- Lived:
- born in Benares (Varanasi) — in 1827 by British records, 1835 by popular Indian tradition, and c. 1828–1830 by the reckoning of historians Tapti Roy and Rudrangshu Mukherjee, which this book follows; died near Gwalior, 17–18 June 1858. The life happened in Bithur, Jhansi, Kalpi and Gwalior — a two-hundred-mile stretch of central India.
- Field:
- queenship and war — the last ruling Rani of Jhansi, and the face of the Rebellion of 1857
- The Big Idea:
- When the East India Company declared her adopted son legally nonexistent and took her state under the Doctrine of Lapse, she fought the annexation for four years with lawyers — and when war came anyway, she held a fortress under siege, escaped through an army, seized Gwalior fort at dawn, and died in cavalry uniform, sword in hand.
- In their words:
- "Merā Jhānsī nahīṅ dūṅgī" — "I will not give up my Jhansi" — as the Australian lawyer John Lang recorded her vow in 1854, four years before she made it good.
- If you remember one thing:
- The general who destroyed her armies wrote into his official despatch that she was "the best and bravest military leader of the rebels" — the enemy's own epitaph for a widow not yet thirty.