jas 2008 lakshmibai
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The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive: Lakshmibai, Jhansi, and 1857
PRACHI DESHPANDE
The contested historiography of the 1857 rebellion and its importance in shaping the
Indian nationalist imagination makes it an excellent entry point into an investigation of
nationalist pasts and their archival bases. This paper examines a concatenation of
influential narratives of different genres that have become critical sources for a history of
the rebel leader Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and for configuring her as an icon of heroic
Indian womanhood. It places each of these sources, ranging from late nineteenth-century
Marathi texts to mid-twentieth-century Hindi narratives, within their specific
spatiotemporal setting and highlights the contradictory regional projects underlying
apparently smooth nationalist narratives. Through a close examination of the making of
the Lakshmibai archive, the author argues that a consideration of the editorial and
textual practices that went into the making of reliable and usable archives for a modern
historiography is critical to the unpacking of nationalist historiographies.
Prachi Deshpande (pdeshpande@berkeley.edu) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
History at the University of California, Berkeley.
Of the many rebel leaders of the Great Rebellion in 1857–58 against the East India
Company’s rule, perhaps the most enigmatic is the rani (queen) of the small state of Jhansi,
Lakshmibai. Lakshmibai lost her kingdom to the company under Lord Dalhousie’s doctrine of
lapse when her husband, Gangadharrao, died in 1853 with only an adopted heir. When Company
soldiers stationed in Jhansi rebelled and killed all the Europeans in June 1857, Lakshmibai took
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charge of the state. A few months later, she joined the rebels Nanasaheb and Tatya Tope in
fighting the British and died in battle in early 1858.
The historiography of the rebellion is well known for the polarity of positions about its
status as a mutiny or political revolt and for the sheer volume of source material, ranging from
official documents to personal narratives. Personalities of the rebellion, such as the Mughal
emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (Dalrymple 2006) or the rebel sepoy Mangal Pandey (Mehta 2005;
Mukherjee 2005), continue to fuel scholarly and popular debate about their motives and actions.
The rebellion’s representations are also remarkable for the British and Indian nationalist
imaginations that they have fired from its immediate aftermath to this day. The historiographical
intensity of this episode makes it an excellent entry point into an examination of nationalist
historiographies and the making of authoritative archives for the narration of momentous events
and pasts.
I undertake such an examination in this paper by considering closely the historiography
on Rani Lakshmibai, who is prominent in these nationalist imaginations. Colonial discourses
presented her as an Orientalized Jezebel who justified the brutal peace that Britain established
after the rebellion (Jerinic 1997; Sharpe 1993; Singh 2002). In the dominant Indian nationalist
narrative, she has emerged as a heroic mother battling for her son’s patrimony, an iconic figure
in the gendered representations of the modern Indian nation. Layers of these representations have
encrusted around the figure of Lakshmibai for a century and a half.1
I attempt here to peel back
these layers to peer closely at some of the intellectual practices and political contexts that have
produced this powerful nationalist narrative on Lakshmibai. Rather than a quest for the “original
Lakshmibai,” I seek instead to point to the contradictions that underlie such a search. This paper
is not a survey of all the major works, scholarly and popular, on Lakshmibai or Jhansi. Instead of
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dwelling on the most well-known representations, such as V. D. Savarkar’s Indian War of
Independence (1909) or Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s rousing Hindi poem khoob ladi mardani
woh to jhansiwali rani thi,2
this paper takes up a particular concatenation of influential prose
writings in Hindi and Marathi to examine closely the transmission of information about
Lakshmibai. This archival excavation, accordingly, begins with the more recent representations
and digs its way back to some formative writings of the late nineteenth century. In so doing, it
places each layer in its own spatiotemporal context and calls into question the apparent
smoothness and gradual accumulation of objective knowledge about Lakshmibai’s life and
actions. Through a close examination of the making of an archive about this particular moment
in history, I wish to highlight here more broadly the multiple and often discordant projects that
underlie such apparently coherent pasts, along with their very archival building blocks.
VRINDAVANLAL VARMA, J HANSI KI R ANI (1946)
Among the most powerful representations of Lakshmibai is the Hindi novel Jhansi ki
Rani (The Queen of Jhansi) by Vrindavanlal Varma (1889–1969), a progressive nationalist and
lawyer and one of the most prolific novelists of the twentieth century. A native of Jhansi whose
grandfather fought with the rebels, Varma was a constitutional moderate and active in Jhansi’s
local politics from the 1920s, and although he began writing at this time, much of his well-
known work was produced from the 1940s onward.3
His numerous historical novels all
celebrated events, personalities, and battles from central India and gave a modern historical
coherence to the cultural region called Bundelkhand. Indeed, seeking and bringing to light this
“Bundelkhandi” past was the overarching theme binding all of Varma’s novels, but his novel on
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Jhansi was his magnum opus. As it is one of the most influential of the nonscholarly layers on
the revolt in Jhansi and its queen, let us begin with this novel.4
Stirring writings about Lakshmibai’s valor had appeared in Hindi from at least the
1880s.5
Varma’s novel, however, successfully normalized Lakshmibai as a nationalist heroine.
She was one among many female heroic characters in his novels who represented an idealized
Indian womanhood and was constructed as the gendered site par excellence of a progressive
Indian modernity with deep roots in tradition.6
Indeed, his novel served to produce the local
depth and national contours of this tradition, even as it historicized the heroic figure of
Lakshmibai. A principal feature of the modern historical novel in many Indian languages was
that its creators saw their task as being simultaneously historical and literary. Historical novelists
sought not only to contribute to literature but also to enrich the historical record. Varma was the
pioneer of this form in Hindi and, like many of his contemporaries in other languages,
approached the past with a mixture of conviction and curiosity. He was dismayed at biased
colonial sources that revealed only fragments of Lakshmibai: Diplomatic correspondence
suggested that she had negotiated for peace with the company until the very end, while many
memoirs blamed her for the massacre of British women and children. Neither explained why she
decided to arm against the company or how had she become a skilled horsewoman and military
strategist in spite of being a Brahman widow. Varma sought sources and answers to these
questions that would enable him to narrate a fuller, fleshed out story that he was sure existed:
Along with colonial archives, he also sought Indian perspectives. He relied heavily on D. B.
Parasnis’s Marathi biography of Rani Lakshmibai for basic information. He also used a memoir
by Vishnubhat Godse, a Marathi Brahman man who was in Jhansi in early 1858 and wrote in
detail about its siege and recapture by the British. In Varma’s own words, he harassed countless
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old men for their memories. His creative talents, then, would be harnessed to bring these fading
memories, attractive for their immediacy and presumed as authentic, to historical light. These
archival efforts would later serve both as preface and as appendix, and as the armor of
authenticity for the novel. Indeed, it is this claim to verisimilitude that underwrites the novel’s
authority as a historical source.
Varma placed Lakshmibai within both an immediate and a long-term historical context.
He began with a brisk genealogy of the Marathi-speaking chiefs of Jhansi, who had migrated to
central India as part of the military expansion by the eighteenth-century Maratha state of the
Deccan and set up many such small principalities. The last head of this empire, the Peshwa
Bajirao II, had himself settled in Bundelkhand after the British defeated the Marathas in 1818;
Lakshmibai’s father was part of the retinue that moved there with him. Born in 1832, she grew
up with the Peshwa’s adopted son, Nanasaheb, the other infamous rebel of 1857.
