There’s scarcely a child in India who hasn’t heard of the courageous Jhansi ki Rani—while my generation grew up memorizing and stridently reciting Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s ‘Khoob ladi mardaani voh to Jhansi vali rani thi’, subsequent generations have met her in picture books and most recently in a Bollywood production which is, as usual, less concerned with historical fact than with creating alternative histories. What then could another telling of this tale have to offer a reader? It turns out—plenty.
To begin with, the child’s perspective is centred throughout the book, even though it is purportedly about a queen celebrated primarily for her martial prowess. Opening with the adoption of a kinsman’s young son, Damodar, by Jhansi’s royal couple to bypass the British Doctrine of Lapse, the narration eschews the hackneyed descriptions of grandeur to focus on Damodar’s bewilderment at acquiring a new mother when he already had a ‘perfectly nice mother’. His silk robes chafe his skin. In fact, silken garments, whenever they appear, are almost always portrayed as irritants rather than desirable, and jewellery is only minimally mentioned, and that too in specific contexts such as the Rani donating her heavy, gem-studded necklace to the cause of the 1857 rebels.