Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi

Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi was the queen of the Maratha-ruled princely state of Jhansi, situated in the north-central part of India. She was one of the leading figures of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and a symbol of resistance to the rule of the British East India Company in the subcontinent.
Originally named Manikarnika and nicknamed Manu, Lakshmibai was born at Kashi to Moropant Tambe and Bhagirathibai Tambe, a Maharashtrian couple. She lost her mother at the age of four. Her father worked at the Peshwa court of Bithoor; the Peshwa brought her up like his own daughter, and called her “Chhabili” for her light-heartedness. She was educated at home.
Because of her father’s influence at court, Lakshmibai had more independence than most women, who were normally restricted to the zenana. She studied self-defence, horsemanship, archery, and even formed her own army out of her female friends at court. Tatya Tope, who would later come to her rescue during the 1857 Rebellion, was her mentor.

Lakshmibai was married to Raja Gangadhar Rao Newalkar, the Maharaja of Jhansi, in 1842, and thus became the queen of Jhansi. After their marriage, she was given the name Lakshmibai, and the Raja was very affectionate towards her. She gave birth to a son, Damodar Rao, in 1851. However, the child died when he was about four months old. After the death of their son, the Raja and Rani of Jhansi adopted Anand Rao. Anand Rao was the son of Gangadhar Rao’s cousin, and was later renamed as Damodar Rao. However, it is said that the Raja of Jhansi never recovered from his son’s death, and he died on 21 November 1853.
Because Damodar Rao was adopted, the British East India Company, under Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, applied the Doctrine of Lapse, rejecting Rao’s claim to the throne and annexing the state to its territories. In March 1854, Lakshmibai was given a pension of 60,000 rupees and ordered to leave the palace and the Jhansi fort.
On May 10, 1857 the Indian Rebellion started in Meerut. This began after the rumour that the new bullet casings for the Enfield rifles were coated with pork and beef fat and unrest began to spread throughout India. During this chaotic time, the British were forced to focus their attentions elsewhere, and Lakshmibai was essentially left to rule Jhansi alone, leading her troops swiftly and efficiently to quell skirmishes initiated by local princes. With the city relatively calm and peaceful in the midst of the unrest in northern India, she conducted the Haldi Kumkum ceremony with great pomp and ceremony before all the women of Jhansi to provide assurance to her subjects and to convince them that the city was under no threat of an attack.

Up to this point, Lakshmibai had been hesitant to rebel against the British, and there is still some controversy over her role in the massacre of Company officials, their wives and children on 8 June 1857 at Jokhan Bagh. This was done to reduce her popularity amongst the countrymen and villagers. Her hesitation finally ended when British troops arrived under Sir Hugh Rose and laid siege to Jhansi on 23 March 1858. An army of 20,000, headed by Tatya Tope, was sent to relieve Jhansi but failed to do so when his forces engaged with the British on 31 March. Along with Sir Hugh Rose there was an Indian general who betrayed Rani Lakshmibai. Three days later the besiegers were able to breach the walls and capture the city. The Rani escaped by night with her son, surrounded by her guards, many of them women.
Along with the young Anand Rao, the Rani decamped to Kalpi along with her troops, where she joined other rebel forces, including those of Tatya Tope. The two moved on to Gwalior, where the combined rebel forces defeated the army of the Maharaja of Gwalior after his armies deserted the rebel forces. They then occupied a strategic fort at Gwalior. However, on 17 June 1858, while battling in full warrior regalia against the 8th (King’s Royal Irish) Hussars in Kotah-ki Serai near the Phool Bagh area of Gwalior, she was killed and someone burnt her. The British captured Gwalior three days later. In the British report of the battle, General Sir Hugh Rose was reported badly hurt and he commented that the Rani was “remarkable for her beauty, cleverness and perseverance” and had been “the most dangerous of all the rebel leaders”.

However, the lack of a corpse to be convincingly identified as that of Lakshmibai convinced Captain Rheese that she had not actually perished in the battle for Gwalior, stating publicly that: “[the] Queen of Jhansi is alive!” It is believed her funeral was arranged on the same day near the spot where she was wounded. Lakshmibai was memorialized in bronze statues at Jhansi and Gwalior, both of which portray her on horseback. Other equestrian statues can be seen in Agra and Pune.
Her father, Moropant Tambey, was captured and hanged a few days after the fall of Jhansi. Her adopted son, Damodar Rao (formerly known as Anand Rao), fled with his mother’s aides. Rao was later given a pension by the British Raj and cared for, although he never received his inheritance. Damodar Rao settled down in the city of Indore, and spent most of his life trying to convince the British to restore some of his rights. He and his descendants took on the last name Jhansiwale. He died on 28 May 1906, at the age of 58 years.

The Lady with the Lamp

First of all, thank you all so much for the feedback on this blog! It really encourages me to go on with the blog and the novels, making a pleasant task even more delightful. Now, let me tell you about the lady with the lamp…

Florence Nightingale was a pioneer, in more ways than one. She managed to put behind the Victorian views on women as inferior than men when it came to intellect, but also made important contributions to the field of nursing. She was born in1820 into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and was named after the city of her birth.

Inspired by what she took as a call from God in February 1837 while at Embley Park, Florence announced her decision to enter nursing in 1844, at the age of 24 and despite the intense anger and distress of her mother and sister. You see, women of higher birth were expected to never work, their only purpose in life was to become a wife and a mother. Florence worked hard to educate herself in the art and science of nursing, in spite of opposition from her family and the restrictive societal code for women. She was so fierce in her determination, that when she was courted by politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, she rejected him, convinced that marriage would interfere with her ability to follow her calling to nursing.