Throughout the novel, Lakshmibai invokes a genealogy of resistance that spans both this
longer Maratha history as well as a more local past. She worships both heroic Maratha rulers
such as Shivaji as well as those from Bundelkhand such as Chhatrasal, who resisted Mughal
expansion into their territories. She is, like them, an Indian patriot, part of a common history.
Through this genealogy, Varma gives her actions in 1857 roots and meaning. He also explains
small empirical details within a larger nationalist framework. For instance, a Mr. Martin wrote
from Agra to Lakshmibai’s son, Damodarrao, well after the revolt, declaring that she had had no
hand in the massacre of Europeans at Jhansi. This letter, first used by D. B. Parasnis in 1894 after
he acquired it from Damodarrao, was regularly quoted thereafter as proof of Lakshmibai’s
innocence in later nationalist histories. Historians, however, were not able to ascertain how Mr.
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Martin had known of Lakshmibai’s innocence or how he had managed to escape the massacre,
thus casting some doubt on the letter’s reliability. In Varma’s novel, all is explained:
The battle raged on the second day as well. By evening the British had nothing
left to eat. They scoured every inch of the fort but found nothing. . . . They sent
word to the Rani pleading hunger.
The Rani had rotis prepared. She told Kashibai, “You must take these to
the British somehow. You know all the secret routes. Take only Sundar and
Mundar with you. Light a torch wherever necessary.
The women knew of the Rani’s benevolence, but hadn’t seen how
limitless it was. Kashi asked respectfully, “My lady, would the British have
helped us had we been in their place?”
The Rani replied, “Why become like them? Moreover, I don’t want to
spoil our future plans by starving them now.” She smiled. . . .
The three friends loaded the food on to their backs and took them through
the tunnels to the British. . . . One of them was a man named Martin, who had
seen where they came from. When they came again the next day with food, he
quietly followed them, and then escaped to Agra. They didn’t even realize that he
had done so. (1946, 179)
Varma, therefore, presents Lakshmibai as humane, and he emphasizes this humanity as a mark of
her difference from the British colonialists, even as he explains how Martin knew of her
innocence of the massacre. Other such examples abound in the novel.7
Establishing this
coherence in the narrative of the past, achieved through the creation of imaginary but appropriate
characters, conversations, and plot situations, is certainly one of the primary objectives—and
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chief attractions—of the historical novel and one of the reasons that its historicity has to be
studied together with its literary qualities.
If clarifying cause and effect is one means through which this fullness is achieved,
another is by rendering historical events and personalities quotidian, palpable, and familiar.
Varma treated small bits of information in the archival record as points of entry into a more
elaborate world, emphasizing these traces as tantalizing glimpses of what must have been. First,
this brought the people of the time into sharper relief: In the novel, Lakshmibai’s attendants
smile, joke, and get infatuated with rebels, and when ordinary Jhansi residents are not burning
with the desire for rebellion, they pray, listen to music, and appreciate the beauty of spring.
Second, this technique powerfully brought home the poverty of the archival record, even as
Varma relied heavily on it to buttress the novel’s own flights of imagination and his own
analysis. For example, he interpreted a surviving letter from Lakshmibai asking colonial officials
for permission to conduct her son’s thread ceremony as being, “in reality,” a cover for a political
meeting of rebel leaders (Varma 1946, 116–17, 151–53). Without this explanation, the letter
meant little; at the same time, it served as the ultimate, elusive proof of Lakshmibai’s strategic
plans for revolt.
Varma expertly used the device of conversations in regional dialects and colloquial
expressions to discuss social attitudes, enabling readers to “hear” voices from the past. The novel
peoples the past, as it were, with all the diversity of Bundelkhand: Varma’s characters belong to
different castes and religions and speak in different dialects. This, needless to say, also gave the
rebellion deep popular roots. Through these conversations, Varma critiqued both colonial racism
as well as the feudalism of many native princes. He criticized Lakshmibai’s husband’s arbitrary
rule: Gangadharrao callously pokes fun at the efforts of the lower castes to adopt the sacred
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thread and banishes a Brahman man and an untouchable woman from his kingdom for
conducting a scandalous love affair (Varma 1946, 34–47). Gangadharrao is a typically decadent
feudal chief in the novel, preoccupied with the stage, dancers, and playacting in general.
Lakshmibai articulates, by contrast, Varma’s own vision of anticolonial utopian
possibilities, albeit from a reformist, middle-class Hindu position. Jhansi is also imagined as a
space of interreligious harmony in the novel under her benevolent rule. Hindus and Muslims in
Jhansi do not clash for public space during religious processions, and they are equally loyal to
the queen, who is deeply pious herself but respectful of all faiths (Varma 1946, 208–9). At the
end of the novel, it is a Muslim soldier who protects the spot of her cremation from being
desecrated by calling it the site of a holy Muslim saint (338).
Although Varma placed Lakshmibai within an unproblematic Indian nationalist
genealogy of medieval patriots, the novel nevertheless had to negotiate some thorny questions of
regional particularities and national unity. Part of this had to do with Varma’s own modernist and
democratic discomfort with the rebel sepoys’ dreams of restoring the empire. Indeed, the idea of
the “people,” and the power of their aspirations to goad princely rulers into rebellion against
colonialism, is a prominent theme throughout the novel. Elsewhere, Varma also tried to
rationalize the rebels’ invocation of Mughal rule in the early twentieth-century vocabulary of
centralized government and provincial autonomy:
[Tatya Tope told the Rani,] “I met a lot of eager Muslims; they say that the
Empire should be established again in Hindustan. I said, “Swarajya” [self-rule]
and Empire can actually co-exist. When they asked, how, I said that people would
establish their own rule in their regions and provinces, and while the Emperor
could certainly intervene in them, his seal would be on inter-provincial issues and
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big matters. His own rule would extend only to the areas around Delhi. All the
provinces and regions will fight jointly in the name of self-rule and the Emperor
against a common outside enemy, and this is how together, they will govern
Hindustan.” (1946, 129)
Nation and region, however, were also negotiated through the figure of Lakshmibai. Although
she lived and ruled in Bundelkhand, Lakshmibai’s immediate social world was peopled with
Marathi Brahmans and their customs. Delighted that a Marathi drama company would be visiting
Jhansi, the queen’s attendant Mundar says,
“My lady, the play will be in Marathi!”
The Rani said, “Marathi in Jhansi! It is true that there are Maharashtrians
in large numbers, that is fine, and those people may well have a play staged for
their entertainment; but the company will find royal patronage only if they stage
the play in Hindi. I might have been born in a Maharashtrian family myself, but I
think of myself not as a Maharashtrian but as a Vindhyakhandi. 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. This is my decision.” (1946, 230)
Given his location in the “Hindi heartland” of India, Varma’s brisk pruning of Lakshmibai’s
Marathi roots would seem to point to the familiar demand for homogeneity and assimilation that
the nation makes on its regions. By placing her within the Maratha genealogy of Shivaji and the
Peshwas, Varma certainly appropriated this regional history for the wider Indian nation and
dissolved her complex roots in it. Nevertheless, this passage also reveals residual local anxieties
about Jhansi and Bundelkhand’s own claims to her. Rather than simply see Varma’s novel as an
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assimilatory nationalist narrative, it also has to be understood as expressing its own regional
vision of the Indian nationalist past.
Critics have lauded the strong women characters in Varma’s fiction and his insistent
focus on the physical courage of Lakshmibai in particular. One of the achievements of the novel
was its successful straddling of the masculine world of the battlefield and the feminine world of
the queen’s boudoir. Building on fragmentary historical references to women’s contributions to
the rebel military effort at Jhansi, Varma detailed Lakshmibai’s plans to train all her attendants
for battle, and throughout, these ordinary women fight alongside the men, even as they giggle
and fuss over flowers. Lakshmibai shows an unusual interest in military matters and statecraft,
which her doting father indulges from her childhood. At the same time, she is a maternal figure
for all around her, and she finds the time to cook special dishes and feed her son amid all the
strategic planning.
