unfazed and mocks him for his effeminacy: ‘Because of the circumstances of her upbringing, Manu had Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 113 rarely had the occasion of being in female company as a result of which she was free of the excessive shyness and modesty which characterized the stifling upbringing of women in those days’ (37). During her marriage negotiations with Gangadhar Rao, Manu, instead of posing the usual ‘womanly’ questions, asks about the military strength and strategic importance of Jhansi. Yet, a strategically placed framework of essential womanliness softens this emphasis on masculinity. Thus, just as in Chauhan’s poem, the historical memory of the Rani must function as a viable representation of conflicting, yet compatible, mythological identifiers – femininity, valour, maternity and nation. The Rani, before and after her husband’s death, sponsors the many women- oriented festivals that take place in the Hindu calendar and functions as a mother figure for the populace. Her masculine abilities are muted through her eventual apotheosis into a goddess/mother who is the prime exhortation in the fight against the British. However, it seems imperative to foster the national and the mythic over the weaknesses of femininity. Even though Varma draws liberally from Vishnubhat Godse’s Marathi work Majha Prawas (1884), recently translated into English as 1857: The Real Story of the Great Uprising (2011), in which Godse spends some time on the unfortunate timing of the monthly bleeding which occurs while the Rani is on the run and encamped at Kalpi, Varma refrains from any mention of the Rani’s menstrual cycle. Godse’s text describes it as a weakness, greeted with annoyance and impatience by the warrior Rani, who cannot afford to lose time due to such womanly drawbacks. While infusing the Rani’s character with several ‘softening’ sensibilities, Varma is assiduously aware of crafting a figure symbolising strength and power. In a continuing series of contradictory impulses, the Rani, as a woman and widow, is a powerful claimant to ‘Shakti’, which, as Susan S. Wadley delineates, is a power/energy acquired by women through their larger share of suffering and servitude.54 Varma describes the Rani as ‘touched by the powers of the Goddess whom she had just invoked’ (144) and when the Rani, Nana Saheb and Tantya Tope organise the rebellion, the men, in a very improbable scenario, ‘bent to touch her feet, the first time they had accorded her this honor’ (147). Nana Saheb and Tantya Tope were elder to the Rani and Jhansi had always been a vassal state of the Peshwas; the Rani owed her allegiance to Nana Saheb and not the other way around. In this unconvincing scene, both Tantya Tope and Nana Saheb, in Varma’s imagined Jhansi, recognise this apparent ‘Shakti’ in the Rani and their own inability to possess it. It is a nuanced nationalist gesture that offsets her real power in the military and political sphere by imbuing the Rani with symbolic value. Thus, the inadequacies of hierarchal representation, 114 The Rani of Jhansi woman as goddess and ruler but also woman as subordinate subject, are resolved in this arbitrary shift between the historical and the mythological. The many disparities between the Rani and the men are subsumed within the symbolic of the country and the Goddess. She infuses confidence in her troops not because she is an expert swordswoman, horse-rider, or military strategist, but because ‘our Rani is the very incarnation of the Goddess Durga’ (193). This metaphoric change from woman to goddess serves not only to contain the Rani within the discourse of the nation, but also sidesteps any accusations of masculinity in the rendering of a national heroine. Though she is singular because of her participation in battle, her representations are carefully charted to reinforce notions of Indian femininity. As an outsider who became a queen and then a symbol of revolution, the Rani is a text signifying the potential of the nation and its citizens to rise up to the challenge of leadership. But even as the nationalist project may demand a heroic rendition of the mythical Rani, the exigencies of tradition and culture seek a less problematic figure. This shift in the Rani’s representational value is consistent with a larger mutation of cultural, gender politics. In Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation Tanika Sarkar traces the growing confidence of Hindu nationalism to the period following 1857. Amongst the complex transition of Bengali literary concerns and cultural politics, Sarkar places the Hindu woman as the ‘locus of unconquered purity’. This deification elevated the Hindu woman to a goddess and also conveniently drew attention away from the material conditions of women at that time: ‘For Hindu nationalists, woman’s subjectivity and agency were rendered complete by this act of embodiment. Her entire being, conditioned by scriptural commands, was adequate to sustain an embryonic nation that lay hidden and protected within her chaste womb’.55 Varma’s characterization of the Rani and of Nana Saheb and Tantya Tope’s obeisance to her, recognises the Rani in a similar mode of national maternity and it is this representation that allows for her most powerful mobilisation. Vrindavanlal Varma’s great grandfather had died in 1857 as a supporter of Rani Lakshmi Bai and his great grandmother, a contemporary of the Rani, told him stories of the queen that stayed in the child’s mind and made it into his book.56 Thus, Varma’s novel is marked by a certain claim to authorial authenticity and immediacy. It is essential, in the case of this specific novel, to remember that Varma’s ancestral and regional roots anchor the narrative and Varma recreates Jhansi and its Queen, in particularly maternal metaphors as the life-giving source both of the author and of his nation. The prevalence of gendered ‘social evils’ such as sati and child marriage, however, presented a dilemma in the representation of a Hindu ‘character’ Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 115 that was worthy of the nationalist project. Varma is especially adept in weaving social and cultural controversies into the behaviours and relationships of the characters in his novel. In describing a hullabaloo in Jhansi over the sacred thread worn by the upper three castes of Hindu society, the author connects the debate to an inter-caste love affair between a Brahmin and a Shudra woman. The approval meted out to the relationship stabilises the reformist agenda of the novel. The romances between the Rani’s ‘ladies in waiting’, comprised of her maids and former actresses and thus lower caste women, from her husband’s theatre and the generals and officers in her army – Juhi and Tantya Tope, MotiBai and Khudabaksh, Puran and Jhalkari – add a fable like quality to the novel. As passion is translated into loyalty to each other, to the Rani and to the cause, these idealised heterosexual unions, mostly unconsummated love affairs, accentuate the patriotic zeal of the lovers to serve the nation. Though reform of religious and cultural systems like caste and women’s subordination is not negated, such reform is most appropriately viable in the larger project of nationalist liberation. However, these supposedly universalist themes of caste and gender reform inserted into the Rani’s narrative tell particularly ahistorical stories that disrupt the temporal and historical frame. Religion and not caste was a signifying factor in the rhetoric and motives underlying 1857. It was not until the twentieth century that caste reform and the plight of the untouchables, whom Gandhi renamed Harijans (children of God), became central to the national stage. Thus, in a reconfiguration that is innovative of cultural legacy and patterns and by focusing on the individual and the community in different ways, Varma infuses vital force not just into the Rani’s story but also into a tableau of Indian life, which is represented as vibrant, revolutionary and resistant to imperialism. As Prachi Deshpande notes,

[E]stablishing this coherence in the narrative of the past, achieved through the creation of imaginary but appropriate characters, conversations and plot situation, is certainly one of the primary objectives – and chief attractions – of the historical novel and one of the reasons that its historicity has to be studied together with its literary qualities.57

The Rani’s reformation of her maids and the ‘nautch girls’ associated with her husband’s theatre into soldiers and officers of her army and her rehabilitation of a dacoit (Bandit) named Sagar Singh furthers this reformist impulse across caste, class and gender lines. Of course, none of these characters survive the battles of the rebellion and thus never become enduring symbols that destabilise societal structure. During an especially tense moment in the siege of Jhansi, 116 The Rani of Jhansi the Rani recommends Moti Bai, an actress from her husband’s theater, for an important mission. Her advisors suggest someone else who, they add, ‘boasts of superior lineage as well’ (225). This remark irks the Rani: ‘Does the supreme sacrifice for one’s country, one’s motherland, need to be qualified on the basis of caste and lineage? Oh! In what manner has this daughter of a dancing girl proved herself any the less!’ (226). Yet, in an earlier note the narrator states that though Moti Bai is the illegitimate child of a nautch girl, ‘she was a maiden and observed purdah outside the theatre’ (21), thereby testifying to her virtuous conduct. If the marginal status of these women is never fully revoked, it is not an obstacle to their participation in the revolution. Though these modes of marginal femininity are deployed in the service of the nation, they are always muted by a somewhat traditional slant. Although Moti Bai’s birth is not a hindrance to her revolutionary zeal, her status is made acceptable by the fact that she observes the traditional Hindu modes of decorum by remaining in purdah. A respectable femininity is maintained and thus adherence to a gendered stratification trumps the hierarchy of caste. Social evils are conveniently excoriated and the Rani posited as a scion of reform, yet there is no indication or criticism of what the Rani also embodies – a child bride married to an aging king and a disenfranchised widow. The impetus to produce an Indian identity that is indeed worthy of emulation translates into a ‘morally superior’ narrative in which identification of the Rani as a Hindu goddess is reinforced and the negative aspects of that connection elided. The Rani’s story is retold, as Francesa Orsini states, through the many other stories of the people around her:

The transformation within Lakshmibai is echoed in the people surrounding her: in her maids, in the women of Jhansi at large and finally in her soldiers and the men of Jhansi, who all turn into an army of heroes. The servants-turned-friends of the Rani are her most immediate replicas: from daughters of an impoverished family to slaves of the queen, they become her sahelis, her companions, trained in the art of war and finally shine as viranganas, to the extent that each of them at the moment of her death in combat is mistaken for the Rani herself.58

Orisini’s egalitarian reading is borne out in the novel as it shifts the centre of resistance to project revolution as a force emanating from Jhansi’s people rather than from monarchical decree. Varma’s novel deploys the Rani’s mystique in a particularly familiar and celebrated ‘Hindu’ way in order to propel her from a marker of India’s ancient past to an accessible and unproblematic figure of inspiration in India’s present. In making this particular version of history pertinent to the present, as well as Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 117 communicable in its approach, Varma not only elaborates upon the historical materiality of 1857, but also evokes it through the accessible frame of festivals and social issues that would have struck a chord with his reading public in 1946. But this rendition, I argue, is framed within a Hindu paradigm that is presented as secular because it is dominant and pervasive. The Rani, though reformist, is never untrue to her caste. She is well versed in the Shastras (scriptures) as is appropriate for a ‘girl from a highborn Brahmin family’ (35). Though the Rani upholds a secular rhetoric by stating, ‘Nobody, irrespective of caste or status should be considered too small or insignificant for this venture [the rebellion]’ (126), yet when it is time to choose a flag she decides on saffron rather than green. As one of the Rani’s Generals, Raghunath Singh, remarks ‘we will need to decide on our flag. The Badshah’s green flag flutters above all rebel armies’ (170). This is vital as the ‘Badshah’, the deposed Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, is a Muslim ruler and though he is the titular head for ‘all rebel armies’, the Rani is loath to fight under a green flag – a traditionally Muslim colour. She ends the dispute by stating ‘We shall adopt a saffron flag as our own’ (170). The traditional colour of Hinduism, saffron is chosen by the ‘secular’ army of the Rani in place of the Muslim green and this identification of the Rani’s cause with a ‘saffron’ symbol serves to reinforce the struggle as one waged for a ‘Hindu’ nation. In exhorting her comrades to fight against the British, the Rani repeatedly claims ‘…our very dharma (religion) is in danger’ (139). The privileging of religion over political or territorial concerns draws attention to the particularity of the dharma in danger. Thus, the ‘mainstream’ narrative of 1857 must straddle the imperatives of both secular nationalism and Hindu national identity. The revolt is inclusive of India’s diversity (Bahadur Shah Zafar and the Rani are on the same side) and yet its foundations are decidedly Hindu. It is worth remembering that at the time when Varma’s book was written and published, the activities of the Muslim League and of Muslims as a whole were suspect in the nation’s discourse and the Congress’s energies were more inclined towards independence than amity between Muslims and Hindus. Unlike Sudipto Kaviraj’s reading ‘that Hindus, or in some cases Indians, failed to develop a sense of political nationalism and resistance against foreign invaders, because of their otherworldly asceticism’, Varma positions the Rani as political precisely because of Dharma.59 Thus, the defining characteristics of Indian womanhood are maintained as the Rani fights for her Dharma (a rightful code of conduct based on religion) and not for personal gain, which also serves to revitalise Hinduism as an inspirational ideology. 118 The Rani of Jhansi

The narrative vacillates between secular inclusion and singular religious identity. A group of Pathans seek refuge in Jhansi and swears allegiance to the Queen. This group of fictionalised Islamic soldiers remains key to protecting the Rani and is evidence that the Rani is able to mobilise all religions and groups. Yet, the narrator’s voice continuously poses the question – ‘And what of the fate of Hinduism?’ (114). The missionary zeal of the British is a severe cause for concern and there are multiple allusions to forced conversions. In what is perhaps the most powerful reference to the rebellion as a ‘Hindu’ endeavour, Nana Saheb and the Rani describe it as a ‘Yagna’, a highly ritualised ceremony conducted by Brahmins. The use of Hindu rituals and ceremonies ostensibly makes the Rani’s story accessible to the dominant demographic of India – the Hindus, yet it is a narrative to which the lower castes remain hostage and from which the varied religious traditions of India are alienated. Varma’s prologue states that his sources for the story range from his great grandmother’s stories to nineteenth century documents found by him in Jhansi. His comprehensive and popular rendition of the revolt proves his research in contemporary and historical documents. But his fictionalised representation of the Rani’s life, along with apocryphal stories of her childhood, claims an immutability precisely because he mobilises the underlying Hindu mode of a heroic womanhood. The rendering of the Rani as a goddess figure, not only in the narrative of Hinduism but also in India’s nationalist freedom movement and in the slippage between them, provides the story an unassailable status. The parallel and often intersecting discourses of Hinduism and nationalism afford Varma’s novel a canonical position that is not easily criticised without the danger of being labelled anti-patriotic. Gandhi’s influence on the nation’s rhetoric and thus on its literary and cultural products like Varma’s novel, cannot be underestimated. In her article ‘The Politics of Gandhi’s “Feminism”, Constructing “Sitas” for Swaraj’, Suresht Ranjan Bald contends that though Gandhi’s remarks on women were stridently committed to the ‘equal but separate’ paradigm, they were not contradictory when viewed in context of his commitment to Indian independence.

When Gandhi’s writings and statements on women are examined as a part of his political strategy for achieving Swaraj (self-rule), one can see how his concerns for women tended to be defined by his perception of whatever was politically most effective; in fact, when viewed in the context of the changing political needs of the nationalist movement, Gandhi’s views on women become surprisingly coherent.60 Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 119

Bald argues that Gandhi, though vocally espousing the cause of the Indian woman, was not really involved with the social and political emancipation of women. He was, instead, concerned more with how the ‘woman question’ fit into the larger goal of his non-violent movement.61 In a similar vein, Peter Gaeffke marks Gandhi’s return to India and his presence on the Indian political scene as a turning point for Hindi prose:

[T]he situation in India was not one to particularly inspire pride . . . While the traditional ruling classes, Muslims as well as Hindus, went on enjoying what was left from the Moghul culture, Arya Samajis and Sanatanists quarreled over the definition of the essentials of Hinduism.62

Gaeffke argues that the cultural and political confusion prevailing in early twentieth century India resulted in animosities along class and caste lines and the advent of Gandhi’s movement allowed for a ‘national’ cohesion that resulted in Hindi literature’s particular turn to novels reflecting nationalist concerns such as social reform, independence and political awakening. Taking his cue from Gandhi’s philosophy, Varma posits the Rani as an upholder of Swaraj – politically and personally. Swaraj can literally be translated to mean self-rule, or home rule. Though first made famous by Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s assertion in 1899, ‘Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it’, the term gained a sort of ‘cultural vision’ for the shape of the Indian independence struggle in Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj (1909). Written, according to Gandhi, to remind the expatriate Indians not to indulge in political terrorism,63 it is an ‘answer to the Indian school of violence’.64 In it, Gandhi describes Swaraj not only as a collective notion of political expression and emancipation, but also as discipline and abstinence for the individual. A lofty and difficult ideal, it remains entrenched, in Hindu philosophy and scripture. He writes,

‘I have used the language of politics, but I have really tried to offer a glimpse of dharma. What is the meaning of Hind Swaraj? It means rule of dharma or Ramarajya.65 We may read the Gita or the Ramayana or Hind Swaraj. But what we have to learn66 from them is desire for the welfare of others.67

Gandhi maintains his loyalty to Hindu religious texts and also forwards his notion of Swaraj as a concept built on a Hindu morality – Ramarajya, the rule of Ram, an incarnation of Vishnu and the hero of the epic Ramayana. Bharatiya Jan Sangh politics in the decade following independence wove the question of Swarajya directly into debates regarding the Hindi language. The following 120 The Rani of Jhansi extract from the Party documents delineates this more clearly: ‘Incomplete Swarajya – The Congress Working Committee’s recent resolution on language which is going to be the basis of Government’s policy has come as an utter disappointment to all those who have longed to see Swarajiya manifest itself in the sphere of language too’.68 Prachi Deshpande reads what she calls ‘Varma’s brisk pruning of Lakshmi Bai’s Marathi roots’ as Varma’s own obeisance to the linguistic demands of the ‘Hindi heartland’.69 At a crucial juncture in the novel, when a travelling Marathi troupe comes to Jhansi, the Rani states, ‘Hindi is the language of my Jhansi. The play will happen if it is in Hindi, I won’t tolerate it if it isn’t’ (230). The narrative culls the regional inflections of Marathi to present instead a Hindu and thus Hindustani heroine. This move from Hindi to Hindu to Hindustan prevails as Varma reasserts the Rani’s use of Swaraj as the common aim of the rebels. He uses the supposed historical precedent set by a letter from the Rani to the Raja of Banpur, preceding Gandhi’s notions by half-a-century, to bring into play the popular and well-known concept of Swaraj in the twentieth century. In his foreword to the novel, Varma states,

Subsequently, I came across some papers taken from the Collector’s office which had been taken as testimony from the general populace of Jhansi in 1858. They convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that LakshmiBai’s struggle had been prompted by the dream to realize swarajya’ (9).

