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Female Fighters in Armed Conflict
This book explores the why and the how of women’s participation in armed struggle,
and challenges preconceived assertions about women and violence, providing both
a historic and a contemporary focus.
The volume is about women who have participated in armed conflict as
members of an armed group, trained in military action, with different tasks within
the conflict. The chapters endeavor to make women’s own voices heard, to discover
the untold stories of women as perpetrators and facilitators of military violence,
and the authors do this through the use of personal interviews and the study of
primary documents. The work widens the geographical perspective of feminist
security studies to discover in what ways the historical, political and social context
has motivated the women to participate in military action, and presents new case
study data from Germany, Ukraine, Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Cameroon, India, the
Philippines, Vietnam and Latin America. Temporally, the chapters cover almost
two centuries, from the late 19th century to the present day, touching upon a wide
variety of examples of armed conflict, from wars of independence to the Second
World War. Bringing together approaches from politics, history, anthropology and
area studies, the chapters are informed by the fundamental insights of feminist
research and address such pivotal questions as hegemonic masculinity in the armed
forces and the relation between women’s armed violence and female agency.
This book will be of much interest to students and researchers in gender and
security studies, armed conflict and history.
Béatrice Hendrich is a professor of Turkey studies at the University of Cologne,

Germany.
Routledge Studies in Gender and Security
Series Editors: Laura Sjoberg, University of Florida, and Caron E. Gentry,

University of St. Andrews
This series looks to publish books at the intersection of gender studies, international
relations, and Security Studies. It will publish a broad sampling of work in gender
and security – from private military companies to world wars, from food insecurity
to battlefield tactics, from large-n to deconstructive, and across different areas of
the world. In addition to seeking a diverse sampling of substantive work in gender
and security, the series seeks a diverse author pool – looking for cutting-edge junior
scholars alongside more established authors, and authors from a wide variety of
locations and across a spectrum of backgrounds.
Gendering Military Sacrifice
A Feminist Comparative Analysis
Edited by Cecilia Åse and Maria Wendt
NATO, Gender and the Military
Women Organising from Within
Katharine A. M. Wright, Matthew Hurley and Jesus Gil Ruiz
Gender and Drone Warfare
A Hauntological Perspective
Lindsay C. Clark
Gender and Civilian Victimization in War
Jessica L. Peet and Laura Sjoberg
The Gender and Security Agenda
Strategies for the 21st Century
Edited by Chantal de Jonge Oudraat and Michael E. Brown
Gender Mainstreaming in Counter-Terrorism Policy
Building Transformative Strategies to Counter Violent Extremism
Jessica White
Female Fighters in Armed Conflict
Listening to Their Own Stories
Edited by Béatrice Hendrich
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Gender-and-Security/book-series/RSGS
Female Fighters in
Armed Conflict
Listening to Their Own Stories
Edited by Béatrice Hendrich

First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Béatrice Hendrich; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Béatrice Hendrich to be identified as the author of the editorial
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hendrich, Béatrice, 1964- editor.
Title: Female fighters in armed conflict: listening to their own stories/
edited by Béatrice Hendrich.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2024. |
Series: Routledge studies in gender and security | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023009454 (print) | LCCN 2023009455 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032353173 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032353180 (pbk) |
ISBN 9781003326359 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Women soldiers–History. |
Women and the military–History. |
Women and war–History. | Women in combat–History.
Classification: LCC UB416 .F446 2024 (print) | LCC UB416 (ebook) |
DDC 355.0082–dc23/eng/20230530
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009454
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009455
ISBN: 978-1-032-35317-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-35318-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-32635-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003326359
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
List of contributors vii
1 Female fighters in armed conflict: Introduction1

BÉATRICE HENDRICH
PART 1
The historical perspective: Changing perceptions,
repeating patterns?19
2 A woman in power in 19th-century South Asia: An inspiring life

path for struggles against injustice 21
RICHARD HERZOG
3 Fighting for peace, fighting for the country?: The inclusion of

women in Turkey’s national defense in the late 1930s 39
BÉATRICE HENDRICH
4 Soldaderas and Guerrilleras: Camp followers and female

fighters in Latin American armed conflicts in the 19th and 20th
centuries 60
BARBARA POTTHAST
5 Discourses about women, bodies and military combat in

Vietnam: “In my heart, I always wished to go” 78
HUE NGUYEN THI AND EVA FUHRMANN
vi Contents
PART 2
Case studies 1: Women in national armed forces 103
6 Transfer, transformation and use of combat experience inside

Nazi concentration camps, 1942–1945: The fight continues after
the battle 105
OLESIA ISAIUK
7 Women soldiers in frontline war rooms: Protecting the nation

on the backstage of war 126
AYELET HAREL
8 Women of color in the armed forces of Germany: Invisibly exposed? 146

EGZONA GASHI AND BÉATRICE HENDRICH
PART 3
Case studies 2: The gender of sacrifice and agency169
9 Gendered resistance: Self-portrayals of female suicide bombers

in Palestine171
BRITT ZIOLKOWSKI
10 Jihad with a woman’s face: Boko Haram female fighters in

Cameroon191
AIMÉ RAOUL SUMO TAYO
11 Demythifying the caliphate: Asymmetrical dependencies of

radicalized women in jihadist groups in the Philippines 211
CHARLOTTE MEI YEE CHIN
Index233
Contributors
Charlotte Mei Yee Chin, M.A., works as research associate and lecturer at the
Institute for Islamic Theology at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. Her
research interests include religion, gender, radicalization and prevention of violent
extremism and her PhD dissertation focuses on the topic “Demystification of the
Caliphate – Reintegration of (De)Radicalized Females in Southeast Asia”.
Eva Fuhrmann received her PhD in Southeast Asia studies at the University of
Bonn, Germany. She currently is a research associate at the Institute of Social
and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. Her research
focuses on gender, work and learning in Vietnam.
Egzona Gashi holds a bachelor’s degree of social work and is currently a master’s
student in gender studies at the University of Cologne, Germany. Her work focuses
on intersectionality (especially migration and gender) and gender-based violence.
Ayelet Harel is a professor of political science at Ben-Gurion University’s

Conflict Management and Resolution Program, and the Department of Politics and
Government, Israel. Her research is at the intersection of politics and feminist interna-
tional relations. Her latest coauthored book is titled Breaking the Binaries in Security
Studies: A Gendered Analysis of Women in Combat (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Béatrice Hendrich is a professor of Turkey studies at the University of Cologne,

Germany. Her research areas are gender history and the religious landscape of
Turkey, religious topoi in the literary history of Turkey and the history of the
Muslim/Turkish community of Cyprus. She leads a research group on female war-
riors in Turkey.
Richard Herzog is a postdoctoral research fellow at the History Department of

Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, and at a DFG Collaborative Research
Centre. His main research focuses on Latin America, decolonial studies and intel-
lectual history, specifically from a transnational perspective.
Olesia Isaiuk received her PhD in Lublin, Poland, in 2016 with her dissertation
titled “Lviv University during the First World War”. She does research at the Center

viii Contributors
for Liberation Movement Studies and at the Lontsky Prison National Memorial
Museum, Lviv, Ukraine, with a focus on Ukrainian victims during the Third Reich.
Hue Nguyen Thi, PhD, is a researcher at the Department of Area Studies, the
Institute of Vietnamese Studies and Development Science, Vietnam National
University, Hanoi, Vietnam. Her research interests are Vietnamese history and
culture; gender and gender equality; and current social and cultural changes in
Vietnam, particularly in the countryside.
Barbara Potthast is a professor of Latin American history at the University of

Cologne, Germany. Her research interests include the history of gender and fam-
ily, and social movements, as well as processes of collective identity formation in
Latin America.
Aimé Raoul Sumo Tayo, PhD, is an associate researcher at the laboratory, Observer
les Mondes En Recomposition (OMER), “Observe the Worlds in Recomposition”
of the University of Liège and a visiting professor at the University of Maroua,
Cameroon. His research focuses on borders, wars, counterinsurgency strategies
and contemporary criminal threats. He recently completed a Swiss Government
Excellence Postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland,
after a French Ministry of Foreign Affairs postdoctoral fellowship at the University
of Paris Descartes, France.
Britt Ziolkowski, PhD, is a scholar of Islam and researcher at the State Office
for the Protection of the Constitution in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. In her
research, she focuses on Islamic political movements (specifically, the Salafi
movement and Hamas), gender and radicalization.
1 Female fighters in armed conflict
Introduction
Béatrice Hendrich
Beyond the androcentric narrative: What this book is about

This is a book about women who join armed conflicts. While their participation is
not always as combatants on the battlefront, they are clearly members of an armed
organization, serving outside the administrative or medical barracks, trained in the
use of certain weapons – even if only for the sake of self-defense – and deployed
in conflict areas.
The persons presented in this book as women identify as female; or at least they
do not oppose being identified as female. As such, the book does not explicitly
inquire about the experiences of queer soldiers or the national conscription rules
toward transpersons. Our focus is on female persons in armed organizations, on
their self-positioning and experiences, and routines and practices in a field that is
connoted as masculine, and in which women still count as “the other” (Kümmel,
2006), as the minority and exception, no matter how long the history of women in
armed battles, how fast the number of deployed women recently has been increas-
ing, how rapid the change of deployment rules has been throughout the last decades
or that many national forces feel pushed to reconsider gender diversity in their
employment policies. This approach may be criticized for promoting the idea of a
world consisting of cis persons, of “‘properly’ gendered bodies … crucial to our
imagining and doing of war” (Welland, 2018, p. 132). While we acknowledge that
engaging with armed women (and men) necessitates critically addressing feminini-
ties (and masculinities), we focus in this very volume on one aspect in the area of
gender in war and violence.
The book considers women’s participation in armed fighting a historical given,
notwithstanding highly different percentages or forms of deployment and military
duties throughout history and in different world regions. The book is not in doubt
that women are mentally, intellectually and physically able to command and exert
violence, to think in categories of “enemy and ally”, and that some of them believe
in the necessity of armed combat – (albeit not always in) the same way men do. To
acknowledge women’s participation in acts of violence does not at all clash with
the reality of women being endangered by male violence worldwide in a gender
specific and massive way. Nevertheless, it allows a differentiated understanding
of women’s reality. It makes it possible to develop new perspectives on the social
and cultural circumstances and power relations that shape women’s lives, and to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003326359-1
2 Female Fighters in Armed Conflict
apply Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality (1989) to the analysis of