Varma’s depiction of Lakshmibai was informed by the progressive, Hindu reformist
approach described earlier, which allowed him to project into the past both the need for social
reform as well as the proper limits of such reform. His elaboration of the carefree childhood that
nurtures Lakshmibai’s interests underscores the necessity of female education and the
importance of cherishing daughters alongside sons. Through Lakshmibai’s contempt for her
husband’s frivolities, Varma also underlines her independence of thought and conviction. And
yet, the novelist disciplines Lakshmibai into a model, if progressive and educated, nationalist
widow whose likes and preferences are in the service of a higher political cause and who is
unwavering in her chastity and devotion.8
Her abrupt transformation from excitable tomboy to
determined mother after a brief marriage to a man several years her senior is accepted as natural
in the text. This traumatic thrusting into adulthood through early marriage and childbirth was a
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common experience for young Marathi Brahman girls of the mid-nineteenth century, including
for Chimabai, the girl whom Lakshmibai’s father, Moropant Tambe, married at the same time
that she married Gangadharrao. In glossing over the painful realities of early marriage and
enforced widowhood with Lakshmibai’s own eager austerity and political determination, Varma
drew on a century-long moderate, reformist Hindu discourse that advocated ascetic widowhood
as a desirable, and suitably progressive, middle ground between the radical poles of immolation
(sati) and the right to remarriage (Chakravarti 1989, 1998; O’Hanlon 1991).
Vrindavanlal Varma, then, rendered existing fragmentary narratives into coherent and
pleasurable yet historical common sense about Lakshmibai, Jhansi, and the rebellion. It is, to
reiterate, the novel’s powerful claim to verisimilitude that has rendered his work just as
authentic, and yet more authoritative, than the stirring poetry of Chauhan, which invoked local
Bundela ballads as its claim to truth. Fact and fiction have blurred not only in the novel but also
in its enthusiastic reception, and Varma has emerged as one of the central authoritative figures on
the subject, with fiction writers and biographers after him explicitly citing him as a biographical
source for their narratives on Lakshmibai.9
Imagining a utopian past within an explicitly realist
frame, the novel is an excellent example of how the modern historical novel in different Indian
languages did the work of history, in terms of authoritatively depicting the past as it (surely) had
been while simultaneously molding it to fit a desired nationalist imagination.
D. B. PARASNIS, J HANSHI S ANSTHANCHYA M AHARANI L AKSHMIBAISAHEB YANCHE C HARITRA
(1894, 1938)
The next layer in this excavation of the Lakshmibai archive is Dattatraya Balawant
Parasnis’s Marathi biography of Lakshmibai, Jhanshi Sansthanchya Maharani Lakshmibaisaheb
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yanche Charitra (A Biography of Queen Lakshmibai of Jhansi), published in 1894. The first
detailed study of Lakshmibai in Marathi, this text served as a crucial source for information, as
well as a point of departure, for Varma’s novel. Parasnis was a participant in the new discourse
on history among Western-educated intellectuals in late nineteenth-century Maharashtra that
sought to create a modern Marathi historiography based on patriotism, pride, and positivism
(Deshpande 2007). Parasnis was a leader in collecting and editing materials as well as in
fashioning self-consciously modern narratives out of them.10
Fear of colonial reprisal had prevented anybody from attempting a truthful history of
Lakshmibai before him, Parasnis noted, but several “nasty rumors” about her in both colonial
sources and their native imitators had spurred him to write an authoritative biography (1894, 2–
3). The heavy reliance on a mixture of sarcasm and unctuous loyalism in his critique of British
and Indian actions during 1857 suggests that this fear of reprisal was still present when Parasnis
wrote. His main argument in the biography was that the British had misunderstood Lakshmibai.
She had taken charge of Jhansi not as a rebel but to rule in the company’s name. Although forced
to defend her city when colonial forces besieged it in March 1858, she had never meant to
oppose the company in the first place. Indians seeking their glorious past had to take pride in her
courage, he argued, but also contest colonial historians who painted her as a scheming rebel (17–
28). Varma would completely reverse Parasnis’s argument in his novel, even as he relied heavily
on the information in it.
Studied alongside its Hindi translation (1938), this late nineteenth-century Marathi text
enables us to examine closely the textual transmission of historical sources and the anticolonial
and regional-linguistic frameworks informing it. Parasnis’s historical method fell on the cusp
between existing Marathi historical writing and new Western practices. For instance, he provided
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extensive footnotes, most of which discussed the reliability of his sources and how he had
procured them. However, he also quoted liberally from secondary sources or important treaties
within the main text, often without any accompanying citations (Parasnis 1894, 3–4, 68–80). In
so doing, he was continuing the earlier practice of Marathi bakhar s (historical prose narratives)
in seamlessly transmitting earlier sources into newer ones (Deshpande 2007, 28–32, 114–17).
These notes reveal an emergent historical imagination through the experimentation with
techniques of history writing and changing attitudes toward questions of transmission. Parasnis
went back and forth between an older method of claiming authority through a respectable
informant and Rankean empiricism. Therefore, in some places he cited Lakshmibai’s son
Damodarrao as his informant, whose authority derived simply from the fact of who he was.
However, Parasnis’s trump card for establishing Lakshmibai’s innocence in the massacre of
Europeans was that no documentary proof pointed to her involvement (1894, 121, 125–26).
Parasnis’s attention to his sources was both intellectual, in terms of their importance for a
modern historical method, and political, as an Indian counterpoint to colonial narratives of 1857.
Eyewitness accounts were powerful in underwriting the authority of colonial histories.
Constructing an alternative narrative of 1857, therefore, also involved constructing an
authoritative archive: Parasnis mentioned a few narratives he acquired from “knowledgeable and
intelligent” people in Gwalior, Indore, and Jhansi, in addition to information supplied by
Damodarrao. He also paraphrased extensively from the as yet unpublished memoir of
Vishnubhat Godse, who had been in Jhansi during the revolt. Parasnis did not mention Godse by
name even once but simply described the source of the information variously as “a native
gentleman,” “a well-read and intelligent man,” and “an old servant of the Rani’s who witnessed
these events” (1894, 13, 147, 190). At several points where he cited a source as being an “Ujjain
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manuscript,” he was also, in fact, quoting from Godse (152, 154, 194). It is possible that Parasnis
kept Godse’s name private in order to avoid bringing any undue attention to him from the
colonial authorities. However, this anonymity and the different descriptions of the same text also
conveyed the impression that his sources were many and varied and, moreover, that they were
authoritative and eyewitness accounts. Godse’s account formed the backbone of the latter half of
Parasnis’s biography and allowed him to claim an authoritative archive for his analysis.
Parasnis also took up “unfounded rumors” about Lakshmibai’s husband Gangadharrao’s
alleged effeminacy. (As noted earlier, Varma’s novel was to obliquely summarize these as an
inordinate fondness for playacting.) He dismissed them, arguing lack of proof:
A lot of people have a lot of opinions about Maharaj Gangadharrao. However,
after perusing the matter carefully we realize that because Maharani
Lakshmibaisaheb turned out so courageous, people have cast aspersions on her
husband. It is natural that a woman’s bravery will cause people to suspect her
husband of lack of potency or manliness. But this does not warrant unfounded
accusations. We have no proof as to the veracity of the stories about
[Gangadharrao]. What’s more, there appears to be a misunderstanding. Some say
he wore bangles! The truth is that he often said, “Now all of us princes [defeated
by the company] have to wear bangles.” (Parasnis 1894, 38–39)
Such a quip to the British resident about how the company had disempowered all the Indian
kings, he went on, had simply been blown out of proportion. Parasnis, therefore, not only
dismissed any bazaar gossip about Gangadharrao but also turned to Lakshmibai’s femininity to
quash any rumors of her husband’s alleged effeminacy.