Varma’s insistence on expanding the scope of the Rani’s resistance from Jhansi to all of India reflects her mythical status in twentieth-century nationalism. The Rani’s resonance with Swaraj goes as far back as Savarkar’s text from 1909 in which he wrote:

The central figure of the fight…the central idea, the impersonation of Swaraj… the incarnation of liberty…She was the concentrated essence of all virtues… The flame of patriotism was always burning in her heart. And she was proud of her country’s honor and pre-eminent in war. It is very rarely that a nation is so fortunate as to be able to claim such an angelic person as a daughter and queen. That honour has not yet fallen to the lot of England.70

Most historical evidence indicates that the Rani was not part of a large organizing group charged with fomenting rebellion in 1857. She was instead thrust into the midst of it by the annexation of her kingdom and the Jokhan Bagh massacre. But Varma reads the Rani’s participation as her commitment to a ‘national’ cause – ‘The acquisition of the throne was for her only the Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 121 means of realizing a larger, more ambitious goal, not the end in itself’ (106). This consecration of the national not only assumes cohesion for the rebellion in the Bundelkhand area (of which Jhansi was one kingdom), but also posits the Rani as a national rather than regional leader. In Varma’s novel, her immortalised phrase, ‘Main apni Jhansi nahin doongi’ (I will not give up my Jhansi) (109) does not emphasize the Rani’s attachment to her kingdom. The possessive ‘apni Jhansi’ (my Jhansi) is a futile assertion ostensibly negated by her eventual acceptance of the annexation. But this acceptance is tempered by her anticipation of a larger project: ‘You know very well that our sights are fixed much higher than the mere acquisition of a kingdom. So take heart and make an even stronger resolve to attain your goal’ (110). Varma’s insistence on the Rani’s involvement in a national war of independence serves to lift her out of regional particularity and expands her scope as a symbolic icon of Indian womanhood.71 The cohesive nature of the national rhetoric, however, evinces its instability at various junctures in the text. Though the emphasis is on a ‘national’ resistance, the Rani refuses to fight under the green flag of the Muslim Badshah and adopts the more Hindu-oriented saffron colour. This opposition to the Mughal rule, perceived as alien, further manifests itself in the political architecture of the rebellion. While organising the political framework of the resistance, Tantya Tope remarks, ‘I have envisaged a plan by which we could have a blend of swaraj and badshahi rule….’ (122). Ostensibly this refers to the fact that the Muslim Mughal Emperor was considered the ruler of India, but the regional Kings and Queens wanted autonomy for their territories. There is sufficient political wrangling here to assume that the removal of the colonial yoke still left the Mughal dynasty in charge and that was still perceived as foreign rule. Thus, in this text Swaraj cannot be conflated with Badshahi rule, still viewed as an imposition on a Hindu culture, as it cannot bear out the philosophy of Swaraj that has envisioned a more indigenous (Hindu) framework for postcolonial India. Towards the end of the novel, during the siege of Jhansi, the Rani dreams that a ‘woman of peerless beauty dressed in flaming red robes’ (242) says to her: ‘Lakshmibai, look at me. My hands have been burnt black by the exploding shells. I command you: Arise! Do not lose hope for the Goddess of Swaraja is immortal…she is indestructible’ (242). Varma chooses to read the Rani’s actions as a precursor to Gandhi’s nationalism in perhaps the most telling of his metaphoric images; Swaraja is personified as a Hindu Goddess. It is, of course, a perplexing conflation that flattens the many divergences and distinctions 122 The Rani of Jhansi between 1857 and Gandhi’s non-violent movement into a seamless trajectory of nationalist struggle. Varma recasts the Rani of Jhansi as a forerunner of Swaraj and her story as a national parable consistent with contemporary nationalist ideology on religion, gender and patriotism within the context of Indian independence, which seemed a conclusive possibility in 1946. In an exhortatory passage, the Rani appeals to her cohort by arguing that their actions need not achieve independence to be successful, but that they are contributing to the cause of Swaraja, which shall be carried on by future generations.

Swaraja is a sacred mission, which is not always accomplished, in a single birth or a single lifetime, it is our eternal goal for which generations before us have striven and generations to come shall perhaps strive. We have only laid the foundations. The strength of which shall perhaps see the fulfillment of that dream. (247)

This secular tale of nationalism is enacted, however, within the normative directives of Hinduism and Varma substantiates 1857 as a nationalist struggle and the Rani as a specifically Hindu icon of India. Thus, unlike Chauhan’s poem, which personifies secular intangibles like freedom and independence (Swatantrata), the Rani’s apotheosis as a Hindu goddess of nationalism (Swaraj) in Varma’s text justifies the struggle as a Hindu striving and renders the Hindu as the rightful claimant to Indian independence. Before her last battle, the Rani takes solace in the words of a holy man, Baba Gangadas. She states, ‘I take inspiration from the Baba’s words “the foundation for swaraja is not laid with a few carelessly thrown bricks…”’ (291). In the original Hindi novel the Rani’s states, ‘I am going to become a brick in the foundation laid for Swaraj’ (80).72 The Rani is posited as a founding member of the struggle for Indian independence in both versions. In the Hindi text, the holy man at whose hut the Rani and her companion Mundar are cremated, remarks, ‘These are the daughters of Sita and Savitri’s country’ [Sita or Savitri ke desh ki putriyan hain yeh] (81). This passage reinstates the Rani within a nationalist history, which subordinates the fighting Rani to the suffering Sita and nationalism is simply an extension of the domestic obligations of an Indian wife.73 Thus, the Rani’s power is curtailed within an acceptable framework of Indian femininity where the militant Durga is only an aspect and not a contradiction of the subservient Sita. Scholars have argued that representations of virangana figures in Indian history ‘transcended gender’. I suggest, however, that the apotheosis of the Rani’s life remains entrenched in subservient and sacrificial Hindu femininity, which paradoxically renders Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 123 it more rhetorically powerful.74 The Rani forfeits family, kingdom and battle, but gains immortality in the nation’s history. Her story, a combination of personal tragedy and national commitment, alongside the sensational effect of an Indian woman in battle against the British, gives her an immutable position in literary and popular culture – rendered so in the twentieth century through print culture, television and film.

Figure 4: Mehtab and Sohrab Modi in Jhansi ki Rani (1953)

The Reel Rebel: Sohrab Modi’s film Jhansi Ki Rani

While books in English and Hindi dominate the literary imaginary of the elite in India, the overwhelming numbers and influence of films remain key arbiters of the nation’s history for the masses. From India’s first full-length motion picture Raja Harishchandra (1913) to Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005), cinema, specifically the Bombay film industry, has breathed life into long forgotten figures of the past. India’s first film in Technicolor, Jhansi ki Rani (1953) had grand historical sets and powerful individual performances by the actress Mehtab as the Rani and Sohrab Modi who directed the film and also played her mentor, Rajguru. Unlike the literary sphere, where the colonial influence on language and form is vociferously contested to reclaim the nation’s stories, the cinematic medium, in its reach and pliability, performs within a more inclusive linguistic and cultural milieu. English, Hindi and Urdu are used in different 124 The Rani of Jhansi and often interchangeable, ways to mark information on the screen and in the dialogue. The opening and closing refrain of the eponymous title Hindi song ‘dhan dhan bundelkhand hai dhan hai hind ka panni, amar hai Jhansi ki rani’ signals the beginning and end of the film – ‘Blessed is Bundelkhand, blessed is the very water of India and immortal is the Rani of Jhansi’. English text appears on the screen after the opening credits: ‘A stirring page from India’s historic past’. It is a textual and cartographic superimposition that engages the written with the cinematic text, the regional with the national and the vernacular with the colonial language; an ‘image-text’.75 An example of postcolonial cultural production, the film is cognizant of both its colonial heritage and its nationalist imperative; and thus the dual directives fashion a cinematic narrative replete with nods to reform, national cohesion, dramatic expectations of songs and dances and elements of romance. The film deviates from the usual fictionalisation of the Rani by placing significant importance in the monarch’s advisor, the Rajguru, who sets out to find a person to ‘restore Jhansi to its rightful claim in history’ after king Gangadhar’s subsidiary alliance with the East India Company.76 In Bithur, Rajguru chances upon the child Manu, the young Rani Lakshmi Bai. Incensed that an English carriage has struck her father, Manu assembles a rag-tag army of children to challenge the English driver. Even at this early formative stage, she embodies a magnetic presence able to unite Hindu, Muslim and even British children against a common foe. Manu’s worth as a leader is the first established fact in the film’s characterisation. The film, like many of the other Indian texts that retell her story, recreates a series of vignettes that portray her innate abilities and preordained greatness. Impressed by his chance meeting with this extraordinary young girl, Rajguru calls on her father to look at her kundali (astrological chart). The presiding Brahmin declares approvingly, ‘She is Lakshmi, the bringer of prosperity and fate, Saraswati in knowledge and Durga in Shakti’. This divine triumvirate of goddesses qualifies the ideal elements of Hindu Indian womanhood – an auspicious wife and wise mother who is able to call forth immense strength in the face of adversity – and thus, Manu’s fate decrees an unprecedented life. Yet, this particular unfolding of events also reinserts masculine control of the headstrong young girl. It is Rajguru, who discovers and moulds her to become a queen, the priest who corroborates the ideal fusion of femininity in her destiny and her father and then her husband, who have final say over her life. In a deft handling of the film’s most uneasy moment, the child marriage of Manu to the much older Gangadhar is negotiated through the prism of Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 125 national service. When Manu’s father protests: ‘Gangadhar is over fifty years old and Manu is hardly nine – won’t this be against Dharma?’ Rajguru replies in a lofty tone:

This marriage is not based on the basis of age or years, or on the suitability of the bride and groom for each other, Manu’s wedding is not for pleasure, hearth, or family – it is for the nation. The nation’s freedom is hiding in this bride’s veil. The tinkling of her wedding bangles will turn into the sound of clashing swords. And every child of the country will fight till the entire nation is free.

This nod to reform, what was once traditional but is now considered aberrant in the national, is strengthened when Rajguru later dissuades the Rani from committing Jauhar (burning herself to prevent being dishonored by the British), urging her instead to live for the nation. Thus, in the best of the Hindu mythological tradition, the goddess incarnated on earth cements her mortal ties to procure her divine mission. Manu is married to Gangadhar but she serves the nation. Unlike the usual cinematic scenes of bridal bidahi (departure and separation), the young girl is resolute and cheerful. Manu leaves her paternal home with a gun in her hand. Upon her arrival in Jhansi, Rajguru begins her education – a combination of military, historical and religious training – in order to teach her to ‘live and die like a queen’. This digression allows the film to remain ideologically committed to the reformist agenda, as the educational hiatus delays her true marriage (sexual life), which commences only after she has finished her education, that is, reached biological maturity. Thus, the film is able to divert attention from the child marriage by highlighting instead the Rani’s education, acumen and knowledge. Rajguru writes on a board in Hindi, ‘[T]he brave are worshipped. I will become brave’. When asked to rewrite the sentence, the Rani assertively states, ‘I am brave’. In this instance, perhaps as an unintended consequence, the Rani is as dexterous with the pen as she is with the sword, wresting control of what history will ordain for her by confidently stating her own will and purpose. She studies the lives of heroic figures such as Shivaji, Chand Bibi and Durgavati, both ‘Vir and Virangana’. All three figures gathered fame in regionally anchored historical narratives as upholders of Hindu Dharma and thus these references maintain a continuity of resistance first against the Muslims and then against the British. As a montage of scenes mark the passing of time, the young Manu transforms into a beautiful woman while sparring with swords. The end of the queen’s education is marked by celebrations that highlight the essential difference in character between the resolute Rani and her esthete 126 The Rani of Jhansi husband. While she organises a military parade of women to celebrate the king’s birthday, Gangadhar stages a play for her. However, these telling but harmless exchanges are brought to an abrupt end with the death of their only child. What follows contains the very crux of the Rani’s story. A son is hastily adopted in keeping with the strict stipulations of the Shastras and the dictums of the East India Company. However, all this turns to naught when Lord Dalhousie refuses to legalise the adoption and issues an edict ratifying Jhansi’s annexation. In the film’s most stirring scene, the Rani is framed by the decorated edges of a window as she witnesses her adopted son’s ‘Raj Tilak’ (a ceremony formalising him as the heir to the throne) interrupted by the Company representative Major Ellis. As Ellis reads out the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie’s order of annexation, the Rani, doubly framed within the window and the camera’s lens, comes to dominate the screen in a close-up and declares – ‘Mein apni Jhansi nahin doongi’, (I will not give up my Jhansi) and as her men unsheathe their swords she reiterates ‘Mein apni Jhansi kabhi nahin doongi’ (I will never give up my Jhansi). The scene is etched to demonstrate a confrontation of competing sovereignties – Indian and British, feminine and masculine, monarchical and colonial. While Major Ellis asks to ‘stop the ceremony in the name of the Governor-General’, Rajguru replies ‘continue it in the name of the Rani of Jhansi’ and the court disregards Ellis and disbands even as he is reading the Governor-General’s order. This shift in authority is sudden but not unexpected, as the film builds on its own sequential chronology and upon the audience’s familiarity with the Rani’s story. The film bolsters the revolutionary spirit by an imaginative and popular recreation of the 1857 revolt through the song ‘Humara Pyaara Hindustan’, [Our beloved India]. Rajguru travels to the main centres of the revolt – Meerut, Lucknow and Delhi – to consult rulers and to drum-up support for the agitation, while lotus flowers and chapattis make their way across villages and communities and courtesans taunt sepoys for their effeminacy.77 This representation disrupts the accepted chronology of the rebellion to suggest instead that the momentum for 1857 begins with Jhansi and the Rani’s resistance in 1854 – ‘Whether we gain victory or defeat, let the future generations remember that the first sword against British injustice was raised by the queen of Jhansi, Rani Lakshmi Bai’, [fateh milay yah shikst, lekin hamari aanay wali santaan yehi kaheegee ke vidayshee hakumat ki nainsaafi kay saamnay sabsay pehli talwaar jo miyaan say bahr niklee woho Jhansi ki rani Lakshmi bai ki thi]. Rajguru takes the Rani’s sword and roams India to meet with other rebel leaders. A combination of cinematic scenes and text in English mark the years and then the main centres and dates of revolt. Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 127

The English language, it seems, must mark historical events as neither Hindi nor Urdu are used for the same purposes: Lucknow, Mangal Pande, Meerut, Delhi are written in the English script on the cinematic scene in a seeming disregard for the millions of Indians who cannot read English. Thus, the film bolsters an elite notion of historical cognizance even as it employs this most democratic of representational mediums. As the rebellion breaks out across the country, the film follows the iconic events of the Rani’s life interspersed with references to national cohesion and secular revolution. Amidst the battle at Jhansi, the film spends an inordinate amount of time on the interaction between the Rani and her Muslim General, Ghor. As the resounding sounds of Har har mahadev and Allah o Akbar punctuate the battles, this plurality and tolerance of the Hindu and the Muslim war cry is further highlighted when Ghor, the Muslim, addresses the Rani as ‘Ma’ and seeks permission to launch cannonballs towards a Hindu temple behind which the British troops are sheltered. Thus, the ‘good Muslim’ displays respect towards Hinduism and goes so far as to honour the queen as a mother figure, contrary to all Islamic dictates. Muslim protests at the characterisation of the nation as a mother figure became a part of the national debate around such poems and songs as Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s ‘Vande Mataram’ and thus this concatenation of scenes around the Rani as a mother figure revered by a Muslim subject cannot but be read as deliberately political. The camera continues to focus on Ghor, who is soon injured by cannon fire and falls with Jhansi’s flag. It is a metaphorically rich scene and references, perhaps unknowingly, the politics of the green and saffron flag in Varma’s novel. Ghor saves Jhansi’s flag from dishonour by not allowing it to touch the ground – his body serves as its resting place – and the flag honors this Muslim son of Jhansi. While most Muslims strive to recite the Kalma before they die, Ghor declares – ‘When I meet God on Judgment day, at least I will be able to say to him that I kept my word, long live Jhansi’, [Quayamat kay din mein apne khuda ko imaan say miloonga…jhansi zindabad]. While there are multiple references in the film to Dharma, which encodes the actions of the Hindu characters under duty, the Muslim characters, clearly outside the Hindu framework, embody the honour and the sanctity of their word. This iteration of the good Indian Muslim subject, a disciplined minority necessary for national cohesion, is especially pertinent as it comes in 1953 only six years after the traumatic partition. Though the language wars of pre-independence India may have resulted in Urdu’s exit from the public sphere and the supposed ascendance of Hindi, 128 The Rani of Jhansi the dialogue in the film oscillates between literary Urdu, colloquial Hindustani (Urdu and Hindi) and Sanskritic Hindi and gives credence to the multiple ways in which language complicates and steps out of, the ‘official’ boundaries. Colloquial and formal Urdu and Hindi intersect in the film’s dialogue in what many scholars have termed ‘Hindustani’. When the duty-bound Henry (the Rani’s childhood friend) muses ‘mujhe tum par fakar hai, Manu’, [I am proud of you, Manu]. The words could be read either as Urdu or as Hindustani. However, when a tertiary character refers to a difficult decision the English have to take he states, ‘Lohay kay channay chabanay hain’, [One has to digest an unpalatable choice], the language is decidedly colloquial Hindi. In his pleasure loving state, the Peshwa Rao declares in Gwalior ‘sharab ka daor chal ta rahay’. [ Let the drinking continue]. The phrase is decidedly a mixture of Hindi and Urdu. Yet, when the Rani’s pyre is lit in a poor Sadhu’s hut, the soundtrack is decidedly literary Hindi: ‘swarag sidaree woh veer atama day kar yeh sandesh jaan sabhi ko pyaari hai par jaan say pyaara desh’ [This brave soul has departed for heaven after imparting her message, though everyone is attached to their life the attachment to the country supersedes it]. The use of the word ‘swarag’, (heaven in Hindi) versus ‘jannat’ (the Islamic notion of paradise), indicates a distinction between Hindu and Muslim religious iconography, but stays true to the ideal of an Indian secularism marked by an inclusivity towards all religion by elevating the country above it all. However, these religious identities in the service of the nation indicate the prevalent hierarchy – Muslims must integrate to the Hindu identity of the country. As the imperial past is abolished in nationalist language, literature and film, these varied, but not apolitical, linguistic registers attempt to find an appropriate expression for the new and abrupt changes faced by the nation. The last image, in both Varma’s novel and Modi’s film, of the cremated Rani is, I suggest, a final and complicated obeisance to traditional notions of Indian womanhood – a particularly elastic rendering that allows for a compromise between the progressive and regressive mode of representation. These narratives tread shifting ground in symbolising the Rani as fighting both for her husband, since it is his kingdom and heir she defends and heralding twentieth century nationalism in fighting for the nation. Though the Rani does not perform Sati, is even dissuaded from it in the film by Rajguru, she has continued to uphold the sat (the truth) of the sati by eventually immolating herself in the course of duties performed for the husband. The film ends with the conflagration of the Rani’s pyre and as the credits roll in English, the scene shifts to the real memorial in Jhansi. The historical and the contemporary, the individual and Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 129 the nation, are bridged in the culminating images of the film. The Rani’s last words ‘Azadi amar ho’, (Freedom is immortal), are whispered to the strains of India’s national anthem, connecting 1857 to modern nationalism and to the impending reality of the nation. This last shift in locale, from the cinematic sets of Jhansi to the actual site affixes this ‘stirring page from India’s past’ to the needs of the nation’s present. The Rani’s story, told within a post-independence narrative of a nation recovering from the trauma of partition, must do the work of nation building. Unlike Varma or Chauhan’s recreation of the Rani’s story, which emphasises anti-colonial resistance before 1947, Modi’s film, I argue, is marked by the events of partition. The past, it would seem, must rehabilitate itself as a nurturing force for the new generations of the independent nation and separate the turbulent brutality of 1857 from the memories of partition violence. Whereas Varma’s Jhansi Ki Rani Lakshmi Bai recasts the revolutionary virago within a pure, virtuous domesticity demanded of the new nation, Sohrab Modi’s film atones for the communal sins of partition in a secular history of individual sacrifice and renunciation.

