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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 inshaping the Indian nationalist imagination make it an excellent entry pointinto an investigation of nationalist pasts and their archival bases. This paperexamines a concatenation of influential narratives of different genres that

have become critical sources for a history of the rebel leader Rani Lakshmibaiof Jhansi and for configuring her as an icon of heroic Indian womanhood. It places each of these sources, ranging from late nineteenth-century Marathitexts to mid-twentieth-century Hindi narratives, within their specific spatio-temporal setting and highlights the contradictory regional projects underlyingapparently smooth nationalist narratives. Through a close examination of themaking of the Lakshmibai archive, the author argues that a consideration ofthe editorial and textual practices that went into the making of reliable and usable archives for a modern historiography is critical to the unpacking ofnationalist historiographies.

OF THE MANY REBEL leaders of the Great Rebellion in 185758 against the EastIndia Companys rule, perhaps the most enigmatic is the rani (queen) of thesmall state of Jhansi, Lakshmibai. Lakshmibai lost her kingdom to the Companyunder Lord Dalhousies doctrine of lapse when her husband, Gangadharrao, diedin 1853 with only an adopted heir. When Company soldiers stationed in Jhansirebelled and killed all the Europeans in June 1857, Lakshmibai took charge of

the state. A few months later, she joined the rebels Nanasaheb and Tatya Topein fighting the British and died in battle in early 1858.

The historiography of the rebellion is well known for the polarity of positionsabout its status as a mutiny or political revolt and for the sheer volume of sourcematerial, ranging from official documents to personal narratives. Personalities ofthe rebellion, such as the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (Dalrymple2006) or the rebel sepoy Mangal Pandey (Mehta 2005; Mukherjee 2005), con-tinue to fuel scholarly and popular debate about their motives and actions.The rebellions representations are also remarkable for the British and Indiannationalist imaginations that they have fired from its immediate aftermath to

Prachi Deshpande ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.

The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 67, No. 3 (August) 2008: 855879. 2008 The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. doi:10.1017/S0021911808001186


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this day. The historiographical intensity of this episode makes it an excellent entrypoint into an examination of nationalist historiographies and the making ofauthoritative archives for the narration of momentous events and pasts.

I undertake such an examination in this paper by considering closely the histor-

iography on Rani Lakshmibai, who is prominent in these nationalist imaginations.Colonial discourses presented her as an Orientalized Jezebel who justified thebrutal peace that Britain established after the rebellion (Jerinic 1997; Sharpe1993; Singh 2002). In the dominant Indian nationalist narrative, she hasemerged as a heroic mother battling for her sons patrimony, an iconic figure inthe gendered representations of the modern Indian nation. Layers of these rep-resentations have encrusted around the figure of Lakshmibai for a century and ahalf.1 I attempt here to peel back these layers to peer closely at some of the intel-

lectual practices and political contexts that have produced this powerful nationalistnarrative on Lakshmibai. Rather than a quest for the original Lakshmibai, I seekinstead to point to the contradictions that underlie such a search. This paper is not asurvey of all the major works, scholarly and popular, on Lakshmibai or Jhansi.Instead of dwelling on the most well-known representations, such as V. D. Savar-kars Indian War of Independence (1909) or Subhadra Kumari Chauhans rousingHindi poem Khoob ladi mardani woh to jhansiwali rani thi,2 this paper takes up aparticular concatenation of influential prose writings in Hindi and Marathi toexamine closely the transmission of information about Lakshmibai. This archival

excavation, accordingly, begins with the more recent representations and digs itsway 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 theapparent smoothness and gradual accumulation of objective knowledge aboutLakshmibais life and actions. Through a close examination of the making of anarchive about this particular moment in history, I wish to highlight here morebroadly the multiple and often discordant projects that underlie such apparentlycoherent pasts, along with their very archival building blocks.

VRINDAVANLAL VARMA, J HANSI KI RANI (1946)

Among the most powerful representations of Lakshmibai is the Hindi novel Jhansi ki Rani (The Queen of Jhansi) by Vrindavanlal Varma (18891969),

1For a partial list, see Durga Prasad Mishra (1884), Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1909), MahaswetaDevi (1956), D. V. Tamhankar (1958), Joyce Lebra-Chapman (1986), and Tapti Roy (2006). Thereare numerous other works in different Indian languages, including two films in Hindi and one in

Telugu (Modi 1953; Gautam 1956, Sathyanand 1988).2See Subhadra Kumari Chauhan (2000, 5665): Bravely she fought, the queen of Jhansi! Thislong ballad on Lakshmibai by Chauhan (190448), the poet famous for her rhythmic androusing nationalist verse, is the most oft-quoted of her writings and the most well known ofLakshmibais popular representations. The collected works do not specify the date when it wascomposed.

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a progressive nationalist and lawyer and one of the most prolific novelists of thetwentieth century. A native of Jhansi whose grandfather fought with the rebels,

Varma was a constitutional moderate and active in Jhansis local politics fromthe 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 novelsall celebrated events, personalities, and battles from central India and gave amodern historical coherence to the cultural region called Bundelkhand.Indeed, seeking and bringing to light this Bundelkhandi past was the overarch-ing theme binding all of Varmas novels, but his novel on Jhansi was his magnumopus. As it is one of the most influential of the nonscholarly layers on the revolt inJhansi and its queen, let us begin with this novel.4

Stirring writings about Lakshmibais valor had appeared in Hindi from at least

the 1880s.

5

Varma

s novel, however, successfully normalized Lakshmibai as anationalist heroine. She was one among many female heroic characters in hisnovels who represented an idealized Indian womanhood and was constructedas the gendered site par excellence of a progressive Indian modernity withdeep roots in tradition.6 Indeed, his novel served to produce the local depthand national contours of this tradition, even as it historicized the heroic figureof Lakshmibai. A principal feature of the modern historical novel in manyIndian languages was that its creators saw their task as being simultaneously his-torical 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 inHindi and, like many of his contemporaries in other languages, approachedthe past with a mixture of conviction and curiosity. He was dismayed at biasedcolonial sources that revealed only fragments of Lakshmibai: Diplomatic corre-spondence suggested that she had negotiated for peace with the company until

3As a member of the Liberal Party, Varma was a critic of Gandhian civil disobedience. He partici-pated in the loyalist Aman Sabhas that proliferated across the United Provinces after World War Iand served on the Jhansi district local board from 1936 to 1952. Varma contested the national elec-

tions in 1952 from Jhansi but lost. On the Aman Sabhas, see Peter D. Reeves (1966). For a detailedoverview of Varmas politics, literary outlook, and oeuvre, see Shashi Bhushan Singhal (1989).4Many later historical and fictional works in Hindi and Marathi, too numerous to list here, drawextensively on Varma. I have chosen his novel as exemplary of a popular historical imagination pre-cisely for the influential role it has played in the last few decades.5The 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 theRanis bravery and the uniqueness of a beautiful young woman battling British rule (1884). Theauthors name also appears as Durga Prasad Sharma on one of the front pages. Early texts suchas this one in Hindi and other languages may, of course, be examined for their anticolonial ornationalist 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 sourcesbecame critical to the nationalist narrative about Lakshmibai, this paper restricts its analysis tothe texts by Varma, Parasnis, Vaidya, and Godse.6Many of Varmas novels were titled after heroic women from central India, such as Virataki Padmini (1933), Mrignayani (1950), Ahilyabai (1955), Maharani Durgavati (1961), andRamgarh ki Rani (1961).