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Parasnis also harnessed Lakshmibai’s battlefield skills to a specific regional politics of
caste and masculinity. The regeneration of masculinity, of course, was critical to anticolonial
nationalism more generally (Sinha 1995; Chowdhury 1998). However, asserting martial courage
among Brahmans in particular, especially through the historical exploits of the Peshwai, also
figured prominently in the writings of Marathi Brahman nationalist historians of the late
nineteenth century, in the face of both colonial and, increasingly, non-Brahman discourses that
identified Maratha military skills with kshatriya (warrior) qualities (Deshpande 2007, 177–95).
Parasnis’s text repeatedly described Lakshmibai’s overwhelming kshatriya-ness, even as it
upheld her as a Marathi Brahman chieftain, thus claiming this legacy of martial qualities not only
for Maharashtra but also for its Brahmans (1894, 177–82, 331, 346).
Unfortunately, the Hindi translation of Parasnis’s biography provides no information
about the translator, and it is a good hundred pages shorter (Parasnis 1938). There are no
explanations in the text for this condensation, but a close reading of the two versions of the
biography reveals the different temporal and regional contexts within which Lakshmibai’s story
was invoked. The abbreviated translation smoothed out some of the historiographical
“scaffolding” in Parasnis’s original and its ambivalence about the relative reliability of sources
by simply removing his discussion of the existing literature and many of the footnotes. Where
the original had been unsure about some facts, the Hindi translation was now quite certain.11
Published at the height of the nationalist movement, more than thirty years after the original and
nearly a century after the rebellion, it was much more forthright in its criticism of British motives
and actions during and after 1857.
The Hindi translation also placed much less emphasis on the broader Maratha history of
the two previous centuries. In the Marathi original, Parasnis expressed dismay that Lakshmibai’s
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story had gone unheard in Maharashtra, when Marathi people had “special reasons to feel
affectionately towards [her]” (1894, 5). Reclaiming Lakshmibai’s heroism not just for an Indian
national but also a Marathi regional narrative of pride was one of the themes running through
Parasnis’s work; to this end, he placed Jhansi’s eighteenth-century history and its changing
fortunes under the company within a wider history of Maratha expansion and decline. The
Maratha conquest of central India became, in this narrative, part of a national Hindu resistance
against Mughal rule, yet Parasnis was also keen to argue that these expansions “demonstrated to
everyone that we Maharashtrians were radiant, valorous and had pride in our dharma” (12).
When the rebels captured Gwalior in 1858, the ruler Shinde, who had remained loyal to the
company, fled, and Raosaheb Peshwa proclaimed the revival of the Peshwai itself. The rebels,
however, quickly lost this advantage when Shinde brought in reinforcements, and Lakshmibai
was killed in the battle that followed. Although Parasnis was careful to laud the eventual colonial
victory, he dwelt at length on this Peshwa revival, invoking past campaigns and glories in detail
through Lakshmibai’s own voice and even lauding Shinde’s loyalty to his sworn lord, the
Company (276–77).
The Hindi translation was untroubled by these specific Marathi historical demands, but it
did have some of its own. It severely abbreviated Parasnis’s excursions into Maratha history and
recast some of his arguments. The Maratha arrival into Bundelkhand thus appeared here as the
result of the local ruler Chhatrasal’s generosity in giving them land for helping him fight the
Mughals (Parasnis 1938, 25–26). Similarly, while it acknowledged the Peshwa’s “national”
service, it was much more straightforward in its criticism of Shinde’s decision not to rebel in
1857 than the Marathi original had been:
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Had the ruler of Gwalior cared to recall the long, cordial relationship of service to
the Peshwa since the beginning . . . he would have helped him. But he did not. He
ignored the pleas of Raosaheb, the descendant of the glorious Peshwa who
established self-rule and protected his faith; instead he honored his relationship
with foreigners and those of foreign faiths and protected his own rule. This matter
is worth considering carefully in India’s history. (1938, 206)
The 1938 Hindi translation of Parasnis’s biography, then, was much more than the simple
transfer of content to another language, but it is this abridged version that many scholars of 1857
and the events in Jhansi have referenced in their works, albeit without any discussion of these
divergences.12
And yet, diverge it did; it bore the marks of the passage of time and a more
stridently anticolonial political environment, emerging more confident in its assertions. Its
incorporation into a Hindi regional-linguistic domain also imprinted Bundelkhand’s local claims
to nationalist history more strongly on it than the Maratha legacy that the original text had
invoked. Lakshmibai’s heroism-cum-vulnerability served in the Hindi version to illuminate a
generically Indian or Hindu womanhood, glossing over the Marathi original’s caste-inflected
anxieties about effeminacy. As such, the translation served as another smoothing layer in the
accumulating nationalist narrative about Lakshmibai, Jhansi, and 1857.
CHINTAMANRAO VAIDYA, ED. M AZA P RAVAAS : S AN ATHRASHESATTAVAN S AALCHYA
B ANDHACHI H AKIKAT (1907)
We now turn to the memoir by Vishnubhat Godse, the Marathi Brahman who was present
in Jhansi in 1857–58, which would prove a crucial source of information for both Parasnis’s and
Varma’s narratives. It was another modern Marathi historian, Chintamanrao Vaidya, who
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commissioned this memoir in the first place and brought it to Parasnis, then edited and published
it in 1907 as “My Travels: A History of The 1857 Revolt.” Godse was Vaidya’s family priest.
Vaidya asked Godse to write down his experiences in 1884 in exchange for a hundred rupees.13
We cannot ascertain what Vaidya’s brief to Godse was, or the extent to which it
influenced Godse’s composition. The edits that Vaidya made to Godse’s narrative when he did
publish it, however, suggest that even if both had agreed on either a memoir of his travels or a
history of the rebellion, there remained a considerable gap between Vaidya’s expectations and
Godse’s submission.14
In his introduction to the text, Vaidya pointed out that eyewitness
accounts by Indians were critical to a future, truthful history of 1857 and to counter biased
British sources. He went on to clarify,
I must say that I have made very few changes to the original text. I have corrected
the language in some places and written it according to contemporary usage, and I
have edited out some places where I felt the information was excessive. But on
the whole one may say that the text remains the original. Only in two places I
have added five or ten sentences of my own, and those two are in keeping with
the original text. (Vaidya 1907, 3)
A closer look reveals that this was at best a conservative, and at worst a disingenuous
description. Vaidya’s sweeping changes alert us not only to the deep nationalist impulses
underlying modern historiographic practice in India, they also force us to consider more carefully
the methodological complexities through which manuscripts identified as primary sources
entered a modern, authoritative archive for South Asian history.