This chapter has worked with three kinds of creative formats that were integral to the fashioning of the literary and historical archive: Chauhan’s famous poem enunciates a version of heroic womanhood as invested in recreating an image of ‘Bharat Mata’ as in engendering a modern nation in 1930; Varma’s novel anticipating independence sets the historical record for the inherent strength of the national construct in 1946; and Modi’s film reworks history into a new technologically viable medium for the rehabilitation of minority identities in a post-partition era in 1953. These historical narratives of Hindi literature and film are significant in articulating the rebellion as a foundational moment for the nation – one in which disparate voices cohere in the linguistic and political unison of Hindi and commend Rani Lakshmi Bai to a project defined by the intersections of culture, history and literature. Thus, meaning is negotiated in gendered and political narratives even as it is shored up as historical truth – the Rani is both real and imagined, peripheral yet essential. While the historical novel is bound to a representational matrix in narrating the past, this narration is also beholden to such aesthetic categories as beauty, language, communication, feeling and emotion and the affordability or alienation from them. And though the historical film is not necessarily marked by novelty or innovation, the imaginative capability of the form invariably produces a new product. Thus, stories of an arcane and violent past are reconciled with an already occurring egalitarian future and the use of the imaginative envisions 130 The Rani of Jhansi the possibilities foreclosed by historical fact. I suggest then that the historical poem, novel and film in ‘imagining a utopian past within an explicitly realist frame’, be understood not simply as representing the past, but as a referent to the transformative, and thus history making, potential of the text.78

Endnotes

1. Rani Lakshmi Bai’s story is retold in many different Indian languages. These are some famous examples: ‘Laksmi Bayi Satakam’ (Malayalam poem 1908), Jhansi-ni-Rani (Gujarati novel 1921), Jhamsici Samgramadevata Rani Laksmi (Marathi 1925), Jhasir Rani (Bengali 1942). Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature 1911–1956, 117. 2. ‘Story & Research’ in the film are credited to Pt. S.R. Dubey, but the vignettes of Rani Lakshmi Bai’s life correspond greatly to Varma’s novelistic rendition. 3. Though accepted as a ‘national’ language, Hindi is not declared as such in the Indian constitution, which does, however, give it the status of an ‘official language’. http:// www.thehindu.com/news/national/hindi-not-a-national-language-court/article94695. ece 4. Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions, 148. 5. Christopher Shackle and Rupert Snell, Hindi and Urdu since 1800:, A Common Reader, 43. 6. Faruqi provides an interesting, competing narrative for the identification of Urdu with ‘camp’. See Shamsur Faruqi Rahman, Early Urdu Literary Culture and History. 7. Southern India, which had its own varied languages remained veritably immune to these linguistic struggles as the influences of Mughal rule had trickled south in a limited manner and the dominance of the local languages (Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu) was retained. 8. Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions, 217. 9. Harish Trivedi, ‘The Progress of Hindi, Part 2, Hindi and the Nation’, 959. As quoted from Rahul Sankrityayan’s presidential address of 1947 to the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan. 10. Amrit Rai, A House Divided, The Origin and Development of Hindi/Hindavi, 17. 11. Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions, 149. 12. Trivedi, ‘The Progress of Hindi, Part 2, Hindi and the Nation’, 964. 13. For a brief history of the journal, see: http://books.google.com/books?id=9VUtAG 9GJjAC&pg=PA33&dq=sujata+mody+the+emergence+of+Sarasvati&hl=en&sa=X& ei=i-diUdWSEI3U9QTzvYGYBg&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA 14. This movement was undertaken to protest and subvert the colonialist economic policy of transporting raw materials from the colony to Britain’s industrialised sectors and then shipping the finished products back to the colonies for sale. This policy levied exorbitant taxes on the sale of the finished products in India and served to cripple the domestic economy and industry. The Swadeshi movement burnt British goods in Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 131

mass demonstrations and the followers of the Congress began to only wear Indian handspun Khadi cloth and use Indian-made goods. 15. Francesca Orsini’s The Hindi Public Sphere, 177. 16. Shackle and Snell, Hindi and Urdu since 1800, 48 17. Brass, Paul. Language,Religion and Politics in North India. 18. Alok Rai, A House Divided, 103. 19. Lajjaram Mehta, ‘Bharatvarsha ki rashtrabasha’, 620. As quoted in Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 17. 20. Part of Hindu ritual, aarti is the traditional gesture for welcome, respect and celebration performed by the women of the household. 21. Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism, 95. Khari may be translated as ‘standing’, thus standard, but also as pure, original, even primary. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Sujata S. Mody, ‘Literary Self-Determination and the Disciplinary Boundaries of Hindi Literature in the Early Twentieth Century’, 236. 25. Trivedi, ‘The Progress of Hindi, Part 2, Hindi and the Nation’, 979. 26. Ibid. 27. Sisir Kumar Das A History of Indian Literature 1911–1956, 94. 28. Prachi Deshpande, ‘The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive: Lakshmibai, Jhansi and 1857’, 874. 29. Harish Trivedi, ‘The Progress of Hindi, Part 2, Hindi and the Nation’,1000. 30. Priya Joshi, ‘Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public and the British Novel in Colonial India’, 3–4. 31. Joshi, ‘Culture and Consumption’, 12. 32. Ramesh Rawat, ‘1857 and the “Renaissance” in Hindi Literature’, 96. 33. Ibid, 109. 34. Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Limits of Nationalism’, http://india-seminar.com/2003/522/522%20 sumit%20sarakar.html 35. Trivedi, ‘The Progress of Hindi, Part 2, Hindi and the Nation’, 986. 36. Mody ‘Literary Self-Determination and the Disciplinary Boundaries of Hindi Literature in the Early Twentieth Century’, 237. 37. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said. Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. 38. Details of Chauhan’s life have been taken from Susie Tharu and K.Lalita’s Women Writing in India, 600 BC to early 20th Century, 419–420. 39. All translations of the poem are mine. 40. As quoted by Sumathi Ramasawmy in The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, 140. 41. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation, 122. 42. Milind Wakankar, ‘The Moment of Criticism of Indian Nationalist Thought: Ramchandra Shukla and the Poetics of a Hindi Responsibility’, 990. 132 The Rani of Jhansi

43. The Begum of Awadh was the first wife of the deposed Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. She joined the rebellion in 1857 even as her husband lived in exile in Calcutta. She lived out her last years in asylum in Nepal. 44. Pankaj Rag, 1857: The Oral Tradition. 45. Akshaya Kumar, Poetry, Politics and Culture: Essays on Indian Texts and Contexts, 23. 46. Biographies of the author narrate many anecdotal ‘coming of age’ stories in which Varma, reticent about accepting the ‘truth’ of fiction and highly sceptical of the liberties taken with historical facts in literature, desired a truthful representation of history. In the preface to his novel, Varma professes reading Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello. He also read Max Mueller’s India: What can it teach us? and Dr Marsden’s History of India and set out to correct the record by ‘shattering British illusions’ of Indian life. Shakuntla Devi, Upnayaskar Vrindavanlal Verma ke Naari Paatron ka Swaroop (The Characterization of Female Protagonists in Vrindavan Lal Varma’s Novels). Chandigarh: Punjab University Press, 1979. 47. Some of his titles are: Musahib Ju, Kalakar ka dand (1943), Jhansi Ki Rani (1946) Kashmir ka Kanta (1947), Rakhi ki Laaj (1947), Madhavji Scindhia (1949), Mrignayani (1950), Sona (1950), Peelay Haath (1950), Poorv ki Aur (1951), Phoolon ki Boli (1951), Birbal (1953), Bhuvan Vikram (1954), Ahaliya Bai (1955), Anghooti ka Daam (1957). 48. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj. 49. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. 50. Though Varma’s geographic landscape is limited to the kingdom of Jhansi, its religious, social and ethnic topography reflects the varied affiliations of modern Indians. I want to caution here that Varma’s Jhansi is not wholly fictitious: mid- nineteenth-century Jhansi’s demographics included many different religions, castes and classes even though it was a kingdom ruled by a Brahmin family; Hindus as well as Muslims occupied key positions in the government and military. I aim to highlight instead the ambivalence of the nationalist project that manifests itself in Varma’s text in an unproblematic rendering of history. 51. Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions, 267–279. 52. Sandhya Shetty, ‘(Dis) Figuring the Nation: Mother, Metaphor and Metonymy’, 59. 53. Since the quoting of the text in Hindi and then translating it into English for every quote would prove cumbersome for the reader, I have used the English translation of the text throughout the chapter. The page numbers reference the recent English translation (2001) of Varma’s novel by his great granddaughter Amitya Sahaya. Varma, Vrindavan Lal, Jhansi ki Rani, Lakshmi Bai. 54. Susan S. Wadley, ‘On the Meaning of Sakti to Women in Tamil Nadu’, 1–34. 55. Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, 143. 56. Parminder Sharma Kamlesh, Vrindavanlal Varma Vyaktitva Aur Krititva (Vrindavan Lal Varma’s Life and Works). 57. Deshpande, ‘The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive’, 859. 58. Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 221. Coherent Pasts in Hindi Literature and Film 133

59. Sudipto Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India, 151. 60. Suresht Ranjan Bald, The Politics of Gandhi’s “Feminism”: Constructing “Sitas” for Swaraj’, 82. 61. This is also dealt with at some length in the Introduction in this book. 62. Peter Gaeffke, Hindi Literature in the Twentieth Century, 37. 63. This is a direct reference to the Ghadar Party and its activities in England, Canada and the United States. Made up mostly of Punjabi activists, the Ghadar Party comprised of Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and Christians from Punjab who had immigrated in the early part of the twentieth century. Their activities were considered subversive by the authorities in Canada and the United States and they were often persecuted and extradited to England. 64. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, xv. 65. Most recently used by the fundamentalist Bharatya Janata Party government in power in India in espousing Hindutva (Hindu living and Hindu identification) as a central notion of Ramarajya – a Hindu as well as nationalist concept. 66. I also find it extremely interesting that though Gandhi’s stress on passivity and suffering is anchored in Hindu philosophy, very rarely do comparisons to Christianity make their way into a discussion on it. Passivity, suffering and an inordinate amount of fortitude against assailants is certainly also preached by the New Testament, but this is a comparison that rarely, if ever, surfaces in most discussions on Gandhi. 67. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, available on http://www.gandhiserve.org/ cwmg/cwmg.html, 489, 496. 68. Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Party Documents, Vol. 5, Delhi, 1954 – Resolution of 8 May 1954. As quoted in Hindu Nationalism: A Reader, 227. 69. Deshpande, ‘The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive’, 861. 70. V.D. Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence, 463, 482, 493. 71. The controversy regarding the terming of 1857 as a ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ and ‘First War of Indian independence’ is detailed in the Introduction. 72. Vrindavanlal Varma, Jhansi ki Rani. First published in 1946. 73. Sita is Ram’s wife in the epic Ramayana. She accompanies him to the forest on a 14-year exile and is then kidnapped by Ravan, the king of Lanka. On her rescue, she goes through an ‘Agni Pariksha’ (trial by Fire) to prove her fidelity and purity. On their return to their kingdom Ayodhya, Ram throws her out of his house because she has supposedly lived with another man during her confinement in Lanka. Many years later Ram discovers her and their two sons, but he is still unable to accept Sita. At this final humiliation she asks the Earth to open-up and take her. As a result, the mythic Sita has become a by-word for Indian women’s fortitude in accepting suffering and dedication to their husband. 74. Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 210. 75. W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, 95. 76. Translations of the dialogues from the film into English are mine. 134 The Rani of Jhansi

77. One of the most popularly prevalent motifs of the 1857 revolt is the passing of chappatis (bread) and lotus flowers from village to village as a sign of impending rebellion. Another yet to be corroborated story credits the prostitutes in Meerut with inciting the mutiny of soldiers. No historical evidence has been able to either prove this existed or why. However, it has become an inalienable part of the Indian lore surrounding the revolt. 78. Deshpande, ‘The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive’, 862. Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 135

V Unmaking the Nationalist Archive Gender and Dalit Historiography

hile nationalist literature remained preoccupied with resurrecting the Wgreat individuals of Indian history, Mahasweta Devi’s Jhansir Rani, published in 1956 just a decade after Vrindavanlal Varma’s Jhansi ki Rani Lakshmi Bai, posited a different set of concerns and cultural logic in rewriting the story of Rani Lakshmi Bai.1 In this chapter, I draw attention to a little known text by Mahasweta Devi; to what it takes to negotiate the repressions and silences of colonial and nationalist archives – both anti-colonial and hegemonic ones – from a feminist lens; and to the vexed figures of history that are produced in writing against colonialist and nationalist paradigms. Mahasweta Devi wrote Jhansir Rani, translated by Mandira and Sagaree Sengupta as The Queen of Jhansi (2000), almost three decades before she became well known in Western academic circles for her writing and activism in India.2 Mahasweta’s biography diverges diametrically from Victorian fiction in not representing the Rani merely as a figure of convergence in Indo-British colonial relations, and nor is The Queen of Jhansi conventionally nationalist in characterizing the Rani as a forerunner of Indian independence. Instead, Mahasweta presents a biography that extols the Rani’s virtues and corroborates her esteemed position in the anti-colonial struggle, yet the expected mutation into a hagiography is prevented by anchoring the narrative in regional details and by turning the biography into a larger project of recovering history and critiquing the postcolonial state. Mahasweta supplements the frame of colonial relations with a network of patriarchy, caste, religion and language and resists recasting the gendered subject as a supplicant to male, upper-caste historiography. Instead, by aligning the Rani with Dalit communities and by intertwining their participation in 1857, Mahasweta forces a paradigmatic displacement redefining 136 The Rani of Jhansi the biographical form and unsettling the historical record – and thus reworking not only the concept of the text but also the expected characterisation of its reader.3 Mahasweta’s book is important as a representation of the Rani’s story that is aligned neither with the colonialist enterprise nor the nationalist project. This is not to say that it is clearly a feminist text, or the ‘correct’ representation, but rather that it presents a nuanced reevaluation of the Rani in cultural, literary and historical texts to institute a different procedural protocol in the history Mahasweta wants to rehabilitate – the Rani is positioned as an instrument of critique instead of a singular historical narrative. A critical consideration of The Queen of Jhansi is crucial in charting Mahasweta Devi’s movement from a proponent of independence to a critic of postcolonial politics and in placing the Rani within a critical crossroads of Indian feminist and nationalist imperatives, especially since the vast amount of scholarship on Mahasweta’s work, or on the Rani of Jhansi, has not been attentive to this text.4 A well-known critic of India’s neocolonial state politics and an activist for the rights of indigenous communities, opposition and a questioning of historical knowledge mark Mahasweta’s writing. But her work on the Rani is not simply antagonistic to the national project, nor is it sufficiently defined as a text of feminist awakening: ‘Mahasweta’s fictions are thus not stories of the improbably awakening of feminist consciousness in the gendered subaltern. These are singular, paralogical figures of the women (sometimes wild men, mad men) who spell out no model for imitation.’5 This quote from Spivak writes against the glib association of Mahasweta’s work with a postcolonial feminist perspective and argues in its place that these fictional characters are not set up as sites of emulation, but are instead the fragmented embodiments of neocolonial state politics. I argue that The Queen of Jhansi signals both the difficulty in formulating the story of a post-independence feminist icon in India’s history and the uneven entry of the subordinate, the subaltern and the Dalit perspective in the nationalist configurations of women’s stories. Though Mahasweta’s work, as read by Spivak, may ‘out’ no model for ‘imitation’, her first literary work The Queen of Jhansi is constructed under specific polemic obligations to offer a different mode of understanding the history of a feminist idol in India. Mahasweta Devi’s version of the Rani’s story cannot be contained within one overarching framework. In its attention to folk poetry, ballads, personal anecdotes and colonial archives, the text defies classification as either scholarly biography or fictionalised representation. In deploying ‘non-traditional’ forms of archive in rewriting the Rani’s story, Mahasweta’s project avows a Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 137 continued resistance to state-sanctioned narratives while articulating the need for engagement with the production of historical knowledge. Analysing The Queen of Jhansi, I will address Mahasweta’s reframing of the Rani in the oral tradition as a folk hero, as an alternative, albeit contradictory, embodiment of femininity and as a map for reconstructing colonial history.