all these aspects.
Moreover, if the presence of women in various instances of armed conflicts is
a given; silencing their presence renders it impossible to speak about the concrete
circumstances of their participation, deployment or armed self-defense. Female
fighters are exposed to additional forms of threat and danger in conflict zones that
need to be addressed, not silenced, academically and politically. Unfit equipment
and pathetic sanitary conditions are among the many problems experienced by ser-
vicewomen. Instead of pondering on the unfit female body, the focus should be
geared toward solving the issue of unfit equipment and addressing physical needs.1
Another issue is the long-standing “hesitation” to deploy women in combat roles,
which produces curious results: In the British Armed Forces, for instance, women
had been included in combat situations without being allowed to carry a weapon
until 1981 (Goldman, 1982, p. 6). In other instances, the weapon as a status symbol
can be denied to women: Cases are known from non-state armies or rebel groups
where young people and women are used in lower non-soldier status, with bad or
no equipment at all, for allegedly minor duties, which are nevertheless life-threat-
ening. This observation is in line with Laura Sjoberg’s argument that “gender often
constitutes what counts as security and what does not” (2016, p. 53).
This book is about women participating in armed conflict, as members of an
armed group, trained in military action, at varying positions and with different tasks
within the conflict. The armed groups in question here differ in their organizational
degree, power and status. There are national armed forces as well as paramilitary
units, and non-state armed opposition groups (NSAGs; Mazurana, 2013). The book
does not aim to discuss the differences between state violence and other forms of
military violence, or between soldiers and terrorists. This is partly due to the chal-
lenges of defining terrorism and separating it from other forms of organized armed
violence. Arguing from a historical perspective, which is indeed the approach of
several chapters in this volume, not a small number of insurgents, rebels and terror-
ists are known to constitute the core of the later national forces, after the success of
the insurgency, thereby dislocating the distinction between soldiers and terrorists.
What is even more important in the frame of this volume is that we did not want to
observe women’s activities through a normative or moral lens, since this approach
would obstruct our real goal, which is listening to women and their stories. It is,
however, within the scope of academic freedom, and justified by the key topic of
each chapter, that some of the contributors discuss certain violent acts as terrorism,
particularly in the case of suicide bombing.
The chapters included in this volume are based on fundamental insights of femi-
nist research and gender studies, and are also indebted to the burgeoning litera-
ture on women and gender in international relations and security studies. Feminist
research ethics is a shared and indispensable ground for the chapters. This applies
to both the contributions from social and political sciences and the historically
oriented ones. Some main aspects of feminist research ethics, such as the empow-
erment of the research participants or reciprocity between the researcher and the
participants (Kingston, 2020, p. 533), are, however, not applicable to the analysis of
Female fighters in armed conflict 3
historical documents or only in an intermediate form. Nevertheless, self-reflection,

deconstruction of power relations and avoidance of reproducing inequalities and
(implicit) hierarchies (Leprince and Steer, 2021, p. 11) are also necessary qualities
of any feminist research in the humanities. Ultimately, the authors in this volume
all believe that rigid categorizations and dichotomic thinking are dangerous; they
not only fail to enrich our understanding of the world but also silence and obscure
the complex diversity and relationality that we set out to analyze.
Cynthia Enloe’s legacy in feminist security studies (FSS) is fundamental here
for two reasons: She not only compelled us to ask “Where are the women?” during
our preparatory online sessions, but she also emphasized the significance of “femi-
nist curiosity”, which allowed us to critically inquire personal certainties about the
gender aspects of armed combat and armed forces, and broaden the disciplinary
horizon by taking our own research projects further. This was done in some cases
by relocating soldiering women from the margins of the research into the center, in
others by focusing on the beginning of a story instead of the end; the question of
how and why women happen to join armed activities instead of describing the dis-
armament and reintegration process. We also endeavored not only to broaden but
to transcend disciplinary restrictions toward a feminist transdisciplinary approach,
in the sense of “opening towards a reflexive transgression of artificially imposed
boundaries” and “consistently and repeatedly leave our disciplinary comfort zones
and go into unfamiliar knowledge fields” (Hughes, 2020, p. 2). We do not claim to
have realized this goal in toto, but one could argue that for feminist transdiscipli-
narity, the journey is the goal.
In addition to these early classics of Enloe or Yuval-Davis (Yuval-Davis and
Anthias, 1989; Yuval-Davis, 1997), the recent generation of in-depth studies has
inspired, supported and facilitated the process of reading, listening and interpret-
ing what we came across in our documents and in the field. There is now a sound
basis of theoretical work that explores the relation between gender and security
from different angles, including the regional differentiation of FSS (Leprince and
Steer, 2021; Stern and Towns, 2022), soldiering and citizenship (Lomsky-Feder
and Sasson-Levy, 2017) and women’s violence (Gentry and Sjoberg, 2015).
There are also comprehensive works such as Women and War by Carol Cohn
(2013a) and the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Security (Gentry, Shepherd
and Sjoberg, 2018).
Two subfields among the more recent publications were particularly helpful:
The first is the growing number of empirical case studies on the gendered experi-
ences of women during their participation in the armed forces or during the post-
war reintegration process (Gentry, Shepherd and Sjoberg, 2018; Harel-Shalev and
Daphna-Tekoah, 2020; Katto, 2020; Hlatky, 2022). The second includes studies on
different aspects of security that do not focus on gender issues as their main subject
but include the gender dimension of the issue under investigation in an organic
manner (Ware, 2012; Hutchinson, 2018; Hagemann, 2019; Varma, 2020).
In hindsight, the book chapters should have discussed more explicitly the broad
issue of embodiment (Narozhna, 2022); the militarization and mutilation of the
(masculine) body (Sünbüloğlu, 2018); or the enactment of embodied experiences
in art, literature and mass media (Baker, 2020). That being said, an integration of
narrative approaches and embodiment (Heavey, 2015), both experienced and nar-
rated, has been implemented in this volume in Chapter 7 by Ayelet Harel on Israeli
women soldiers in frontline war rooms, and in Chapter 5 by Hue Nguyen Thi and
Eva Fuhrmann about female warriors in Vietnam.
Listening to their voices

A crucial interest in all chapters collected in this volume was to make women’s
own voices heard. This endeavor comes with a variety of challenges; some of the
challenges are discipline-specific, some are the result of the specific circumstances
in security studies. For historians, for example, discovering the untold stories of
women having joined an armed fight and/or military violence is still a novelty.
A fundamental reason for this belatedness in research is the dominance of male
“experts” both in general historiography and in military history (Hagemann, 2017,
p. 180). Women’s experiences, voices and memories are considered part of the
private sphere, while men constitute the public, and the public constitutes male his-
toriographers’ key interest (Hagemann, 2019). This purposeful negligence of the
presence of women in historical armed conflict is obviously not related to historical
and social reality, as its continuation in male narratives on more current conflicts,
particularly in patriarchal societies, such as in Bosnia (Smeulers and Simić, 2019)
or India (Basu, 1991; Patel, 2022), demonstrates.
Furthermore, as part of feminist reflexive empowering practice, the contribu-
tors have sought ways to make women’s voices heard in an authentic way. In the
case of field studies, qualitative interviews seem to be a suitable tool to ensure this.
However, in security studies, qualitative studies have their limits: Due to the pecu-
liar circumstances of research in this field, many approaches are difficult, if not
impossible, to apply. In his chapter on Boko Haram female fighters (Chapter 10),
Aimé Raoul Sumo Tayo, for instance, mentions the challenge of talking about
women “who do not use speech as their primary mode of expression” (Ashby,
2011) in a context where stories about them often define them. There are only a
handful of studies that can build on such an extended sample of 100 interviews as
that of Harel-Shalev and Daphna-Tekoah (2020).
Research in security is also confronted with challenges regarding security sen-
sitivity. Security sensitivity is all encompassing: It covers the researcher, inter-
view partners and their surroundings, and handling the collected data (Gurol and
Wetterich, 2021, p. 109). Therefore, it might be impossible, harmful or ethically
unacceptable to interview women during an ongoing underground activity, a related
engagement with an armed troop or even after their deployment. Another problem
with interviews is the lack of any pristine authenticity; the interview as well as the
interview partners are part of a setting that is formed by power relations and only
decipherable in its context. In a (post)colonial research environment, it is almost
impossible to eliminate asymmetric power relations from the qualitative research
process. Kate Coddington (2017) suggests replacing the interview with other forms
of engaging with relevant persons, for example, participating in activists’ meetings,
and reading all sorts of written documents much more intensely. These are not only
egodocuments and artistic works produced by persons of interest, but also all kinds
of interviews and videos, including third-party productions such as newspaper arti-
cles or parliamentary debates and court documents (Strange, 2010; Lafi, 2018).
By means of collecting and comparing as many different texts as possible, careful
reading and historical and political contextualizing, women’s voices and narratives
can be retrieved against all historiographical odds (Purvis, 1992).
Soldiers, combatants, fighters: Why “war” is still a more complex

battle zone for women than for men
The individual chapters in this volume differ in their regional and historical refer-
ences. Likewise, women’s motives for joining the struggle and their experiences
during this struggle are of quite different natures. One of the common features,
however, is that women’s participation in the armed struggle is a significantly
more complex field than that of men’s. This applies to women’s rank in the mili-
tary hierarchy, their tasks, the evaluation of their activity by the military and
civilian environment and the assessment of whether they perform “genuine” sol-
dierly or military tasks at all, or whether they provide simple support services.
Women’s participation in armed struggle is not taken for granted; moreover, they
are under much stronger pressure to justify themselves. When women volunteer
for service in the armed state forces, they are asked why they do it at all. When
women, for social and economic reasons or under threat of violence, are forced
into a fight, which then in retrospect is interpreted as immoral by the victori-
ous side or the majority society, the contempt for women is significantly greater
than for the male combatants (Mazurana, 2013, p. 151). These different aspects
are used in a way that reinforce and justify each other. In a way, it means that
because women are unfit for real – i.e., manly – duties; if they want to join, they
have to do the less glorious tasks and be content with that. As a result, women
are on average deployed in positions of markedly lower status. These are by no
means only “female activities” such as nursing, office work and making coffee
(Yuval-Davis, 1997, p. 101, cited in Sjoberg and Via, 2010, p. 82). Rather, these
are potentially high-risk tasks, such as safehouse keeping, espionage, ammuni-
tion transport or reconnaissance in the field.2
Due to fewer career opportunities, which are often already predetermined by
law through maximum quotas and restrictions on certain positions, women in regu-
lar armies earn less and benefit less from retirement pensions or financial care that
would be their due for post-traumatic stress disorder or bodily traumatization. In
historical cases where women joined informal insurgent troops that were included
in the emerging state forces after the victory, such as the Vietnamese Youth Shock
Brigade or the Turkish nationalists during their War of Liberation (1919–1922),
the women were excluded or had to campaign for financial support in their old age,
because they were not considered to have been regular soldiers. In cases where
women serve in higher positions, tokenism sets in. Their visibility as an exception
to the rule rises overproportionally, “resulting in strong pressure for performance
excellence … and polarization of gender differences, which encourages behavior

