Person · INA officer & doctor · India
Lakshmi Sahgal
A Madras-trained doctor practising in Singapore who raised and commanded the Rani of Jhansi Regiment of the INA, an all-woman combat unit of about a thousand — the first of its kind in Asia — and went with it into Burma in 1944.
- Date
- 1914–2012
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 1.290, 103.850
Worth knowing
Captured in 1945 and returned to India, she practised medicine in Kanpur for another sixty years, mostly among refugees and the poor, joined the Communist Party, and stood against A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for the presidency in 2002 at the age of eighty-seven.
About the place
Placed at Singapore, where she was practising when Bose arrived in 1943 and where she raised and commanded the regiment. She was born at Madras and died at Kanpur.
Connections (2)
- AnalogueSarojini Naidu
The two most prominent women of the independence period took opposite roads to the same end. Sarojini Naidu led the Dharasana salt raid into police lathis without raising a hand and became a Congress president and a governor; Lakshmi Sahgal raised and commanded an all-woman combat regiment in Burma and spent the rest of her life as a doctor in Kanpur and a Communist. One is in every textbook and the other in almost none.
- Named afterJhansi Fort
The INA's women's unit was named the Rani of Jhansi Regiment after Lakshmibai, who had died fighting the British eighty-six years earlier — a deliberate choice of ancestor by a force raised in Singapore from Tamil and Malayali plantation families and captured Indian troops. About a thousand women enlisted. Naming the first Asian women's combat regiment after a Maratha queen of a Bundela fort is a claim about continuity that the recruits plainly felt.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Lakshmi Sahgal”. Lakshmi Sahgal, A Revolutionary Life: Memoirs of a Political Activist (1997); INA records in the National Archives of India.
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