Place · Bundela hill fort · India
Jhansi Fort
The Bundela fort at Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, built by Bir Singh Deo in 1613 and expanded by successive Bundela rulers. Jhansi became the capital of a small Maratha principality after 1742 under Shrimant Naroshankar; Rani Lakshmibai (born 1828, married Raja Gangadhar Rao 1842) became regent after his death in 1853 and refused the Doctrine of Lapse annexation by Dalhousie. The fort was the centre of her resistance in the 1857 uprising — the 1858 Siege of Jhansi (23 March - 4 April 1858) saw her defend the fort against Sir Hugh Rose's British force. Lakshmibai escaped on horseback with her adopted son on her back and died fighting at Gwalior on 17 June 1858. The fort's Ganesh Mandir, Lakshmi Mandir and the main gate (Mahadar) survive.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Patron dynasty
- Chandela
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.456, 78.575
Connections (4)
- CampaignRed Fort, Delhi
Jhansi and Delhi were two centres of the 1857 rebellion, and they show its two faces: the old Mughal capital, where the sepoys placed a reluctant eighty-two-year-old emperor at the head of a movement he did not control, and a Bundela fort where a widowed ruler whose adoption had been refused under the doctrine of lapse fought and died in the field.
- Historical routeLucknow Kathak gharana
Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh and the patron under whom Lucknow Kathak took its mature form, was deposed in 1856 and exiled to Calcutta — one of the annexations that made 1857 possible, and the same doctrine of lapse that cost Lakshmibai Jhansi. The dancers of the Lucknow court dispersed with the patronage. This is a schematic connection between two consequences of one policy, not a route anybody travelled.
- CampaignGwalior Fort
Lakshmibai escaped the sack of Jhansi in April 1858 and joined Tatya Tope; in June they took Gwalior's fortress from a Scindia who had remained loyal to the Company, held it a fortnight, and lost it. She was killed in the fighting in cavalry dress. Gwalior is the last conventional action of the rebellion; Tatya Tope's guerrilla war in central India ran on until April 1859.
- Named afterLakshmi Sahgal
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
History of India — Wikipedia
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