that adheres to gendered stereotyping” (Lomsky-Feder and Sasson-Levy, 2017, p.
144).
So, women’s tasks and positions in warfare and insurgence are numerous but
often underrated, unpaid and located somewhere between or beyond the usual
ranks and carrier paths. The Female Engagement Teams and Cultural Support
Teams, active in international military missions, are a telling example of how to
increase the number of female soldiers in regular armies without de facto integrat-
ing them into established male units.3 In the same vein, it is almost impossible to
delineate the physical space within which women fighters’ activities take place.
While the front line is usually conceived of as men’s space, women are deployed in
spaces that appear to be located at a (safe) distance from the war zone; in ambigu-
ous spaces such as a safe house or the territory occupied by the enemy (as a spy);
a war room, at the supportive infrastructure in the rear; or at the home front, in
civil defense and paramilitary activities. This observation clearly corresponds to
the feminist perspective on war that contests and refutes the existence of “a clear
location and a distinct beginning and end” of war (Cohn, 2013b, p. 21).
The issue of naming female fighters is likewise no small feat. The definition of
“combatant” is indeed a frequently discussed matter in the literature. Moreover,
even though the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions have endeavored to define
a combatant clearly and comprehensively, it is often the fighting parties who decide
in the final analysis whom to call a combatant. According to the convention, a
combatant is someone who is authorized to use force in a violent conflict “under
a clear chain of responsible command” (Medecins sans frontieres, n.d.). Denying
the status of combatant of a person means denying the right to be treated as a
prisoner of war (POW) in case of captivity. Combatants and POWs, respectively,
cannot be prosecuted for their execution of violent orders, and they enjoy certain
rights during imprisonment. Denying this status leads, in effect, to uncontrolled
forms of punishment against everyone who is identified as having exercised vio-
lence as a noncombatant, and this affects civilians in self-defense more often than
not (Medecins sans frontieres, n.d.). The cases of female soldiers of the Red Army
during the Second World War in Olesia Isaiuk’s chapter (Chapter 6), and of the
female members of the IS-affiliated Boko Haram in Cameroon in Sumo Tayo’s
chapter (Chapter 10), exemplify how and why female warriors are more likely to
be denied the legal safeguards of combatant status.
There is, however, a second aspect in the definition of the combatant that should
be taken into consideration. Hlatky (2022) traces how armed state forces them-
selves have been trying to exclude women from what they define as combat posi-
tions for a long time, based on the presumption that women are mentally and bodily
unfit. Not recognizing women’s contributions, Hlatky maintains, eventually turned
into “hypocrisy” (p. 31) when the US was at war in Kuwait and Iraq where “women
who were deployed faced no less risk than their male counterparts but were not
recognized for their contributions or eligible for combat medals because they were
technically barred from combat roles” (pp. 31–32). Harel’s chapter (Chapter 7)
provides an example of the increasing blurring of “the line between combat and
non-combat” (Hlatky, 2022, p. 32) due to the increasing technicalization and digi-
talization of warfare. The Israeli female soldiers serving in war rooms in proximity
to the war zone challenge the definition of combatant as well as of war space.
It is remarkable that women have access to NSAGs more easily than to state
forces.4 The organizations’ rhetoric about why they include (or reject) women,
is manifold. A very common aspiration, as often adopted by politically left lean-
ing revolutionary groups, is to achieve the desired social equality even during the
struggle. Publicly shaming men who have yet to join in the struggle (or who have
been considered not to be fighting wholeheartedly) may also be a reason for wom-
en’s demonstrative participation. This perspective is also held by women them-
selves, as Britt Ziolkowski’s chapter on Palestinian female suicide bombers reveals
(Chapter 9). Beyond the rhetoric, pragmatic reasons exist, such as the existence of
tasks that should be explicitly performed by women or the lack of male combat-
ants. Women’s ways into an NSAG are also diverse: Ranging from being violently
forced to passionately supporting the cause (Loken and Matfess, 2017). Just as entry
into an NSAG is more flexible than into a state army, the division of non-combat
and combat tasks is less cemented and more adapted to current needs (Mazurana,
2013, p. 150). From a gender studies perspective, female fighters always come with
an extra benefit for the organization: They ideologically solidify the cause (national
unity or revolutionary equality), they strengthen the bond between the organization
and the civil population (Dirlik, 2018), they hand down the message to the next
generation (their children) and under certain occasions they can trick the other side
because they are not perceived as fighters or terrorists.5
Finally, the chapters in this volume present several instances where, for the
women, the armed fight has come to an end or not started yet, but it is (still) a domi-
nant part of their everyday lives, of body and mind. Evidently, wars do not start
with the shooting of the first bullet, nor do they end with the declaration of ceasefire
(Cohn, 2013b, p. 22). This can be traced in the establishment of an encompassing
system of militarizing the society of Turkey between the World Wars (as discussed
in Chapter 3 by Béatrice Hendrich), the continuation of the fight by Ukrainian war-
riors during their imprisonment in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, or
women’s social and economic living conditions when they are back in civil society
after their armed fight, as explored in several chapters of the volume.
Beyond the Eurocentric narrative

When we planned this book, we intended to include contributors from a vari-
ety of countries and diverse academic backgrounds, so that we could widen the
geographical range of the case studies; discover in what ways specific historical,
political and social contexts motivated women to participate in armed organiza-
tions; and provide an inclusive approach on FSS. This ambition was based on the
awareness of the generally inadequate inclusion of the Global South in (femi-
nist) security studies and international relations, both in terms of the location of
research institutions and scholars, and in terms of the appropriate consideration
of issues and perspectives emanating from the Global South. In security studies,
which “derives its core categories and assumptions about world politics from a
particular understanding of European experience” (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006,
p. 330), a decentered perspective is still the exception, not the norm. It is even
argued that the absence of the Global South is not an unintended byproduct of
“Western-Centrism” but a “constitutive practice” (Bilgin, 2010) in security stud-
ies. It appears that from its beginning, the relatively young discipline of FSS has
been aware of the shortcomings and distortions of both White security studies
and White feminism. However, being aware of a challenge does not necessarily
lead to overcoming the same, as Katerina Krulišová and Míla O’Sullivan (2022)
show in their outline of FSS’s short history: the high ethical and thematic stand-
ards that the discipline sets for itself include a consequent anti-imperialist stance,
awareness of the significant achievements of (women’s) movements and activists
especially in the Global South, and a focus on “lived experience, positionality,
reflexivity, and emancipation of marginalized subjects” (p. 35). At the same time,
internationally visible research is still produced at established research institutions
in the Global North (Krulišová and O’Sullivan, 2022, p. 36). As Krulišová and
O’Sullivan also demonstrate, the academic periphery includes European geogra-
phies such as “CEE, South-eastern and Southern Europe” (p. 36), and, one could
add, all the borderlands with strong intellectual ties with Europe, despite their
continual othering by Europe, such as Ukraine and Turkey.6 In recent years, the
number of specific case studies related to the Global South and comparative works
has increased considerably (Asaad and Hasanat, 2022; Steenberg, 2022; Katto,
2020). This can be considered a major step toward an inclusive research area, but
there remains inexorably a dependence on publishing criteria and rules of aca-
demic writing created by the center (Kloß, 2017), and a substantial need for mate-
rial resources facilitating an exchange of academics and activists from different
parts of the world on equal footing.
When we prepared the book, we were confronted with all sorts of COVID
restrictions but also with a rapidly emerging “digital turn” in academic conversa-
tions. Taking advantage of these circumstances, we circulated a call for papers and
“met” with everyone interested in the topic during multiple but short online meet-
ings. This provided the opportunity to include discussants and contributors from a
variety of countries. Throughout the process, as always happens, tentative contribu-
tors withdrew. While some informed us about their reasons for withdrawal – often
related to difficulties because of the pandemic – others just disappeared. We had the
experience that it was more difficult to continue communication with people located
at research institutions in the Global South. Relying on earlier experiences in global
cooperations, we, the core group from Cologne, had the impression that their teach-
ing load and the demands of their employers, but also differing modes of academic
communication reduced their motivation to stay with us. A positive example of suc-
cessful cooperation is Chapter 5 by Hue Nguyen Thi (Vietnam National University,
Hanoi) and Eva Fuhrmann (University of Cologne) on female participation in the
Vietnamese military from the 1940s to the present. To sum it up, an open call for
papers and digital communication means are not enough for “more balanced rela-
tionships in the global system of knowledge production” (Kloß, 2017, p. 13), and it
will take persistence and doggedness before the easily stated “internationalization
approach” of academia in the Global North turns into productive reality.
So, while the topics treated in this collected volume are located on four conti-
nents, the academic background of the contributors is still, to a significant degree,
shaped by European academia. Yet, we endeavored to decenter Europe, to ques-
tion the homogenizing national perspective on war and peace, to display how war-
related and war-justifying discourses travel at an accelerating speed in a globalized
world, and how personal and political networks connect world regions beyond the
colonial divide. At the same time, the chapters present seemingly similar phenom-
ena that are not necessarily the result of similar circumstances.
Some contributions in this volume explicitly tackle a “fluidity between suppos-
edly separate scales” (Al-Bulushi, Ghosh and Grewal, 2022, p. 2) such as Global
South/North or different religious communities; for example, the chapters about
women of color in the armed forces of Germany (Gashi and Hendrich, Chapter
8), or women from a variety of countries including Germany and Finland joining
the Islamic State in the Philippines (Chin, Chapter 11). Yet those chapters with
a focus on a specific country also mirror cultural, economic and political inter-
connectedness between regions more or less far from each other, as a result of
colonial continuities and “neo-colonial globalization” (El Habbouch, 2019, p. 3).
Richard Herzog’s contribution on the Lakshmibai (Chapter 2), a female ruler dur-
ing the British colonial rule in South Asia, illustrates the significance of one his-
torical exemplar figure for early anti-colonial insurgents, various Indian nationalist
agendas and for the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, which was established in 1943 as
part of the Indian National Army, and was composed of volunteering women from
Malayan rubber estates.
Postcolonial states share the experience of a war of independence with the coun-
tries in the eastern Mediterranean, in this case, Turkey and Israel, even if the politi-
cal and historical context of these countries is decidedly different. The impact of a
war of independence on women’s lives is a telling case in point, since it provides
both universal and specific aspects. The assessment of an armed struggle against
external enemies as a progressive, liberating and thus justified act has turned into
an integral part of the national founding DNA in many different countries from
the North as well as the Global South. In those countries, it constitutes an almost
insurmountable hindrance to the activities of feminist pacifists. On the other hand,
it is often argued that there exist fundamentally different feminist perspectives
on warfare in postcolonial countries, almost irreconcilable with the perspectives
of feminists from the North. One argument is that the convergence of African
women’s fight for equality with their anti-colonial fight (Oluwaniyi, 2019, p. 5) is
completely missing from the European feminist experience. Another argument is
that for “women in the Euro-American sphere, access to combat has been read as
claiming equal citizenship with men”, while for “women in the Global South, their
claim to combat has often prioritized national self-determination for the colonized
people” (Magadla, 2021, p. 27).
Countries that are not so unambiguously located on the colonial world map are
often out of sight of postcolonial studies.7 The chapter “Fighting for peace, fighting
for the country?” (Hendrich, Chapter 3) illustrates the ambiguity in which feminists
of Turkey found themselves in the 1930s when, on the one hand, they declared soli-
darity with the women of the colonized countries and their call for independence
and armed resistance, and, on the other hand, they invoked the “Western model”,
according to which military service was an element on the way to civic equality.
Likewise, the broad range of women who fought wars not strictly anti-colonial but
still aiming at overcoming an oppressive rule, such as civil wars or the anti-Fascist
resistance in Europe, or women who consider themselves a part of the international
anti-imperialist war against the very state whose citizenship they hold, is missing
from the discussion. The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), based in the
USA, is an eminent example of this globalizing perception of armed female resist-
ance (Gosse, 2005). The TWWA conceived of women’s fight as self-defense:
Whereas the struggle for liberation must be borne equally by all members of
an oppressed people, we declare that third world women have the right and
responsibility to bear arms. Women should be fully trained and educated in
the martial arts as well as in the political arena. Furthermore, we recognize
that it is our duty to defend all oppressed peoples. (Third World Women’s
Alliance, 20 December 1971)
Decentering Europe is a requirement in FSS as much as it is inescapable to avoid

any essentialization of the “women of the Global South” and to take account of
“the multiple manifestations of subaltern subjectivities” (Souza, 2019, p. 9). A new
level of digital post-spatiality adds to the complexity of the Global South as a “sub-
versive perspective” (Kloß, 2017) and a “normative conceptualization” (Demir,
2017, p. 55). The twisted and multispatial biographies of women supporting and
fighting for local and global organizing powers such as the Islamic State, cannot
be adequately analyzed without using an approach that includes all those aspects.
The structure of the book

