Rani Lakshmibai
The Rani of Jhansi fought the British in 1858 and was killed in the field at about twenty-nine. Born Manikarnika in Varanasi around 1828 into a Marathi Brahmin family, she was raised at the court of the exiled Peshwa in Bithur alongside boys, and learned to ride, shoot and use a sword, which was unusual and is well attested. She was married at fourteen to the Maharaja of Jhansi and took the name Lakshmibai. Her son died in infancy, and the couple adopted an heir the day before her husband died in 1853. Dalhousie applied the doctrine of lapse — the East India Company's rule that a princely state without a natural heir reverted to the Company — and annexed Jhansi, refusing the adoption and offering her a pension. She contested it through the courts and lost. The rebellion of 1857 reached Jhansi in June, when the garrison mutinied and the European inhabitants who had surrendered were killed; her role in that has been argued about ever since and she wrote to the British denying responsibility. She governed the state through the following months, raised and drilled a force including women, and fought when Hugh Rose besieged the fort in March 1858. She escaped by night with her adopted son on her back, joined Tantia Tope, and helped take Gwalior. She was killed near there in June, in men's clothes, and Rose wrote that she was the bravest of the rebel leaders. She became a national figure in India long after her death, through a poem by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan that schoolchildren still learn, and the women's regiment of the Indian National Army was named for her in 1943. The British called the rebellion a mutiny and India calls it the first war of independence.
- Lived: 1828 CE – 1858 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: queen, military_leader, revolutionary