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the very end, while many memoirs blamed her for the massacre of British womenand children. Neither explained why she decided to arm against the company orhow had she become a skilled horsewoman and military strategist in spite ofbeing 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 sureexisted: Along with colonial archives, he also sought Indian perspectives. Herelied heavily on D. B. Parasniss Marathi biography of Rani Lakshmibai forbasic information. He also used a memoir by Vishnubhat Godse, a MarathiBrahman man who was in Jhansi in early 1858 and wrote in detail about itssiege and recapture by the British. In Varmas own words, he harassed countlessold men for their memories. His creative talents, then, would be harnessed tobring these fading memories, attractive for their immediacy and presumed

as authentic, to historical light. These archival efforts would later serve both aspreface and as appendix, and as the armor of authenticity for the novel.Indeed, it is this claim to verisimilitude that underwrites the novels authorityas a historical source.

Varma placed Lakshmibai within both an immediate and a long-term histori-cal context. He began with a brisk genealogy of the Marathi-speaking chiefs ofJhansi, who had migrated to central India as part of the military expansion bythe eighteenth-century Maratha state of the Deccan and set up many suchsmall principalities. The last head of this empire, the Peshwa Bajirao II, had

himself settled in Bundelkhand after the British defeated the Marathas in1818; Lakshmibais father was part of the retinue that moved there with him.Born in 1832, she grew up with the Peshwas adopted son, Nanasaheb, theother infamous rebel of 1857.

Throughout the novel, Lakshmibai invokes a genealogy of resistance that spansboth this longer Maratha history as well as a more local past. She worships bothheroic Maratha rulers such as Shivaji as well as those from Bundelkhand such asChhatrasal, who resisted Mughal expansion into their territories. She is, likethem, an Indian patriot, part of a common history. Through this genealogy,

Varma gives her actions in 1857 roots and meaning. He also explains small empiri-cal details within a larger nationalist framework. For instance, a Mr. Martin wrotefrom Agra to Lakshmibais son, Damodarrao, well after the revolt, declaring thatshe had had no hand in the massacre of Europeans at Jhansi. This letter, firstused by D. B. Parasnis in 1894 after he acquired it from Damodarrao, was regularlyquoted thereafter as proof of Lakshmibais innocence in later nationalist histories.Historians, however, were not able to ascertain how Mr. Martin had known ofLakshmibais innocence or how he had managed to escape the massacre, thus

casting some doubt on the letters reliability. In Varma

s novel, all is explained:

The battle raged on the second day as well. By evening the British hadnothing left to eat. They scoured every inch of the fort but foundnothing. They sent word to the Rani pleading hunger.



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The Rani had rotis prepared. She told Kashibai, You must take theseto the British somehow. You know all the secret routes. Take only Sundarand Mundar with you. Light a torch wherever necessary.

The women knew of the Ranis benevolence, but hadnt seen howlimitless it was. Kashi asked respectfully, My lady, would the Britishhave helped us had we been in their place?

The Rani replied, Why become like them? Moreover, I dont wantto spoil our future plans by starving them now. She smiled.

The three friends loaded the food on to their backs and took themthrough the tunnels to the British. One of them was a man named

Martin, who had seen where they came from. When they came againthe next day with food, he quietly followed them, and then escaped toAgra. They didnt even realize that he had done so. (1946, 179)

Varma, therefore, presents Lakshmibai as humane, and he emphasizes thishumanity as a mark of her difference from the British colonialists, even as heexplains how Martin knew of her innocence of the massacre. Other suchexamples abound in the novel.7 Establishing this coherence in the narrative ofthe past, achieved through the creation of imaginary but appropriate characters,

conversations, and plot situations, is certainly one of the primary objectivesandchief attractionsof the historical novel and one of the reasons that its historicityhas to be studied together with its literary qualities.

If clarifying cause and effect is one means through which this fullness isachieved, another is by rendering historical events and personalities quotidian,palpable, and familiar. Varma treated small bits of information in the archivalrecord as points of entry into a more elaborate world, emphasizing these tracesas tantalizing glimpses of what must have been. First, this brought the peopleof the time into sharper relief: In the novel, Lakshmibai s attendants smile,

joke, and get infatuated with rebels, and when ordinary Jhansi residents arenot burning with the desire for rebellion, they pray, listen to music, and appreci-ate the beauty of spring. Second, this technique powerfully brought home thepoverty of the archival record, even as Varma relied heavily on it to buttressthe novels own flights of imagination and his own analysis. For example, he inter-preted a surviving letter from Lakshmibai asking colonial officials for permissionto conduct her sons thread ceremony as being, in reality, a cover for a politicalmeeting of rebel leaders (Varma 1946, 11617, 15153). Without this

7The reason for the massacre led by the daroga Bakshish Ali, for instance, is explained as revengefor a humiliating public beating from a British officer (Varma 1946, 180). Similarly, Lakshmibai andother leaders set the date for simultaneous rebellion across northern India for May 31, 1857 in thenovel, but the sepoy Mangal Pandeys unfortunate hurry to rebel (by firing at his British officer atthe Barrackpore cantonment on March 29) destabilizes these plans (17374).



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explanation, the letter meant little; at the same time, it served as the ultimate,elusive proof of Lakshmibais strategic plans for revolt.