Vaidya corrected Godse’s prose for grammar as he transcribed the manuscript from the
longhand Modi into the print-friendly Nagari script, and, along with chapter divisions and titles,
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he also inserted Sanskrit couplets as epigraphs and Marathi couplets within the text. He heavily
embellished descriptions and added excited utterances. He inserted details of Lakshmibai’s
horse-riding skills and elaborated on the grandeur of her palace. Vaidya despaired at the
preoccupation with ritual in the Marathi Brahman world in central India. Criticizing the rebels’
reliance on astrologers for their battle plans, he editorialized (in Godse’s voice) that this
superstition had definitely declined in recent decades:
There is no doubt that twenty-five years ago the condition of Hinduism and
people’s faith in it were quite different. And it is also true that today such a
formidable rebellion would not have erupted just over the issue of cartridges. It
would indeed seem strange today that when British battalions were marching
from the South and rushing from all directions and on tree after tree guilty and
innocent dead bodies were swinging, people were thinking of feeding Brahmans
and occupied with calculating the arithmetic in long rolls of horoscopes to find
out auspicious dates. But then religious belief was so firm back then that people
trusted the sacred fire to the sharpness of the sword and were convinced that the
auspicious moment would take care of the enemy. (Vaidya 1907, 30–31)
Although critical of its superstitious excesses, Vaidya was struck by this world’s grandeur and
envious of Godse for having glimpsed it. To the description of a Brahman gathering in Gwalior,
he added, “I got to see these extraordinary gatherings of scholars, which was quite an elusive
privilege” (25).
Vaidya was thus attracted and repelled by the very recent, and yet very distant, history of
the people he understood to be his own ancestors. In several places, he changed Godse’s
“Hindustan” to “uttar Hindustan,” reflecting the expansion of this geographic-cultural category
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in his own nationalist imagination. Most importantly, Vaidya transformed the manuscript into an
eyewitness memoir of the rebellion. He rearranged and edited the chapters to foreground the
section on Jhansi and altered the text to suggest Godse’s own presence at various events, even
where Godse revealed other sources for his information (Vaidya 1907, 28).
Vaidya abbreviated Godse’s descriptions of Gangadharrao, retaining only the king’s quip
to the resident about the general loss of power among Indian chiefs that Parasnis, too, had
discussed, and a throwaway reference to his impotence (1907, 48). His approach to Lakshmibai,
however, was rather more complex. Although he embellished Godse’s descriptions of
Lakshmibai to emphasize her essential vulnerability in spite of all her courage (80–81), he did
not celebrate her austerity and patriotism in an idealized widowhood. Instead, Vaidya focused on
her unhappy and loveless marriage. He interpreted her widowhood as “freedom,” emphasizing
that it was her husband’s death and the release from his restrictive bondage that allowed her
innate leadership qualities to find true expression (56–61). Vaidya’s interpretation thus remained
imbricated in contemporary constructions of devoted, nationalist womanhood, and yet it allowed
Lakshmibai’s widowhood itself to serve as a site for imagining anticolonial, modern possibilities,
and for rejecting the feudal degeneracy and oppression that her husband stood for. In later
nationalist representations, the emancipatory possibilities of Lakshmibai’s widowhood would be
foreclosed in the face of their disciplinary potential, as writers such as Varma would harness her
widowhood to emphasize nationalist devotion, chastity, and austerity.
In 1948, it was this heavily edited version of Godse’s travelogue that the novelist
Amritlal Nagar translated into Hindi. The title that Nagar gave it, Ankhon Dekha Gadar (An
Eyewitness to the Revolt), suggests that Vaidya succeeded in his effort to produce Godse’s text
as an authoritative source for the rebellion. Like Varma, Nagar, too, sought sources of the
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rebellion that would allow him to navigate an acceptable middle path between narratives of
fanatical mutineers and of nationalist wars of independence.15
His search anticipated the
subalternist approaches to the rebellion, and he was delighted with the vividness and energy of
Godse’s memoir, albeit as presented by Chintamanrao Vaidya. Nagar’s translation made very
minimal changes to the Godse/Vaidya text, occasionally smoothing details of village and caste
that Godse had provided for some people in Jhansi and simplifying them into “Marathas” (Nagar
1948, 51). He did, however, remove even the fleeting reference to Gangadharrao’s impotence, as
well as Godse’s observation that the prevalence of impotence in Bundelkhand, a result of the
poor quality of the water, had turned the local women toward adultery (Nagar 1948, 54; Vaidya
1907, 51). Regional-national considerations underlay Nagar’s approach to the text as well. He
retained a lot of the Marathi vocabulary and idiom in his Hindi translation, and he defended this
in the preface as a means of both retaining fidelity to the original and of enriching the national
language (Hindi) itself (Nagar 1948, 8). Nagar’s translation was to prove a landmark event, as it
was through his Hindi version that most of the later scholarship on the rebellion in Hindi and
English would access Godse’s remarkable text and make it the preeminent primary source from
an Indian perspective of the events across Bundelkhand at the time.
VISHNUBHAT GODSE, M AZA P RAVAAS : ATHRASHESATTAVAN B ANDACHI H AKIKAT (1884, 1966)
And so to the final layer in our excavation, Vishnubhat Godse’s unabridged Maza
Pravaas, which Datto Vaman Potdar published in 1966.16 A poor young Brahman from the town
of Varsai, Godse’s family had been in service with the Peshwai but ridden with debt. Godse
traveled north to Gwalior with his uncle in March 1857 in search of income from a religious
ceremony to relieve this debt burden. Instead, he found himself amid the great upheaval. His
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text, written over two decades after he returned to Varsai, defies easy classification. A
chronological account of his travels, it is also an analysis of the rebellion. Unfolding events
shape his itinerary, but so does the urge for pilgrimage. His prose is rich with emotion with not
infrequent touches of humor and irony. His own voice, constructed as that of a disinterested
observer caught up in events not of his making, comes startlingly close to that of a modern
travelogue. Yet Godse’s overall conception of the rationale for his journey, his political analysis,
and his narrative prose remain firmly rooted in an older world that was changing rapidly under
colonialism by the time he wrote. He was a penniless traveler outside colonial power structures,
with a worldview that was aware of political shifts yet unclear about their wider implications. At
the same time, as a Marathi Brahman, he had relatively privileged access to a century-long
network of pilgrimage and migration in the Gangetic plain. Indeed, the rebellion was by no
means the narrative’s organizing principle; the last section of the text, which Vaidya was to
exclude, focused almost exclusively on his pilgrimage to various holy places.
Godse went north with a mixture of nervousness and excitement. Although the Gwalior
ceremony was cancelled, he headed to Jhansi and found patronage with Lakshmibai. Godse
witnessed General Hugh Rose’s capture of Jhansi in March 1858 and nearly lost his life to the
invading soldiers. He left Jhansi frightened and penniless for Kalpi to the north, only to witness
Rose capture this city as well. From there, Godse and his uncle went to Bithur, then to
Chitrakoot, but they were robbed a couple of times. In Banda, they narrowly escaped being
hanged as rebels, then traveled with Tatya Tope’s retinue for a while, and then completed the
sacred pilgrimage to Prayag, Kashi, and Ayodhya, also visiting Lucknow. In early 1860, he
returned home after nearly three years.
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Godse drew heavily on the narrative tradition of the Marathi bakhar, a prose genre that
sought to make narrative sense of the past (Deshpande 2007, 19–39). In keeping with the form’s
descriptive strategies, he crafted plausible conversations between his characters and embellished
them with emotional outbursts in direct speech. He harnessed his literary talents to convey
particular moods or the horror of events, regularly emplotting important events in well-known
mythical tales. For example, he plotted Nanasaheb Peshwa’s flight from Bithur following the
Kanpur massacre in the idiom of Rama’s exile from Ayodhya, describing the entire city in
mourning at his departure, underscoring both the tragedy of the event and Nanasaheb’s charisma
(Godse 1966, 49–52). Along with his own experiences, Godse also included details of rebel
actions from other places and cited his sources through familiar bakhar categories of
“knowledgeable people” or “well-spoken, intelligent Brahmans” (32, 36, 56, 140–41). His
detailed description of the siege and of the atmosphere of death and fear after the British sacking
of Jhansi is graphic and very moving.