Mahasweta Devi

Born in Dhaka in 1926, Mahasweta Devi belonged to a well-placed upper- class family deeply involved with Bengali arts and letters. Her father Manish Ghatak was a well-known poet and her mother Dharitri Devi was involved in social work. Her paternal uncle Ritwik Ghatak was a renowned Bengali filmmaker and her maternal uncle Sachin Chaudhary was the founder-editor of the Economic and Political Weekly of India. Mahasweta grew up during the burgeoning years of the nationalist movement in Bengal and graduated from Tagore’s radical institution Shantiniketan in 1946. Active as a volunteer in the peasant struggles and in the independence movement, she was a part of Gananatya, a theater group committed to bringing political awareness to rural areas. The history of armed anti-colonial groups like the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar in Bengal were also a part of Mahasweta’s heritage. Married in 1947 to the dramatist Bijan Bhattacharya, a member of the Indian People’s Theater Movement, she worked in the postal audit office ‘but lost the job when the new nationalist government found her “guilty” of being a communist’. During this hiatus in regular employment she worked as a schoolteacher and started writing for journals along with trying her hand at various ‘odd jobs’ like selling ‘soap dyes and exporting monkeys to the United States’. Though she continued to produce shorter prose pieces and journalistic articles, it was her involvement with the agrarian Naxalite movement that led her to write Hajar Churasir Ma (Mother of No. 1084) in 1974, almost twenty years after her last major work The Queen of Jhansi.6 But it was her novel Aranyer Adhikar (1979) that won her the Central Sahitiya Academy Award and propelled her to the attention of mainstream media and academia. This book documents the rebellion of the Dalit Munda tribe against the British authorities and Indian landowners during 1895 and 1900.7 What followed was a prolific output of short stories and novellas intimately involved with issues of gender, feminism, agrarian reforms, peasant rights and the role of the activist in postcolonial India. In their landmark anthology Women Writing in India 600 B.C. to the Present, Tharu and Lalitha write: ‘Throughout Mahasweta’s varied fiction, women’s subjugation 138 The Rani of Jhansi is portrayed as linked to the oppressions of caste and class. But in the best of her writing she quite brilliantly and with resonance, explores the articulations of class, caste and gender in the specific situations she depicts’.8 Women’s writing and women’s history, according to Tharu and Lalitha, provides invaluable insight into cultural and literary nation making. While ‘the shift from oppositional anticolonial nationalism to the nation-state politics of an ascendant nationalism becomes clearly discernible in post-independence myths, narrative regimes and cultural institutions. The story of what India is begins to be secured anew at this time’.9 Women’s presence in history within an often-contradictory matrix of agency and oppression, and with scrupulous attention to the politics of specific contexts, is an astute observation for a text like The Queen of Jhansi. The Rani’s presence in history as a harbinger of anti- colonial revolution and a representation of mythological motherhood is read, in Mahasweta’s text, not only alongside the absence of women in the public sphere but also within the matrices of ambivalence and ambiguity that beset postcolonial representation. The Queen of Jhansi arrives contemporaneously, in the years leading up to the centenary of the 1857 rebellion, with notable historical contributions like S.N. Sen’s Eighteen Fifty Seven (1957) and R.C. Majumdar’s The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 (1957). Of course, The Queen of Jhansi does not achieve even a fraction of the canonical status attained by Sen or Majumdar’s book, or even by Varma’s novel, perhaps because it is written in Bengali or perhaps because Mahasweta’s persistence in legitimising memory (grandmother’s stories, folklore and poetry) as official archives proves too radical a stance.

Revising, Rereading History

In an interview published within the translated biography, Mahasweta states, ‘In all my writings I have tried to present the subaltern point of view’ (275). However, Mahasweta’s text underscores the importance of the personal foregrounding the marginal, the multiple connotations of the self and a kind of nationalism that relies on popular memory in rewriting a ‘lost’ history within the parameters of a postcolonial narrative. An evaluation of The Queen of Jhansi simply within the domain of the Subaltern Studies project, or as a subaltern narrative, does not extend the theoretical paradigm. As critics have pointed out, simply bringing hitherto unknown sources to the fore does not, in effect, change the historical method. I suggest then that an analysis of The Queen of Jhansi within the new methodological directives of Dalit literature and historiography Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 139 may yield a more productive reading in which ‘instead of reentering an old debate about the problem of recovering the subaltern’ one may pay attention ‘to the continued problem of reading it’.10 Thus, in Mahasweta’s text establishing the truth of history or the right chain of events as a way of recovering the past is only one way of rehabilitating the people’s narrative experience and may often remain indifferent to a meaningful ‘subaltern recovery’. According to the Hindu scripture the Manusmriti, lower castes and women occupy the same scalar position and are to be denied education and other privileges of upper-caste society. This dictate has manifested in centuries of political and cultural disinheritance and that is why ‘for obvious reasons, Dalit writing does not elegize or glorify an idyllic past, nor does it project visions of a utopian future; it also largely lacks the historical signposts that would allow it to participate in a nationalist historical chronology’.11 The removal of women and lower castes from the dominant narrative of history and literature, or a mostly derogatory representation, coalesces in a mistrust of colonial history and postcolonial political promise. As indicated earlier, there is more at stake than simply recovering a history from below or writing from the periphery. This is not to reduce the text or to ignore its imperatives; rather, it is to render the margin more supple and incisive so as to enhance its polyvocal interdisciplinary import. In Mahasweta’s case, the conventionally understood margin, which is attentive to the intersections of gender and sexuality, is augmented by the concerns of India’s tribal communities. Recent work in Dalit literature and historiography has provided a keener and more counter-intuitive analysis of the ‘local’, the ‘popular’ and the ‘marginal’. The sources and forms of historical investigation, which are not dominated by the sanctioned narratives of state, constitute the marginal here. In an apocryphal story, a white Christian missionary, in India at the beginning of the twentieth century, asked a group of young Indian schoolboys to write an essay on the ‘Mutiny’. ‘Every youth sent in a sheet of blank paper. It was a silent, unanimous, unapologetic refusal to perform the task’.12 The story and its symbolic ‘blank’ convey a striking metaphor concerning the 1857 rebellion. Indian historians interpret the ‘refusal’ of the Indian students as a form of protest against the spate of historical and fictional literature that has come from British writers.13 The Dalit autobiography, Juthan, by Omprakash Valmiki, provides another example on the same theme. A Brahmin teacher asks his students to tear out the offending pages on Dalit history from their textbooks and the lower-caste protagonist/narrator can only look upon helplessly on his history that lies as detritus on the floor. This upper-caste 140 The Rani of Jhansi erasure of the Dalit past in Juthan resonates unfortunately with the anti- colonial stance of the young schoolboys – a complex intertwining in which feudal and caste interests intersect with nationalist resistance and simply replace the history of the colonial masters with an upper-caste version of the national narrative. In 1982, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, Gyanendra Pandey, David Arnold and others founded The Subaltern Studies Collective in a concerted multi-disciplinary attempt to cause an epistemological shift in the scholarship of colonial and postcolonial history. Though the research produced by these and other scholars ranged widely from literature to economics, the shared goal was to make visible the continued resistance of the subaltern classes to hegemony. Thirty years before the advent of the collective, the beginnings of subaltern theory, or perhaps more appropriately subaltern practice, are already visible in The Queen of Jhansi. Mahasweta writes in the preface, ‘Years ago, when I was a child, my grandmother told me the story of the Queen of Jhansi’(ix). This sentence sets a very personal tone, suggesting that studying the Rani is not just a question of history or colonial context, but rather a story of relatives, folktales, of the personal retelling and reconfiguring the larger public narratives of nationalist and anti-colonial history. Thus, Mahasweta urges the reader to deconstruct historical context as a particular form of colonial and national rationality. Locating the genesis of the biography in the oral literature of her family allows the writer not only to rewrite the Rani’s history, but also to claim for herself, an Indian woman, authorship of the nation’s narrative. Mahasweta is rewriting the Rani into a history in which there is a ‘complete absence of books based on factual evidence other than those by English historians’(ix). ‘Those who usurped the throne also controlled the pen. So, we have studied, learned and believed only what they wrote, what they taught us, in whichever manner it pleased them’(xi). The allegation of usurpation is directed not only at the colonial masters but also at the postcolonial elite that insist upon patriarchal, caste, communal and class-oriented politics that circulate within a Western notion of history. It is both a questioning of received knowledge and a critique of textuality – a practice that has obscured the stories of women and Dalits. Mahasweta’s work is thus imbued with a revolutionary zeal to resurrect the lost voices of Indian history within a formalist revision of what constitutes the archive. In a characteristically laudatory paragraph recreating the Rani in the mode of the divine feminine, Mahaweta writes India and Rani Lakshmi Bai interchangeably: ‘If the essence of our land could be personified, that embodiment would be Rani Lakshmi Bai. If for a hundred years ordinary people Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 141 have known that in her hands, soil turned into brave soldiers, wood became swords and mountains got transformed to speedy horses, what kind of woman could she have been?’(xv). As the personification of India, the Rani is not reduced here to the rhetoric of nationalist symbolism, but instead rearticulated to embody the very distance ‘ordinary people’ experience from history. The dominant narrative of a rational, modern, postcolonial state understands their ‘have known’ only as superstition or belief rather than a separate and equally viable epistemology in which emotions have analytic and interpretive scope. Mahasweta’s project of historical re-writing attempts to resurrect the common folk as agents who are not tertiary to the narrative of kings, queens and colonial masters. Though historians and anthropologists may allow for superstition, ritual and the supernatural in a cultural system of beliefs and symbols, the use of such evidence is absent in the writing of factual history. But this chasm, described in The Queen of Jhansi, between the ways in which history is understood by the people and written by the elites remains a dilemma in postcolonial discourse. Mahasweta’s assertion of the Rani’s transformative powers is based on a popular song in Bengali also titled The Queen of Jhansi. ‘From clay and stones / She molded her army. / From mere wood / She made swords / And the mountain she transformed / into a steed. / Thus she marched to Gwalior’.14 The allusion to this popular song acknowledges Mahasweta’s reference to the realm of imagination. Yet, nationalist iconography, replete with affective imagery, is not analogous to the discourse of a rational, modern, postcolonial state. For instance, this nationalist ditty could be read both as a true expression of the voice of the people, or as another example of elite nationalism’s reinvention of the past in the name of the people. Mahaweta Devi’s realist and yet iconoclastic biography, in its opposition to nationalist mythmaking, strives to salvage true popular resistance as evidenced in the oral and folk traditions of the disenfranchised classes. Mahasweta further validates this understanding of history by voicing the popularly held belief that the Rani is still alive. ‘As long as people insist, “Rani margai na houni” (The Queen is not dead)—the Queen will be alive…The people of India have not accepted her death’(xvi). Mahasweta is not referring here to a mythical sense of nationalist immortality but is instead reaffirming the people’s continued need for a symbol of resistance. The masses of India have not accepted her death because the promised advantages of independence are still interminably far. In asserting that ‘the Queen is still alive today through local ballads and sayings’(x), the author suspends a rationalist conception of time and history; one which has not justly served women or the Dalit community 142 The Rani of Jhansi in India. Accepting the Rani’s death, in The Queen of Jhansi, signifies the acceptance of a nationalist allegory built upon exclusion; the Rani is thus imbued with a specific kind of symbolic value for a new postcolonial resistance. This kind of representation of historical figures is key to what Dipesh Chakarabarty describes as ‘devices of collective memory that were both antihistorical and nonmodern’.15 One may understand Chakrabarty’s ‘antihistorical’ here as the realm of mythology, legend, experience and oral literature, which also constitutes a collective archive of the past. Though it does not approach the political astuteness of Mahasweta’s later work, which lends itself fully to the Dalit cause, The Queen of Jhansi deploys the Rani’s position in Indian nationalism to engage with multiple issues and is cognizant of the imperatives for which Chakrabarty argues. The text attempts to supplement the ‘official’ history of Rani Lakshmi Bai not only with a history of her people, but also with a ‘personal’ history that accounts for the Rani as a woman, mother, widow and ruler. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay ‘Deconstructing Historiography’, engages with a similar dilemma, ‘a cognitive failure’, in the Subaltern Studies project that must contend with a simultaneous mapping of the elite academic/ critic/historian’s position and the stories of peasant and tribal history. Spivak writes:

I am progressively inclined, then, to read the retrieval of subaltern consciousness as the charting of what in poststructuralist language would be called the subaltern subject-effect. A subject-effect can be briefly plotted as follows: that which seems to operate as a subject maybe part of an immense discontinuous network (“text” in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language and so on.16

In the sections titled ‘Historiography as Strategy’ and ‘Woman’ of the above quoted essay Spivak necessitates a critical appraisal of the subaltern project in constantly reminding us that ‘…it can never be continuous with the subaltern’s situational and uneven entry into political (not merely disciplinary, as in the case of the collective) hegemony as the content of an after-the-fact description’.17 In accordance with Spivak, I would argue that though the subaltern’s ‘entry into political hegemony’ remains ‘uneven’, the attempt to position the subaltern in a dialectic relationship is crucial. Even as Spivak acknowledges the attention paid to women by the Subaltern Studies project, she asserts that what is missing at many junctures is a nuanced study of how woman gets subsumed, nevertheless, under the reifying categories of class, tribal affiliation, region and caste. And thus, Spivak places Mahasweta’s work within the parameters of subalternity: Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 143

‘The space that Mahasweta’s fiction inhabits is rather special, even within this specifying argument. It is the space of the “subaltern,” displaced even from the catechrestic relationships between decolonization and the Enlightenment, with feminism inscribed within it’.18 Tempting, as it is to read The Queen of Jhansi simply as an earlier incarnation of the Subaltern Studies Project, I suggest again that Dalit contestations of history provide a richer frame of analysis. 1857 figures greatly in the Dalit historiography of the postcolonial period: firstly, because there is a dearth of Indian documentation regarding the rebellion, which allows for revision and invention and secondly, because Dalits are able to claim a positive role in the history of the nation, a history in which they have mostly been accused of being anti-nationalist (fracturing the unity of the country by asking of their own rights rather than the nation’s). ‘They (Dalits) mostly imagined their nation in the historical biographies of their national heroes and freedom fighters, who, in their perception, played a greater role in freeing and developing the nation than did the conventional heroes of the nationalist movement’.19 The Jhansi revolt, in Dalit historiography, is considered primarily a revolt of the Dalit sepoys, who in turn prompted their Queen, Rani Lakshmi Bai, to raise the flag of rebellion. In his incisive work Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India (2006), Badri Narayan contextualizes this particular reordering of history:

But with developments in Indian democracy and the changing political arena in which Dalits and subalterns have become the principal actors, the distinction between a myth and a verifiable fact is becoming blurred…Here, the past is not merely a bygone past. It is, instead built into the present. In this condition, the past not only appears as the professional historian’s past, which is claimed to be ‘rational history’ based on empirical and positivistic notions of the past. It also appears as the past that helps the Dalits in their ongoing struggle for craving their future against the oppressive present.20

For Mahasweta, Rani Lakshmi Bai, though of the Brahmin caste and of a royal family, is deeply imbued with symbolic power for the contemporary struggles of Dalit people and women. Thus, the Rani is recast and renarrated as an icon of the downtrodden, a characterisation crafted primarily through a reliance upon orality and memory. Yet, as Romila Thapar has cautioned: ‘memory is sometimes claimed in order to create an identity and history based on such claims is used to legitimize the identity. Establishing a fuller understanding of the event is crucial in both instances, for otherwise the identity and its legitimation can be historically invalid’.21 144 The Rani of Jhansi Folk Traditions and History

The biography follows the chronological story of the Rani’s life and culminates in her death. Unlike Vrindavanlal Varma’s novel, Jhansi ki Rani (1946), which charts the Rani’s life alongside the connected stories of other characters, Mahasweta’s book does not spend a lot of time on the characterisation of other figures but digresses instead into folk and popular anecdotes along with a discussion of official colonial and military dispatches. This contrast in form is relevant, as Varma’s novel has become a canonical fictional representation of the Rani’s life, while Mahasweta’s biography has not had the same historical or analytical impact. The text restricts itself to the Rani’s story from a spirited, motherless child to dutiful wife, widowed queen, mother and rebel leader and elaborates upon it with recreated conversations and an omniscient narrative; but it remains indelibly concerned with indigenous representation, contemporary regional concerns and the role of Jhansi’s populace. Mahasweta’s attentiveness to folklore, which is markedly different from the colonial ethnographic methodology, indicates that the common folk were just as involved in negotiating colonial rule as the colonised elite. With her work on oral folk narrative of the nineteenth century, Sadhana Naithani has pointed out that ‘what has remained obscured is the narrative expression of this experience (colonialism) by the colonized, specifically as oral narrative expression’.22 Mahasweta uses a mix of historical details and oral folk tradition to position her text in opposition to colonial British ethnography and historiography and thus gestures towards an unrecognised axis of colonial and Indian relations, perceptions and representations. A poetic anecdote narrates the story of the kingdom’s name. On seeing the ancient fort of Jhansi from a distance, one of the Rajput kings of the area, Virsingha Dev, said, ‘There’s only a mist (Jhanki) before my eyes’ (4) and the name Jhansi stuck from that day.23 Taking her cue from the anecdote, Mahasweta clears the ‘mist’ surrounding Jhansi’s past and explicates in detail the political and historical antecedents of the kingdom. Whereas in Victorian novels the Rani is most often compared to Joan of Arc or Boadecia, Mahasweta places the Rani in an Indian lineage that boasts of Rani Durgavati, a Rajput princess who had ruled the kingdom of Bundelkhand and ‘dies fighting to save its independence’ (132) against the Mughals. Ethnic differences between the Bundelas (Rajputs) and the Peshwas (Marathas) and the regional wrangling between the kingdoms surrounding Jhansi, are integral to the unfolding of Mahasweta’s story: ‘The Rajput principalities of Orcha and Datia, envious of the advancement made by the Maratha kingdom of Jhansi, began to stir up’ (13). In Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 145 an area predominantly flanked by Bundela Rajput kingdoms, the Maratha state of Jhansi was an eyesore and none of the regional kingdoms helped the Rani in her fight against the British. Rather, a neighbouring queen, Ladein Dulaiya, of the state of Orchha, attacked Jhansi while it was undergoing annexation; and so Rani Lakshmi Bai fought another Indian queen before she fought the British. A contemporary raso (ballad) of the nineteenth century composed by Kalyansingh Kurhera and quoted by Devi, commemorates the conflict: ‘She took Jhansi over with her cleverness, Gangadhar’s wife / Instead of fighting with the city of Orchha / she kept talking with the chief Nathe Khan’ (commander of Orchha) (109). A historical documentation of the attack, the ballad is also a testament to the administrative and military stratagems employed by the Rani and to the local people’s involvement in the political life of the kingdom. This ballad is vital evidence because most colonial accounts of the 1857 uprising consider the rebellion either a mutiny, born of the sepoys’ dissatisfaction, or a sporadic rising of regional rulers opportunistic and greedy for territory. But Mahasweta places emphasis on the local people, ‘This unpleasant business was being discussed everywhere. A political awareness that was absent among the simple folk until now was aroused by the English’ (70) and it serves to highlight the Rani’s popular appeal as a symbol of resistance. For example, in writing of one of the battles, Mahasweta states: ‘While the English had 3 dead and 20 wounded, the Indians had 500 dead among whom 300 were farmers who went forward to face the English with rocks, bows, arrows and spears’ (143). Though the account is unverifiable, it portrays anti-colonial sentiment widespread among aristocracy and peasantry and evinces the popular support of the Rani. But there is no concomitant engagement with the emphasis on the elite subject, the maternal monarch, as a catalyst of political consciousness for ordinary people. According to Mahasweta, the Rani’s canonical position in the history of 1857 and in the consequent postcolonial politics of India, is assured because her stance against the British seems an incredible feat. She states:

Even with the end of the English Raj, the Queen’s astonishing words kept echoing in the minds of Indians. Jhansi with 20 lakh rupees of annual income in taxes looked so weak, so small, compared to the expanse of British India in the maps of those times that it really convinces us of the importance of immortalizing her words, especially since the Queen could speak up so fearlessly with so little power. (58)

But she contends that this exhortatory perspective is limited to the meta- narratives of history that are concerned with taxes, geography, military and 146 The Rani of Jhansi politics. Elaborating upon the gap between state-sanctioned official history and the people’s history, Mahasweta writes:

This is what we feel. But the old man who roasts corn over a charcoal fire in winter in the outskirts of Jhansi does not know anything of all this….he recites a rhyme to his granddaughter—That Queen, so very great was she. / Said she would never let go of Jhansi… / As long as water in India flows / The Queen of Jhansi will live (58).

