Tapti Roy

The 400-year-old town of Jhansi still feels that it owes its fame to a young Rani who ruled for four-and-a-half years. In the uprising of 1857 which came to be known as the 'First War of Indian Independence', she was a singular figure in a gallery of heroes. Rani Lakshmi Bai also became the protagonist in a different kind of story--fiction by British writers to dramatize the horrific experience of the mutiny to which an oriental queen, full of passion, added a ...