Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (47 page)

On every parapet a gun she set

Raining fire of hell,

How well like a man fought the Rani of Jhansi

How valiantly and well!

Indian folk song of 1857

T
he story of the Rani of Jhansi, which ended with her death leading her men in the course of the Indian Rebellion, or ‘Mutiny’, began like that of Boadicea, with an injustice. In this case, however, the injustice was British, not Roman.

In Britain itself – two or three months away even by steamer – preparations were already under way for that huge ceremonial sculpture commemorating Boadicea and her daughters which stands today on the Embankment of the Thames. The sculptor Thomas Thornycroft and his wife – also a sculptress – were favourites of the British royal family. She had immortalized the young Princess Alice as ‘Spring’ and the Prince of Wales as ‘Winter’; he had produced public pieces such as ‘Alfred the Great encouraged to the pursuit of learning by his mother’ and an equestrian statue of the Queen. In 1856, under the patronage of Albert, the Prince Consort, who lent horses from his own stable as models and often visited the sculptor’s studio to measure progress, Thornycroft embarked on the Boadicean group.
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Although, as we shall see, it was to be half a century before Boadicea, her daughters and her chariot achieved their present resting place (the Prince Consort had envisaged the central arch of the entrance to Hyde Park) the accession of another queen regnant in the shape of Victoria had had its predictable effect in drawing attention to Boadicea’s fortunes. In the winter of 1859
the Poet Laureate Lord Tennyson read aloud to his wife what he described as ‘a fiercely brilliant poem’, constructed in an unusual and extremely difficult metre adapted from the Latin of Catullus.
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That poem was
Boädicea
:

So the Queen Boädicéa, standing loftily charioted,

Brandishing in her hand a dart and rolling glances lioness-like,

Yell’d and shriek’d between her daughters in her fierce volubility

Till her people all around the royal chariot agitated …

The poem ended with a sombre picture of the Roman colony awaiting the British holocaust and reflecting in silence on their misdeeds which had brought it about:

Out of evil evil flourishes, out of tyranny tyranny buds.

Ran the land with Roman slaughter, multitudinous agonies.

Perish’d many a maid and matron, many a valorous legionary,

Fell the colony, city, and citadel, London, Verulam, Cámuldodúne.

In truth, there was little real parallel to be drawn between Tennyson’s ‘loftily charioted’, yelling and shrieking Boadicea, and Victoria, whose own conception of being a Warrior Queen was more that of Maria Theresa. On the one hand Queen Victoria displayed throughout her long reign a real affection for her ordinary soldiers and devotion to what she perceived as their interests; on the other hand, despite bursts of emotion – ‘Oh, if the Queen were a man!’ – she was in no sense a warmonger. When she urged on Mr Gladstone in 1871 over the Franco– Prussian war ‘the necessity for great prudence and for not departing from our neutral position’,
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above all not to take action alone, one can sense the cautious shade of Queen Elizabeth I at her shoulder.

Yet ironically enough, within Queen Victoria’s increasingly vast dominions – that ‘empire … on us bestow’d’ celebrated by Cowper – a situation had arisen which did parallel, almost exactly, that of Boadicea and the Romans. At the time the Rani of Jhansi
was compared, not to Boadicea, but to another very different warrior-woman, Joan of Arc. Sir Hugh Rose, the British commander who finally defeated her at Gwalior, himself used the phrase ‘a sort of Indian Joan of Arc’ to the Commander-in-Chief of the army, the Duke of Cambridge.
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Since Boadicea had now become a patriotic symbol of British rule on the one hand and an established queen regnant on the other, it was perhaps scarcely surprising that British contemporaries of the Rani did not note the similarities of their two stories.

The parallels however were and remain remarkable. The injustice with which the story of the Rani of Jhansi began was not only dealt out to her by a dominant ‘occupying’ power of another race, but was also dealt out to her as a young or youngish widow. (As with Boadicea, the Rani’s exact date of birth is unknown.) This was not a case of physical brutality – scourging or rape; but there was a clear element of violation, according to Hindu law, in the way the Rani’s claims to rule Jhansi in the name of her late husband’s adopted son were ignored.

