Rani Lakshmi Bai, better known as the Rani, or queen, of Jhansi was one of the great nationalist heroines of pre-independence India. Born the daughter of a Benares brahmin, she was married off to Raja Gangadhar of Jhansi, but never bore him children – a fact exploited by the British to force her and her adopted baby son into retirement in 1853. The Rani retaliated in 1857, the year of "Mutiny", by leading her personal bodyguard of five hundred Afghan-Pathan warriors to seize Jhansi fort. The British dispatched troops to see off the insurgents, but took seventeen days to blow a beach in the walls of the citadel. Three days of fierce hand-to-hand fighting ensued, in which five thousand soldiers were killed. With her son strapped tightly to her back, the Rani somehow managed to slip through the British net and rejoin the main rebel army at Gwalior, where she rode to her death, dressed as a man using her sword with both hands and holding the reins of her horse in her mouth".
Statues of Rani Jhansi in this heroic pose stand all over northern India. For many in the Independence movement, she was India’s Joan of Arc; a martyr and icon whose example set in motion the freedom struggle that eventually rid the subcontinent to its colonial rulers.
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