Godse interpreted the rebellion as a dharmic response to British interference in Hindu and
Muslim religion and inheritance. He was awestruck by Lakshmibai and waxed eloquent about
her efficient administration as well as her love of long baths (Godse 1966, 60–67). His
assessment of the rebellion’s outcome was, like the conclusions of many bakhar s, a moral one:
[Nanasaheb said that] he would not give the order for the women and children to
be killed. In no time or kingdom has the practice of killing women been
sanctioned. Hearing this speech, however, the soldiers couldn’t contain
themselves and rushing to the prison these cruel Chandalas killed all the women
and children will swords and guns. They sent letters ordering that the women and
children of the whites that were under capture should be killed. . . . And so in
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Jhansi, Delhi, Agra and elsewhere the white women and children were killed. At
that time the great wise and old men began saying that this time we had hoped
that the black people would be victorious and the whites would go back to vilayet
and Hindu-Musalmani would reign once again. But those hopes have now been
dashed because the Vedas and the Shastras forbid the killing of women. Instead
this cruel act has ensured the failure of the black people. (43–44)
Exonerating Nanasaheb Peshwa of the massacre, Godse nevertheless laid the blame for the
failure of the revolt squarely on the rebels themselves. Jhansi, in his view, suffered especially
because of the long-term moral pollution generated in the town:
This is how I understood it. There are too many impotent men in Bundelkhand.
Either for that reason or because of the soil itself, the women are adulterous. Plus,
what with Jhansi being the capital, it had become very polluted. Recall the
episode I narrated earlier about the sweeper woman. But through Lakshmibai’s
leadership, the Lord ensured that the city was purified. Now the earlier disabilities
no longer remain. (107)
Godse had heard a story from local priests about an affair between a local Brahman and a
sweeper woman from the days of Madhavrao Peshwa (in the late eighteenth century). With the
Brahman’s help, the sweeper woman seduces all the Brahmans in town and retains evidence of
their affairs with her; when her liaison with the first Brahman is uncovered and they face
imprisonment, she defiantly unfurls the evidence, thus casting the entire Brahman community
into shame. Afraid that the Peshwa will find out and pronounce a heavy penance, the two
principal offenders are cast out of the city and the rest purified with appropriate ceremonies
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(Godse 1966, 68–72). It was this episode that he invoked as a moral transgression when trying to
make sense of the chaos all around him in Jhansi.17
Godse also speculated about Gangadharrao’s alleged impotence and elaborated in some
detail his fondness for dressing and living as a woman for several days every month, complete
with saris, jewelry, wigs, and menstrual segregation. He described a conversation between the
Jhansi chief and the British resident, who asked him about his unusual behavior. In a quip that
has been alluded to earlier, Gangadharrao told the resident that this was nothing strange, as the
British arrival had led all the big rulers of the subcontinent to wear bangles; he was but a small
chief! Godse did not relate this alleged effeminacy or impotence to Lakshmibai’s masculine
qualities of battlefield bravery. He noted that despite the freedom available to her, Lakshmibai
remained chaste and devout, but her fondness for male dress and her status as ruler generated no
special commentary in the text. It was in describing her desperate situation after escaping from
the Jhansi siege that Godse turned to her femininity. Just a few miles outside Kalpi, he tells us,
Lakshmibai got her period while on the road. She had no money or clothes and was unsure about
how to approach Raosaheb Peshwa for help; at such a time, it was not surprising that she would
burst into tears (Godse 1966, 96–97). Despite Godse’s formulaic descriptions of various women
as chaste and dutiful or his speculations about adulterous Bundelkhandi women, Lakshmibai’s
individual personality is not reduced in his narrative to a template of idealized womanhood,
whether Marathi, Bundelkhandi, or Indian. Although he takes literary recourse to her femininity
to emphasize her helplessness, she emerges primarily as a benevolent ruler and strategist.
Godse clearly viewed Hindustan as a cultural sphere distinct from his own. He didn’t
speak the language well and relied heavily on “our people” (Dakshini Brahmans, in his words).
At the same time, he was aware that the holy places on the Ganga that he visited were within a
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shared sacred geography as the Narmada and Godavari closer to his own home, and he was
familiar with the history that had produced this Marathi network in Bundelkhand. He employed
colonial administrative terms and knew of British suzerainty. Yet he also traveled almost
exclusively within the older Maratha world of patronage to Brahmans and the memory of
Peshwa power. He identified people by loose geographic-cultural regions, but his negotiation of
these regional differences was not, as it was to be in later narratives by Parasnis, Vaidya, and
Varma, in a nationalist vocabulary of an overarching, subcontinental Indian-ness. Instead, it was
closer to Indo-Persian theories of moral ecology, with the very water available in Bundelkhand
generating sexual and political impotence, and thereby both moral and political decline in his
analysis (Bayly 1996, 25–26; 1998).
Godse returned after his travails with only a large pitcher of Ganga water and very little
money. He wrote down this astonishing narrative in 1884 at Vaidya’s behest, but he died without
receiving the money he had been promised. Conducting its own rather remarkable travels
through various textual expressions over the last century or more, however, his memoir has come
to serve as an important foundational text for a nationalist archive and imagination of 1857. This
is a fulfillment that Godse himself almost certainly never would have imagined. Maza Pravaas
provided an on-the-spot, documented view of Jhansi in revolt and the suffering of ordinary
people. Most importantly, his details of Lakshmibai’s everyday routine helped nationalist
discourse “rescue” her from obscurity as well as condemnation in colonial documents as a
defeated, cruel feudal chief. She could, with his text produced in the archive as an authoritative
Indian eyewitness primary source, be fixed not just in legend and memory but also in history as a
benevolent and patriotic queen.
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CONCLUSION
In uncovering these particular layers of the Lakshmibai narrative, it is easy to dismiss
Vaidya’s editing of Godse’s text as a young nationalist’s fabrication of a document to fit his
political ends, to criticize Parasnis for exaggerating the extent of his sources, or to fume at a
shoddy, abridged translation of Parasnis’s detailed biography. Parasnis’s own contemporaries, in
particular, were none too sure about his scruples in gathering sources (Khobrekar 1972; Sarkar
1955). Taken individually, each of these examples could be critiqued as simply being bad
scholarship, but I would venture to suggest that taken together, these practices were more
ambiguous and invite deeper exploration of the emergence of an archivally based Indian
historiography.
Before colonial education, scribal transmission necessarily involved the updating of texts
for form and content, adapting them to current circumstances, and incorporating older texts into
new ones The notion of authorship encompassed both composer and copyist. However, led by
Indological scholarship in the mid-nineteenth century, modern scholars sought to break with
older scribal methods; the idea of a pure text shifted from refining its content to a complete lack
of interference with it, with a split between author and copyist/editor (Novetzke 2003). The
modern idea of an original manuscript and author, the importance of fidelity to this original
through quotations, citations, and the careful mapping of separate manuscript versions, dates, and
copyists in editing and commentary gained currency.