‘I have always considered Jhansi among the native states of the Bundelkhand as a kind of oasis in the desert’: this was the verdict (in his memoirs) of Sir William Sleeman, long stationed at the court of the Rani’s husband, Gangadhar Rao.
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It is important to realize that the small Mahratta principality of Jhansi, in the Bundelkhand hill country of northern India, had a history of friendship towards the British interest, just as the Iceni’s resentment at their treatment was fuelled by memories of their voluntary submission to Caesar. Jhansi had been raised by the British to princely status by that treaty of 1817 which brought the Mahratta Confederacy to an end although its dynasty had in fact been sovereign for nearly a hundred years. Thereafter the Rajah of Jhansi considered himself to be its independent and hereditary ruler; but he also inherited a tradition of benevolence towards and dependence upon the British government. In 1825 Gangadhar Rao’s grandfather, Ramachandra Rao, was granted the title of maharajah and ‘devoted servant of the glorious King of England’ (George IV) for aiding the British against some rebels.
When Gangadhar Rao’s own succession in 1838 was disputed within the family, the British backed his claim.
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Prosperity and peace followed for Jhansi, in both cases assured by the efficient supervision of British officials. Gangadhar Rao himself liked to spend his time in the theatre, both directing and acting: he played female parts and was reputed to wear female dress offstage as well. Not necessarily for these reasons alone, Gangadhar Rao was believed to be homosexual. Be that as it might, it was more to the point that he did not manage to produce an heir: his first wife died childless. In 1842 Gangadhar Rao married again. His bride was she who would be known to history as Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi.

Lakshmi Bai was probably born in about 1830: estimates vary between 1827 and 1835, with the British authorities tending to go for the earlier and the Indians for the later figure.
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Her original name was Manukarnika – one of the many names of the holy river Ganges – and she was brought up in the wing of a palace in Benares on the south bank of the great river itself. This was because her father, Moropant Tambe, a brahmin official, acted as chief political adviser to the brother of the last Peshwa of Bithur, whose court had come to rest in Benares after his deposition.

A web of legends surrounds the childhood of little ‘Manu’. Her horoscope is said to have indicated an important marriage. It is also scarcely surprising to find that many of these legends feature her one way or another as a tomboy. Here once again are the familiar stories of the future Warrior Queen wrestling with boys and disdaining the company of girls (except to insist on always playing the role of leader among them). A favourite if probably apocryphal tale has ‘Manu’ demanding a seat on the howdah of an elephant when playing with the adopted son of the Peshwa, Dhondu Pant, later known as Nana Sahib (he was surely too old to have acted as her playmate in childhood, despite the dramatic destiny which would one day link their names). The little girl was rebuked for her presumption: ‘You were not born to ride on an elephant.’ At which the future Rani shouted at the future Nana
Sahib: ‘I’ll show you! For your one elephant, I will have ten. Remember my words.’