An intricate grid of class and caste access to knowledge is formed here. ‘This is what we feel’, refers to an educated privileged class that has recourse not only to the contents, but the fashioning of history, whereas, the peasant speaks of history in legends and stories and relays it through an oral tradition – an unverifiable form for the modern discourses of history. It is a moment of convergence between the peasant and Mahasweta’s recollection; the inception of Mahasweta’s project lies in the stories told to her by her grandmother. Therefore the oral is both a marker of separation from the sanctioned history of the state and a signifier of collaboration between varied groups. But what is left as an axiomatic statement in the figure of the ‘peasant’ needs further elaboration; he is simultaneously a symbol of a variant tradition that does not ostensibly have the same tools of comprehending history as the elite and an integral contributor to the fashioning and endurance of a history that is less reified. Thus the text ‘radically delinks historical determination and the production of character, suggesting a concept of time and history in the text that cannot be accommodated by prevailing critical paradigms’.24 Yet, this binary of emotion and knowledge also constructs the peasant as a romanticised figure who remains childishly enthralled by song, story and sentiment – at odds with the nation’s citizens who participate in the modern processes of textual practice. Mahasweta’s biography is extensively researched; she quotes widely from military dispatches and personal letters from the colonial archives, official accounts, as well as local legends, ballads and stories. One of her sources is P.C. Joshi’s seminal essay titled ‘Folk Songs of 1857’, which elaborates on some of the folk poetry and ballads that endured during and after the rebellion. The most famous of these folk songs is composed in the Bundela dialect and was later immortalised in national Hindi literature by the poet Subhadra Kumari Chauhan.25

How valiantly like a man fought she, The Rani of Jhansi! Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 147

On every parapet a gun set she, Raining fire of hell, How well like a man fought the Rani of Jhansi, How valiantly and well!26

This is an extremely well-known and important example. The emphasis on hearing the story orally and the popularity of the refrain due in part to Chauhan’s poem, exemplify how tradition and contemporary literary consciousness mix to create a single image. Another song belittles Sir Hugh Rose, under whose command, the Company’s army had laid siege to Jhansi.

Amidst tears from his eyes Proud Hugh Rose spoke: I beg you for one pot of water To quench my thirst With the first potful And ask for more (To get that coveted pot) Hand over your guns The ammunition And also your sword!27

This song is an astute observation of the devious machinations of the East India Company, which often entered kingdoms as supplicants under the guise of trade and inevitably became the occupying power. But Mahasweta’s use of folk poetry in her book is not significant merely because it demonstrates the persistence of folklore, but because it testifies to the involvement of the masses with the figure of the Rani of Jhansi. Though this poem may simply be interpreted as the reiteration of scintillating historical stories in the folk tradition, it is also a reflection of the non-traditional means of information gathering and coordination that took place during the uprising. The organizing of rebel armies through covert means became an obsessive detail with historians chronicling the 1857 war. Sir George Trevelyan, in his book Cawnpore: Short Narratives (1865), details some of the alternative means by which the censoring power of the empire was subverted to disperse information and exhortations concerning the rebellion:

The dolls employed in theatres began to speak a strange language and to dance a dangerous dance. Panwadas (ballads) and Lawniyas (folk musical art-form that 148 The Rani of Jhansi

stirs pathos and softer emotions) were sung near police stations. Ballad of Alha Udal (a heroic ballad that stirs the blood) was also employed. From Calcutta to Punjab dangerous tamashas in the night were exhibited…Female gypsies were also used…The effect in rousing hatred was tremendous….28

The use of poetry and puppetry, as well as folk dances and drama in the contemporary moment of 1857 bespeak the masses’ abilities to circumvent the imposed structure of silence by the colonial authorities.29 In employing a similar strategy in rewriting the Rani’s story, Mahasweta’s narrative is aligned with a continuing resistance to officially sanctioned information.30 The famed colonial study of the ‘Sepoy’ rebellion by the British scholars Kaye and Malleson corroborates the use of popular cultural motifs as a means of organising during the rebellion: ‘There were two subjects which the Kathputlee-wallahs (puppeteers) extremely delighted to illustrate – the degradation of the Moghul and the victories of the French over the English, the one intended to excite hatred, the other contempt, in the minds of the spectators’.31 This example also points to the disparate modes of constructing history. Whereas the British chronicle the involvement of the ‘entertainers’, marginal groups such as the tribals (often termed dacoits), to undercut classifications of 1857 as an organised anti-colonial rebellion, Mahasweta’s account inverts the logic by mobilising the same rhetoric to show that, in fact, it was the very fragmentary nature of the disparate groups that mandated a popular anti-colonial sentiment not simply imposed by the rulers, but existent, instead, among the people. While colonial ethnography understood

that the lore of the Indian folk was ancient, spiritual and traditional; that it did not have any historical consciousness; that it was completely untouched by European influence; and that the narrators were incapable of any literary conception and representation of their contemporary socio-historical reality, the political confrontations enacted within these alternative modes of poetry, drama and folk ballads testify to the Rani’s place not only in nationalist history but in the quotidian life of the region. Thus ‘instead of being passive bearers of a repertoire of tradition, the narrators (of this folk tradition) emerge as self-conscious subjects whose narratives performed multiple functions in social communication’.32 Mahasweta’s narrative is simultaneously realist and folklorist; an acknowledgement of ‘marginal’ forms of historical knowledge and a refutation of imperialist ethnography and thus it draws attention to the particularly gendered and elitist form of the archive upon which conventional historiography is dependent. Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 149 Narratives of Femininity

Alongside the implications of her authority as queen, the biographer must also contend with Rani Lakshmi Bai in her varied submissive roles as woman, wife, mother and widow. Unlike Victorian portrayals in popular fiction, where a vision of British womanhood offsets the Rani’s lack of femininity, there are no cultural comparisons between Indian and British women in Mahasweta’s book. The Rani’s interaction with Major Ellis, the political representative of the East India Company in Jhansi, is portrayed as a sexual relationship in many Victorian texts. Mahasweta takes a strident stand against this convention and clarifies that since Ellis and the Rani spoke Hindi and were both involved in the running of Jhansi, their interaction was sullied by other authors: ‘His respect for the Queen was seen in a perverse light and the Queen’s character was deliberately vilified’ (56). Mahasweta refers to novels such as Phillip Meadows Taylor’s Seeta (1881) and Gillean’s The Rane (1887), which portray the Rani with a predilection for British men, as scurrilous depictions that ‘never became popular even in England’ (56). But as Mahasweta writes against hyper-sexualised representations of the Rani in British texts, there is a definite slant to construct the Rani as chaste and decidedly asexual. The acceptable prominence of a supposedly celibate woman leader has historical antecedents from British colonial history (Elizabeth I) to Indian politics (Indira Gandhi).33 Rajeswari Sunder Rajan stresses the need for these women to be patterned along asexual lines:

Bhagwan Josh, a historian, describes the widespread protest in India at the depiction of the Rani of Jhansi’s alleged affair with a British officer in a play by a British playwright, Phillip Cox, written in the 1930s. He concludes that ‘a defeminized image of the Rani forms an inseparable part of the cultural mythology of Hindu nationalism.’34

Rajan’s reference signifies one particular representation of the Rani as ‘defeminized’ because she is not sexualised. Mahasweta reads Rani Lakshmi Bai’s widowhood as liberation but cannot help writing her as asexual, as an exemplar of women’s agency but one that is produced out of loss of access to patriarchal privileges. In this narrative, Devi can successfully negotiate the legacies of colonialism and nationalism but perhaps not of feminism and women’s agency – a pitfall when the focus remains in writing against the grain of exclusionary colonial and national histories. In Hindu nationalism the Rani is quite conveniently mobilised in the ‘feminine’ mode as a mother, goddess and widow. Lata Mani has by now 150 The Rani of Jhansi famously argued ‘Tradition was not the ground on which the status of woman was being contested. Rather the reverse was true: women in fact became the site on which tradition was debated and reformulated’.35 Mani’s essay redefines the axis on which colonial debates concerning women and reform took place in India. She argues that it is within the concerns of colonialism, its investment in maintaining the feasibility of ‘tradition’, that a rearticulation of women, scripture, society and religion is enacted under the auspices of reform in the early eighteenth century. In the Rani’s case, a much later variant of traditional ‘protection’ is utilised to annex her kingdom. Her position as a widow without a natural born son and Jhansi’s condition as a state without a natural heir to the throne coalesce to produce a stultifying rubric under which the Rani has no recourse and Jhansi must, under the Doctrine of Lapse, fall to the British. Once again, colonial reform can put forth a version of emancipation under which the widow need not become sati, but this impulse falls short of allowing Rani Lakshmi Bai to be recognised as the rightful monarch of Jhansi. Translated into political terms, the East India Company employed the ‘Doctrine of Lapse’ ostensibly to take ‘care’ of states/kingdoms that had been so bereaved, but the ‘care’ afforded these ‘widowed’ states simply subsumed them into the Company’s empire.36 In the interview, included in the English translation of the book, Mahasweta states, ‘Frankly, I felt her widowhood liberated her in many ways’ (271). The book is invested in constructing a contentious narrative of widowhood in which the widow dies on the battlefield and in defence of her kingdom, rather than on the sati pyre in acquiescence to patriarchy. As a royal Hindu woman of the Brahmin caste, the Rani’s decision not to commit sati or to shave her head and retire from public life marks her in both Indian and British discourses as aberrant. It is later, under the logic of imperial policy and nationalist struggle, that this ‘aberration’ is neutralised and therefore also mobilised. Praised in some British texts for her non-conformity with sati and thus as an emblem of British reform, the Rani’s refusal to undertake the ‘persecution’ of Hindu life also undercuts the imperial impulse as the Indian woman makes it unnecessary for the aid of the ‘white men…saving brown women from brown men’.37 Representations of women who chose not to commit sati,38 and entered the public sphere of political, religious or military activity, remain missing from the popular and canonical fiction of nineteenth century Victorians.39 In the typical colonial romance novel of the mutiny, discussed in the first two chapters of the book, Indian female protagonists who are rescued by British men (romantically and militarily) experience only a short span of this colonial Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 151 notion of freedom and die in an expedient manner to not complicate the racial and imperial divide.40 These novels can sustain the chivalric rescue of an Indian woman by a British man only within the rhetoric of reform and only in saving the Indian widow from a horrific death. Romance or public life for the widow, with or without her colonial rescuer, is beyond the imaginative capabilities of these texts. Such a notion would require a more imaginative social sphere capable not only of conceiving bi-racial marriages/unions as the inevitable by-product of colonialism but of also celebrating them as the inevitable next step in social reform. Mahasweta reads widowhood for the Rani as an energising experience: ‘The Rani’s personality had not found full expression when her husband was alive. Her character matured during the nine months she ruled Jhansi’ (117). In a coincidental temporality of gestation, ‘the nine months she ruled Jhansi’, symbolize a rebirth in which Rani Lakshmi Bai is reinvested as the politically empowered female sovereign of Jhansi. The narrative is astutely aware of the stereotype of Indian femininity and its wider social and political implications. In writing about the Rani’s preparations for her imminent battle with the British, Mahasweta states: ‘Then the world would see that the Queen did have an identity which was different from that of a vegetarian woman preoccupied with religious duties, who was overflowing with gratitude at the mercy of the English and was only an unworthy representative of an eroding feudal system’ (74). In a gastronomic reordering of femininity, the passivity of the ‘vegetarian woman’ is identified with the private sphere of ‘religious duties’ – a domesticity maintained as a luxury at the ‘mercy of the English’. The narrative and history, testify to the Rani’s participation in the public sphere of political contest and battle and thereby represent an alternative, uncontainable, version of femininity that transcends the colonial reifications of the Indian widow. Mahasweta’s narrative is, however, subject to the persistent tropes of Indian femininity and a militant feminism is elided by a nostalgic allegiance to tradition: ‘A woman whose vermilion bindi had been wiped off her forehead by widowhood, whose mangalsutra had been torn off her neck, whose fatherless son was deprived of his rightful inheritance, had not taken to fighting motivated by a desire for her own personal success’(148).41 The Rani’s entrance into the political fray, by this account, is the last recourse of a humiliated widow. In a complex ideological stance, Mahasweta continues to emphasise the erosion of the Rani’s status within patriarchy as ‘suitable reason’ for her militancy. The ‘mangalsutra’ and the ‘vermilion bindi’ are markers of marriage in Hindu society and therefore the violence of the ‘mangalsutra..torn off her neck’, the erasure 152 The Rani of Jhansi of status in the ‘bindi..wiped off her forehead’, the continued link to patriarchy as merely a guardian for her ‘fatherless son’ and the complete disavowal of her claim to the throne which is her son’s ‘rightful inheritance’, chart a divergent path from earlier descriptions in the book that allow subjectivity and agency for the Rani. The insistence on the Rani ‘not having taken to fighting motivated by a desire for her own personal success’ (148) denies her individuality. Thus, ‘despite the representation …of very powerful women, their presence functions much more forcefully as a sign of that which is marked as ‘feminine”’.42 The sanctioned matrix in Mahasweta’s text, even avowedly feminist at certain junctures, subordinate the Rani to the interests of the family, the community and the state. Even as the narrative questions the status of the disenfranchised citizens – women, tribals, peasants, Dalits – the nationalist imperative overtakes the revolutionary impulse to produce an account that does not cohere in a singular ideological framework. The text must then contend with a multiple indexing of representation and ideology, one in which the Rani of Jhansi cannot be cast simply as either secular or religious, progressive or conservative, upper-caste monarch or Dalit icon. This liminality frames her experience as singular and uncontrollable in the gendered discourse of the nation. As Homi Bhabha suggests, ‘that we understand this “outside” not in simple spatial terms but as constitutive of meaning and agency. The “outside” event could also be the unacknowledged liminality or “margin” of a discourse, the point where it contingently touches the “other” discourse as itself’.43 The Rani is singular not only as being “outside” colonial discourse, but also as a figure with multiple manifestations of feminine representation and symbolism. Though celebrated as a dutiful mother and wife, the ideal Lakshmi, who rises to the fore to protect her son/his kingdom, she is also the terrifying aspect of the godesses Chandi, Durga and Bhowani. ‘Her head armour gleaming in the sun and her pearl necklace swinging, she encouraged her soldiers by crying out, “Har Har MahaDev”.44 The British gunners, seeing her appear like a goddess of war, forgot to fire’ (212). This dichotomy of femininity is rationalised in Hindu and nationalist ideology as both secular (anti-colonial leader) and mythic (warrior goddess). But the proliferation of stories, myths and histories exceed the nationalist directive and make it difficult to order her presence in the available paradigms. In historical as well as fictional accounts, the Rani is credited with unusual military acumen and regarded as the one true leader of the rebellion not concerned merely with aggrandising territory but with the ideals of the rebellion. Her immortal phrase, ‘Mein Jhansi Nahin Doongi (I will not give up Jhansi)’ Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 153