Yet the world of manuscript gathering, editing, and printing remained much more
diverse, at least in Maharashtra and arguably in other regions as well. As nationalists hunted out
all manner of documents for publication, this decentralized and unregulated research activity
took many different forms. Editors chose from multiple copies to create master documents and
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gave long, dense manuscripts titles and chapter divisions. In keeping with earlier scribal
practices, they often “corrected” language and expression. Others published documents with
legal affidavits attached as to their pristine, untouched condition (Deshpande 2007, 114–24).
The search for authentic documents matched the hunt for desirable documents that,
nationalist historians were convinced, were out there. This search generated impatience with
documents when they didn’t conform to the real narrative that was firmly believed to exist
outside the text and underlined the argument that it was just a question of the proper document
being brought to light. It was in this wider environment that Chintamanrao Vaidya edited
Godse’s text; historical methods and imperatives from different sides of the colonial divide
collided in his approach to it. Although his desire to turn Godse’s narrative into a reliable
primary source stemmed from a colonial-modern environment, Vaidya used older scribal
methods in order to achieve this goal. In this he was not alone; in 1892, Kashinath Pandurang
Parab issued the fifth edition of the Marathi translation of James Grant Duff’s famous 1826
work, History of the Mahrattas. Writing well after Marathi historians had unearthed fresh
information and critiqued a number of Duff’s arguments, Parab wished to incorporate these
changes to “improve” the text. He lamented, however, that the Director of Public Instruction’s
stipulation that the original could not be altered had prevented him from doing so; he only
corrected the spelling of a few names, which he went on to list.18
The Hindi translation of
Parasnis’s biography, too, “updated” it for current times and for its own regional audience. As
we have seen, it recast and pruned many of Parasnis’s excursions into Maratha history; many of
the Marathi couplets that had adorned the original were also replaced with Hindi ones throughout
the text in the translation. While circulated and used within a firmly modern historiographical
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environment in the 1930s, it continued to employ an older method that this modern
historiography consciously attempted to supersede.
Historical novels were critical to the normalization of nationalist pasts into historical
common sense. Straddling historiographical and literary spheres, many novels simultaneously
created the narratives they firmly believed existed outside the available archival record. Varma’s
creative yoking of his wider imaginative reconstruction to visible traces in the historical record
underlined the idea that the archives were only the tip of the iceberg, that with the right
combination of conviction and creativity toward these traces, the truth in all its detail would be
revealed. These documentary traces continued to anchor imaginative stories, but their ultimate
authority was also undercut, as they were deemed incapable of fully revealing the past.
Nationalist fictions and convictions, then, could trump historical proof, even as they successfully
sought to contribute to this broader reconstruction of the past. That such convictions have
shaped, and continue to shape, South Asian politics in recent decades, from Somnath to Ayodhya
within India and beyond, is well known (Thapar 2005).
Varma’s Hindi novel on Jhansi and the Hindi version of Parasnis’s biography, when
contrasted with the Marathi writers and materials, also serve to highlight here the multiple local
and regional contexts that produced self-consciously nationalist expressions. Varma sought to
simultaneously localize and nationalize the events of 1857–58 in Jhansi. He gave the rebellion a
deeper social and linguistic texture even as he elevated a local chief into a nationalist heroic
pantheon, as many “Walter Scotts” in other Indian languages were doing with similar local
chiefs and heroic histories.19
This process of localizing the national and vice versa, however, was
fraught with anxieties; it involved negotiations between the contested claims of different regions
and communities to specific narratives and figures.
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These claims have expanded in recent decades to include those of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh
through the figures of lower-caste viranganas (women heroes) who fought British forces during
the revolt. The most prominent of these is Jhalkaribai, a woman of the Kori caste in
Lakshmibai’s entourage, believed to have served as Lakshmibai’s look-alike and decoy, thus
enabling the queen to successfully escape during the siege. Seeking archival basis for these
counternarratives of 1857, Dalit representations of Jhalkaribai have invoked Godse and Varma as
proof of her historicity (Narayan 2006, 119; Gupta 2007, 1743). Yet she is absent from all the
incarnations of Godse’s text, which only refer generally to Lakshmibai’s female servants. It was
Vrindavanlal Varma’s novel that first evoked Jhalkari textually as a loyal companion, one who
dutifully served her queen by putting her own life in danger. He, too, tapped into existing local
memories of Lakshmibai’s dramatic escape, some of which undoubtedly included the Jhalkari
story. He learned about the popularity of Jhalkari’s exploits among the Kori community and
mentioned having met her own grandson (Varma 1946, 344). Her caste status and dialect formed
part of the Bundelkhandi social and linguistic landscape that he sought to present. As noted
earlier, Varma’s statements about collecting these local memories are generalized, making it
difficult to match any one recollection or its source to a particular event in the novel. However, it
is testimony both to the success of his historical-literary project and to the importance of the
historical novel within nationalist narratives more broadly that, rather than cast a cloud of doubt
on the novel as a whole, this ambiguity has enveloped the entire text with the aura of truth. As
Gupta and Narayan have shown, much of the later twentieth-century Dalit literature on
Jhalkaribai retained Varma’s basic nationalist kernel of the Jhalkari story but inverted it—in this
Dalit discourse, it is Jhalkari’s patriotism, her masculine valor, and her initiative that enable
Lakshmibai and Jhansi to rebel.
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Finally, the approach in the different texts with regard to Lakshmibai’s womanhood
suggests the complex and shifting transactions between gender and community—regional, caste-
based, or national—in the construction of heroic histories.20
Later texts annexed particular
fragments from Godse’s descriptions of the individual personalities of Lakshmibai and
Gangadharrao to larger arguments, albeit with contradictory, discordant notes. Vaidya’s detailing
of an essential femininity through Lakshmibai’s vulnerability nevertheless saw an emancipatory
potential in her widowhood. Parasnis emphasized her bravery to counter suspicion of her
husband’s impotence, but he also employed her womanhood to underwrite her innocence in the
rebellion. Varma, by contrast, determinedly smoothed her widowhood and unconventionality
into a single-minded, devout nationalism. All these representations erased any hint not only of
Lakshmibai’s sexuality but also that of Gangadharrao, whose lifestyle as described in Godse’s
text became, in later narratives, at best a misunderstanding, and at worst a marker of feudal
decadence. Godse’s narration of local memories and rumors of Gangadharrao’s lifestyle resonate
with Abdul Halim Sharar’s description of the Nawab of Awadh Nasir-ud-din Haidar (r. 1827-
1837) as an effeminate man given to dressing and living as a woman. (Sharar 1975, 57) While
Sharar’s account draws heavily on nineteenth-century Orientalist depictions of Awadh’s
decadence and Godse’s draws on local knowledge in Jhansi, it is notable that both rulers, shorn
of their political authority by the Company in the years preceding the Rebellion, are represented
through these gendered images of emasculation. Given their geographic and temporal proximity,
it is worth probing more deeply the links between such existing, local, pre-colonial
interpretations of political decline in the vocabulary of physical impotence and Orientalist
representations of native princes as effeminate and degenerate. In this sense, Parasnis and Vaidya
may well have been correct to interpret Godse’s details about Gangadharrao as a metaphor of
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political impotence, even though their nationalist approach also led them to suppress these details
from their own appropriations of Godse’s text.
Scholarship on the emergence of a modern Indian historiography has emphasized the
deep epistemological break that came with colonialism and the dominance of statist and
majoritarian concerns in nationalist narratives (Chatterjee 1993; Nandy 1995; Lal 2004).
