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WOW2: November's Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History -11-17 thru 11-23 [1]

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Date: 2022-11-19

November 19, 1828 – Lakshmibai born, Maharani of the princely state of Jhansi in Northern India, a leading figure in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and a symbol of resistance against the British Raj for Indian nationalists. Just before her husband died, he adopted a child as his heir in the presence of the British political officer, to whom he gave a letter instructing that the child be treated with respect and that the government of Jhansi should be given to his widow for her lifetime. Because the boy was adopted, the British East India Company applied the Doctrine of Lapse, rejecting the child’s claim to the throne, and annexing the state to its territories. Lakshmibai was given an annual pension and ordered to leave the palace and the fort. When the 1857 rebellion started in Meerut, the Rani got permission from the British political officer to raise a body of armed men for her protection. The city was still relatively calm, but the Rani conducted a Haldi Kumkum ceremony (a married women’s gathering where they exchange turmeric and vermillion powder as symbols of their married status and wishes for their husbands to have long lives) with pomp in front of all the women of Jhansi to provide assurance to her subjects, and convince them that the British were cowards and not to be afraid of them. British forces under Major-General Hugh Rose arrived in March, and Rose demanded the surrender of the city, and said otherwise it would be destroyed. The Rani issued a proclamation: "We fight for independence. In the words of Lord Krishna, we will if we are victorious, enjoy the fruits of victory, if defeated and killed on the field of battle, we shall surely earn eternal glory and salvation." The city was besieged under heavy bombardment, and an attempt by forces sent by Tantia Tope, a leader of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, to relieve the city failed. On April 2, the British breached the city’s wall, and in spite of encountering determined resistance which they had to fight block by block, reached the palace. The Rani had fled in the night with her son, surrounded by guards, and joined the rebel forces. The city was given no quarter, not even the children. The Rani went with the rebel forces to Gwalior, but it was attacked by Rose’s forces in June, and the Rani was severely wounded while wearing a sowar’s (horse soldier’s) uniform, and exchanging fire with a British soldier. Not wishing the British to capture her body, she said to burn it. Local people did cremate her after she died. The British captured the city of Gwalior three days later. In the British report of this battle, Hugh Rose commented that Rani Lakshmibai was "personable, clever and beautiful" and she was "the most dangerous of all Indian leaders." Rose reported that she had been buried "with great ceremony under a tamarind tree under the Rock of Gwalior, where I saw her bones and ashes." Twenty years after her death, Colonel Malleson wrote in History of the Indian Mutiny: “Whatever her faults in British eyes may have been, her countrymen will ever remember that she was driven by ill-treatment into rebellion, and that she lived and died for her country. We cannot forget her contribution for India.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/19/2136919/-WOW2-November-s-Trailblazing-Women-and-Events-in-Our-History-11-17-thru-11-23

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