Varma expertly used the device of conversations in regional dialects and col-loquial 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 ofBundelkhand: Varmas characters belong to different castes and religions andspeak in different dialects. This, needless to say, also gave the rebellion deeppopular roots. Through these conversations, Varma critiqued both colonialracism as well as the feudalism of many native princes. He criticized Lakshmibaishusbands arbitrary rule: Gangadharrao callously pokes fun at the efforts of thelower castes to adopt the sacred thread and banishes a Brahman man and anuntouchable woman from his kingdom for conducting a scandalous love affair

(Varma 1946, 34

47). Gangadharrao is a typically decadent feudal chief in thenovel, preoccupied with the stage, dancers, and playacting in general.Lakshmibai articulates, by contrast, Varmas 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 underher benevolent rule. Hindus and Muslims in Jhansi do not clash for publicspace during religious processions, and they are equally loyal to the queen,

who is deeply pious herself but respectful of all faiths (Varma 1946, 2089). Atthe 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 nation-

alist genealogy of medieval patriots, the novel nevertheless had to negotiate somethorny questions of regional particularities and national unity. Part of this had todo with Varmas own modernist and democratic discomfort with the rebel sepoysdreams of restoring the empire. Indeed, the idea of the people, and the powerof their aspirations to goad princely rulers into rebellion against colonialism, is aprominent theme throughout the novel. Elsewhere, Varma also tried to rational-ize the rebels invocation of Mughal rule in the early twentieth-century vocabu-lary of centralized government and provincial autonomy:

[Tatya Tope told the Rani,] I met a lot of eager Muslims; they say thatthe Empire should be established again in Hindustan. I said, Swarajya[self-rule] and Empire can actually co-exist. When they asked, how, Isaid that people would establish their own rule in their regions and pro-

vinces, and while the Emperor could certainly intervene in them, his seal

would be on inter-provincial issues and big matters. His own rule wouldextend only to the areas around Delhi. All the provinces and regions willfight jointly in the name of self-rule and the Emperor against a commonoutside enemy, and this is how together, they will govern Hindustan.(1946, 129)



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Nation and region, however, were also negotiated through the figure of Lakshmibai.Although she lived and ruled in Bundelkhand, Lakshmibais immediate social world

was peopled with Marathi Brahmans and their customs. Delighted that a Marathidrama company would be visiting Jhansi, the queens attendant Mundar says,

My lady, the play will be in Marathi!

The Rani said, Marathi in Jhansi! It is true that there are Maharash-trians in large numbers, that is fine, and those people may well have aplay staged for their entertainment; but the company will find royalpatronage only if they stage the play in Hindi. I might have been bornin a Maharashtrian family myself, but I think of myself not as a Mahar-

ashtrian 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 isnt. Thisis my decision. (1946, 230)

Given his location in the Hindi heartland of India, Varmas brisk pruning ofLakshmibais Marathi roots would seem to point to the familiar demand for hom-ogeneity and assimilation that the nation makes on its regions. By placing her

within the Maratha genealogy of Shivaji and the Peshwas, Varma certainly appro-priated this regional history for the wider Indian nation and dissolved her

complex roots in it. Nevertheless, this passage also reveals residual local anxietiesabout Jhansi and Bundelkhands own claims to her. Rather than simply see

Varmas novel as an assimilatory nationalist narrative, it also has to be understoodas expressing its own regional vision of the Indian nationalist past.

Critics have lauded the strong women characters in Varmas fiction and hisinsistent focus on the physical courage of Lakshmibai in particular. One of theachievements of the novel was its successful straddling of the masculine world ofthe battlefield and the feminine world of the queens boudoir. Building on frag-mentary historical references to womens contributions to the rebel militaryeffort at Jhansi, Varma detailed Lakshmibais plans to train all her attendants forbattle, and throughout, these ordinary women fight alongside the men, even asthey giggle and fuss over flowers. Lakshmibai shows an unusual interest in militarymatters and statecraft, which her doting father indulges from her childhood. At thesame time, she is a maternal figure for all around her, and she finds the time to cookspecial dishes and feed her son amid all the strategic planning.

Varmas depiction of Lakshmibai was informed by the progressive, Hindureformist approach described earlier, which allowed him to project into the

past both the need for social reform as well as the proper limits of suchreform. His elaboration of the carefree childhood that nurtures Lakshmibaisinterests underscores the necessity of female education and the importance ofcherishing daughters alongside sons. Through Lakshmibais contempt for herhusbands frivolities, Varma also underlines her independence of thought and



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conviction. And yet, the novelist disciplines Lakshmibai into a model, ifprogressive and educated, nationalist widow whose likes and preferences are inthe service of a higher political cause and who is unwavering in her chastityand devotion.8 Her abrupt transformation from excitable tomboy to determined

mother after a brief marriage to a man several years her senior is accepted asnatural in the text. This traumatic thrusting into adulthood through early mar-riage and childbirth was a common experience for young Marathi Brahmangirls of the mid-nineteenth century, including for Chimabai, the girl whomLakshmibais father, Moropant Tambe, married at the same time that shemarried Gangadharrao. In glossing over the painful realities of early marriageand enforced widowhood with Lakshmibais own eager austerity and politicaldetermination, Varma drew on a century-long moderate, reformist Hindu dis-

course that advocated ascetic widowhood as a desirable, and suitably progressive,middle ground between the radical poles of immolation (sati) and the right toremarriage (Chakravarti 1989, 1998; OHanlon 1991).

Vrindavanlal Varma, then, rendered existing fragmentary narratives intocoherent and pleasurable yet historical common sense about Lakshmibai,Jhansi, and the rebellion. It is, to reiterate, the novels powerful claim to verisimi-litude that has rendered his work just as authentic, and yet more authoritative,than the stirring poetry of Chauhan, which invoked local Bundela ballads as itsclaim 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 author-itative figures on the subject, with fiction writers and biographers after him expli-citly 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 excel-lent example of how the modern historical novel in different Indian languages didthe work of history, in terms of authoritatively depicting the past as it (surely) hadbeen while simultaneously molding it to fit a desired nationalist imagination.

D. B. PARASNIS, JHANSHI SANSTHANCHYA MAHARANI L AKSHMIBAISAHEB YANCHE

CHARITRA (1894, 1938)

The next layer in this excavation of the Lakshmibai archive is DattatrayaBalawant Parasniss Marathi biography of Lakshmibai, Jhanshi Sansthanchya

8The one reference to the regular ritual head shaving required of Brahman widows at this time isalso harnessed to Lakshmibais 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 forthe ceremony (Varma 1946, 150).9Many Hindi critics have treated Varmas text as biography (Singhal 1989, 81). A recent Englishexample is Tapti Roys Raj of the Rani (2006). Roy seeks to narrate both the life and the legendof Lakshmibai together, and Varmas novel uncritically forms the backbone for the sections thathave no archival sources.



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Maharani Lakshmibaisaheb yanche Charitra (A Biography of Queen Lakshmibaiof 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 Varmas novel. Parasnis was a participant in the new discourse on history

among Western-educated intellectuals in late nineteenth-century Maharashtrathat sought to create a modern Marathi historiography based on patriotism,pride, and positivism (Deshpande 2007). Parasnis was a leader in collectingand editing materials as well as in fashioning self-consciously modern narrativesout of them.10

Fear of colonial reprisal had prevented anybody from attempting a truthfulhistory of Lakshmibai before him, Parasnis noted, but several nasty rumorsabout her in both colonial sources and their native imitators had spurred him

to write an authoritative biography (1894, 2

3). The heavy reliance on amixture of sarcasm and unctuous loyalism in his critique of British and Indianactions during 1857 suggests that this fear of reprisal was still present when Para-snis wrote. His main argument in the biography was that the British had misun-derstood Lakshmibai. She had taken charge of Jhansi not as a rebel but to rule inthe Companys name. Although forced to defend her city when colonial forcesbesieged it in March 1858, she had never meant to oppose the Company inthe first place. Indians seeking their glorious past had to take pride in hercourage, he argued, but also contest colonial historians who painted her as a

scheming rebel (1728). Varma would completely reverse Parasniss argumentin his novel, even as he relied heavily on the information in it.