In Rome in 1847, she met Sidney Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert, a brilliant politician who had been Secretary at War (1845–1846), a position he would hold again during the Crimean War (1853-1856). Herbert was on his honeymoon; he and Florence became lifelong close friends. Herbert and his wife were instrumental in facilitating her nursing work in the Crimea, and she became a key adviser to him in his political career.

Florence continued her travels as far as Greece and Egypt. Her writings on Egypt in particular are testimony to her learning, literary skill and philosophy of life. Sailing up the Nile as far as Abu Simbel in January 1850, she wrote

“I don’t think I ever saw anything which affected me much more than this.” And, considering the temple: “Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect without effort, without suffering… not a feature is correct – but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man.”

At Thebes she wrote of being “called to God” while a week later near Cairo she wrote in her diary

“God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation.”

Later in 1850, she visited the Lutheran religious community at Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein in Germany, where she observed Pastor Theodor Fliedner and the deaconesses working for the sick and the deprived. She regarded the experience as a turning point in her life, and issued her findings anonymously in 1851; The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine was her first published work; she also received four months of medical training at the institute which formed the basis for her later care.

On 22 August 1853, Florence took the post of superintendent at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, a position she held until October 1854. Her father had given her an annual income of £500 (roughly £40,000/US$65,000 in present terms), which allowed her to live comfortably and to pursue her career.

Her most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports began to filter back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Florence, were sent (under the authorisation of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman Empire, where the main British camp was based. They arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari. She and her nurses found wounded soldiers being badly cared for by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal; there was no equipment to process food for the patients. It was around this time that she earned her well know nickname, the lady with the lamp, after her habit of making rounds at night.

After she sent a plea to The Times for the government to produce a solution to the poor condition of the facilities, the British Government commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital, which could be built in England and shipped to the Dardanelles. The result was Renkioi Hospital, a civilian facility which under the management of Dr Edmund Alexander Parkes had a death rate less than 1/10th that of Scutari.

Nightingale receiving the Wounded at Scutari, a portrait by Jerry Barrett

However, death rates did not drop: they began to rise. The death count was the highest of all hospitals in the region. During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there. Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. Conditions at the temporary barracks hospital were so fatal to the patients because of overcrowding and the hospital’s defective sewers and lack of ventilation. A Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Florence had arrived, and effected flushing out the sewers and improvements to ventilation. Death rates were sharply reduced. During the war she did not recognise hygiene as the main cause of death, and she never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate.

Florence continued believing the death rates were due to poor nutrition and supplies and overworking of the soldiers. It was not until after she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army that she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions. This experience influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance. Consequently, she reduced deaths in the army during peacetime and turned attention to the sanitary design of hospitals.

While she was in the Crimea, on 29 November 1855, a public meeting to give recognition to Florence for her work in the war led to the establishment of the Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses. There was an outpouring of generous donations. Sidney Herbert served as honorary secretary of the fund, and the Duke of Cambridge was chairman. By 1859 Florence had £45,000 at her disposal from the Nightingale Fund to set up the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas’ Hospital on 9 July 1860. The first trained Nightingale nurses began work on 16 May 1865 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. She also campaigned and raised funds for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury, near her family home.

She wrote Notes on Nursing, which was published in 1859, a slim 136-page book that served as the cornerstone of the curriculum at the Nightingale School and other nursing schools established, though it was written specifically for the education of those nursing at home. She wrote:

“Every day sanitary knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of how to put the constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from disease, takes a higher place. It is recognised as the knowledge which every one ought to have – distinct from medical knowledge, which only a profession can have”.

Notes on Nursing also sold well to the general reading public and is considered a classic introduction to nursing. Nightingale spent the rest of her life promoting the establishment and development of the nursing profession and organizing it into its modern form. In the introduction to the 1974 edition, Joan Quixley of the Nightingale School of Nursing wrote:

“The book was the first of its kind ever to be written. It appeared at a time when the simple rules of health were only beginning to be known, when its topics were of vital importance not only for the well-being and recovery of patients, when hospitals were riddled with infection, when nurses were still mainly regarded as ignorant, uneducated persons. The book has, inevitably, its place in the history of nursing, for it was written by the founder of modern nursing”.

By 1882, Nightingale nurses had a growing and influential presence in the embryonic nursing profession. Although much of her work improved the lot of women everywhere, it seems she had little respect for women in general. She criticized early women’s rights activists, and preferred the friendship of powerful men, insisting they had done more than women to help her attain her goals, writing, “I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions.” She often referred to herself in the masculine, as for example “a man of action” and “a man of business”. She did, however, have several important and passionate friendships with women. Later in life she kept up a prolonged correspondence with an Irish nun, Sister Mary Clare Moore, with whom she had worked in Crimea. Her most beloved confidante was Mary Clarke, an Englishwoman she met in 1837 and kept in touch with throughout her life. On 13 August 1910, at the age of 90, she died peacefully in her sleep in her room at 10 South Street, Park Lane.

She was a lady of great courage indeed, facing all prejudices about women’s intelligence and social expectations, not letting herself be intimidated by any obstacles while pursuing her one dream, her passion.