The book consists of three parts. The chapters are, however, not arranged accord-
ing to their geographical references or along a timeline but according to common
key topics and structural approaches. The first part, titled “The historical perspec-
tive: Changing perceptions, repeating patterns?”, includes chapters that scrutinize
change and continuity over an extended time span. Richard Herzog’s chapter
(Chapter 2) on the female ruler of Jhansi, Lakshmibai, traces the cultural and
political reception of a woman in an unexpected position. After the death of her
husband, the Maharaja of Jhansi in northern India, she declared herself to be his
heir and became one of the leaders and emblematic figures of the massive upris-
ing against British colonial rule in South Asia of 1857. She died while actively
involved in armed battles. In the following decades, she turned into a legendary
figure for the Indian independence movement, Indian nationalism and related liter-
ary production. The “Rani of Jhansi Brigade”, established in 1943 as a regiment of
the insurgent Indian National Army, was one of the few all-female combat units
of the Second World War. The example of the Jhansi Brigade also strengthens
our claim that women’s armed fight or female units have a strong tendency to be
organized from the beginning as a symbolic exception to the rule, with peculiar and
unclear rules and duties, independent from the women soldiers’ perspective and the
danger of their activities. The Jhansi Brigade was trained but never participated in
active combat. While the effect of such a brigade’s existence on Indian women’s
self-esteem is mostly positively rated, it can also be argued that the political gain
it has offered to its creator, the second president of the Indian National Congress,
Subhas Chandra Bose, is higher than what it has done for the women who remain
politically underrepresented to this day.
In Chapter 3, titled “Fighting for peace, fighting for the country?”, Béatrice
Hendrich analyzes Turkey’s public discourse on women’s soldiering in the 1930s.
In the second decade of the Turkish Republic, the War of Liberation had already
turned into a blueprint for militarizing the whole society, including girls and women,
covering all parts of life from formal education to pastime activities. Women’s inclu-
sion was presented in relation to the already established meta-narrative of the poor
but brave Anatolian women who contributed to the War of Liberation by carrying
ammunition to the field, or, in rare cases, by actively participating in armed com-
bat. Meanwhile, the influential all-male politicians and militaries of the time were
eager to keep the women outside this last stronghold of masculine homosociality,
the armed forces, even after educational institutions and the parliament had already
opened their gates for females. Allowing girls into the organization for gliding and
parachuting, the Turkish Bird; establishing military preparatory school classes for
girls; and neighborhood courses on civil defense, particularly for women, were meant
to reconcile differing expectations. Unlike in other countries, the Second World War
did not lead to the official inclusion of women in the armed forces of Turkey.
Women’s participation in (post)colonial insurgent and state forces, their histori-
cal background and political context are treated in Barbara Potthast’s chapter as
well as that of Eva Fuhrmann and Hue Nguyen Thi. Potthast (Chapter 4) focuses
on women as agents in armed conflicts in Latin America over the last two centu-
ries. Until the mid-20th century, female participants were variously characterized
as providers, camp followers or as idealistic supporters, while during the second
half of the 20th century, the figure of the female guerrilla fighter became promi-
nent. Their use of arms was evident, but they were still idealized and characterized
by “female” attributes, such as beauty and sacrifice, albeit in service of a political
cause. Regarding women and violence in armed conflicts, Potthast poses some fun-
damental questions in her chapter, such as the motivations for participation in vari-
ous ways and the conflicts with traditional roles, as well as questions concerning
intergroup gender relations, public discourses and memories about these women,
especially in post-conflict societies. She argues that a long-term perspective can
shed light on persistent structures and problems as well as changes in gender roles.
Hue Nguyen Thi and Eva Fuhrmann’s chapter (Chapter 5) investigates the (dis)
continuities of female participation in the Vietnamese military from the 1940s to
the present. Based on a critical analysis of public discourses related to women and
war, both today and in the past, and drawing on narrative interviews with female
veterans, the chapter outlines and compares the place of women in NSAGs as well
as in today’s state forces. During the fight for independence, from 1945 to 1975,
women in all parts of the country took up arms to join the fight. Numerous female
fighters who lost their lives during the war became national heroines. Today, there
is no formal law that prevents women from joining military or security forces;
on the contrary, women are encouraged to contribute to the nation’s defense and
security. While being constructed as courageous and brave defenders of the nation,
women are simultaneously depicted as the caretakers of the family. The chapter
also provides a precise background of the Vietnamese state with its institutions
such as the Vietnamese People’s Army, the Communist Party and the Vietnamese
Women’s Union, all of which closely cooperate to produce and control the roles
women can assume inside and outside the army.
The second part of the volume, titled “Case studies 1: Women in national armed
forces”, focuses on the service within and for state forces, looking closely at a vari-
ety of physical places and political expectations that altogether constitute this wide
space of serving the nation. Chapter 6, by Olesia Isaiuk, is on Ukrainian women
who were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War.
This study sheds light on a group of female fighters neglected by political memory,
historiography and academic research, similar to the Jhansi Brigade. Before impris-
onment, these women had been participating either in underground activities in the
frame of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, led by Stepan Bandera, or in officially
recognized armed forces such as the Red Army of the USSR. While the structure of
the Red Army and the Banderites (named after Bandera) was completely different,
and the women’s training and tasks had different focuses, both groups considered
themselves fighting for an already existing, legally recognized state under occupa-
tion. In the concentration camps, they not only shared the same experiences but
also shared the contention that imprisonment was an integral part of their fight, and
that the fight had to continue, even in a modified way, during captivity. According
to Isaiuk, the women endeavored to reorganize themselves inside the camp and to
support the weaker inmates. Additionally, they considered survival as a necessary
task that would allow them to continue their armed fight after imprisonment.
Ayelet Harel’s chapter (Chapter 7) presents a special case of inclusion and exclu-
sion from the front lines, of being noncombatant but in proximity to combat at the
same time, using the example of Israeli female soldiers serving in war rooms. In
the past decade, female soldiers assigned to strategic war rooms have become sig-
nificant participants in war; with some of them running and commanding the war
rooms. Because of both their locatedness (Susan Bordo) and professional capacity,
they challenge the traditional concepts of security, war and gender roles. The use of
various visual devices, which bring images of war into the war room, affects how
the women in there both “experience” and “make” war. Even though they are not
physically present on the battlefield itself, this has not stopped them from being
exposed to extreme violence. In Isaiuk’s chapter, protection is carried out toward
other women and children by the imprisoned female soldiers as a part of the military
masculine role model the female soldiers attune themselves to once they acquire the
status of a combat soldier. The Israeli combat-support soldier in the strategic war
room, according to Harel, protects both the state and the soldiers in the battle zone,
while at the same time being protected by the combatants. While the diversifying of
military tasks may question the understanding of gendered roles in the military, this
doubt, as formulated by Orna Sasson-Levy (2002, p. 357), that whether this devel-
opment will ever “undermine[s] the hegemonic order” of masculinity, remains.
Chapter 8, “Women of color in the armed forces of Germany”, by Egzona
Gashi and Béatrice Hendrich, discusses the consequences of intersectionality in the
German Federal Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, with a focus on migrant German
women and women of color serving within the Bundeswehr in different positions.
The guiding question is how these women experience their military service and
how they make sense of themselves in this core institution of the nation-state and
“hyper-masculine organization” (Lomsky-Feder and Sasson-Levy, 2017, p. 1). The
study shows that discrimination based on religion, ethnicity and gender often over-
lap and multiply in the case of women of color, who are often of Muslim creed
given Germany’s immigration history. The chapter outlines the recent history of
changes both in German citizenship law and in regulations regarding conscrip-
tion and serving in the armed forces since these changes constitute the backdrop
of the topic. Intersectionality, German nationalism and racism, citizenship, and
the significance of (a precarious) language form the theoretical framework of the
discussion. The empirical part of the analysis is based on two original qualitative
interviews as well as on further published material such as videos, interviews and
semiautobiographical books. The research process itself showed that the German
case remained hitherto untouched by the academia, while similar cases such as
the situation of female soldiers of color in the US Army have been substantially
researched and written about.
The third part of the book, titled “Case studies 2: The gender of sacrifice and
agency”, looks at female members of organizations located in the field of political
Islam. The presentation of these three chapters, by Britt Ziolkowski, Aimé Raoul
Sumo Tayo and Charlotte Mei Yee Chin, respectively, by no means intends to sug-
gest that there is a special form of violence just because these organizations are all
Islamic. Instead, they are connected to each other by certain elements that illustrate
the main questions of this volume remarkably well. To begin with, the participation
of women in armed violence by organizations that promote a most binary and patri-
archal worldview, seems to challenge established concepts of gender and security.
Second, the deployment of female suicide bombers is not a new phenomenon. It
can be argued that male-made propaganda finds more and more rhetorical devices
to justify women’s participation. Third, the effort to include women is often stipu-
lated by ideological concerns, a lack of “manpower” and the hope to mobilize
hesitating men. Fourth, (inter)national security institutions have realized quite late
that women can commit “such things”. Indeed, the Western conception of Muslim
women as being essentially passive caters to this perception. Finally, participation
in such extremely violent organizations as Boko Haram, for example, brings to
the fore, once again, questions related to our understanding of agency and military
sacrifice: How are supposedly “female” forms of sacrifice – for the family, but also
for the extended family in form of the nation – and men’s soldierly sacrifice of
dying during a battle connected to each other? Do we have to discuss the matter of
agency in joining an armed group or perpetrating violence separately in each case,
or does participating in an organization based on order and obeying constitute a
loss of agency in any case?
Ziolkowski’s chapter (Chapter 9) focuses on the self-portrayal of Palestinian
female suicide bombers during the Second Intifada. It examines the written testa-
ments and visual documents of three women who carried out their acts with the
support of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
The visual documents in particular underline the possibility of reading martyrdom
as the ultimate fulfillment of patriarchal motherhood, while shattering the myth of
the peaceful woman at the same time.
Sumo Tayo (Chapter 10) provides a rare case of research based on original
interviews with female former jihadists, Cameroonian army officers and former
Boko Haram captives, prominent counterinsurgency actors, and eight former sui-
cide bombers arrested before or during the attacks. The author discusses the weap-
onization of female bodies by Boko Haram, cosmetic feminization in the context
of a military phallocracy, and the mobilization of women by Boko Haram in the
hypermale combat role as well as in intelligence and support activities. The reasons
for women’s participation in armed conflicts, he concludes, cannot be reduced to
one single idea like victimhood.
Finally, in Chapter 11, Chin highlights the continuing significance of the Islamic
State (or Daesh) in the Philippines as well as women’s increasing relevance in
these groups. Her chapter analyzes dependencies of radicalized women in jihad-
ist groups there and focuses on the social context from which women “depart” in
order to join these groups. To this end, she gives an overview of the historical and
political background of the Philippines, illustrates the roles and functions of female
jihadis, and shows how the intersection of multiple oppressed identities enforces
marginalization and vulnerability resulting in the radicalization of women. Based
on her holistic understanding of the initial conditions of radicalization, she con-
cludes that contrary to radicalization theories, which focus mainly on ameliorating
socioeconomic conditions of the individual, group narratives facilitating radicali-
zation processes must additionally be addressed.
A distinctly important motivation for presenting this book was undoubtedly
the authors’ desire to address and scrutinize their own view of gender in violent
conflicts within a transnational exchange among colleagues. Our exchange was
realized in the form of repeated online meetings, since the COVID pandemic had
forced us to try new ways of academic cooperation. However, while the pandemic
made us revise our hesitation toward exclusively online meetings, the next crisis
undermined many certainties about pacifism and armed fighting in Western Europe:
the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. From a Western European per-
spective, doing research on war and peace has acquired a different quality since
then. The chapters included in this volume are both the result of individual research
and of the online meetings. The hope is that we can feed additional knowledge and
perspectives, as well as productive questions, into the field of feminist international
relations and security studies.
Notes
1 A NATO report from 2021 criticizes both the lack of appropriate equipment and of
adapted healthcare (vaginal and urinary tract infections are common, menstrual cycle
symptoms are not addressed, pregnancy is just regarded as a “mishap”) and demands
explicitly “to mainstream the inclusion of female research subjects” in future research
projects (Braithwaite and Lim, 2021, pp. 48, 58, 75).
2 It seems that the categorization of “traditional male” and “female” tasks in the field
should be discussed further. Taarnala (2016) also includes not only cooking and caring
but also intelligence in the noncombatant female area. Cohn, however, underlines the
importance of “male care” for a successful combat (2013b, p. 23).
3 “The term itself [cultural support team] took sex out of the equation; however, the teams
still solely comprised female Servicemembers” (Katt, 2014, p. 109).
4 Quantitative data is provided by Wood and Thomas (2017); Mazurana (2013).
5 The deployment of (allegedly pregnant) women in violent action, and the blindness of
the hegemonic institutions toward women’s sheer ability to exert violence has a long
history. One wonders if this arrangement, which is only successful in a world of totally
gendered perception and prejudice, will now come to end. After all, the (inter)national
institutions have started to understand that “IS brides” are not victims that should be
rescued and sent home without any interrogation.
6 Catherine Baker (2021) shows how the population of former Yugoslavia is categorized
as non-White and to which extent this arbitrary categorization is related to practices of
securitization.
7 For a case in point, see Fatma Müge Göçek’s “Parameters of a postcolonial sociology of
the Ottoman Empire” (2013).
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Part 1
The historical perspective