Studied alongside its Hindi translation (1938), this late nineteenth-centuryMarathi text enables us to examine closely the textual transmission of historicalsources and the anticolonial and regional-linguistic frameworks informing it.Parasniss historical method fell on the cusp between existing Marathi historical

writing and new Western practices. For instance, he provided extensive foot-notes, most of which discussed the reliability of his sources and how he had pro-cured them. However, he also quoted liberally from secondary sources orimportant treaties within the main text, often without any accompanying citations(Parasnis 1894, 34, 6880). In so doing, he was continuing the earlier practice ofMarathi bakhars (historical prose narratives) in seamlessly transmitting earliersources into newer ones (Deshpande 2007, 2832, 11417). These notesreveal an emergent historical imagination through the experimentation withtechniques of history writing and changing attitudes toward questions of trans-mission. Parasnis went back and forth between an older method of claiming auth-ority through a respectable informant and Rankean empiricism. Therefore,

10Parasnis wrote several books in English and Marathi, including Sri Mahapurush Brahmendras- wami Dhavadshikar: Charitra va Patravyavahara (1900), Musalmani Amadanitila MaratheSardar (1900), The Sangli State (1917), and he coauthored, with C. A. Kincaid, the multivolumeHistory of the Maratha People (191825).



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in some places he cited Lakshmibais son Damodarrao as his informant, whoseauthority derived simply from the fact of who he was. However, Parasnisstrump card for establishing Lakshmibais innocence in the massacre of Eur-opeans was that no documentary proof pointed to her involvement (1894, 121,

12526).Parasniss attention to his sources was both intellectual, in terms of their

importance for a modern historical method, and political, as an Indian counter-point to colonial narratives of 1857. Eyewitness accounts were powerful in under-

writing the authority of colonial histories. Constructing an alternative narrative of1857, therefore, also involved constructing an authoritative archive: Parasnismentioned a few narratives he acquired from knowledgeable and intelligentpeople in Gwalior, Indore, and Jhansi, in addition to information supplied by

Damodarrao. He also paraphrased extensively from the as yet unpublishedmemoir of Vishnubhat Godse, who had been in Jhansi during the revolt. Parasnisdid not mention Godse by name even once but simply described the source of theinformation variously as a native gentleman, a well-read and intelligent man,and an old servant of the Ranis who witnessed these events (1894, 13, 147,190). At several points where he cited a source as being an Ujjain manuscript,he was also, in fact, quoting from Godse (152, 154, 194). It is possible that Para-snis kept Godses name private in order to avoid bringing any undue attention tohim from the colonial authorities. However, this anonymity and the different

descriptions of the same text also conveyed the impression that his sourceswere many and varied and, moreover, that they were authoritative and eyewitnessaccounts. Godses account formed the backbone of the latter half of Parasnissbiography and allowed him to claim an authoritative archive for his analysis.

Parasnis also took up unfounded rumors about Lakshmibais husbandGangadharraos alleged effeminacy. (As noted earlier, Varmas novel was to obli-quely summarize these as an inordinate fondness for playacting.) He dismissedthem, 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 becauseMaharani Lakshmibaisaheb turned out so courageous, people have castaspersions on her husband. It is natural that a woman s bravery willcause people to suspect her husband of lack of potency or manliness.But this does not warrant unfounded accusations. We have no proof asto the veracity of the stories about [Gangadharrao]. Whats more, thereappears to be a misunderstanding. Some say he wore bangles! Thetruth is that he often said, Now all of us princes [defeated by theCompany] have to wear bangles. (Parasnis 1894, 3839)

Such a quip to the British resident about how the Company had disempoweredall the Indian kings, he went on, had simply been blown out of proportion.



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Parasnis, therefore, not only dismissed any bazaar gossip about Gangadharrao butalso turned to Lakshmibais femininity to quash any rumors of her husbandsalleged effeminacy.

Parasnis also harnessed Lakshmibais battlefield skills to a specific regional

politics of caste and masculinity. The regeneration of masculinity, of course,was critical to anticolonial nationalism more generally (Chowdhury 1998; Sinha1995). However, asserting martial courage among Brahmans in particular,especially through the historical exploits of the Peshwai, also figured prominentlyin the writings of Marathi Brahman nationalist historians of the late nineteenthcentury, in the face of both colonial and, increasingly, non-Brahman discoursesthat identified Maratha military skills with kshatriya (warrior) qualities(Deshpande 2007, 17795). Parasniss text repeatedly described Lakshmibais

overwhelming kshatriya-ness, even as it upheld her as a Marathi Brahman chief-tain, thus claiming this legacy of martial qualities not only for Maharashtra butalso for its Brahmans (1894, 17782, 331, 346).

Unfortunately, the Hindi translation of Parasniss biography provides noinformation about the translator, and it is a good hundred pages shorter (Parasnis1938). There are no explanations in the text for this condensation, but a closereading of the two versions of the biography reveals the different temporal andregional contexts within which Lakshmibais story was invoked. The abbreviatedtranslation smoothed out some of the historiographical scaffolding in Parasniss

original and its ambivalence about the relative reliability of sources by simplyremoving his discussion of the existing literature and many of the footnotes.

Where the original had been unsure about some facts, the Hindi translationwas 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 duringand after 1857.

The Hindi translation also placed much less emphasis on the broader Marathahistory of the two previous centuries. In the Marathi original, Parasnis expresseddismay that Lakshmibais story had gone unheard in Maharashtra, when Marathipeople had special reasons to feel affectionately towards [her] (1894, 5).Reclaiming Lakshmibais heroism not just for an Indian national but also aMarathi regional narrative of pride was one of the themes running through Para-sniss work; to this end, he placed Jhansis eighteenth-century history and its chan-ging fortunes under the Company within a wider history of Maratha expansion anddecline. The Maratha conquest of central India became, in this narrative, part of anational Hindu resistance against Mughal rule, yet Parasnis was also keen to argue

that these expansionsdemonstrated to everyone that we Maharashtrians wereradiant, valorous and had pride in our dharma (12). When the rebels captured

11For example, Parasnis is not sure about whether the jail darogas name was Bakshish Ali; thetranslation, however, simply states it as such (1938, 54).