(57), is played out as a commitment to struggle. Mahasweta dismisses the other leaders of the rebellion as ‘feudalistic’ and says that the ‘only person in whom the sepoys found a partial realization of their ideals was the Queen of Jhansi’ (146). This statement reinforces the Rani’s position as a true ‘rebel’ and writes against the notion of a disenfranchised and disgruntled sovereign driven to desperate measures. Mahasweta quotes T.R. Holmes’ contemporary account History of the Indian Mutiny widely in describing the strides made under the Rani to include women in the army. ‘The garrison was as resolved to hold the fortress as their opponents were to wrest it from their grip. Even women were seen working in the batteries and distributing ammunition’.45 The stories of Jhalkari, who pretended to be the Rani and gave herself up to General Hughes; of Ganga, who was the Rani’s companion and was killed in battle; and of Mandar who fought alongside the Rani till her last battle in Gwalior – are all honoured in Mahasweta’s texts as she charts a map of comparison and company that places the Rani within an indigenous rather than European tradition of female heroism. The accompanying by-products of this valour, cruelty and massacre, are neatly sidestepped as the Rani is forced to bloodshed but is not bloodthirsty. The Jhansi massacre, as with other accounts, is blamed on the Muslim Risaldar Kale Khan and the jail warden Bakshish Ali. The kinship of women is set against the description in the novel of male deceit and greed. The Rani is let down at crucial junctures by the other rebel leaders Rao Saheb and Tantya Tope and Scindia, whose Gwalior fort is captured from him under the Queen’s command, is characterized as an ‘impotent and worthless king’ (222). In her final battle at Gwalior, after receiving a fatal wound, the Rani is whisked to a safe place to prevent her body from falling to the British. In an operatic death scene crafted by Mahasweta, the Rani’s last words echo the triumvirate ethos of nationalist tradition, femininity and anti-colonial struggle. Her first sentence, ‘Be loyal to Ananda (her adopted son)’, reinforces her primary characterization as a mother. Her second sentence is ‘Pay my troops their salary’. Thus, on the battlefield she remains a commander of her troops, concerned with their welfare. And her last sentence is, ‘Don’t let my body go to the British’ (243). This final adherence reinforces the idea of ‘violation’ that is integral to the concept of the Indian women’s body in the public sphere. It is precisely this ‘body’ of the colonial Indian woman, who has stepped outside the requisite bounds of the home, which must be protected from a discursive mutilation in the colonial context and also reordered suitably in the philosophy of nationalism as pure, virtuous and domestic. In a continuing discourse of female sacrifice, it is precisely the Rani’s role as a good wife and mother that 154 The Rani of Jhansi necessitate her transformation into a warrior, who is then sacrificed for the conservation of the male-identified nationalist project. The Rani’s funeral pyre after she ‘died on the battlefield, as befitting a warrior’ (244) turns into a blaze and the ‘people’s uprising that had taken shape in Lucknow, Meerut, Kanpur, Agra, Delhi, Jhansi, as well as in many little known villages, towns, riverbanks, fields, farmlands etc., also burnt in that fire’ (245). The Rani, even in Mahasweta’s judiciously parsed text, cannot but be an idealised symbol of the nation; and even her death, as a warrior, cannot shift the enduring material embodiment of her as a national mother figure. Thus, the multiple valences of the text signal the inherent contradictions in, what Sandhya Shetty, in her discussion of Mahasweta’s short story ‘Stanadayini’, has called, the ‘ideality/materiality opposition’, which offers ‘no easy exit from binarism’. This story of a wet-nurse who has served upper-caste/class families ends with the corpse of the ‘mother figure’ (the wet-nurse), whom only an untouchable will carry to the cremation grounds. Unlike the death of Rani Lakshmi Bai, a grand conflagration of the nation’s hopes, the death of this gendered subaltern in ‘Stanadayini’ proceeds without notice by the upper caste patriarchal elite and the woman and the Dalit make do with what is left to them. Shetty pushes ‘beyond these critiques that attempt to neutralize the mother’s idealization in Indian nationalist discourse by recourse to a demonstration of her irreducible corporeality’. 46 How then is one to read a text such as The Queen of Jhansi, which is both the story of a remarkable woman but also cannot help but be one of maternal symbolism? I argue that Mahasweta attempts to avoid this binary by concerning herself less with the Rani as an ‘incommensurability of nation and gendered subaltern’ and more so with the figure of a leader who is discursively produced through historical recovery, folklore and popular discourse. ‘It shows, rather, that the gendered subject as allegorical sign is also a signifier, itself caught up in the rhetorical play of metalespsis and double- voicing as much as in the “realistic” representation of subalternity as such’.47 Even characterisation as an able military leader cannot wrench Rani Lakshmi Bai out of patriarchal context and the text functions under the dual signage of political opposition and social conservatism.

Another Heroine: Jhalkari Bai and Dalit Politics in the Twenty First Century

Even as nationalist historiography, as well as Mahasweta’s text, has strived to posit a unity of purpose that cut across caste, class, region and religion in 1857, alternative sources and recent Dalit scholarship has revealed a complex Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 155 and nuanced sociological context. Whereas many Dalit tribals found common cause with the rebels and sepoys, many other groups sided with the British against upper-caste communities who had, in their opinion, held the exploitative monopoly longer than the British. For instance, a Captain Bruce at Kanpur was able to raise a police force of lower caste mehtars to reestablish British authority and upper-caste rebels were asked to clean bloodstains, a task relegated to untouchables, at the site of the Kanpur massacre and whipped by the mehtars if they refused to do so.48 But the same assertion holds true for all of India’s varied populace in the nineteenth century – what is read as national sentiment was often a convoluted mixture of regional, caste, class, religion and ethnic interests. While the focus in postcolonial historiography has remained on the many kingdoms, individuals and communities who rebelled against the British, less attention has been paid to the many others who supported the colonial masters and in turn benefitted from their munificence. Whereas certain colonial descriptions of the mutiny used the nomenclature of caste to mark the rebellion a ‘lower caste’ affair, nationalists of the early twentieth century overturned such definitions by ascribing nationalism and freedom to upper-caste figures such as the Rani. Thus, the Dalit literary and historical revisionist scholars derive logic from such facile permutations to resurrect their own icons in the historical past by displacing the Rani with Jhalkari Bai. Dalit scholarship has strived to resurrect its own symbols from 1857, Jhalkari Bai in Bundelkhand and Udadevi in Uttar Pradesh, as a way of gaining traction in the national past. First mentioned by Vrindavanlal Varma in Jhansi ki Rani as Rani Lakshmi Bai’s maid, Jhalkari Bai was adopted by Dalit activists as their heroine of 1857. The historical gaps, literary allusions and mythmaking have been used in contemporary politics to bolster the image of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Mayawati. Formed primarily as a political group to represent the Dalit (Untouchable, Scheduled Caste and Tribes and Other Backward Castes), the BSP has mobilised a vast historical rhetoric to advocate for power in the many states of central India. As Badri Narayan asserts, ‘they contend that despite the blood and sweat that they had shed for the building of this nation and their historical role in its development, the state has not helped them to recover from their social, cultural and economic losses’.49 As an acknowledgement of Jhalkari Bai’s role in Indian history, Dalit activism was effective enough to get the Indian government to issue a stamp in her name in 2001. Jhalkari Bai’s role in history is built entirely on conjecture, myth, literary allusion and oral tradition espoused by Dalit activists and politicians. There 156 The Rani of Jhansi is no historical record that mentions her as a rebel of note in 1857. But, as Mahasweta’s text amply shows, it is often difficult to trace the origin between print and oral culture and these stories remain fluid, collected but also changed and subject to change. The same form of transitional and transmutable archive that is mobilised by Mahasweta’s text to resituate the Rani of Jhansi in the national feminist narrative as a folk hero of the masses has also, in an unanticipated way, become a tool for Dalit activists and politicians to effectively upstage Rani Lakshmi Bai as the ‘true’ heroine of 1857. Thus, a brief discussion on Jhalkari Bai’s emergence as a Dalit icon is crucial in charting the unforeseen trajectory of the archive Mahasweta revitalised. Many counter-narratives have been composed to resurrect Jhalkaribai as the Dalit heroine of the colonial past. Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s iconic refrain from her poem ‘Jhansi ki Rani’ (1930), ‘Bundele Harbolon ke mukh humne Sunee kahani thee / Khoob lari mardani woh to Jhansi wali Rani thee’ [We heard the story from the mouths of the Bundela clan / It was the Rani of Jhansi who fought like a man], is mirrored in rhyme and contested in content in the following couplet composed by Archana Verma (1997): ‘Macha Jhansi mein ghmasan, chahunaur machee kilkari thee / Angrezon se loha lenein, ran mein kudee Jhalkari thee’ [Amidst the sound and fury of battle at Jhansi / Plunges Jhalkari Bai to confront the British].50 Another version is included in a biography of Jhalkari Bai: ‘Khub lari Jhalkari tu tau, teri ek jawani thi. / dur finrangi ko karne mein, veeron mein mardani thi. / har bolon ke much se sun hum teri yeh kahani thi’ [Jhalkari you really fought, your youthfulness was unique / You were a man among the brave in ousting the British. / we heard your story from the mouth of warriors].51 In a complex intertwining, descriptions of Jhalkari Bai rely on the same tropes of childhood and bravery associated with the Rani:

Jhalkari Bai is depicted as an ideal woman, occasionally helping her husband in his traditional occupation of cloth weaving and also sometimes accompanying him to the royal palace. She is stated to be brave since her childhood and further got training from her husband in archery, wrestling, horse riding and shooting. Her face and body structure is said to resemble Lakshmibai exactly.52

Depicted astride a horse with a sword in her hand, statues and other images of Jhalkaribai, even the government issued stamp, mirror the popular images of Rani Lakshmi Bai. Yet, as Charu Gupta argues, these courageous women supposedly excavated from the Dalit past are still represented in the modes of patriarchal femininity – an ideal wife and a dutiful daughter – even as they are Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 157

‘transformed from victims into victors within the context of the narrative’.53 Though the story is verily the same as that of the Rani, Jhalkari Bai is not crafted in these poems as a faint reflection of Rani Lakshmi Bai, but as ‘the’ narrative of bravery, one that has been suppressed, written out, to the advantage of the upper-caste, Brahmin queen. Dramas, novels, historical narratives and poetry concerning Jhalkari Bai have appeared amidst the maelstrom of Dalit political activity and the Dalit quest for representation in literature, history and culture in the last two decades. Whereas, Mahasweta quotes folk poetry and recreates conversations to describe the people’s need to believe that the Rani is alive, Dalit historians argue ‘in reality the Rani escaped the colonial army with the help of the Maharaja of Pratapgarh, entered into the dense forest of Nepal Tarai and went underground. In fact, she lived a long life and died at the age of 80’.54 Thus, while the Rani remains alive as an icon of the people’s struggle in the symbolic dynamics of Mahasweta’s text, the Rani really is alive in Dalit accounts as a coward in hiding who is unduly honoured as a heroine. In an

[A]uthoritative and ‘mature’ dalit history…Lakshmibai instead of a model nationalist ruler, appears as a weakling, as reluctant to fight the British and in fact is shown as a British supporter and agent. It is stated that Jhalkari Bai was even worried that Lakshmibai might surrender herself to the British as she was very scared of war.55

While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Hindutva politics commemorate Rani Lakshmi Bai in annual festivals as the epitome of femininity, valour and duty, the BSP hold similar commemorations for Jhalkari Bai in an effort to place her on the same footing as the famed Rani. This symbolic use of icons from the rebellion, for both Hindutva nationalist politics and the reclaiming of Dalit history and identity, use similar coordinates. 1857 is crucial because, unlike the Gandhi and Congress inspired anti-colonial struggle of the twentieth century, it heralds a political consciousness and warrior spirit for both upper castes and Dalits – and thus forms an evidentiary chain of events corroborating the valuable role of Dalits in national history. Badri Narayan argues this persuasively by pointing out that Dalit writers are employing the same narrative techniques, ‘metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche or irony’ as nationalist writers like V.D. Savarkar or even such esteemed secularists like Jawaharlal Nehru. The archival intervention begun by Mahasweta in The Queen of Jhansi sixty years ago has now taken on a separate but not dissimilar visage. Thus, the record remains mutable and subject to mining in the twenty-first century by another group 158 The Rani of Jhansi of disenfranchised citizens. Where Mahasweta’s biography of Rani Lakshmi Bai sought to unseat patriarchal and colonial bias in the writing of history, Dalit narratives, dissatisfied with a national history that remains distant and unresponsive to their concerns, strive to wrest the chronicles of the past from upper caste privilege by using Jhalkari Bai to disrupt the dominance of the Rani. Mahasweta’s objective in constructing a biography replete with anecdotal memories, folklore, historical documents and editorial feminist insights is a project attempting to place history in women. Unlike Victorian popular fiction that disavows ‘writing history’ even as it takes great liberties with historical figures and texts, Mahasweta’s novel boldly asserts her concerns with history:

What is history? What is history made up of? If history is about people, then I would say that the history created on the roads of Jhansi that day is unparalleled. The history that was made that day by thousands of Indians is the real history of India. In comparison to that, what the English did for us or gave us during their rule of 200 years is negligible (177).

Mahasweta’s lack of objectivity is central to the task of dismantling gendered historical practice, which privileges the ‘objective’ by identifying it with the ‘rational’ and the ‘male’. Mahasweta’s work on the Rani of Jhansi is not simply an example of re-writing history by locating new archives, but also a critique of patriarchal bias in the reading of these ‘marginal’ archives. Since women’s bodies are innately connected to the processes of colonial history, in which they become, as Lata Mani and others have written, the site of contestation, Mahasweta is primarily concerned with (re)placing that history in the woman’s body as much as she is committed to placing the woman in history. This discussion on Mahasweta’ Devi’s The Queen of Jhansi, as a map for reconstructing colonial history and as an example of an innovative engagement with the archive, points towards the challenges and hazards of such an endeavour even as it gestures towards its necessity and potential. The desire to recover the hitherto suppressed past, for women and for Dalit groups, requires a reworking of the historical, biographical and historico-literary method that must also face the perils of reductive reasoning, contradiction, romanticization and ideological incoherence. As Darshan Perusek evocatively puts it:

Thus, it is not productive to include non-canonical or ‘subaltern’ sources to simply show that the common folk yearned to throw of the yoke of upper caste, feudal and colonial tyranny – this continues to indulge in a historical binary of the Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 159

oppressor and the oppressed. What seems more useful, however, is to ask how ‘the struggle of the powerless, if it is to have any political significance, must be a struggle for changing the structures which reproduce relations of power’.56

These ‘structures which reproduce relations of powers’ reside, I suggest, not only in the annals of the oppressors and the oppressed, but also in the scholarship and interventions that work towards unsettling the archive.

Endnotes

1. Mahashweta Devi, The Queen of Jhansi (trans. Mandira Sengupta and Sagaree Sengupta). 2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi; ‘ “Draupadi” by Mahasweta Devi’, 179–196. ‘Woman in Difference’, 77–96. 3. Dalit are the people previously described in Indian governmental and cultural documents as Untouchables, Scheduled Castes and Tribes and Other Backward Castes. The identification, Dalit, is a reclaiming of that oppressed identity by political and activist lower caste communities. 4. To the best of my knowledge no other scholar has written on The Queen of Jhansi. 5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘More on Power/Knowledge’, from Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean’s The Spivak Reader 165. 6. A movement begun in the 1960s in Naxalbari in Bengal as part of an agrarian struggle, it spread rapidly to other regions but was brutally suppressed by the government and its activists (many of them young academics) jailed. The movement had an avowedly Maoist character. 7. For more on tribal and peasant revolts in colonial India see: Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency, 45–88.’; Gautam Bhadra, ‘Four Rebels of Eighteen- Fifty-Seven’; Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism’. 8. The biographical information on Mahasweta Devi and the quotes in the biographical paragraphs are taken from Suzie Tharu and K. Lalitha, Women Writing in India 600 B.C. to the Present, 234–236. 9. Sandhya Shetty, ‘(Dis) Figuring the Nation: Mother, Metaphor and Metonymy’, 58. 10. Toral Jatin Gajarawala, ‘Some Time Between Revisionist and Revolutionary: Unreading History in Dalit Literature’, 576. 11. Ibid. 12. Sir Douglas Forsyth, Autobiography and Reminiscences, 24. 13. Ashok Mehta, 1857: The Great Rebellion. 14. Mahashweta Bhattacharya, The Queen of Jhansi. 15. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 40. 16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘In Other Worlds, Essays in Cultural Politics, 204–5. 160 The Rani of Jhansi

17. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Deconstructing Historiography’, 217. 18. Ibid. 19. Badri Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity and Politics, 92. 20. Badri Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, 88. 21. Romila Thapar, Narratives and the Making of History: Two Lectures, 49. 22. Sadhana Naithani, ‘An Axis Jump: British Colonialism in the Oral Folk Narrative of 19th Century India, 183’. 23. Though the translation refers to ‘Jhanki’ as ‘mist’, it more accurately translates as a ‘glimpse’. 24. Gajarawala, ‘Some Time Between Revisionist and Revolutionary’, 587. 25. A modern poet, Subhadhra Kumari Chauhan wrote a long narrative poem in Hindi that is still included in the curriculum of most Indian schools. Chauhan had herself participated in the non-cooperation movement, led a procession bearing the Indian flag after it had been trampled by the colonial police and was jailed in 1940 and 1942. She worked for women’s rights and for the ‘Harijan’ classes and was elected to the Bihar Legislative Assembly before she was killed in an accident in 1948. See Chapter IV. 26. P.C Joshi, ‘Folk Songs of 1857’, 275. 27. Quoted in P.C. Joshi’s ‘Folk Songs of 1857’ from the collection of Vrindavan Lal Varma of Jhansi, 68. 28. Cited in P.C. Joshi’s ‘Folk Songs on 1857’. 29. For more on this see Homi Bhabha’s ‘By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ and ‘Signs taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817’, in The Location of Culture. 30. Also see C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information. 31. Sir John Kaye and Colonel Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, 345. 32. Naithani, ‘An Axis Jump’, 4. 33. Though Elizabeth maintained the aura of the ‘Virgin Queen’ and ‘Cynthia’s Cult’ to perfection in order to generate a viable female alternative to a male king, in the Indian nationalist tradition Indira Gandhi, though married and with two children, separated from her husband early in her political career and it was the figure of the widowed mother that was most deployed by her in garnering public support. 34. Referenced in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s Real and Imagined Women, from Letters to the Editor, The Times of India, 18 July 1992, 127. 35. Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, 118.’. 36. Shuchi Kapila theorises this particular colonial affect of ‘familial’ relations in Educating Seeta:, The Anglo Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule (2010) with attention to nineteenth century literary texts and the characterization of Indian femininity – women and queens. 37. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow- Sacrifice’, 92. Unmaking the Nationalist Archive 161

38. In delineating the events of the early nineteenth century around the sati debates Lata Mani points out that the sensationalised status of sati as the marker of a particularly horrifying and barbaric culture became the bone of contention between British Colonialists and Indian nationalists vying for access to patriarchal set of powers, rather than the question of women’s safety or amelioration of their lives. 39. For a discussion on this in Indian literature and film see Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s ‘Representing Sati’, in Real and Imagined Women, 40–63. 40. Philip Meadows Taylor’s Seeta (1889), Hume Nesbit’s The Queen’s Desire (1893). 41. A ‘vermilion bindi’ is a marker of marriage in the Hindu tradition. It is a red dot worn on the woman’s forehead. The ‘mangalsutra’ is a similar marker of marital status. It is a necklace given to the wife by the husband. 42. Sangeeta Ray, En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives, 26. 43. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 206. 44. Battle cry of the Marathas. 45. Quoted in Mahasweta’s Queen of Jhansi from T.R. Holmes History of the Mutiny, 216. 46. Sandhya Shetty, ‘(Dis)figuring the Nation: Mother, Metaphor, Metonymy’, 51. 47. Ibid, 72. 48. Pankaj Rag, ‘1857: Need for Alternative Sources’, 143. 49. Badri Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, 87 50. Badri Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, 122 51. Jaganath Prasad Shakya, Jhansi ki Sherni: Viranhana Jhalkari Bai kee Jeevan Charitra; quoted in Charu Gupta, ‘Dalit “Viranganas” and Reinvention of 1857’, 1742. 52. Charu Gupta, ‘Dalit “Viranganas”’, 1741. 53. Ibid, 1743. 54. Badri Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India, 124. 55. D.C. Dinkar, Swatantrata Sangram mein Achuchuton ka Yogdan, 21. 56. Darshan Perusek, ‘Subalterns Consciousness and the Historiography of the Indian Rebellion of 1857’, 299.