Changing perceptions, repeating patterns?
2 A woman in power in 19th-century
South Asia
An inspiring life path for struggles against
injustice
Richard Herzog
Introduction
The Rani, the damsel fought for Jhansi,
Recount her valor, people of India!1
With this plea ends the long poetic narrative written by the Indian independence
activist and poet Subhadra Kumari Chauhan in 1930 about Lakshmibai, the Rani
(female ruler) of Jhansi. Lakshmibai was an emblematic figure and one of the main
leaders of the massive uprising against British colonial rule in South Asia in 1857.
This raises two questions: How was it possible for the image of this local ruler to
expand into serving as a model for all of India nearly 70 years later? How and for
what purposes was this legend of the Rani used by politicians and writers at the
time of the Indian independence movement?2
To trace the origins of the legend, this chapter starts with an overview of its roots
in Hindu mythology and folk poetry, as well as of its reception in British “mutiny
novels”. Fictional works by Indian authors provide information about its exploita-
tion in Indian nationalism in the mid-20th century; Subhas Chandra Bose’s “Rani
of Jhansi Brigade” further illustrates its application to pressing political struggles
and issues of gender inequality. It was one of the few all-female combat units of the
Second World War, mobilizing women and girls in an unprecedented form. While
traditional history writing sees the military as an exclusively male domain, the
Rani’s legacy forcefully exemplifies that women have been key players in military
conflicts throughout history.
The time frame covers 1857 to the period shortly before independence in 1947.
Due to the scope of the question, I limit this chapter largely to the literary recep-
tion of the Rani.3 Indian literature on the Rani is especially extensive, comprising
at least three biographies, and several novels and plays, as well as numerous (often
unpublished) poems. In addition, many official British accounts of the Rani’s life
are preserved in the archives of the East India Company and the British Raj. Due
to this almost one-sided documentation, we are much better informed about her
“actual” life from the British than the Indian perspective. Despite or because of
this, Indian historians in particular have relied on legends and local lore in addition
to archives. Especially in Jhansi, a city in the North Indian region of Bundelkhand,
today in the state of Uttar Pradesh, the study of the Rani is considered sacred. In
DOI: 10.4324/9781003326359-3
addition, only a small number of writings by the Rani herself have survived: A few
letters to British administrators from the period leading up to the lapse of Jhansi in
1858, mostly concerned with this British takeover of rulership. The controversies
surrounding the assessment of the rebellion – as a military revolt or as the first
national war of independence, among others – also had a considerable impact on
the discussions about the role of the Rani in it (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, pp. 157–
158; Pati, 2007, p. 1)
This problematic state of sources means that her own voice is quite distant and
filtered through writings about her, mostly by male authors, hence this chapter’s
focus on the Rani legend. Key excerpts from the memoir of the captain of the Rani
of Jhansi Brigade, Lakshmi Sahgal, add an important female voice to this chapter,
in keeping with this edited volume’s themes.
These transversal foci allow for a contextualization of how different images of
the Rani were used to further both British-colonialist and Indian-nationalist politi-
cal agendas in multiple, contrasting ways. The transepochal approach further adds
to a broader research discussion of the uprising of 1857 and of studies on gender,
representation and military history. While the focal point throughout the chapter
is on her role as an influential female fighter, other aspects of her legend – among
them the Rani as mother, politician and anti-imperial icon – should be taken into
consideration in order to better understand her multifaceted history and legacy.
The chapter thus sheds light on Lakshmibai’s continuing function as a female
role model for feminist and subaltern causes, whose heritage remains intrinsically
linked with interests derived from processes of national identity-building. A brief
overview of her short but significant life helps contextualize and better assess the
legend of the Rani.
The Rani’s biography

Due to the proliferation of legends and the scarcity of contemporary sources, it’s
difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction in the Rani’s life story; even her
date of birth (around 1827) is disputed. She was born in Varanasi as the daughter
of a Karhade Brahmin, Moropant Tambe, and was given the name Lakshmi after
her marriage, in honor of the Hindu goddess of prosperity and victory. It is reported
that the Rani learned to read and write and even to ride and fight, in her childhood
in Bithur – exceedingly unusual for a Brahmin daughter in those days. Popular
stories recount that she played with other later revolutionary leaders: Nana Sahib,
Rao Sahib, Bala Sahib and Tatya Tope. These seem to be based on subsequent
legends, since these different persons also came from very different social classes
(Jerosch, 2003, pp. 15–17). In 1842, the young woman married the much older,
childless Maharaja (ruler) Gangadhar Rao of Jhansi, taking the name Lakshmibai.
After the marriage, she had to live in seclusion and follow the court etiquette with
purdah, especially in the beginning.4 In Jhansi, however, she also continued her
unconventional military training; there is talk of the formation of a women’s regi-
ment, to which the Rani herself taught riding and fencing (Lebra-Chapman, 1986,
pp. 17–19; Jerosch, 2003, pp. 29–32).
Woman in power in 19th-century South Asia 23
The marriage remained childless after the early death of an heir to the throne.
Fearing British annexation, the Maharaja adopted a distant relative, Damodar Rao,
shortly before his death in 1853. The governor-general Lord Dalhousie then applied
the rule of “lapse” of territories without legitimate heirs to Great Britain, leav-
ing the Rani as a widow without a principality. According to this rule, Jhansi had
formerly been under the Maratha Empire, which had been taken over by the East
India Company, so that the latter now held sovereignty (Jerosch, 2003, pp. 32–35).
Subsequent attempts by the Rani to object to the annexation and have her adopted
son recognized were rebuffed by Dalhousie (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, pp. 33–38)
After the start of the revolt of 1857, the Indian military mutinied in Jhansi
as well, beginning in June. Jhansi, located in the North Indian region of
Bundelkhand, was strategically important due to its location at the junction of
four major roads (see Figure 2.1). A major problem of the rebellion, which was
suppressed by 1858–1859, was the lack of a coordinated organization as well as
conflicts of interest among leaders and troops, who often joined the British or
switched sides. Therefore, instead of a nationwide war, there was rather a series
of rebellions in different (especially north and central) Indian regions, owing to
similar causes – mainly economic, political and social exploitation by the British
(Pati, 2007, p. 1). Princes in Bundelkhand also condemned the British actions
in the region, so sporadic uprisings occurred even before the mutiny took hold
there, but they did not spread more widely until 1858, during the late stages of
the rebellion (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, pp. 49–50).
The role of the Rani in these revolts and especially in the infamous 1857 mas-
sacre in Kanpur, in which all the English men, women and children of the place
were killed, was and is highly controversial. It is generally considered the worst
massacre of British civilians during the entire revolt and is known as the Bibighar
massacre. However, the Rani’s involvement in the revolt is more commonly dated
in recent research to a period after the massacre, to 1858 at the time of immediate
threat from the British, based in part on eyewitness accounts such as that of the
British T.A. Martin, who absolved her of participation in the massacre (Lebra-
Chapman, 1986, pp. 52–60 and 66–67).5 According to a letter from the Rani her-
self, probably dated 12 June, she was not able to support the British at all due to
a lack of soldiers of her own, at the same time condemning the rebels’ cruelty
(Jerosch, 2003, p. 67).
A final appeal against the lapse of Jhansi to Lord Dalhousie on 14 June is worth
studying in more detail. In it, the Rani highlighted that the people of Jhansi had
held no complaints under her late husband’s rule. In addition, for four months after
the Maharaja’s death, she herself had maintained the state’s administration, show-
casing her great competence to organize state affairs, which the British had decided
to completely ignore (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, pp. 37–38). For the Rani, this meant
that the British government had called off any form of negotiation, turning instead
to the “exercise of the power, without the right, of the great and strong against the
weak and small” (IOL [India Office Library], F/4/2600, quoted in Lebra-Chapman,
1986, pp. 37–38).6 She then alluded to other, successful cases of adoptions that
had been sanctioned in nearby princely states. In her letter’s conclusion, the Rani
Figure 2.1 A map of North India by an unknown author, 1912. (From The Cambridge Modern History Atlas.)
convincingly argued that the dispossessions “of” herself and her ward effectively
meant a “gross violation and negation of the Treaties of the Government of India
[...] and if persisted in they must involve gross violation and negation of British
faith and honor” (IOL, Z/E/2600, quoted in Lebra-Chapman, 1986, p. 38). Her
detailed knowledge of colonial judicial procedure comes through in her detailed
arguments. Lastly, she noted her own sorrow due to the deprivation of her “author-
ity, rank and affluence”, leaving her reduced to a state of “subjection, dishonor and
poverty” (IOL, Z/E/2600, quoted in Lebra-Chapman, 1986, p. 38).
Following this letter, Lakshmibai’s spirited requests to the East India Company
were no longer answered, which led her to arm Jhansi against the advancing British
troops. After fierce resistance to the siege, the Rani fled and after another rebel
defeat at Kalpi, her initiative succeeded in capturing Gwalior. The uniform-wear-
ing Rani was killed in a cavalry skirmish outside Gwalior on 17 June, in one of
the last major battles of the revolt (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, pp. 93–95, 99–103 and
109–117).
The birth of a legend