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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 Peshwarevival, invoking past campaigns and glories in detail through Lakshmibais own

voice and even lauding Shindes loyalty to his sworn lord, the Company (27677).The Hindi translation was untroubled by these specific Marathi historical

demands, but it did have some of its own. It severely abbreviated Parasniss excur-sions into Maratha history and recast some of his arguments. The Maratha arrivalinto Bundelkhand thus appeared here as the result of the local ruler Chhatrasalsgenerosity in giving them land for helping him fight the Mughals (Parasnis 1938,

25

26). Similarly, while it acknowledged the Peshwa

s

national

service, it wasmuch more straightforward in its criticism of Shindes decision not to rebel in1857 than the Marathi original had been:

Had the ruler of Gwalior cared to recall the long, cordial relationship ofservice to the Peshwa since the beginning he would have helped him.But he did not. He ignored the pleas of Raosaheb, the descendant of theglorious Peshwa who established self-rule and protected his faith; insteadhe honored his relationship with foreigners and those of foreign faiths

and protected his own rule. This matter is worth considering carefullyin Indias history. (1938, 206)

The 1938 Hindi translation of Parasniss biography, then, was much more thanthe 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 intheir 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 antic-olonial political environment, emerging more confident in its assertions. Its incor-poration into a Hindi regional-linguistic domain also imprinted Bundelkhand slocal claims to nationalist history more strongly on it than the Maratha legacythat the original text had invoked. Lakshmibais heroism-cum-vulnerabilityserved in the Hindi version to illuminate a generically Indian or Hindu woman-hood, glossing over the Marathi originals caste-inflected anxieties about effemi-nacy. As such, the translation served as another smoothing layer in theaccumulating nationalist narrative about Lakshmibai, Jhansi, and 1857.

12

Recent scholarship has pointed to the power relations that inform translation practices more gen-erally and the complex functions of abridgment and erasure in making literary texts accessible to anew readership (Sadana 2007; Niranjana 1992). Acknowledging and closely examining the distancetraveled by translations from original texts and their ideological environments is particularly criticalfor historical narratives pivotal to the archival knowledge of particular, momentous events, anddebates about their historicity (Eaton 2003).



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CHINTAMANRAO VAIDYA, ED. MAZA PRAVAAS: SAN ATHRASHESATTAVAN SAALCHYA

BANDACHI HAKIKAT (1907)

We now turn to the memoir by Vishnubhat Godse, the Marathi Brahman

who was present in Jhansi in 185758, which would prove a crucial source ofinformation for both Parasniss and Varmas narratives. It was another modernMarathi historian, Chintamanrao Vaidya, who commissioned this memoir inthe first place and brought it to Parasnis, then edited and published it in 1907as My Travels: A History of The 1857 Revolt. Godse was Vaidyas familypriest. Vaidya asked Godse to write down his experiences in 1884 in exchangefor a hundred rupees.13

We cannot ascertain what Vaidyas brief to Godse was, or the extent to which

it influenced Godse

s composition. The edits that Vaidya made to Godse

s narra-tive when he did publish it, however, suggest that even if both had agreed oneither a memoir of his travels or a history of the rebellion, there remained a con-siderable gap between Vaidyas expectations and Godses submission.14 In hisintroduction to the text, Vaidya pointed out that eyewitness accounts byIndians were critical to a future, truthful history of 1857 and to counter biasedBritish 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 con-temporary usage, and I have edited out some places where I felt theinformation was excessive. But on the whole one may say that the textremains the original. Only in two places I have added five or ten sen-tences 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 disingen-uous description. Vaidyas sweeping changes alert us not only to the deep nation-

alist impulses underlying modern historiographic practice in India, they alsoforce us to consider more carefully the methodological complexities through

which manuscripts identified as primary sources entered a modern, authoritativearchive for South Asian history.

Vaidya corrected Godses prose for grammar as he transcribed the manu-script from the longhand Modi into the print-friendly Nagari script, and, along

13Vaidya was the author ofThe 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 Godsestext in order to avoid any government reprisal while Godse was still alive. He shelved theproject until 1907, after Godse had died, and paid his son the promised hundred rupees (Godse1966, xxixxii).14In this article, this heavily edited version of Godses text is cited as (Vaidya 1907), and the uneditedtext, issued by Datto Vaman Potdar, is cited as (Godse 1966).



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with chapter divisions and titles, he also inserted Sanskrit couplets as epigraphsand Marathi couplets within the text. He heavily embellished descriptions andadded excited utterances. He inserted details of Lakshmibais horse-ridingskills and elaborated on the grandeur of her palace. Vaidya despaired at the pre-

occupation with ritual in the Marathi Brahman world in central India. Criticizingthe rebels reliance on astrologers for their battle plans, he editorialized (inGodses voice) that this superstition had definitely declined in recent decades:

There is no doubt that twenty-five years ago the condition of Hinduismand peoples faith in it were quite different. And it is also true that todaysuch a formidable rebellion would not have erupted just over the issue ofcartridges. It would indeed seem strange today that when British batta-lions were marching from the South and rushing from all directions and

on tree after tree guilty and innocent dead bodies were swinging, peoplewere thinking of feeding Brahmans and occupied with calculating thearithmetic in long rolls of horoscopes to find out auspicious dates. Butthen religious belief was so firm back then that people trusted thesacred fire to the sharpness of the sword and were convinced that theauspicious moment would take care of the enemy. (Vaidya 1907, 3031)

Although critical of its superstitious excesses, Vaidya was struck by this world sgrandeur 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 gather-ings of scholars, which was quite an elusive privilege (25).

Vaidya was thus attracted and repelled by the very recent, and yet verydistant, history of the people he understood to be his own ancestors. In severalplaces, he changed Godses Hindustan to uttar Hindustan, reflecting theexpansion of this geographic-cultural category in his own nationalist imagination.Most importantly, Vaidya transformed the manuscript into an eyewitness memoirof the rebellion. He rearranged and edited the chapters to foreground the sectionon Jhansi and altered the text to suggest Godses own presence at various events,even where Godse revealed other sources for his information (Vaidya 1907, 28).

Vaidya abbreviated Godses descriptions of Gangadharrao, retaining only thekings quip to the resident about the general loss of power among Indian chiefsthat 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 Godses descriptions of Lakshmibai to emphasize heressential vulnerability in spite of all her courage (8081), he did not celebrateher austerity and patriotism in an idealized widowhood. Instead, Vaidya

focused on her unhappy and loveless marriage. He interpreted her widowhoodas freedom, emphasizing that it was her husbands death and the releasefrom his restrictive bondage that allowed her innate leadership qualities to findtrue expression (5661). Vaidyas interpretation thus remained imbricated in con-temporary constructions of devoted, nationalist womanhood, and yet it allowed



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Lakshmibais widowhood itself to serve as a site for imagining anticolonial,modern possibilities, and for rejecting the feudal degeneracy and oppressionthat her husband stood for. In later nationalist representations, the emancipatorypossibilities of Lakshmibais widowhood would be foreclosed in the face of their

disciplinary potential, as writers such as Varma would harness her widowhood toemphasize nationalist devotion, chastity, and austerity.

