CRITICLES

The Truth About The Rani of Jhansi

Regiment
This “death-defying” regiment of women in Subhas Chandra Bose’s INA has
been shrouded in fiction and rumours. A new book tracks down surviving
‘ranis’ and finds out whether they really were the Indian Mata Haris.

“I want a unit of brave Indian women to form a Death-defying Regiment, who will
wield the sword which the brave Rani of Jhansi wielded in India s First War of
Independence in 1857,” the characteristically grandiose Indian nationalist
politician Subhas Chandra Bose declared in July 1943 while addressing an
audience of about 60,000 Indians in Singapore. That same year, he went on to
create the Rani of Jhansi Regiment (RJR), whose service is unsurprisingly
surrounded by several myths, many of whom are exploded by Danish researcher
Vera Hildebrand’s new book Women at War.

RJR was an all-female infantry unit of combat fighters and nurses in the Indian
National Army, meant to be deployed against the British Raj in an invasion on the
Indo-Burma border – one that Bose was planning in the last stages of World War
II. Most of the contradictory information about RJR involves the number of
women soldiers and the exact activities they were engaged in.

All manner of people – Indian National Army soldiers of the time, locals in
Singapore, historians, surviving veterans from the regiment and the press – have
reported variously that the RJR women were spies, that they were only nurses
and that the regiment was only propaganda and ‘decoration’. Adding to the
confusion, Captain Lakshmi Sehgal’s fictional account of the regiment fighting
bravely at the border in her novel has, Hildebrande explains, been misconstrued
as fact. However Hildebrand tracked down surviving ‘Ranis’ and uses archival
material to revise some of the misinformation.

Hunting down and interviewing the surviving Ranis seven decades later posed
obvious hurdles. As Hildebrand explains, there are no existing official INA rosters
of the women, and even though she tracked several of the surviving Ranis down
through telephone directories, they are by no means a wholly representative
sample. Five Ranis who regretted having been part of the INA were not too
forthcoming, and three refused outright to be interviewed. Nevertheless,
Hildebrand has managed to gather vast amounts of fascinating material.

The incidents from the Ranis’ time in the infantry range from surreal to amusing.
Several Ranis demonstrate to Hildebrand how bayonet wielding was their
favourite activity, explaining the drill “Maaro, kheencho, dekho” in detail. A Rani
who was a platoon officer talks about being a compulsive sugar stealer and
breaking into a camp commander’s storage room, while another recalls the
Ranis’ bizarre initiation into the regiment: “We cut our own fingers a bit and with
the blood oozing out of them, painted a Tilak mark (an auspicious sign) on the
forehead of Netaji and also had signed our respective names with that blood on a
piece of paper bearing the statement on oath, ‘We shall sacrifice the last drop of
our blood for the cause of our motherland.’” (Bose’s rallying cry, “Tum mujhe
khoon do, main tumhe azadi doonga” (Give me your blood and I promise you
freedom’) evidently became much too literal in the recruiting ritual.)

Much of the book is spent recording conflicting accounts. For instance, while
many Ranis admitted to Hildebrand that they’d been warned they might have to
serve as ‘Mata Haris’ and seduce the enemy for information, another forcefully
denied that this ever happened. “No seducing. The Englishmen should be killed.
No, no, we were not told to be Mata Haris,” said one. A similar denial of facts
(that were sworn to by some Ranis) took place when Hildebrand inquired about
romantic or sexual relationships between soldiers of the INA.

The press and historians would have us believe the regiment had 1500 or more
women but Hildebrand’s research indicates that there were 500 at most. They
were all civilians recruited from Indian families based in Singapore, Burma and
Malaya, and none of them had any previous military experience whatsoever. This
meant that despite members of the RJR being keen to participate in the fight
against the Raj in the last two years of World War II, they were unprepared for
the daunting Burmese jungles.
Where Hildebrand’s book makes a new and seminal point is to clarify that
Bose never gave the regiment the green signal to fight at the front lines of the
Indo-Burmese border, or indeed anywhere else, and the various contingents in
Burma and Singapore spent two years training before unceremoniously being
ordered in 1945 to disband, and retreating bewildered and incredibly
disappointed. In doing this, Hildebrand disproves the generous mixture of
fictitious and real accounts of the regiment’s adventures, including those that
cited versions of incidents from Captain Laksmi Sehgal’s novel Jai Hind: The
Diary of a Rebel Daughter.

“Every Rani interviewed remembered exactly how and when she first learned
about the Regiment and the circumstances under which she enlisted,”
Hildebrand adds, before elaborating how almost all Ranis initially talked about
fighting for India’s freedom when asked why they joined, and only one person
cited feminism, or “the women’s question” as her motive, but there were
intriguing exceptions.

For Tamil women who were recruited from Malaya rubber estates (they
comprised 60 per cent of the original regiment), it was a way of escaping the
sexual abuse, the “coolie” status and other horrific conditions that they were
subjected to at their workplace. Others had a different agenda: hilariously,
several Ranis likened Bose to Jesus and said they thought of him as an “ascetic
warrior”. Hildebrand claims they spoke of “their attraction to the young,
handsome, dignified and seemingly accessible political icon” (a bit which is hard
to swallow today) as a primary motive, while another said her father suggested it
as a way to avoid a prospective unhappy marriage.
Hildebrand also captures a range of male responses to the regiment, from
disapproving husbands of new recruits to Major Generals who wanted to express
support but were uncertain how, to a Singaporean man, whose “chief resentment
of the RJR was that most of the field where he and other boys played football
was confiscated to give the female Indian soldiers a training camp.”

What her book fails to do is provide a useful analysis of Bose’s views of women.
Too often in the book, there are skimpy references to Bose’s ‘revolutionary’
approach to women and him “hold[ing] advanced views for his time on gender
issues”. Neither are his repetitive focus on Indian women’s traditionally sacrificial
instincts or his major shifts in his attitude to women and sexuality, including a
phase where "instructed the men to look at the Ranis as their mothers or sisters,
and apparently expected that admonition to control the soldiers’ sex drive.” (At
one point, Hildebrand makes a hasty exit from trying to make sense of teenage
Bose’s letters to his mother: “What profession should he choose to make her
proud and happy? Would it please her if he became a vegetarian? … We do not
know how she replied, if she responded at all.”) However, these reflections do
not crystallise into a concrete analysis at any point, which is disappointing.

The strength of Hildebrand’s book lies is in the magnitude of her research and its
encapsulation of the dramatic experiences of this now almost forgotten regiment
of women.