Afterword 163

Afterword

There’s always more to tell even when the story has ended. Mahasweta Devi

Figure 5: Cover art from the Amar Chitra Katha series comic Rani of Jhansi

was six years old when I first heard of Rani Lakshmi Bai. The national and at Ithat time only television channel Doordarshan had broadcast Sohrab Modi’s Hindi film Jhansi Ki Rani to mark 15 August, India’s Independence Day. The next day found me in The English Book Shop, one of the two bookstores in my city, where I eagerly bought and read the Amar Chitra Katha comic Rani 164 Afterword of Jhansi. However, these early experiences in Hindi film and English reading were not my initiation into historical or literary research about this heroic queen from India’s past. It took a particularly severe scolding from my teacher in class eight to do that. I was admonished for getting into a fight with boys and told to check myself or, as the teacher said, ‘Who do you think you are, the Rani of Jhansi?’ Rani Lakshmi Bai, the Queen of Jhansi, remains metonymic in the nation’s imagination. She symbolises India’s enduring spirit and martyred past and the communicative significance of the Rani is borne out by the plethora of representation around her. Her mutability as a subject of racial, sexual, linguistic, religious and caste-based representation places her where the intersections of culture and literature cannot be simply accounted for within the historical diachronic. Racial superiority, glorification of colonial manhood, nationalist ambivalence towards history and femininity and the reclaiming of the past for disenfranchised sections of Indian society become the motivating discourses for the narratives discussed in this book. Yet the Indian female rebel, monarch and warrior, remains a disruptive figure. It is the impossibility of reading that links powerful women, such as the Rani, to the tasks of governance and nation. If, as nationalist narratives would suggest, woman is to be the building block of the home and consequently then the society and the nation, she must be a transparent entity – one whose sphere of functionality and significance can be relatively easy to manage. Scholars have suggested construing Rani Lakshmi Bai as a utopian character of literature, symbolising freedom, strength and the poetic worth of outmatched fights. However, this kind of interpretation relegates the Rani once again to the annals of irrelevance, which lead to apotheosis as goddess or mother figure, but not to the crucial regard she deserves in historical research and political reality. In her representations as daughter, wife, mother and then queen, the Rani remains a metaphoric referent of home and nation. Thus, she is seldom seen as an anomaly in Indian texts where the aberrant aspects of her figuration are reformed to fit the hegemonic impulses of the national. A heroine of unending fascination, her remaking in new forms transforms the marginalized into a bounded, integrated and meaningful entity. She is, in this regard, authority and power personified as an abiding figure in the nation’s tradition. Yet, she is not an outright symbol of women’s liberation. The underlying political framework of colonial and postcolonial gender formation complicates the discourse of women’s emancipation, which is often erroneously viewed interchangeably with women’s politicisation or entrance into the public sphere. Rajeswari Afterword 165

Sunder Rajan writing on the role of women leaders in the twentieth century differentiates between the categories of ‘authority’ and ‘power’:

The distinction is based on the nature of decision-making processes: those ‘enacted through publicly recognized institutions’ are derived from the exercise of authority; whereas ‘the influence exerted through informal channels’ is an aspect of power. Authority requires ‘cultural legitimation’, since it encodes ‘the right to make a particular decision and to command obedience.’1

Though Rajan’s formulation addresses a central concern of women’s position in societal and governmental hierarchy, the Rani of Jhansi complicates this definition. Rajan locates ‘authority’, an attribute not traditionally assigned to women, in the ‘recognized institutions’ and thereby differentiates between it and ‘power’, which women have wielded even in subaltern positions. But the figure of the Rani, as the sovereign of Jhansi is not anomalous or new in the context of nineteenth century Indian politics and certainly fits the requirements of a ‘recognized institution’. Yet, Rani Lakshmi Bai also exercises ‘power’ as a symbol and narrative whose influence is ‘exerted through informal channels’. The British texts discussed in this book subvert this non-traditional rendering of power by reducing it to sexual plenitude, which permits assimilation into the literary colonial imaginary. Historical women leaders, not considered representative of the norm, are characterised in nationalist literary and historical texts as extraordinary and isolated. British colonial texts often refer to the Rani as ‘India’s Jezebel’, or the more appreciative ‘Joan of Arc’, but the Rani’s true counterpart in British history is Boadecia – Queen of the Celtic Iceni tribe during the Roman era (circa 60 ad). Her husband had been a ‘client-king’ of the Roman Empire, much like the nineteenth century Indian Kings who paid exorbitant taxes to the British for ‘protection’. He bequeathed his property to his two daughters when he died without a male heir and asked that their mother serve as Regent for the kingdom. The Romans disregarded this will and annexed his territory. Boadecia was flogged and her daughters raped. In retaliation, she led one of bloodiest retributive battles against the Romans in England. Like the Rani, there is a paucity of records for Boadecia’s life, but she is represented as a goddess leading her people to victory and a heroic figure of the British past. There is much historical distance between the Rani of Jhansi and Boadecia. But I draw attention to this comparison to demonstrate that representations of women in battle are emblematic of the cultural and political exigencies of the contemporary moment. Between the years of 1856 and 1885, while the 166 Afterword

‘mutiny’ and the Rani were household topics of discussion in Britain, Thomas Thornycroft sculpted a bronze statue of Boadecia and her daughters. It was finally erected in the administrative centre of London, during the age of ‘High Imperialism’, in 1902 and stands there to this day.2 A new version of colonial femininity emerged as the stereotypes of the ‘subservient’ Hindus were demolished in 1857 and literary and cultural texts of the post-‘mutiny’ period negotiated the dismantled paradigms of colonialism. In Victorian novels like The Queen’s Desire (1893) and Lachmi Bai Rani of Jhansi: The Jeanne D’Arc of India (1901), the Rani’s life is of no import before 1857; she debuts as a literary character particularly within the ‘horrifying’ certainty of the rebellion. Postcolonial texts differ from colonial renditions not only because they expectedly characterise the Rani as a figure of emulation but also because they are dedicated to narrating the Rani’s ‘biography’. Thus, the political imperatives of the colonial and national age underwrite the literary form – while the Victorian age is marked by a proliferation of ‘mutiny’ novels fictionalising 1857 under the aegis of romance and adventure novels, which feature the Rani as a particularly sensational character, Indian narratives chart the Rani’s biography alongside the story of the nation. She may simply be a character in colonial novels but in national texts she is the story. Vrindavan Lal Varma’s novel Jhansi Ki Rani, Lakshmi Bai (1946) is particularly representative of the nationalistic reordering of the Indian past, which allows for a seamless absorption into the narrative of Hindu India. I suggest that the effectiveness of ‘Hinduization’ in Varma’s novel lies in the discourse being cast as secular rhetoric. However, a challenge to state authored versions of the Rani and the Indian past is posed by Mahasweta Devi’s Jhansir Rani (1956) ten years later. It is through the inclusion of folk tales, personal reminisces, popular ballads and archival material that Devi retells the ‘biography’ of the Rani in a narrative that supplements the Rani’s status as a national heroine. Though the essential story is the same as Varma’s, the elements of narration shift the emphasis to cast the Rani as a continuing symbol of resistance as opposed to a regalia of the nationalised past. It is the precise mobilising of female icons, such as the Rani of Jhansi, in terms of their ‘power’ that has been undertaken in this project. Thus, gesturing towards the mythically heroic Rani may at first be heard as an inspirational call to the nation’s women. Closer reading, however, reveals the extent to which even the historical Rani may be recast as the fictional, poetic, or cinematic configuration of a traditional Indian womanhood that is instead a vehicle for the patriarchal destinies of the nation. Thus, at both colonial and postcolonial junctures, while traditional gender roles are most under scrutiny, Afterword 167 the figure of Rani Lakshmi Bai, in equal parts, daughter, wife, mother and queen, functions as a haven of representation – in which female strength may emerge and yet subside on male-identified and male-dominated whims. The figure of the fighting Rani has inspired a host of biographies, comic books, historical narratives, films and even a television serial. The examples discussed in this book are not exhaustive by any means; they represent four particular streams of portrayal. The television serial Jhansi Ki Rani aired between 2009 and 2011 and took grave liberties with the Rani’s story, adding new twists of familial intrigue, love and jealousy – the nation and nationalism, as identifying or motivating constructs, are absented from the serial indicating the distance postcolonial representation has covered since independence. Two new films about the Rani were slated to be in production, The Rebel by Ketan Mehta and an unnamed project by Sushmita Sen. Aishwarya Rai, a former Miss World and leading actress of Indian films, was supposed to play the lead in Mehta’s film, while Miss Sen, a former Miss Universe and actress, had cast herself in the role of the Rani.3 It is perhaps a measure of the Rani’s significance that such ‘stars’ of Indian cinema want to play her, or perhaps the added glamour of stardom is now needed to make the Rani relevant in this post-Doordarshan cable television, internet-inspired age. A recent novel by Jaishree Mishra, Rani (2007) creates a story of unrequited love between the Rani and the Englishman Major Ellis in an attempt, as the author puts it, ‘to find the woman behind the warrior’, who was ‘strangely, a little bit like every woman I knew’.4 This impetus to make the Rani a ‘bit like every woman’ is a new iteration of the same domesticating impulse espied in colonial and national novels. Why must the Rani be like anyone else when she is so clearly extraordinary? What continues to drive cultural, literary and cinematic representations to remake the warrior into a woman while they continue to make the man into a warrior? Whether celebratory or derogatory, the various colonial and postcolonial representations of the Rani serve to immortalise her as figure of Indian-British colonial history. But immortality is not an equitable continuum. Whore, mother, warrior, comrade, lover and queen – this surplus of depictions signals what is at stake in commemorating the unrestricted woman in the civic sphere. She remains excluded from the public, political sphere as a rightful claimant. Yet, the Rani’s seeming mutability from a promiscuous Indian woman to an Aryan and from a Hindu goddess of nationalism to a symbol of indigenous resistance, serves instead to reinforce the power wielded through the body of the public woman. Thus, I contend that there can be no realist rendition in the case of such iconic figures as the Rani of Jhansi. The writing of history itself weaves together poetry, prose, film and 168 Afterword culture in a narrative that is both historiographical and literary. It makes the question of historical facticity irrelevant – for history, as these tales indicate, is as open to invention, revision and re-writing as fiction itself. Representation, in a unique enmeshing of the literary, cinematic, administrative, folk and the popular, positions anew the often contentious, but also complicit, relationship between history and narrative, nation and identity and gender and citizenship. I conclude with the recent rape case in India: in December 2012, a group of men gang-raped and brutally assaulted a young woman and her friend. The woman died of her injuries but the event galvanised public sentiment, which in turn spurred a beleaguered and jaded judiciary and legislature to create a new law affording women more protection and rights against violence. To protect the victim’s identity, media began to refer to her as Jagruti (awareness), Amanat (treasure), Nirbhaya (fearless one), Damini (lightning) and Delhi Braveheart. These names extol the courage of the young girl, but they also move her into the extraordinary lineage of female heroism when what we need most is to understand the extent to which women live with, and overcome, violence in their ordinary lives. Rani Lakshmi Bai is India’s greatest heroine – perhaps it is time to remember that her stories indicate not just the potential of women but also the hypocrisy and cruelties of the culture, community and nation that has streets named after the Rani of Jhansi where women may still not tread in safety.

Endnotes

1. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism, 104. 2. Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens. 3. Both these projects seem to have been shelved for the time being. No further details are available. 4. Jaishree Mishra, Rani, vii. Bibliography 169

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Index 181

Index

aarti, 99, 100 Basu, Amrita, 3 adarshonmukh yatharthvad (principled Battle of Plassey, 39 realism), 101 Bayly, C. A., 58 The Afghan Knife (Sterndale), 36 Begum of Awadh, 108 Ali, Bakshish, 153 Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane, 24 Allegories of Empire (Sharpe), 34, 49 Bengal Survey of Races (Risley), 72 All India Progressive Writers’ Association Bentinck, William, 39 (AIPWA), 101 Besant, Annie, 20 Amin, Shahid, 23 Between Men: English Literature and Male Anderson, Benedict, 112 Homosocial Desire (Sedgewick), 57 Anglo-Sikh wars, 40 Bhabha, Homi, 5, 152 Anushilan Samiti, 137 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 157 Aranyer Adhikar (Devi), 137 Bharatiya Jan Sangh, 119 The Arctic home in the Vedas (Tilak), 74 Bhattacharya, Bijan, 137 Arnold, David, 140 Boehmer, Elleke, 43 Arnold, Edwin, 36 Bose, Subhash Chandra, 20 Arya Kirti (Gupta), 79 brij bhasa (Hindi dialect), 97, 100 Aryan(s) British (Orientalist) scholarship, 102 invasion theory, 68 British women notion of the, 68 attrocities committed against, 4, 36 origin in India, 67–68 as targets of rape, 2, 34–35, 36 queen, Lakshmi Bai as, 25, 76–89 Bronte, Charlotte, 41, 86 theory and colonial policy, 69–76 Bryant, Edwain, 73 Asbab-e-Baghawath-e-Hind (Khan), 8 Bunsen, Charles Josias, 69–70 Austen, Jane, 42 Burke, Edmund, 34 Burn, R., 15 Baba Gangadas, 122 Baharatiya Sahitya Parisad (Indian literary Cadell, Patrick, 15 Council), 101 Cawnpore: Short Narratives (Trevelyan), Baji Rao, Peshwa, II, 12–13, 77 147 Bald, Suresht Ranjan, 118 Central Sahitiya Academy Award, 137 Banerjee, Sikata, 57 Chakarabarty, Dipesh, 23, 142 182 Index

Chakravarti, Uma, 74 culture Chand Bibi, 125 Hindu, 101, 121 charkha, 19 Indian, 111 Charter Act, 39 Muslim, 101 Chatterjee, Partha, 22, 108 oral, 156 Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra, 127 print, 156 Chaudhari, S. B., 9 Dalit activism, 155–156 Chaudhary, Sachin, 137 Dalit groups, 158–159 Chauhan, Subhadra Kumari, 26, 63–64, 75, Dalit historiography, 138–139, 143 77–80, 84, 94, 101, 116, 127 Dalit literature, 138, 139 Chennamma, Kitturu, 3, 20 Dalit Munda tribe, 137 child marriage, 114, 124–125 Dalit politics, 154–159 Chopra, Radhika, 57 Dalit scholarship, 154–155 Christian missionary, 139 Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies Dalmia, Vasudha, 73, 96–97, 112 (Chaudhari), 9 Dalmia Award, 111 Collins, Wilkie, 11 Dalrymple, William, 9–10 colonial historiography, 102, 110 Darwin, Charles, 70 colonialism Das, Sisir Kumar, 102 bi-racial marriages/unions, 151 Dastanbuy (Ghalib), 8 British, 97 David Copperfield (Dickens), 43 colonial literature The Deceivers (Masters), 11 India’s representation in, 34 Deshpande, Prachi, 115, 120 rape-script and, 35 Dev, Virsingha, 144 women and, 41–44 Devi, Dharitri, 137 Colonial Masculinity: The `manly Devi, Mahasweta, 26–27, 111, 137–168, Englishman’ and the `effeminate 145–149 Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Anushilan Samiti and, 137 Century (Sinha), 39 biography of, 135–136, 146, 158 colonial policies birth of, 137 Aryan Theory and, 69–76 fictions of, 136 Indian women and, 16–19 Jugantar and, 137 political categories of gender and, 19 marriage of, 137 The Concept of Race in South Asia (Robb), Dharma (a rightful code of conduct based 73, 81 on religion), 117, 125, 127 Confessions of a Thug (Taylor), 11 Dickens, Charles, 11, 13, 43, 86 Congress Party (Indian political party), 3 Discovery of India (Nehru), 111 Congress Working Committee, 120 Disraeli, Benjamin, 5, 7 Control of the Press Act, 8 Doctrine of Lapse, 6, 13, 71, 150 Cousins, Margaret, 20 Dravidians, 74–75 Cowell, E. B., 70 Duff, Alexander, 6–7, 78 Cox, Philip, 5, 36, 60, 83 Dulaiya, Ladein, 145 Critical Terrains (Lowe), 68 Durga (goddesses of war), 114, 122, 124 Index 183