Although precolonial narrative traditions have received close attention in the context of their
creative heyday (Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 2003; Wagoner 1993; Guha 2004) and
Orientalist underpinnings and governmental practices (Dirks 2001), their impact on nationalist
historiographies, as well as the complexities of editorial method in the making of usable sources,
have received much less attention. This paper has identified three kinds of textual transmission
that went into the making of a nationalist archive and an enduring, popular history of Rani
Lakshmibai and Jhansi during 1857: the editing and publication of a narrative identified as a
primary source, the translation of a published history into another language, and the absorption
of historical materials into a creative work of fiction. These narrative practices, self-consciously
undertaken as both modern and nationalist, have informed the emergence of modern
historiography since the nineteenth century and have been critical to the creation of a valuable,
usable corpus of narrative sources from previous centuries in many different Indian languages. In
probing closely some of the contradictions that informed this dispersal of historical ideas and
truths about Jhansi and 1857, I have argued for a more textured transition from early modern to
colonial-modern forms of historiography and the complex intersection of the local, regional-
linguistic, and national in shaping an Indian nationalist narrative.
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1. For a partial list, see Durga Prasad Mishra (1884), Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1909),
Mahasweta Devi (1956), D. V. Tamhankar (1958), Joyce Lebra-Chapman (1986), and Tapti Roy
(2006). There are numerous other works in different Indian languages, including two films in
Hindi and one in Telugu (Modi 1953; Gautam 1956, Sathyanand 1988).
2. See Subhadra Kumari Chauhan (2000, 56–65): “Bravely she fought, the queen of
Jhansi!” This long ballad on Lakshmibai by Chauhan (1904–48), the poet famous for her
rhythmic and rousing nationalist verse, is the most oft-quoted of her writings and the most well
known of Lakshmibai’s popular representations. The collected works do not specify the date
when it was composed.
3. As a member of the Liberal Party, Varma was a critic of Gandhian civil disobedience.
He participated in the loyalist Aman Sabhas that proliferated across the United Provinces after
World War I and served on the Jhansi district local board from 1936 to 1952. Varma contested
the national elections in 1952 from Jhansi but lost. On the Aman Sabhas, see Peter D. Reeves
(1966). For a detailed overview of Varma’s politics, literary outlook, and oeuvre, see Shashi
Bhushan Singhal (1989).
4. Many later historical and fictional works in Hindi and Marathi, too numerous to list
here, draw extensively on Varma. I have chosen his novel as exemplary of a popular historical
imagination precisely for the influential role it has played in the last few decades.
5. The earliest that I have found is by Durga Prasad Mishra (editor of the weekly Uchit
Vakta, the “cheapest Hindi newspaper in the world . . . with enormous circulation”), who
emphasized the Rani’s bravery and the uniqueness of a beautiful young woman battling British
rule (1884). The author’s name also appears as Durga Prasad Sharma on one of the front pages.
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Early texts such as this one in Hindi and other languages may, of course, be examined for their
anticolonial or nationalist content and are important to the wider development of nationalist
perspectives about 1857. For reasons of space, and to sharpen the focus on how particular
writings and sources became critical to the nationalist narrative about Lakshmibai, this paper
restricts its analysis to the texts by Varma, Parasnis, Vaidya, and Godse.
6. Many of Varma’s novels were titled after heroic women from central India, such as
Virata ki Padmini (1933), Mrignayani (1950), Ahilyabai (1955), Maharani Durgavati (1961),
and Ramgarh ki Rani (1961).
7. The reason for the massacre led by the daroga Bakshish Ali, for instance, is explained
as revenge for a humiliating public beating from a British officer (Varma 1946, 180). Similarly,
Lakshmibai and other leaders set the date for simultaneous rebellion across northern India for
May 31, 1857 in the novel, but the sepoy Mangal Pandey’s “unfortunate hurry to rebel” (by
firing at his British officer at the Barrackpore cantonment on March 29) destabilizes these plans
(173–74).
8. The one reference to the regular ritual head shaving required of Brahman widows at
this time is also harnessed to Lakshmibai’s political goals. She wishes to have her head shaved
so that she can wear male dress more comfortably, but colonial officials refuse to allow her to
travel to Benares for the ceremony (Varma 1946, 150).
9. Many Hindi critics have treated Varma’s text as biography (Singhal 1989, 81). A
recent English example is Tapti Roy’s Raj of the Rani (2006). Roy seeks to narrate both the life
and the legend of Lakshmibai together, and Varma’s novel uncritically forms the backbone for
the sections that have no archival sources.
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10. Parasnis wrote several books in English and Marathi, including Sri Mahapurush
Brahmendraswami Dhavadshikar: Charitra va Patravyavahara (1900), Musalmani Amadanitila
Marathe Sardar (1900), The Sangli State (1917), and he coauthored, with C. A. Kincaid, the
multivolume History of the Maratha People (1918–25).
11. For example, Parasnis is not sure about whether the jail daroga’s name was Bakshish
Ali; the translation, however, simply states it as such (1938, 54).
12. Recent scholarship has pointed to the power relations that inform translation practices
more generally and the complex functions of abridgment and erasure in making literary texts
accessible to a new readership (Sadana 2007; Niranjana 1992). Acknowledging and closely
examining the distance traveled by translations from original texts and their ideological
environments is particularly critical for historical narratives pivotal to the archival knowledge of
particular, momentous events, and debates about their historicity (Eaton 2003).
13. Vaidya was the author of The Mahabharata: A Criticism (1904), The Riddle of the
Ramayana (1906), and The Downfall of Hindu India (1928), among other works in English and
Marathi. According to Vaidya, the lawyer Mahadev Apte advised him in 1884 against publishing
Godse’s text in order to avoid any government reprisal while Godse was still alive. He shelved
the project until 1907, after Godse had died, and paid his son the promised hundred rupees
(Godse 1966, xxi–xxii).
14. In this article, this heavily edited version of Godse’s text is cited as (Vaidya 1907)
and the unedited text, issued by Datto Vaman Potdar, as (Godse 1966).
15. This is now a rich strand of analysis in rebellion historiography (Bhadra 1985;
Mukherjee 1985; Roy 1994), emphasizing in the main the multiple motives for revolt among
different classes and in different regions across northern India. An early biographical text in this
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approach was the Bengali novelized biography by Mahasweta Devi (1956). Nagar himself
published an account of the stories he collected across Awadh about the rebellion (1957).
16. The original Modi manuscript is preserved at the Bharat Itihasa Sanshodhak Mandal,
Pune, where Chintamanrao Vaidya deposited it in 1922.
17. This story is similar to the one in Varma’s novel about the banished intercaste couple
who became Lakshmibai’s spies during the rebellion. This would suggest that Varma might have
had access to Godse’s original manuscript. It is more likely that both drew from stories retold in
the Jhansi area and recast them for their own historical explanations (Varma 1946, 36–40).
18. This introduction was appended to the preface of the sixth edition that Parab issued in
1916, adding that it had been published “exactly as before,” without making “any important
changes” (Parab 1892).
19. Laudatory biographies of several pioneering historical novelists in India usually label
them the “Walter Scott” of their language, as was the case with Bankimchandra Chatterjee in
Bengali or Hari Narayan Apte in Marathi. At least two critics refer to Varma as Hindi’s Walter
Scott (Saxena 1982, 75; Sahay 1982, 653).
20. As Charu Gupta has pointed out, contemporary Dalit histories of 1857 foregrounding
the viranganas continue these shifting transactions. They not only disrupt dominant nationalist
constructions of gender and community identity by displacing the Brahman queen with her Dalit
counterpart, but also they have the potential for allowing Dalit women themselves to stake
stronger, feminist positions and to critique caste as well as patriarchal oppression in society,
including within Dalit communities (Gupta 2007, 1744).
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