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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 ([email protected]) 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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18

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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19

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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21

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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22

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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23

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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24

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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25

(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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26

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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28

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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29

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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30

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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———. 1999. Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai. New Delhi: Kali for

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CHATTERJEE, PARTHA. 1993 Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.

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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



.

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).