… Though a lady, the bravest and best leader of the rebels.7
The remark made by Sir Hugh Rose, the great adversary of the Rani, shows how
her martyrdom immediately won recognition on the Indian as well as the British
side. Her military feats alone as well as her courage on the battlefield as the first
woman to fight the British inspired generations of writers, painters and Indian
patriots (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, p. 117; Rag, 2010, p. 78). Social factors like-
wise encouraged the creation of legends, including Lakshmibai’s ritual support
of the Jhansi’s poor, her participation in religious festivities, and the inclusion of
women and members of various religious groups in her army (Jerosch, 2003, p.
268; Rag, 2010, p. 95). From the British perspective, a more nuanced assessment
of the Rani compared to other rebel leaders took place, for example, in comparison
to the demonized Nana Sahib – Sir Rose’s portrayal of her as the best rebel leader
and the “Indian Joan of Arc” is not exceptional here, especially after her death.
Nevertheless, the aforementioned controversy surrounding Lakshmibai’s role in
the Bibighar massacre included critical voices that highlighted her alleged brutality
toward innocents (Sen, 2007, p. 1755).
The great importance Hindu society attaches to myths as well as its cyclical
conceptualization of time result in a different understanding of history compared
to those found in Western societies. Here, myths play a central role in creating
meaning and identity, and the line between real and epic heroes and deities, and
thus between real and fictive, is often blurred. In addition, the traditionally largely
oral transmission of cultural norms and the strongly spiritual orientation of South
Asian classical literary traditions has created a fertile ground for the spread of the
Rani legend. In this regard, the integration of her legend into folk culture and ulti-
mately into India’s collective memory is its chief characteristic (Lebra-Chapman,
1986, pp. 118–119).
In folklore
According to Lebra-Chapman (1986, p. 119), legends take on a history of their

own, “apart from the people who inspired them”. This is evident in the interconnec-
tions between the Rani legend and Hindu folk traditions through which it gained
influence. In poems and stories, the Rani is often equated with the goddess Durga
and her destructive embodiment Kali, as are her battles against the British Raj with
theirs against the demon Mahishasura. Superhuman powers are attributed to her,
and she is even said to have wielded two swords with the reins held between her
teeth (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, pp. 123–124 and 131).
Another clear parallel is made to the deity Shakti as a cosmic elemental force and
in this way linked to the archetype of the mother, quite widespread in Hinduism.
Thus, astrologers are said to have predicted already at Lakshmibai’s birth that she
would embody characteristics of the three main goddesses Lakshmi, Durga and
Saraswati. Moreover, her role as mother and protector of her adopted son Damodar
Rao is emphasized in many statues and paintings, where she is depicted riding with
her infant son tied around her waist (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, pp. 125–127). The
legend builds on myths and images of powerful and active female deities, among
them Kali and Shakti, rooted in female agency.8
The Rani legend developed in the Jhansi area, where the memory of the Rani is
still passed down from one generation to the next through oral tales in poems, bal-
lads and songs. It was not possible to publish texts praising the rebels during British
rule and especially in the wake of the rebellion.9 Nowadays, parts of this oral tradi-
tion are available to us in written form, while the rest is either lost or lives on in
the memory of poets. In addition, the legend is present in a variety of paintings and
statues, especially in Jhansi, Gwalior, Nagpur and surrounding areas, situated in
museums, public places or markets (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, pp. 127–129).
A very personal and regional image of the Rani can be gleaned from
Bundelkhand’s folk songs, where rural and everyday aspects of her life are empha-
sized and her problems – for instance, the struggles of ruling as a young widow –
are dealt with sympathetically. Vernacular expressions of sympathy with the Rani
emphasize the local support for the rebellion in Jhansi. Interestingly, the folk tradi-
tion records only the ruler’s total devotion to the rebellion once she acted against the
British, notwithstanding the possible tensions between her and the sepoys before
1858 (Rag, 2010, pp. 64–67). At the same time, however, Bundelkhand’s oral tra-
dition can be seen in a continuum of local resistance to foreign rule, reaching back
all the way to the Bundela rebellion of 1842 to 1857. The folk songs of fakirs10
denied any legitimacy to British institutions as invaders. The virtues of folk leaders,
and in some cases even the participation of lower-class village communities, were
emphasized alongside those of the rebel leaders (Rag, 2010, pp. 67–69 and 73–74).
According to traditional understandings of honor, the Rani here embodied truth
in the struggle against British falsehoods (Rag, 2010, p. 91). Moreover, there were
numerous mentions in local folklore of female leaders such as Sheili Devi and
Nanhi Rani of Jigri, as well as of loyal servants of the Rani, including Mundar
and Sundar from her women’s corps known as Durga Dal. This important role of
women in Bundelkhand is related to the fact that, in addition to traditionally “mas-

culine” tasks such as governing and fighting, they largely continued to follow the
central rituals and practices of local culture and worship. For Lakshmibai, these
included visits to the temple of the family goddess Mahalakshmi, support of art-
ists and Brahmin scholars, and distribution of warm clothing to beggars in winter
(Rag, 2010, p. 94–95). According to Pankaj Rag (2010, p. 78), popular culture thus
provides us with strongly divergent images of the Rani – from a young, troubled
woman to an infallible demigoddess – which depend greatly on the difficulties and
hopes, as well as the changing circumstances of the population.
In colonial novels
The Rani of Jhansi similarly occupied a special place in colonial British dis-
course as well, as one of the few important female rebel leaders. This was also
because her story contained a particularly large number of surprising twists and
turns, at least as seen by the English. In addition to being portrayed as an enemy
to whom the infamous Bibighar massacre in Jhanis was attributed, she para-
doxically emerged as a tragic figure and loyal ally who fell victim to colonial
strategies of annexation and “home rule”. Thus, the British fascination with the
legendary heroism of the Rani resembled her Indian recognition in several ways
(Sen, 2007, p. 1755).11 This was reflected in “mutiny novels”, provoked by the
great rebellion and hugely successful in both colonial India and Britain. The
main goal of this new genre was to establish the supposed moral and military
superiority of the British in the wake of massive uncertainties regarding British
domination after 1857 (Sen, 2007, p. 1754).
In the following decade, reports portrayed the Rani mostly negatively, which
also coincides with stereotypical depictions of “native” Indian women of the time,
who were labeled as treacherous and cruel. Similarly, the 1887 mutiny novel The
Rane: A Legend of the Indian Mutiny written by Gillean (Col. J. N. H. Maclean)
describes the Rani as a ruthless seductress who uses her sexuality to manipulate
her white enemies. This calculated use of seduction for political purposes feeds the
stereotype of the brutal Asian ruler, as well as that of the treacherous Brahmin, with
an additional misogynist dimension (Gillean, 1887, pp. 1757–1758).
A racist and sexist exaggeration of public opinion in the New Imperialism phase
of British rule is also reflected in novels such as The Queen’s Desire (1893) by Hume
Nisbet. In it, a voluptuous and promiscuous Rani is depicted as falling for a lower-
class British soldier who, however, abandons her and eventually even unknowingly
kills her in her final battle. This twist of fate appears all too clearly as a revenge by
the superior British military on the rebellious India, here embodied by a Rani heavily
drenched in orientalist tropes (Nisbet, 1893, pp. 1758–1759; Singh, 2014, pp. 33–34).
These examples, however, can be contrasted with mutiny novels of a different
orientation, including, most notably, Philip Meadow Taylor’s Seeta of 1872. The
novel contains a rare admiring portrayal of the Rani, in which she appears as a
courageous, deceived warrior queen – betrayed by the British despite her highly
successful rule (Sen, 2007, p. 1756). In Michael White’s later work, The Jeanne
d’Arc of India (1901), published in the US, Lakshmibai remains celibate. She is
also acquitted of the guilt of the Bibighar massacre in this novel, in contrast to
Taylor’s. This creates an image in the tradition of the European warrior maiden,
bringing to mind particularly Joan of Arc as victor over English invaders; but also
that of the celibate fighter, a central ideal of militant Indian nationalism.12 Through
comparisons with Durga/Kali and the anachronistic attribution of patriotic feel-
ings for India instead of Jhansi to the Rani, the text once again presents her as an
embodiment of Indian nationalism (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, p. 136; Sen, 2007, p.
1760). This comes out clearly in her prophetic farewell speech:
“If I have sinned against the laws of my caste, it was for the love of my
country. Surely, thou wilt forgive a woman who has tried to inspire others to
be brave and just. Oh India”, she cried, [...] “a day will come when their law
shall be no longer obeyed, and our palaces and temples rise anew from their
ruins. Farewell!”
(White, 1901, p. 295)
These characterizations as an icon of anti-colonial resistance show, on the one

hand, the multiplicity of interpretations of her legend in colonial discourse that
were then possible and publishable. These interpretations range from dominant
portrayals to orientalist demonization and sexist degradation of the Rani on to
implicit criticisms of British actions. On the other hand – together with popular
representations – they also influenced her very positioning as a major role model
for emerging Indian nationalism.
Uses in Indian nationalism I: In Indian literature
A legend can be perpetuated on a regional level through folk art; however, to influ-
ence an emerging national consciousness requires additional, more effective and
wide-ranging methods. The Rani legend increasingly spread beyond Jhansi: An
artwork portraying the Rani of Jhansi on horseback killing an Englishman with her
sword from the late 19th century provides one particularly impressive example of
this process (see Figure 2.2). In addition to poems, paintings and songs, numerous
Indian novels and plays about the Rani appeared, positioning her in the then-domi-
nant, Indian nationalist discourse as a heroic mother who fought for her son and for
his inheritance. The first book on the subject was written in 1888 by Bengali author
Chandi Charan Sen, who specialized in patriotic themes (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, p.
135; Deshpande, 2008, p. 856).
Probably the best-known fictional book on Lakshmibai, Jhansi ki Rani [The
Queen of Jhansi], written in Hindi by Vrindavanlal Varma, was published in 1946.
The author was from Jhansi, and his grandfather had fought on the side of the rebels.
In his historical novel, he depicts the ruler as a nationalist heroine: The embodiment
of an idealized Indian femininity, deeply rooted in tradition. She is portrayed as
participating in a resistance movement that encompassed Maratha history and local
past – in the novel she reveres the Maratha ruler Shivaji as well as Chhatrasal, lord
Figure 2.2 A
rtwork from an unknown artist, The Rani of Jhansi on horseback kills an
Englishman with her sword; painting ca. 1860. (From the San Diego Museum of
Art Collection, painting owned by Edwin Binney the 3rd).
of Bundelkhand, who resisted the Mughal expansion into her territories. Thus, the
Rani likewise appears as an Indian patriot and her behavior in the rebellion is lent
additional context and gravitas (Varma, 1992; Deshpande, 2008, pp. 856–858).
Much like in the folk songs of Bundelkhand, Varma emphasizes her humanity – to
set her apart from the British colonialists, and to criticize British racism as well as the
feudalist tendencies of many native rulers. At the same time, he portrays Jhansi under
Lakshmibai’s rule as a place of interreligious harmony, thus putting the rebel demand
for the restoration of Mughal rule into perspective (Deshpande, 2008, pp. 859–860):
[The important revolutionary leader, Tatya Tope, told the Rani,] I met a lot
of eager Muslims; they say that the Empire should be established again in
Hindustan. I said, ‘Swarajya’ [self-rule] and Empire can actually co-exist.
When they said, how, I said that people would establish their own rule in
their regions and provinces, and while the emperor could certainly intervene
in them, his seal would be on inter-provincial issues and big matters.
(As quoted in Deshpande, 2008, p. 860)
In this way, the author articulates his own vision of anti-colonial and autonomous
possibilities in the novel, but from a reformist Hindu perspective. By character-
izing the Rani as a progressive, educated and patriotic widow acting in the service
of a larger political cause, Varma presents an idealized past that is reshaped for a
nationalist mission. At the same time, his authorial blending of historical Indian
sources with fantasy contributes to the blurring of fact and fiction in the reception
of his protagonist (Varma, 1992, pp. 860–862; Singh, 2014, p. 166).
One main source for Varma was an early Lakshmibai biography: D. B. Parasnis’
Jhansi Sansthanchya Maharani Lakshmibaisaheb Yanche Charitra [A biography
of Queen Lakshmibai of Jhansi (1894) written in the Marathi language and pub-
lished in a Hindi translation in 1938. Western-educated Parasnis sought to create a
modern, patriotic historiography in Marathi, in this case by contradicting colonial
historians who would portray the Rani as a scheming rebel. Eyewitness accounts
took a central role and Lakshmibai’s militancy was associated with a regional poli-
tics based on caste and masculinity (Deshpande, 2008, pp. 862–865).
The Hindi translation published at the height of the nationalist movement, on
the other hand, was far more critical of British actions during and after 1857. The
abridged version by an unknown translator shortened the original text by about
100 pages and included major modifications that have often been overlooked. Its
incorporation into a Hindi context also deemphasized the larger impact of Maratha
history on Bundelkhand. In addition, it portrayed Gwalior’s ruler Shinde, who
remained loyal to the British in 1858, more negatively. This influential translation
again illustrates the changing perceptions and nationalistic overtones the rebellion
had attained by the mid-20th century. What is more, “it served as another smooth-
ing layer in the accumulating nationalist narrative about Lakshmibai, Jhansi and
1857” (Desphande, 2008, pp. 865–866).
The most famous modern poem about the Rani, the “Jhansi ki Raani” [The Queen
of Jhansi] mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, written in Hindi by Subhadra
Kumari Chauhan, is still taught and memorized in many schools today, especially in
northern India. Chauhan joined Gandhi’s campaign of non-cooperation in 1921 and
was the first female satyagrahi13 to be arrested in Nagpur. She campaigned for rights
for women and Dalits (“untouchables”), as well as against dowry, before tragically
dying in a car accident in 1948 (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, p. 134; Rag, 2010, p. 63).
Given Chauhan’s nationalist sentiments, it is not surprising that the nationalist
quest for freedom emerges as the central motif of her poem. In this respect, Jhansi’s
fate is embedded in the context of the disastrous impact of British trade, economic
and social policies on indigenous Indian states. While it is true that the concept of
“nation” as conceived by the 20th century liberation movements had not yet devel-
oped in 1857, when rulers and sepoys fought for their own more local territories
and homelands, Chauhan’s projection of modern nationalism does not seem wholly
out of place, insofar as the rebellion, with its focus on British claims and posses-
sions, and clearly advanced seminal anti-colonial claims (Rag, 2010, p. 65).
A distinctive feature of the poem is that Chauhan drew inspiration for it from
a Bundelkhand folk song; by adopting its refrain, the Rani is ascribed masculine,
warlike qualities: “O Rani of Jhansi, how well like a man she fought” (Rag, 2010,
p. 64).14 Other elements, such as the equation with Durga, are also reminiscent
of traditional poetry (Chauhan, 2010). For these reasons, too, the poem has often
been presented as a continuum to oral narratives from 1857. This is contradicted
not only by its nationalist orientation but also by its different emphases – Chauhan
focuses on other important leaders of the revolt and jagirdars15 such as Nana Sahib
and Tatya Tope, in addition to the Rani; while in folk poetry local leaders play a
greater role as initiators of the Jhansi rebellion and community cohesion (Rag,
2010, pp. 69, 74 and 85).
Here, once again, a unified, iconic portrayal of the Rani is evident in her recasting
as a nationalist role model and “freedom fighter” – in a poem that has itself become
part of the country’s oral tradition (Rag, 2010, p. 69).16 This depiction stands apart
from historical facts, chief among them the Rani’s turn to revolt, which is attested
as relatively late, since she was still making petitions to the British authorities as
late as June 1858 (Sen, 2007, p. 1755).
Uses in Indian nationalism II: The Rani of Jhansi Brigade
Through Mahatma Gandhi’s use of deep-rooted symbols, Indian women were