Durgavati, 125 Gandhi, Indira, 149 Dwivedi, Mahavir Prasad, 98, 104, 110–111 Gandhi, Rahul, 3 Gandhi, Sonia, 3 Eagleton, Terry, 104 The Garden of Indra (White), 68 East India Company, 1, 3, 13, 112, 124, General Dyer, 8 126, 147, 149, 150 General Hughes, 153 Battle of Plassey and, 6, 39 General Service Enlistment Act of 1856, 6 diplomatic letter recieved from George, Rosemary Marangoly, 43 Lakshmi Bai, 14 Ghalib, Mirza, 8 Lakshmi Bhai’s antipathy, depiction Ghatak, Manish, 137 of, 76 Ghatak, Ritwik, 137 occupation of Bengal and Punjab, 38–41 Ghor (Muslim General), 127 Rebellion of 1857 and, 40, 48 Ghosh, Chintamani, 98 religious and political interference of, xiv Godse, Nathuram, 99 Economic and Political Weekly of India, 137 Godse, Vishnubhat, 113 1857: The Real Story of the Great Uprising Great Expectations (Dickens), 43 (Godse), 113 Gregg, Hilda, 11 1857: The Real Story of the Great Uprising Guha, Ranajit, 140 (Versaikar), 8 Gujarati language, 99 Eighteen Fifty-Seven (Sen), 9, 138 Gupta, Charu, 156 Elliot, H. M., 72–73 Gupta, Rajnikanta, 79 Ellis, R. R., 13 Enfield rifle catridges, 6 Hajar Churasir Ma (Devi), 137 English Woman in India (Tytler), 82 Harijans (children of God), 115 Enlightenment, 143 Hariscandra, Bharatendu, 98, 100 European literature, 102 Hastings, Warren, 3 Havell, E. B., 72 familial sources, 111 Hindi Devanagari script, 97, 101 Farrell, J. G., 36 Hindi language female infanticide, abolition of, 6 colloquial, 128 femininity history of, 64–95, 96–105 Hindu, 122 identification of, 99 Indian, 85, 95, 151 Hindi Nationalism, 100 marginal, 116 Hindi Navjagran (Hindi Renaissance), narratives of, 149–154 103–104 patriarchal, 156 Hindi Urdu ki Larai (poem), 100 Flashman in the Great Game (Fraser), 5, Hind Swaraj (Gandhi), 119 36, 60 Hindu calendar, 113 Flow Red the Ganges (Partington), 5, 36, 86 Hindu femininity, 122. see also femininity folk traditions, and history, 144–148 Hinduism, 99, 111–112, 117–119, 122, 127 Fraser, George MacDonald, 5, 36, 60 Hindu Marriage Act of 1856, 6 Gaeffke, Peter, 119 Hindu morality, 119 Gananatya (theater group), 137 Hindu nationalism, 114, 117 184 Index

Hindu philosophy, 119 educational policies in, 70 Hindustani Academy Award, 111 female infanticide, abolition of, 6 Hindu tradition, 71 Kipling’s representation of, 33–34 Enfield cartridges and, 6 Maine, Henry Summer, view of, 71–72 notions of femininity, 21 native and colonial women in, 16–19 remarriage under, 6 Proclamation of 1858, 40 Hindutva - Who is a Hindu? (Savarkar), 74 tales of Hindu women in, 3 Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (Sarkar), 114 women’s status in, 19–22 history Indian femininity, 114, 122, 136, 151. see British colonial, 149 also femininity Dalit, 139, 157 Indian film industry, 104 folk traditions and, 144–148 Indian linguistic register, 99 of Hindi, 96–105 The Indian Mutiny - Its Causes and Results in India, 22 (Duff ), 6 Jhalkari Bai’s role in, 155–156 Indian National Army (INA), 20 in national debates, xxxiv Indian National Congress, 98, 103, 107, nationalist, 95, 99, 122 110, 117, 120 revising and rereading, 138–143 Indian nationalism, 96–97, 142 women’s place in, 22–24 Indian Parliament, 105 The History, Literature and Religion of the Indian People’s Theater Movement, 137 Hindus (Ward), 71 The Indian War of Independence of 1857 History of Ancient Sanskrit (Muller), 70 (Savarkar), 9 History of the Indian Mutiny (Holmes), 153 Indian women A History of the Sepoy War in India (Kaye), colonial, 153 7, 9 colonial policies and, 16–19 Holkar, Ahilya Bai, 3 debates concerning, 20–21 Holkar, Bhima Bai, 20 defining characteristics of, 118 Holmes, T. R., 153 Mahatma Gandhi and, 98 homosexuality personification of an Indian culture, 20 Pathan men and, 25, 84 roles under colonial rubrics, 17 practices depicted in Revolt of 1857, suppression of, Gandhi’s views on, 21 58–59 In the Round Tower at Jhansi, 8 June 1857 Punjabi men and, 25, 58 (poem), 54 Household Words (Collins and Dickens), 11 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 8 How I found Livingstone (Stanley), 43 Jane Eyre (Bronte), 42, 86 Ilbert Bill in 1883, 34, 39 `Jan Gan Man’, 26 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 112 Jauhar (burning herself to prevent being Incomplete Swarajya, 120 dishonored by the British), 97 In Darkest Africa (Stanley), 43 Jerinic, Maria, 3, 59 India Jhalkari Bai connections between Europe and, 70 BSP and, 155, 157 depiction of warrior queen tales in, 2 and Dalit politics in the twenty first domestication of, British families, 43 century, 154–159 Index 185

Dalit scholarship and, 154–155 Knox, Robert, 71 as Dalit version of female heroism, 157 Kuka Uprising, 8 emergence as a Dalit icon, 156 Kumar, Akshaya, 109 Indian history, role in, 155–156 kundali (astrological chart), 124 Jhansi Ki Rani (film), 26, 95–96, 123–130 Kurhera, Kalyansingh, 145 Jhansi ki Rani (poem), 95 `Jhansi ki Rani’ (poem), 26 Lachmi Bai Rani of Jhansi: The Jeanne D’Arc Jhansi ki Rani Lakshmi Bai (Varma), 26, 95, of India (White), 25, 35, 67–69, 110–111, 129 76–78 Jhansi massacre, 153 Lady’s Diary (Harris), 11 anti-Muslim sentiments and, 83 Lakshmi Bai, the Queen of Jhansi colonial retribution and, 17 as Aryan Rani, 76–89 Lakshmi Bai accused of, 11, 13–15 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led literature regarding, 35 Hindutva politics and, 157 Jhansir Rani (Devi), 135 birth of, 12 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali, 98–99 and colonial masculinities, 57–61 Jokhan Bagh massacre, 120 death of, 16 Jones, William, 69–71, 74 depicted as Kali, 49, 55 Joshi, P.C., 146 diplomatic campaigns with East India Joshi, Priya, 103 Company, xxiii Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Jhansi revolt and, 143 Britain and Ireland (Kincaid), xxiv marriage of, 12 Jugantar, 137 military training, 12–13 Juthan (Valmiki), 139–140 as politically empowered female sovereign of Jhansi, 151 Kali (Indian goddess), 11 portrayal of, as a Dalit icon, 156 Lakshmi Bai depicted as, 49, 55 responsible fo Jhansi massacre, 15 Kanpur massacre, 155 sexuality, fictional literature on, 37–38 Kapila, Shuchi, 42 as symbol of feminine masculinity, Katrak, Ketu, 19 84–85 Kaviraj, Sudipto, 117 Vrindavanlal Varma, as supporter of, Kaye, John, 7, 9 113–114, 120 Khadi, 19 The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty Khan, Ahmad, 77, 81–86 (Dalrymple), 9 Khan, Kale, 153 Lawrence, John, 7–8 Khan, Nathe, 145 literature Khan, Syed Ahmed, 8 anxiety expressed through, 23 khari boli (standard Hindi), 96, 97, 100 colonial (see colonial literature) Kincaid, C. A., 15 fictional, on Lakshmi Bai sexuality, Kipling, Rudyard 37–38 personification of India, 33–34 women’s place in, 22–24 view of Indian men, 60 Lord Canning, 8 view of Lakshmi Bai, 37–38 Lord Dalhousie, 6, 13, 60, 71, 126 186 Index

Lowe, Lisa, 68 Modi, Sohrab, 26, 95–96, 105, 123–130 Lowe, Thomas, 16 Mody, Sujata S., 100 Lucknow Pact (1916), 101 Mookerjee, Sambhu Chandra, 8 The Moonstone (Collins), 11 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 39, 40 Moti Bai, 116 Macmunn, George, 40, 53, 59 Mudgal, Shubha, 105 Mahatma Gandhi, 98–99, 101, 105, Muller, Friedrich Max, 70–71 110–111, 115, 118–122 Munshi Premchand, 101 nationally unifying symbols of, 19–20 Muslim League, 98–99, 117 reference to female archetypes, 19–20 on suppression of Indian women, 21 Nagari Pracarini Sabha (Society for the Maine, Henry Summer, 71–72 Propagation of Nagari), 98 Majha Prawas (Godse), 113 Nagari script (Hindi), 98–99 Major Ellis, 98, 149 Naithani, Sadhana, 144 Majumdar, R.C., 9, 138 Nana Saheb, 10, 12, 16, 80, 87, 112–114, Manakarnika. see Lakshmi Bai, the Queen 118 of Jhansi Narayan, Badri, 143, 155, 157 Mangal Pandey: The Rising (film), 123 narratives Mani, Lata, 149–150, 158 colonial, on Jhansi massacre, 14 Mansfield Park (Austen), 13 colonialist, 95 Manu. see Lakshmi Bai, the Queen of Dalit, 158 Jhansi of femininity, 149–154 Manusmriti, 139 heroic, 105 marginal femininity, 87. see also femininity of Hinduism, 118 The Martial Races of India (Macmunn), 40 historical, 98, 102, 136, 157 masculinity oral folk, 144 Bengali, 38–41 political, 129 British, 36, 50, 52, 57, 60 postcolonial, 138 colonial, Lakshmi Bai and, 57–61 regional, 102 female symbol, Lakshmi Bai as, 84–85 romance, 42 formulations of, 19 state sanctioned, 137, 139 Indian, 38, 41, 47, 86 Victorian, on Lakshmi Bai, 3 Punjabi, 38–41 nationalism Revolt of 1857, degeneration of, 25 Gandhi’s, 121–122 Masters, John, 11 Hindi literature and, 101–103 Mayawati, 155 Hindu, 96–97, 114 Mehta, Lajjaram, 99–100 Indian, 142 mehtars (lower caste), 155 modern, 129 Memoirs of the History, Folklore and oppositional anticolonial, 138 Distribution of the Races of the political, 117 North Western Provinces of India postcolonial statehood and, 104 (Elliot), 72 secular, 117 Metcalfe, Charles, 8, 13 The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition Metcalfe, Thomas, 58 (Dalmia), 112 Index 187

Native Volunteer Movement of 1885, 39 Punjabi soldiery, 38–41 Nehru, Jawahar Lal, 20, 67, 81, 157 purdah, 116 Nehru Award, 111 The Queen of Jhansi (Devi), 135–138, Nesbit, Hume, 25, 37, 38, 41, 54, 57, 61 140–143, 153–154, 157–158. see also The Nightrunners of Bengal (Masters), 11 Jhansir Rani (Devi) non-violent movements, 105, 119, 122 The Queen’s Desire (Nesbit), 37, 38, 41, 42, Official Mutiny Narratives, 15 47, 48, 49–57, 59 O’Hanlon, Rosalind, 57 Queen Victoria, 2, 11, 52, 53 On the Face of the Waters (Steel), 11 The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture Origin of Species (Darwin), 70 (Bryant), 73 Orsini, Francesca, 98, 116 `Race in Legislation and Political Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 86 Economy’ (Knox), 71 Padma Bushan award, 111 Rag, Pankaj, 109 Pande, Mangal, 127 Rai, Alok, 100 Pandey, Gyanendra, 140 Rai, Amrit, 97, 100 pari boli (the supine form), 100 Raja Harishchandra (film), 123 Partington, Norman, 25–26, 36, 86 Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder, 149 patriarchal femininity, 156. see also Rajaram, Navratna S., 71 femininity Raj Tilak (a ceremony formalizing one as patriotism, 122 the heir to the throne), 126 Paxton, Nancy, 34–35, 57 RakhiBandh Bhai (Varma), 110 The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of Ramarajya (Hindu morality), 119 1857 (Stokes), 10 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 20, 108 Permanent Settlement Act of 1793, 6 Ramayana, 119 A Personal Narrative of the Siege of The Rane (Gillean), 149 Lucknow: From its Commencement The Rane: A Legend of the Indian Mutiny to its Relief by Sir Colin Campbell (MacLean), 37–38, 41, 44–48 (Rees), 26–27, 55 Rani (Mishra), 11 Perusek, Darshan, 158 Rani Avantibai, 3 Peshwa Rao, 128 Rani Durgavati, 3, 144 politics The Rani of Jhansi (Cox), 36, 60, 83, xxxvi of gender, colonial policies and, 19 The Rani of Jhansi, or The Widowed Queen Hindutva, women and, 3, 45 (Arnold), 36 national and regional, 10, 17 The Rani of Jhansi, or The Widowed Queen racial, 26, 69 (Rogers), 25, 59, 83 of religion, 3 Rao, Damodar, 13, 15 transformative, 10 Rao, Gangadhar, 106, 113, 119, 124–126 The Politics of History: Aryan invasion Theory adoption of son by, 13 and the Subversion of Scholarship death of, 1 (Rajaram), 71 marriage of, 12 Prasad, Sohan, 100 Rao, Sadashiv, 15 Punch, 11 Rao Saheb, 153 188 Index rape-script Saktism, 53 British fiction using mutiny, 35–36 Sanskritized Hindi, 96, 99–100 fabrication, for covering reprisals by Saraswati (journal), 98, 104, 111 British men, 35–36 Saraswati, Dayananda, 73, 74 involving the Indian male, 36 Sarkar, Sumit, 103 popularised by colonial literature, 25 Sarkar, Tanika, 114 during the Revolt of 1857, 34–35 sati, 114, 128, 150 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 74 abolition of, 6 Rees, L. E., 11 described, 17, 18 religion, 94, 135, 150, 155 Jane Eyre novel and, 43 East India Company’s interference with meaning for Indian and British people’s, 7 cultures, 56–57 Enfield cartridges and, 6–7 notions of Aryans regarding, 74 minorities and, 3 Satyagraha (non-violent movement), 105 politics of, 3 Savarkar, V. D., 8, 10, 45, 157 Religion and Hidden Cults of India Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky, 29 (MacMunn), 53 Seeta (Taylor), 11, 47, 119 Revolt of 1857, 138, 139, 145, 147, 148 Sen, Indrani, 17 Aryan theory and, 68 Sen, S. N., 9, 10, 107 Indian and British historiographies Senapati Udal, 111 view of, 9 Sengupta, Mandira, 135 introduction to the, 1 Sengupta, Sagaree, 135 Lakshmi Bai’s participation in, 14 Sepoy Mutiny, 6, 77, 143, 148, xiii literary representation of, 49–57 English women and, 34 marriage and, 68 literary representation of, 14, 76–78 Sepoy Mutiny and, 6 Punjabi soldiery and, 40 Rig Veda, 70 The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 Risley, H. H., 72 (Majumdar), 138 Robb, Peter, 73, 81 Shakti, 3, 19 Rogers, Alexander, 25, 59, 83 Sharpe, Jenny, 34, 49 Rose, Hugh Shastras (scriptures), 117, 126 attack on Lakshmibai, 2, 16 Shetty, Sandhya, 24 description of Lakshmibai, 36 The Siege of Krishnapur (Farrell), 36 titles given to, 16 Singh, Raghunath, 117 Rose, Sir Hugh, 147 Singh, Sagar, 115 Rossetti, Christina, 54 Sinha, Mrinalini, 9, 39 Roy, Rammohan, 73 Smyth, John, 82 Rule of Darkness (Brantlinger), 43 social evils, 96, 114, 116 Somner, Doris, 42 Sacred Books of the East, 70 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty, 140, 142 Sahatiyakar Sansad Award, 111 Stanley, Morgan, 43 Sahgal, Lakshmi, 20 Star of Fortune, a Story of the Indian Mutiny Said, Edward, 104 (Muddock), 36 Index 189

The Statements of Native Fidelity Wadley, Susan S., 113 (Mookerjee), 8 White, Michael, 25, 35, 67–69, 75–85 Steel, Flora Annie, 11 women Sterndale, Robert Armitage, 36 in army, 152–153 Stokes, Eric, 10 British (see British women) The Subaltern Studies Collective, 140 colonial literature and, 41–44 Swadeshi movement, 98 cultural and literary nation making Swaraj (self-rule), 111, 118–122 and, 138 Tagore, Rabindranath, 26, 107 cultural reforms and, 114–115 Tambe, Moropant, 12 Hindi- and Urdu- speaking, 100 Tatar aur ek vir Rajput (Varma), 110 in Hindu nationalism, 3 Taylor, Philip Meadows, 11, 47, 149 in Hindutva politics, 3 Thapar, Romila, 143 Indian (see Indian women) Thornton, S., 14 in literature and history, 22–24 Thugi, 38, 49 lower caste, 115 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 74, 119 Mahatma Gandhi and, 98 Tope, Tantya, 10, 12, 16, 80, 86–87, Manusmriti and, 139 113–115, 121, 153 religious reforms and, 115 Trautmann, Thomas, 74–75 sati system and, 150 Trevelyan, Sir George, 147 subjugation of, 137–138 Trivedi, Harish, 98, 102 Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny in India (Narayan), 143 Delhi (Metcalfe), 8 Women Writing in India 600 B.C. to the Tytler, Harriet, 82 Present (Tharu and Lalitha), 137 The Underworld Of India (MacMunn), 59 Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race,and Urdu-Hindi divide, 99 Rape in the British Colonial Urquhart, David, 7 Imagination, 1830-1947 Valmiki, Omprakash, 139 (Paxton), 57 Vande Mataram, 110 Wurgaft, Lewis, 58 Vanity Fair, 43 Wuthering Heights (Bronte), 86 Varma, Vrindavan Lal, 95–96, 110–122, Yadav, K.C., 1 127–129, 135, 138, 144, 155 `Yagna’, 118 Varma, Vrindavanlal, 26 Young, Thomas, 69 Verma, Archana, 156 Versaikar, Vishnubhatt Godse, 8 Zafar, Bahadur Shah, 73, 103, 117 Vishnu (Hindu God), 119 zamindari, 6