On a more elevated level, Lakshmi Bai’s convenient birth in the very ‘lap of Mother Ganges’ meant that her birth could later be imbued with a religious significance: here was the pure incarnation of the sacred river, come to save India by destroying the heathen British. On this level, she was said to have been an assiduous attender at the Temple of Vishweshwar with her parents. Future places of pilgrimage were being provided, her pride in the Hindu religion underlined. A typical story, told of the Rani at the height of her triumph, had her encountering a brahmin by a well and, in spite of her thirst, refusing to let him pull up the clay pot for her: ‘You are a learned brahmin and it does not befit you to do this. I will do it myself.’ Concerning the Hindu religion, she informed the brahmin: ‘for this I have sacrificed all attachment for wealth, life, everything’.
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For all the curtailed freedoms – both sexual and social – of the female in the Hindu religion, as laid down by its brahmin lawgivers, little ‘Manu’, she who had boldly demanded a seat upon the elephant, came from a culture where powerful intelligent women were not unknown.
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Some of these belonged to history: there were folk memories of well-educated Hindu princesses and intrepid women at the Indian courts in the past who had ridden armed with the men. After her death, the Rani would indeed be described to Queen Victoria by Lady Canning, her former lady-in-waiting, now wife of the Governor-General of India, as having kept up the tradition of the Mahratta women for being both ‘brave and clever’ (although this particular Mahratta woman had been ‘wicked’ as well).
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Even within the confines of the Hindu religion itself, there were sundry menacing goddesses, whose mythical behaviour hinted at a very different female nature from that of the gentle and unselfish Sita. This was the heroine of the Ramayana epic who, having been abducted forcibly, was repudiated by her husband, only to prove her continuing love for him (and her virtue) by immolating herself in fire.
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The goddess Durga, for example,
wife of Siva, although seen as basically benevolent and maternal and endowed with a serenely beautiful face, also displayed a remarkable capacity for aggression, with the help of her ten arms, each bearing a different weapon, and her eight accompanying demonesses. (It was to Durga, riding on her tiger, that Mrs Gandhi in her turn would sometimes be picturesquely compared.) As for another version of Siva’s wife, the much-venerated goddess Kali, the black one: here was the force of destruction represented in its most terrifying form: four arms ending in bloodstained hands, fang-like teeth and protruding blood-dripping tongue.

Where the powers of women were concerned, the unconscious influence of Hindu mythology was underlined by public Indian example. Moreover, roughly contemporary with the Rani herself were two remarkable Indian Muslim female rulers. One of these, the Begum of Bhopal, was described to Queen Victoria by Lady Canning in 1861 as ‘A really clever upright character’: she looked after the affairs of her country herself and ruled it admirably. ‘No one disputes her power or her justice.’ When the Order of the Star of India was founded, the Begum of Bhopal was one of the twenty-five ‘Knights’ appointed to it.

Hazrat Mahal, the Begum of Oudh, on the other hand, was also formidably clever – but not morally upright. John Low of the East India Company called her ‘one of those tigress women, more virile than their husbands, who when finding themselves in a position to gratify their lust for power, have played a considerable part in oriental history’. Yet the courageous part played by the Begum as Queen Regent, in the defence of Lucknow against British attack, could not be denied. The
Times
correspondent, W. H. Russell, referred to her as ‘Penthesilea’, an Amazonion image confirmed by the female sepoys who guarded the entrance to the Begum’s harem, wearing military jackets and white duck trousers, with muskets and bayonets, cross-belts and cartridge boxes. Russell reflected: ‘it appears from the energetic characters of these Ranees and Begums that they acquire in their zenanas and harems a considerable amount of actual mental power …’
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After her enthronement, the Begum of Oudh was received by Queen Victoria in England. It was a development greeted with angry cynicism by Ernest Jones, the Chartist poet and leader (whose father, in contrast or perhaps in explanation, had been a royal equerry). Despite the Begum’s notorious ‘peccadilloes’, once she had been dethroned, he exclaimed, moral scruples had been thrown out of the window in face of her rank: ‘and the dusky royalty hobnobs with the pallid’.
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One might look at it from another angle and see in Queen Victoria’s persistent welcome to various Indian royalties her attractive lack of racism, in the sense that so many British people of the time practised it.

There is yet another possible angle. The career of Hazrat Mahal, long-reigning Queen Cartimandua to the Rani’s more dramatic Boadicea, reminds one how differently matters might have gone for Lakshmi Bai … Given her energy, courage and determination, given that female rule was not of its nature inimical at this point to the British, how might she not have fared under another set of stars – another horoscope? As it was, Manukarnika, who took on her marriage the name of Lakshmi, the lovely goddess of fortune and prosperity, would one day be transformed further into powerful Durga riding upon her tiger – and even, maybe, bloodstained Kali herself.