Rani of Jhansi

Lakshmibai Newalkar, the Rani of Jhansi (pronunciationⓘ; born Manikarnika Tambe; 19 November 1828 — 18 June 1858),[1][2] was the Maharani consort of the princely state of Jhansi in Maratha Empire from 1843 to 1853 by marriage to Maharaja Gangadhar Rao Newalkar. She was one of the leading figures in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, who became a national hero and symbol of resistance to the British rule in India for Indian nationalists.

Quotes

• She inspires us till today and shall continue to inspire future generations till eternity. None would have imagined that Manikarnika Tambe, as Lakshmi Bai was known before marriage, belonging to a simple Marathi Brahmin family from Varanasi, could weave a chronicle of valor, courage, queenship, and sacrifice.
  • Rawal M. S. & Rawal Y. S. (2019). Saffron swords. Garuda Prakashan.

• [Rani Lakshmibai is] "personable, clever and beautiful"... "the most dangerous of all Indian leaders".
  • Hugh Rose in David, Saul (2003), The Indian Mutiny: 1857, London: Penguin; p. 367 Ashcroft, Nigel (2009), Queen of Jhansi, Mumbai: Hollywood Publishing;

• Whatever her faults in British eyes may have been, her countrymen will ever remember that she was driven by ill-treatment into rebellion and that she lived and died for her country, we cannot forget her contribution to India.'
  • — Colonel Malleson in Edwardes Red Year: one of two quotations to begin pt. 5, ch. 1 (p. 111); History of the Indian Mutiny was begun by John Kaye but Malleson both rewrote parts of it and completed the work.

• The British Raj in India has treated Savarkar’s book as most dangerous for their existence here. So it has been banned. But it has been read by millions of our countrymen including my humble self. In trying to elevate the events of 1857, which interested historians and administrators had not hesitated to call for decades as an ‘Indian Mutiny’, to its right pose of Indian War of Independence, albeit a foiled attempt at that, it is not a work of patriotic alchemist turning base mutineering into noble revolutionary action.... But the greatest value of Savarkar’s book lies in its gift to the nation of that Torch of Freedom in whose light a humble I and a thousand other Indians have our dear daughters named after Laxmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi. Even Netaji Bose in a fateful hour had to form an army of corps after Rani of Jhansi. But for Savarkar’s discovery of that valiant heroine, Rani of Jhansi should have been a long-forgotten ‘mutineer’ of the nineteenth-century.
  • Subbarao about the book by V.D. Savarkar, quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 (2019)