Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, named Manikarna "mistress of jewels" at birth, was uniquely qualified to lead her people in peace and in war. Her mother died when the girl was four years old and she was raised by her father, an advisor in the court of Peshwa of Bithoor.

Unlike most girls at the time, Manikarna learned to read and write beside the boys at court and trained in fencing, shooting, martial arts, horseback riding and the ancient gymnastic form of mallakhamba.

​​​​​​​Miniature of Rani of Jhansi found during the capture of the Nawab of Farrukhabad's palace in 1857, National Army Museum, Public Domain.

At the time of Manikarna's lifetime, ​​​​​​​India was an expanse of many small princely states falling under the rule of the British East India Company acting as a sovereign power for the British Crown.

At fourteen, she married Maharaja Gangadar Rao ruler of the Kingdom of Jhansi who was twenty years older than she. As was custom for a queen, she chose a new name and became known as Rani Lakshmibai. Shown below her royal chambers, Lakshmibai appears a traditional young royal woman of the time. She was anything but.

Lakshmibai didn't adhere to the Hindi purdah norms under which women concealed their skin and figures with veils or curtains and were kept separate from men. Perhaps because she got a taste of freedom growing up with boys in the court of Peshwa.

She found wearing a turban like a man more practical, especially when exercising to keep up her physical prowess, as well as practicing with weapons at the palace. She trained other women as well, forming a regiment of women soldiers.

 
“This may not have been quite so unusual as it appears,” writes Allen Copsey, who has extensively researched the rani’s life. The palace women’s quarters were often guarded by armed women, and these women warriors did sometimes fight in battles. “What was unusual was for the rani to be in charge of their training.”
 

Lakshmibai refused to behave in the expected way for childless Hindu widow such as shaving her head, breaking her bangles, and submitting to restrictions on what she could wear, eat, her psychical movement and social activities. 

She appealed face to face with British officials, pleading to retain the right to rule Jhansi. Despite the fact the independent princely state had supported a pro-British stance prior to the king's death, the British East India Company seized the territory and refused to recognize the rule of rani or her adopted son.

Apparently, that's when she uttered her famous cry. “Mera Jhansi nahin dengee!”–Hindi for “I will not give up my Jhansi!” 

Which is easy to picture when you see her portrayal in a recent biopic.

​​​​​​Biopic, Manikarnika, 2019, courtesy Instagram.
 

Rani Lakshmibai's statue in Solapur near the Kambar Talav | Wikimedia Commons

Several months later, Rani Lakshmibai faced the British again at Gwalior where the fort held by rebels fell on June 16, 1858. Still commanding a large Indian armed force the next day, the warrior queen died in the midst of battle.

The fortress at Jhansi in about 1882. The British stormed the fort in its attack on the town in 1858.

In the eyes of the British, she was something else. John Lang, the first white person to see her, wrote this description.

“She was a woman of about middle size—rather stout but not too stout. Her face must have been very handsome when she was younger, and even now it had many charms— though according to my idea of beauty, it was too round. The expression was also very good, and very intelligent. The eyes were particularly fine, and the nose very delicately shaped. She was not very fair, though she was far from black. She had no ornaments, strange to say, upon her person, except for a pair of gold ear-rings. Her dress was a plain white muslin, so fine in texture, and drawn about her in such a way, and so tightly, that the outline of her figure was plainly discernible—and a remarkably fine figure she had.”

Lieutenant George Forrest (who sacrificed his life for the British cause) called Rani Lakshmibai an "ardent, daring, licentious woman.".

One Englishman, Colonel G. B. Malleson wrote in his 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.”

Portrait of Lakshmibai, the Ranee of Jhansi, (1861 by Royal Artist of Jhansi Ratan Kushwah in Indore) Probably done after her death (June 1858): she wears a valuable pearl necklace and a cavalrywoman's uniform Public Domain

But the stigma and slander of British historians could not last. Over the following decades, Lakshmibai emerged as a symbol not just of resistance but of the complexities that come with being a powerful woman in India.

“Her story has come to us less as history and more as mythology,” Harleen Singh, an associate professor of literature and women’s studies at Brandeis University, said in a phone interview. “It’s female heroism that is bound to the family and the nation.”

In the 1940's, the Indian National Army formed an all-female unit that helped in the fight for independence, which did not come until 1947, 90 years after Lakshmibai's death. 

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