In 1948, it was this heavily edited version of Godses travelogue that the nove-list Amritlal Nagar translated into Hindi. The title that Nagar gave it, AnkhonDekha Gadar (An Eyewitness to the Revolt), suggests that Vaidya succeededin his effort to produce Godses text as an authoritative source for the rebellion.Like Varma, Nagar, too, sought sources of the rebellion that would allow him tonavigate an acceptable middle path between narratives of fanatical mutineers and

of nationalist wars of independence.

15

His search anticipated the subalternistapproaches to the rebellion, and he was delighted with the vividness andenergy of Godses memoir, albeit as presented by Chintamanrao Vaidya.Nagars translation made very minimal changes to the Godse/Vaidya text,occasionally smoothing details of village and caste that Godse had provided forsome people in Jhansi and simplifying them into Marathas (Nagar 1948, 51).He did, however, remove even the fleeting reference to Gangadharrao s impo-tence, as well as Godses observation that the prevalence of impotence inBundelkhand, a result of the poor quality of the water, had turned the local

women toward adultery (Nagar 1948, 54; Vaidya 1907, 51). Regional-nationalconsiderations underlay Nagars approach to the text as well. He retained a lotof the Marathi vocabulary and idiom in his Hindi translation, and he defendedthis in the preface as a means of both retaining fidelity to the original and ofenriching the national language (Hindi) itself (Nagar 1948, 8). Nagars translation

was to prove a landmark event, as it was through his Hindi version that most ofthe later scholarship on the rebellion in Hindi and English would access Godsesremarkable text and make it the preeminent primary source from an Indian per-spective of the events across Bundelkhand at the time.

VISHNUBHAT GODSE,MAZAPRAVAAS:ATHRASHESATTAVANBANDACHIHAKIKAT (1884, 1966)

And so to the final layer in our excavation, Vishnubhat Godse s unabridgedMaza Pravaas, which Datto Vaman Potdar published in 1966.16 A poor young

15This 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 indifferent regions across northern India. An early biographical text in this approach was the Bengalinovelized biography by Mahasweta Devi (1956). Nagar himself published an account of the storieshe collected across Awadh about the rebellion (1957).16The original Modi manuscript is preserved at the Bharat Itihasa Sanshodhak Mandal, Pune,

where Chintamanrao Vaidya deposited it in 1922.



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Brahman from the town of Varsai, Godses family had been in service with thePeshwai but ridden with debt. Godse traveled north to Gwalior with his unclein March 1857 in search of income from a religious ceremony to relieve thisdebt burden. Instead, he found himself amid the great upheaval. His 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. Hisprose is rich with emotion with not infrequent touches of humor and irony.His own voice, constructed as that of a disinterested observer caught up inevents not of his making, comes startlingly close to that of a modern travelogue.Yet Godses overall conception of the rationale for his journey, his political analy-sis, and his narrative prose remain firmly rooted in an older world that was chan-

ging rapidly under colonialism by the time he wrote. He was a penniless traveleroutside colonial power structures, with a worldview that was aware of politicalshifts yet unclear about their wider implications. At the same time, as aMarathi Brahman, he had relatively privileged access to a century-longnetwork of pilgrimage and migration in the Gangetic plain. Indeed, the rebellion

was by no means the narratives organizing principle; the last section of the text, which Vaidya was to exclude, focused almost exclusively on his pilgrimage tovarious holy places.

Godse went north with a mixture of nervousness and excitement. Although

the Gwalior ceremony was cancelled, he headed to Jhansi and found patronagewith Lakshmibai. Godse witnessed General Hugh Roses capture of Jhansi inMarch 1858 and nearly lost his life to the invading soldiers. He left Jhansi frigh-tened and penniless for Kalpi to the north, only to witness Rose capture this cityas well. From there, Godse and his uncle went to Bithur, then to Chitrakoot, butthey were robbed a couple of times. In Banda, they narrowly escaped beinghanged as rebels, then traveled with Tatya Topes retinue for a while, and thencompleted the sacred pilgrimage to Prayag, Kashi, and Ayodhya, also visitingLucknow. In early 1860, he returned home after nearly three years.

Godse drew heavily on the narrative tradition of the Marathi bakhar, a prosegenre that sought to make narrative sense of the past (Deshpande 2007, 19 39).In keeping with the forms descriptive strategies, he crafted plausible conversa-tions between his characters and embellished them with emotional outburstsin direct speech. He harnessed his literary talents to convey particular moodsor the horror of events, regularly emplotting important events in well-knownmythical tales. For example, he plotted Nanasaheb Peshwas flight from Bithurfollowing the Kanpur massacre in the idiom of Ramas exile from Ayodhya,

describing the entire city in mourning at his departure, underscoring both thetragedy of the event and Nanasahebs charisma (Godse 1966, 4952). Along with his own experiences, Godse also included details of rebel actions fromother places and cited his sources through familiar bakharcategories ofknowl-edgeable people or well-spoken, intelligent Brahmans (32, 36, 56, 14041).



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His detailed description of the siege and of the atmosphere of death and fearafter the British sacking of Jhansi is graphic and very moving.

Godse interpreted the rebellion as a dharmic response to British interferencein Hindu and Muslim religion and inheritance. He was awestruck by Lakshmibai

and waxed eloquent about her efficient administration as well as her love of longbaths (Godse 1966, 6067). His assessment of the rebellions outcome was, likethe conclusions of manybakhars, a moral one:

[Nanasaheb said that] he would not give the order for the women andchildren to be killed. In no time or kingdom has the practice of killing

women been sanctioned. Hearing this speech, however, the soldierscouldnt contain themselves and rushing to the prison these cruelChandalas killed all the women and children will swords and guns.They sent letters ordering that the women and children of the whitesthat were under capture should be killed. And so in Jhansi, Delhi,Agra and elsewhere the white women and children were killed. At thattime the great wise and old men began saying that this time we hadhoped that the black people would be victorious and the whites wouldgo back to vilayet and Hindu-Musalmani would reign once again. Butthose hopes have now been dashed because the Vedas and the Shastrasforbid the killing of women. Instead this cruel act has ensured the failureof the black people. (4344)

Exonerating Nanasaheb Peshwa of the massacre, Godse nevertheless laid theblame for the failure of the revolt squarely on the rebels themselves. Jhansi, inhis view, suffered especially because of the long-term moral pollution generatedin the town:

This is how I understood it. There are too many impotent men inBundelkhand. Either for that reason or because of the soil itself, the

women are adulterous. Plus, what with Jhansi being the capital, it hadbecome very polluted. Recall the episode I narrated earlier about thesweeper woman. But through Lakshmibais leadership, the Lordensured that the city was purified. Now the earlier disabilities nolonger remain. (107)