mobilized for the independence movement to an unprecedented degree. For Gandhi,
women represented religious and moral role models rather than active combatants,
in keeping with his doctrine of non-violent resistance. The role of women was mod-
eled on the goddess Sita as a self-sacrificing housewife. Following this, spinning and
weaving were more in keeping with “female nature” for Gandhi (Hills and Silverman,
1993). However, his view of women differed greatly from that of another important,
more controversial pro-independence campaigner – Subhas Chandra Bose (known
by the honorific title Netaji or “Respected Leader”). The former Congress leader
Bose attempted in vain to convince Hitler to come to India’s aid from 1941 onward;
in 1943 he traveled by submarine from Germany to Japan, securing Japanese col-
laboration for his Indian National Army (INA) (Sahagal, 2013).17
In contrast to Gandhi’s more conservative view, Bose, a strong proponent of
armed resistance, saw women as activists. Moreover, he wanted to abolish child
marriages, purdah and the ban on widow remarriage through specific programs. He
insisted on female education, economic independence for women and the right not
to marry: According to Bose, Indian women were denied their basic human rights.
Like Gandhi, he used ancestral images of women, but chose a historical figure that
both matched his notion of powerful women and served as a metaphor for Indian
resistance to British rule (Hills and Silverman, 1993, pp. 754–755).
From 1943 up until his death in 1945, Bose led the INA of his “Provisional
Government of Free India” from exile, which acted against the British colonial
government. It drew thousands of former prisoners and volunteers from the Indian
expatriate population in present-day Malaysia and Burma to fight alongside the
Imperial Japanese Army against British and Commonwealth forces in Southeast
Asia. By naming the women’s regiment of the INA after the Rani of Jhansi, Bose
gave expression to a new form of Indian female heroism that merged nationalist
and feminist ideas (Hills and Silverman, 1993, pp. 753–755).
Under Bose’s leadership, 1500 Indian women in Burma, British Malaya and
Singapore; Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs; poor and rich alike, adopted the uniforms
of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment between 1943 and 1945. The INA was largely made
up of poor migrant workers from the diasporic Indian community in East Asia
(Viswanath, 2014, p. 63). Bose dreamed of “thousands of Ranis of Jhansi” in his
“last war of independence” (Hills and Silverman, 1993, p. 743). Importantly, accord-
ing to Geraldine Forbes, the Rani Regiment was “not only […] India’s first and only
women’s regiment [but also] one of the first conscious attempts in world history to
integrate women into the military as a fighting force” (Forbes, 2013, p. xiii).
The recruits’ duties consisted of military and medical missions for which they
were trained – most were trained as combatants and a minority as nurses. Their
training and their uniforms were the same as those of the male soldiers. According
to female recruits, the regiment was also intended to promote the empowerment
of women’s rights in peacetime. Bose was even challenged by women soldiers
to prove his commitment to large-scale female mobilization – through a petition
demanding their right to fight signed in their own blood (Hills and Silverman,
1993, pp. 744–746; Forbes, 2013, pp. xxi–xxii).
By early 1945, the British Indian Army had reversed the Japanese attack on
India. Nearly half of the Japanese forces and half the INA forces were killed, and
the INA – including the Rani Regiment – finally surrendered with the recapture of
Singapore in September 1945. Since, after its training, the regiment had arrived at
the Malaysian front when the Japanese and INA forces were already retreating in
1943, they would never serve in battle, a major frustration for the female soldiers.
Many returned to Singapore without seeing action, while some who remained to
help in Burma were taken prisoner – including the female commander of the regi-
ment, Lakshmi Sahgal (Forbes, 2013, pp. xviii–xix). Still, even though the soldiers
did not take part in active combat, they were involved in several skirmishes and
endured air attacks, capture and interrogation. From this perspective, marginalizing
them because of their retreat appears as a male judgment, somehow marking out
only those who participated in battle as “true soldiers” (Forbes, 2013, p. 62).
A memoir written by Lakshmi Sahgal provides us with a valuable personal
account of the Rani Regiment. A few main points and perspectives from this rich
source will be discussed, due to this chapter’s scope. Sahgal was a medical doctor,
a military leader and would continue her activism following her return to India
after the end of World War II, working on behalf of refugees as well as for the
Communist Party of India (Marxist). Sahgal strongly believed in equal rights for
women and in the necessity for women to participate in the Indian freedom strug-
gle. She was always financially independent due to her medical practice, allowing
her to freely pursue her political and advocacy work that challenged conventional
norms of what was and was not acceptable for Indian women. In this way, Sahgal
and her memoir, as well as the regiment’s female warriors, subverted the tradi-
tional role of nurturing peacemaker in Indian society (Sahgal, 2013, p. 62).
When Subhas Chandra Bose took over control of the INA, he made Sahgal the
captain of the newly formed Rani of Jhansi Regiment, as well as the Minister of
Women’s Affairs of the provisional Azad Hind government; she came to be known
in India by the sobriquet “Captain Lakshmi” (Forbes, 2013, pp. xvi–xvii).
Sahgal had been strongly in favor of the INA’s formation: “I had always […]
felt that the final blow for independence would have to come from armed struggle”
(Sahgal, 2013, p. 43). At the same time, it was clear to her that “no mass move-
ment can succeed if one entire section of the community were to remain outside
it” (Sahgal, 2013, p. 138). In her memoir, the captain applauds Bose for realizing:
How deeply [Indian women] felt the chains of slavery, which in their case
[were] doubly strong as it was India’s domination by a foreign power that
had retarded her progress and had kept alive the antiquated superstitions
which bound down women far more than [they] did men.
(Sahgal, 2013, p. 140)
In this narration, a sharp awareness by both Bose and Sahgal of the deeply inter-
twined nature of discrimination by way of British colonial policies and of sexism
comes through.
The Rani Regiment’s legacy remains contradictory. The INA has been called
“The Forgotten Army” in “India’s Untold War of Independence” (meaning the
INA’s battles), but even within this still quite marginal history, the Rani Regiment
has been marginalized and often remains erased from male author’s writings on the
INA (Forbes, 2013, p. xiii; Viswanath, 2014, p. 60). On the one hand, at the time
the regiment was not taken seriously by Japanese nor by British troops, as they did
not consider it a threat. This was due to the relatively small size, but also surely to
misogynistic attitudes toward female soldiers. On the other hand, the fact that the
regiment’s soldiers never fought in battle – unlike the historical Rani – undermined
their claims for equality in the eyes of male soldiers.
In an interview conducted in 1989, more than 45 years after the Regiment’s
formation, Sahgal commented on the positive psychological effects of recruitment
on the soldiers: “You see, the main thing was, they were being made to feel like
human beings. Before that, they were mainly being treated like cattle”. For her, in
the aftermath of the war, the experience of participating in an armed force “made
them very much more independent. They would voice their opinions and not cow
down. It gave them a lot of self-confidence” (Sahgal, 2013, pp. 169 and 171). Then
again, as Gita Viswanath points out, Sahgal glosses over more controversial issues
in her memoir, chief among them the court martial held in independent India for the
officers who had joined the INA. While their sentence was finally remitted, it did
raise uncomfortable questions about what it meant for Indian soldiers of the British
army to rebel (Viswanath, 2014, p. 63).
It becomes clear, then, that analyzing the regiment in purely military terms is
too simplistic. As Forbes argues, its larger goal was sociopolitical: Both Bose and
Sahgal wanted to build a structure that would allow women to realize their full
potential to become equal partners in a newly built India (Forbes, 2013, pp. xxviii–
xxx). Then again, Bose held more strategic goals as well: The women’s regiment
might counter then-current accusations against the INA of being a puppet army
indirectly formed by the Japanese. To quiet such claims, the regiment made up of
highly motivated women would showcase the voluntary recruitments into the INA.
Beyond such practical considerations, there is no doubt that the creation of the Rani
Regiment was a novel and meaningful move that transcended mere representation:
“The INA being a revolutionary liberation army used women as symbols of moder-
nity that promised equality between the sexes. Bose’s gesture of inducting women
in his INA, motives notwithstanding, was far ahead of its time” (Viswanath, 2014,
p. 61).
Despite the INA’s ultimate military defeat, the formation of the Rani Regiment
nevertheless succeeded in mobilizing women and girls in an unprecedented way.
They committed themselves to the liberation struggle independently, together with
men and women of other castes and religious affiliations. This mobilization was
bolstered by Bose’s charisma and his references to mythical elements with pre-
dominantly female attributes such as Kali and the Indian motherland, as well as
to the Rani legend, which was once more effectively invoked, and in the process,
reinterpreted (Viswanath, 2014, pp. 749–750 and 757). Clearly, the Rani’s hold
over Indian imaginations, or rather that of her multiple, evolving legend, was ever
strengthening during the mid-20th century.
The ever-changing Rani: An outlook