Godse had heard a story from local priests about an affair between a localBrahman and a sweeper woman from the days of Madhavrao Peshwa (in thelate eighteenth century). With the Brahmans help, the sweeper woman

seduces all the Brahmans in town and retains evidence of their affairs withher; when her liaison with the first Brahman is uncovered and they face imprison-ment, she defiantly unfurls the evidence, thus casting the entire Brahman com-munity into shame. Afraid that the Peshwa will find out and pronounce a heavypenance, the two principal offenders are cast out of the city and the rest purified



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with appropriate ceremonies (Godse 1966, 6872). It was this episode that heinvoked as a moral transgression when trying to make sense of the chaos allaround him in Jhansi.17

Godse also speculated about Gangadharraos alleged impotence and elabo-

rated in some detail his fondness for dressing and living as a woman for severaldays 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 toearlier, Gangadharrao told the resident that this was nothing strange, as theBritish 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 impotenceto Lakshmibais masculine qualities of battlefield bravery. He noted that despite

the freedom available to her, Lakshmibai remained chaste and devout, but herfondness for male dress and her status as ruler generated no special commentaryin the text. It was in describing her desperate situation after escaping from theJhansi siege that Godse turned to her femininity. Just a few miles outsideKalpi, he tells us, Lakshmibai got her period while on the road. She had nomoney or clothes and was unsure about how to approach Raosaheb Peshwa forhelp; at such a time, it was not surprising that she would burst into tears(Godse 1966, 9697). Despite Godses formulaic descriptions of various

women as chaste and dutiful or his speculations about adulterous Bundelkhandi

women, Lakshmibais individual personality is not reduced in his narrative to atemplate of idealized womanhood, whether Marathi, Bundelkhandi, or Indian.Although he takes literary recourse to her femininity to emphasize her helpless-ness, she emerges primarily as a benevolent ruler and strategist.

Godse clearly viewed Hindustan as a cultural sphere distinct from his own.He didnt speak the language well and relied heavily on our people (DakshiniBrahmans, in his words). At the same time, he was aware that the holy places onthe Ganga that he visited were within a shared sacred geography as the Narmadaand Godavari closer to his own home, and he was familiar with the history thathad produced this Marathi network in Bundelkhand. He employed colonialadministrative terms and knew of British suzerainty. Yet he also traveledalmost exclusively within the older Maratha world of patronage to Brahmansand 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 voca-bulary of an overarching, subcontinental Indian-ness. Instead, it was closer toIndo-Persian theories of moral ecology, with the very water available in

17This story is similar to the one in Varmas novel about the banished intercaste couple who becameLakshmibais spies during the rebellion. This would suggest that Varma might have had access toGodses original manuscript. It is more likely that both drew from stories retold in the Jhansiarea and recast them for their own historical explanations (Varma 1946, 3640).



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Bundelkhand generating sexual and political impotence, and thereby both moraland political decline in his analysis (Bayly 1996, 2526; 1998).

Godse returned after his travails with only a large pitcher of Ganga water andvery little money. He wrote down this astonishing narrative in 1884 at Vaidyas

behest, but he died without receiving the money he had been promised. Con-ducting its own rather remarkable travels through various textual expressionsover the last century or more, however, his memoir has come to serve as animportant foundational text for a nationalist archive and imagination of 1857.This is a fulfillment that Godse himself almost certainly never would have ima-gined. Maza Pravaas provided an on-the-spot, documented view of Jhansi inrevolt and the suffering of ordinary people. Most importantly, his details ofLakshmibais everyday routine helped nationalist discourse rescue her from

obscurity as well as condemnation in colonial documents as a defeated, cruelfeudal chief. She could, with his text produced in the archive as an authoritativeIndian eyewitness primary source, be fixed not just in legend and memory butalso in history as a benevolent and patriotic queen.

CONCLUSION

In uncovering these particular layers of the Lakshmibai narrative, it is easy to

dismiss Vaidyas editing of Godses text as a young nationalists fabrication of adocument to fit his political ends, to criticize Parasnis for exaggerating theextent of his sources, or to fume at a shoddy, abridged translation of Parasnis sdetailed biography. Parasniss own contemporaries, in particular, were none toosure about his scruples in gathering sources (Khobrekar 1972; Sarkar 1955).Taken individually, each of these examples could be critiqued as simply beingbad scholarship, but I would venture to suggest that taken together, these prac-tices were more ambiguous and invite deeper exploration of the emergence of anarchivally based Indian historiography.

Before colonial education, scribal transmission necessarily involved theupdating of texts for form and content, adapting them to current circumstances,and incorporating older texts into new ones. The notion of authorship encom-passed both composer and copyist. However, led by Indological scholarship inthe mid-nineteenth century, modern scholars sought to break with olderscribal methods; the idea of a pure text shifted from refining its content to a com-plete 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 thecareful mapping of separate manuscript versions, dates, and copyists in editingand commentary gained currency.

Yet the world of manuscript gathering, editing, and printing remained muchmore diverse, at least in Maharashtra and arguably in other regions as well.



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As nationalists hunted out all manner of documents for publication, thisdecentralized and unregulated research activity took many different forms.Editors chose from multiple copies to create master documents and gave long,dense manuscripts titles and chapter divisions. In keeping with earlier scribal

practices, they often corrected language and expression. Others publisheddocuments with legal affidavits attached as to their pristine, untouched condition(Deshpande 2007, 11424).

The search for authentic documents matched the hunt for desirable docu-ments that, nationalist historians were convinced, were out there. This searchgenerated impatience with documents when they didnt conform to the real nar-rative that was firmly believed to exist outside the text and underlined the argu-ment 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; his-torical methods and imperatives from different sides of the colonial divide col-lided in his approach to it. Although his desire to turn Godses narrative into areliable primary source stemmed from a colonial-modern environment, Vaidyaused older scribal methods in order to achieve this goal. In this he was notalone; in 1892, Kashinath Pandurang Parab issued the fifth edition of theMarathi translation of James Grant Duffs famous 1826 work, History of the Mah-rattas. Writing well after Marathi historians had unearthed fresh information andcritiqued a number of Duffs arguments, Parab wished to incorporate these

changes to improve the text. He lamented, however, that the Director ofPublic Instructions stipulation that the original could not be altered had pre-

vented him from doing so; he only corrected the spelling of a few names,which he went on to list.18 The Hindi translation of Parasniss biography, too,updated it for current times and for its own regional audience. As we haveseen, it recast and pruned many of Parasniss 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 andused within a firmly modern historiographical environment in the 1930s, it con-tinued to employ an older method that this modern historiography consciouslyattempted to supersede.

Historical novels were critical to the normalization of nationalist pasts intohistorical common sense. Straddling historiographical and literary spheres,many novels simultaneously created the narratives they firmly believed existedoutside the available archival record. Varmas creative yoking of his wider imagi-native reconstruction to visible traces in the historical record underlined the ideathat 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

18This 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).



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revealed. These documentary traces continued to anchor imaginative stories, buttheir ultimate authority was also undercut, as they were deemed incapable offully revealing the past. Nationalist fictions and convictions, then, could trumphistorical proof, even as they successfully sought to contribute to this broader

reconstruction of the past. That such convictions have shaped, and continue toshape, South Asian politics in recent decades, from Somnath to Ayodhya

within India and beyond, is well known (Thapar 2005).Varmas Hindi novel on Jhansi and the Hindi version of Parasniss biography,

when contrasted with the Marathi writers and materials, also serve to highlighthere the multiple local and regional contexts that produced self-consciouslynationalist expressions. Varma sought to simultaneously localize and nationalizethe events of 185758 in Jhansi. He gave the rebellion a deeper social and linguis-

tic texture even as he elevated a local chief into a nationalist heroic pantheon, asmany Walter Scotts in other Indian languages were doing with similar localchiefs and heroic histories.19 This process of localizing the national and vice

versa, however, was fraught with anxieties; it involved negotiations between thecontested claims of different regions and communities to specific narrativesand figures.

These claims have expanded in recent decades to include those of Dalits inUttar Pradesh through the figures of lower-caste viranganas (women heroes)

who fought British forces during the revolt. The most prominent of these is Jhalk-

aribai, a woman of the Kori caste in Lakshmibais entourage, believed to haveserved as Lakshmibais look-alike and decoy, thus enabling the queen to success-fully escape during the siege. Seeking archival basis for these counternarratives of1857, Dalit representations of Jhalkaribai have invoked Godse and Varma asproof of her historicity (Gupta 2007, 1743; Narayan 2006, 119). Yet she isabsent from all the incarnations of Godses text, which only refer generally toLakshmibais female servants. It was Vrindavanlal Varmas novel that firstevoked Jhalkari textually as a loyal companion, one who dutifully served herqueen by putting her own life in danger. He, too, tapped into existing local mem-ories of Lakshmibais dramatic escape, some of which undoubtedly included theJhalkari story. He learned about the popularity of Jhalkaris exploits among theKori community and mentioned having met her own grandson (Varma 1946,344). Her caste status and dialect formed part of the Bundelkhandi social and lin-guistic landscape that he sought to present. As noted earlier, Varmas statementsabout collecting these local memories are generalized, making it difficult tomatch 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

19Laudatory biographies of several pioneering historical novelists in India usually label them theWalter Scott of their language, as was the case with Bankimchandra Chatterjee in Bengali orHari Narayan Apte in Marathi. At least two critics refer to Varma as Hindis Walter Scott(Saxena 1982, 75; Sahay 1982, 653).



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and to the importance of the historical novel within nationalist narratives morebroadly that, rather than cast a cloud of doubt on the novel as a whole, this ambi-guity has enveloped the entire text with the aura of truth. As Gupta and Narayanhave shown, much of the later twentieth-century Dalit literature on Jhalkaribai

retained Varmas basic nationalist kernel of the Jhalkari story but inverted itin this Dalit discourse, it is Jhalkaris patriotism, her masculine valor, and herinitiative that enable Lakshmibai and Jhansi to rebel.

Finally, the approach in the different texts with regard to Lakshmibaiswomanhood suggests the complex and shifting transactions between genderand communityregional, caste-based, or nationalin the construction ofheroic histories.20 Later texts annexed particular fragments from Godses descrip-tions of the individual personalities of Lakshmibai and Gangadharrao to larger

arguments, albeit with contradictory, discordant notes. Vaidya

s detailing of anessential femininity through Lakshmibais vulnerability nevertheless saw anemancipatory potential in her widowhood. Parasnis emphasized her bravery tocounter suspicion of her husbands impotence, but he also employed her woman-hood to underwrite her innocence in the rebellion. Varma, by contrast, deter-minedly smoothed her widowhood and unconventionality into a single-minded,devout nationalism. All these representations erased any hint not only ofLakshmibais sexuality but also that of Gangadharrao, whose lifestyle as describedin Godses text became, in later narratives, at best a misunderstanding, and at

worst a marker of feudal decadence.21

Scholarship on the emergence of a modern Indian historiography has empha-sized the deep epistemological break that came with colonialism and the domi-nance of statist and majoritarian concerns in nationalist narratives (Chatterjee1993; Lal 2004; Nandy 1995). Although precolonial narrative traditions have

20As Charu Gupta has pointed out, contemporary Dalit histories of 1857 foregrounding the viran-ganas continue these shifting transactions. They not only disrupt dominant nationalist constructionsof 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 pos-itions and to critique caste as well as patriarchal oppression in society, including within Dalit com-munities (Gupta 2007, 1744).21Godses narration of local memories and rumors of Gangadharraos lifestyle resonate with AbdulHalim Sharars description of the nawab of Awadh Nasir-ud-din Haidar (r. 1827 37) as an effemi-nate man given to dressing and living as a woman (Sharar 1975, 57). While Sharars account drawsheavily on nineteenth-century Orientalist depictions of Awadhs decadence and Godses draws onlocal knowledge in Jhansi, it is notable that both rulers, shorn of their political authority by theCompany in the years preceding the rebellion, are represented through these gendered imagesof emasculation. Given their geographic and temporal proximity, it is worth probing more deeplythe links between such existing, local, precolonial interpretations of political decline in the vocabu-

lary of physical impotence and Orientalist representations of native princes as effeminate anddegenerate. In this sense, Parasnis and Vaidya may well have been correct in interpretingGodses details about Gangadharrao as a metaphor of political impotence, even though their nation-alist approach also led them to suppress these details from their own appropriations of Godses text.I thank Manan Ahmed for bringing the Nasir-ud-din reference to my notice and for helping meclarify this point.



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received close attention in the context of their creative heyday (Guha 2004; Rao,Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 2003; Wagoner 1993) and Orientalist underpin-nings and governmental practices (Dirks 2001), their impact on nationalist histor-iographies, as well as the complexities of editorial method in the making of usable

sources, have received much less attention. This paper has identified three kindsof textual transmission that went into the making of a nationalist archive and anenduring, popular history of Rani Lakshmibai and Jhansi during 1857: the editingand publication of a narrative identified as a primary source, the translationof a published history into another language, and the absorption ofhistorical materials into a creative work of fiction. These narrative practices,self-consciously undertaken as both modern and nationalist, have informed theemergence of modern historiography since the nineteenth century and have

been critical to the creation of a valuable, usable corpus of narrative sourcesfrom previous centuries in many different Indian languages. In probing closelysome of the contradictions that informed this dispersal of historical ideas andtruths about Jhansi and 1857, I have argued for a more textured transitionfrom early modern to colonial-modern forms of historiography and thecomplex intersection of the local, regional-linguistic, and national in shaping anIndian nationalist narrative.

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