One explanation for the persistence of the Rani legend is certainly the multitude
of different facets it has taken on over time. Whether for British or Indian groups,
whether as a deceived widow or a goddess of revenge, a cunning seductress or an
Indian Joan of Arc, a nationalist or feminist icon, the portrayal has been subject
to constant change from 1858 until independence. This took place in relation to
developments of the time, such as the rise of Indian nationalism, but also depended
on the backgrounds of the respective authors. The very divergent representations
in British narratives, some of which were highly prejudiced, also reveal a lack of
colonial authority that was to be remedied by references to the past and, at the
same time, a renewed political program manifest in policies of the British New
Imperialism (Singh, 2014, p. 2).
The independence movement’s appropriation of the legend, in turn, built on
myths as well as regional folk art and even isolated works of colonial-era lit-
erature, thus appealing to a broader public. In addition, there was an interplay
between Indian literature and political instrumentalization, so that the Rani as a
role model finally passed from regional to national memory18 during the struggle
for decolonization.
During this protracted process, numerous discrepancies between the mythicized
and the historical Rani evidently occurred, beginning with her martyrdom. This
included stylizations, for instance, when her attachment to local traditions did not
fit into the respective image, or the projection of an Indian patriotism and modern
interpretations of the rebellion into the 19th century. These artifices served to adapt
her image to the present moment as an accessible legend, then as now. At the same
time, her biography, with its combination of traditional and modern elements, has
not lost any of its powerful impact on collective imaginations.
For even after India’s independence, Lakshmibai’s influence continues through
poems learned in schools, through comics, films, election posters, and novels – for
example, as a cameo in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children – all transmitting
their own ideas of their protagonist. Moreover, she remains visible in the public
space via Rani statues erected especially in Bundelkhand, but also in many Indian
regions – often portraying her as a warrior queen on horseback. Her influence is
also tangible in a women’s organization in Nagpur, Rashtra Sevika Samiti (RSS),
which continues to sing her praises (Lebra-Chapman, 1986, p. 133; Jerosch 2003,
p. 271). This organization mainly focuses on the institution of the family, wherein
motherhood is considered the most powerful role for shaping the development of
the Hindu nation. The RSS “evokes … Hindu women from history as an aspi-
rational ideal for its members to embody … For her fight against the British the
[RSS] regards Lakshmibai Newalkar (1828–1858), queen of Jhansi … as an inspir-
ing leader and the one [female leader] embodying exemplary netr̥ tva [leadership]”
(Tyagi, 2020, p. 135). Evidently, despite Indians having succeeded in overthrow-
ing British domination decades ago, the identity-forming effect of the Rani is still
very much visible and relevant to the present day.
One particularly meaningful example to the continued influence of the Rani is
literature written by Dalits (Scheduled Castes, formerly known as “untouchables”).
It generally combines myths with memories and stories from 1857 as well, but in
contrast to more mainstream literature uses them to portray the rebellion as part of
the Dalit liberation struggle. A central role is played by the “Viranganas”, mostly
female heroes who are also incorporated into campaigns of political parties, espe-
cially the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The BSP aims to represent the groups at
the lowest levels of the Hindu social system, with its main support coming from
Dalits. The BSP’s central focus lies in its opposition to and strong criticism of the
inequalities of the caste system. Lakshmibai’s legend forms the background of
numerous Virangana stories, including that of Jhalkari Bai. The latter is said to
have disguised herself as the Rani after the ruler’s escape and to have gone into
battle in her place. Thus, the Dalit heroine is portrayed as more courageous than the
Rani herself – after all a member of a higher caste who is said to have collaborated
with the British. Due to the lack of sources, the voices of the historical Viranganas
are difficult to reconstruct; their accounts are largely based on male authors and
are therefore not necessarily representative of Dalit women. On the other hand,
different images are conveyed here by recourse to Rani legends, which counteract
dominant, negative stereotypes of Dalit women (Gupta, 2007).
Concluding remarks
Role models are needed in the world’s largest democracy, especially in view of
issues such as women’s emancipation and large-scale violence against women
that are still all too pressing. The empowered female ruler serves as a precedent
and figurehead in her historic, active roles as mother, strategist and fighter. Her
example showcases the agency wielded by women both in battle and as inspira-
tion for future generations’ activism. We have seen other possible role models:
Subhadra Kumari Chauhan as an activist for satyagrahi and women’s rights, or
Subhas Chandra Bose and Lakshmi Sahgal, who brought female fighters together
in one regiment regardless of their religion or social status. For them, too, the Rani
of Jhansi was a trailblazer.
Notes
1 From the translation by J. L. Kanchan, quoted in Lebra-Chapman (1986).
2 A first exploration of the chapter’s topic from my side (posted in 2016) can be found
online at the Cross Asia Repository of the Heidelberg University Library: https://fid4sa
-repository.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/3916/.
3 For the Rani in Indian visual art, see Lebra-Chapman (1986, pp. 127–128 and 137–141).
For a brief historiographical overview, see Lebra-Chapman (1986, pp. 157–165).
4 The Islamic tradition of physical seclusion of women through veiling and via separate
areas in buildings. The practice was taken up among Hindu elites by the 19th century.
5 See also Sen (2007, p. 1755): “T. A. Martin subsequently wrote a letter to the Rani’s son,
Damodar Rao, saying that she ‘took no part whatever in the massacre of the European
residents of Jhansi in June 1857. On the contrary, she supplied them with food for two
days after they had gone into the fort’”.
6 From the National Archives of India, New Delhi, Foreign Consultations, April 1854;
India Office Library, British Library, London (hereafter: IOL), F/4/2600, quoted in
Lebra-Chapman (1986, pp. 37–38).
7 Forrest, G. W., Selections from the Letters, Despatches and other State Papers preserved
in the Military Department of the Government of India 1857–58, Kolkata, 1902, vol. 4,
139 (quoted in Jerosch, 2003, p. 14).
8 In a poem by the Jhansi folk poet Bhaggu Dauju Shyam, the Rani is compared to Kali,
but at the same time to the male trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva as well, see Rag
(2010, p. 77).
9 Only two ballads about the Rani written shortly after the rebellion survived in parts, one
written by the Datia court poet, Kalyan Singh Kudara, the other by the poet Madnesh;
see Lebra-Chapman (1986, pp. 129–130).
10 An itinerant ascetic or wonder-worker, traditionally used for Sufi Muslim ascetics. The
term has also been frequently applied to Hindu ascetics since the Mughal era.
11 For a detailed discussion of colonial British writings on 1857 more generally, see Erll
(2007, pp. 176–216).
12 Singh sees the comparison with Joan of Arc, the European model of heroic and sacred
femininity, rather as an attempt to downplay Lakshmibai’s anti-colonial attitude; see
Singh (2014, p. 67).
13 A person who practices satyagraha, Gandhi’s strategy of non-violent resistance.
14 For the complete refrain in Hindi and English, see Rag (2010, p. 64, lines 5–17).
15 Autonomous or semiautonomous rulers who collected taxes as a form of revenue, based
on land grants (jagir)]
16 For an English version, see also http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/jhansi-ki-rani-eng-
lish/.
17 Forbes, Introduction, in Sahgal (2013, pp. xvii–xviii). Due in part to his alliances with
fascist regimes, Bose remains a controversial figure in India until today. For a classic
study, see Gordon (1997).
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that?” applies far more strongly to blank verse than to Campion’s
artificial metres. Custom and Nature, those greater Cæsars to whom
Daniel so triumphantly appealed, had already settled it, as they were
to confirm it later, that rhymed and unrhymed verse, each obeying
the natural evolution of English prosody, should be the twin horses to
draw its car. But Milton never developed his antipathy to rhyme
(which in all probability arose, mainly if not merely, from the fact that
nearly all the most exquisite rhymers of his time, except himself,
were Cavaliers) in any critical fashion, contenting himself with
occasional flings and obiter dicta.[484]
Another poet of the time, Cowley, ought to have given us criticism
Cowley. of real importance. He had the paramount, if not
exclusive, literary interests which are necessary to a
great critic; he had the knowledge; and he was perhaps the first man
in England to possess the best kind of critical style—lighter than
Daniel’s, and less pregnant, involved, and scholastic than Jonson’s
—the style of well-bred conversational argument.[485] But he was a
little bitten with the scientific as opposed to the literary mania, and, in
his own person, he was perhaps too much of a Janus as regards
literary tastes to be able to give—or indeed to take—a clear and
single view. There were, as in Lope, two poets in Cowley, and each
of these was wont to get in the way of the other. The one was a
“metaphysical” of the high flight, who at least would, if he could, have
been as intensely fantastic as Donne, and as gracefully fantastic as
Suckling. The other was a classical, “sensible,” couplet-poet, who
was working out Ben Jonson’s theories with even less admixture of
Romanticism than that which tinged Ben Jonson’s practice. The
entanglement of these was sufficiently detrimental to his poetry; but
it would have been absolutely fatal to his criticism, which must either
have perpetually contradicted itself or else have wandered in a
maze, perplexing as perplexed.
It is with Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert, in the form of a Letter
to Hobbes, and with Hobbes’s answer to it,[486] that England strikes
once more into the main path of European critical development. And
The Prefatory it is of capital importance that, both the writers being
matter of exiled royalists, these documents were written at
Gondibert. Paris in the year 1650. There was much interest
there in English affairs, while, as we have seen, the habit of literary
discussion had, for more than a generation, become ingrained in
Frenchmen. When Davenant set himself to write Gondibert, he was
doing exactly what Chapelain and Desmarets and the rest were
doing; and when he and his greater friend exchanged their epistles,
they were doing exactly what all the French literary world had been
doing, not merely, as is commonly thought, from the time of the Cid
dispute, but from one much earlier. Taking all things together, it was
natural that the subject should be the Heroic Poem, which had been
a favourite of Italian and French critics for some seventy years and
more, but had been little touched in England, though the conclusion
of Ben’s Discoveries shapes a course for it. Hints have been given
before in this History that in the opinion of its writer the “Heroic
Poem” had much in common with that entity which was long without
a literary name, but which an admirable humourist has now enabled
us to describe scientifically as a Boojum[487]—that is to say, it was not
only something undiscoverable, but something which had a malign
and, indeed, destructive influence on those who thought they had
discovered it.
The “Heroic Poem” was to be neither pure Romance nor pure
The “Heroic Epic, but a sort of medley between the two. Or,
Poem.” rather, it was to be a thing of shreds and patches,
strictly epic (or at least Virgilian-epical) in theory and rules, but
borrowing from Romance whatever it could, as our Elizabethans
would say, “convey cleanly” enough in the way of additional
attractions. The shreds and patches, too, were not purely poetical:
they were not taken simply from Homer and Virgil, nor even from
Horace, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, and the rest down to that Musæus
whom Scaliger thought so superior to the Chian. A great deal of
ancient critical dictum was brought in, and as Aristotle and Horace
had said less about Epic than about Drama, they were to be
supplemented from others, especially by that treacherous and
somewhat obscure passage of Petronius which has been
commented on in its place. In fact the whole of this Heroic-Poem
matter is a sort of satire on criticism by Kinds, in its attempt—and
failure—to discover a kind. If the founders of the novel (who, indeed,
in some notable cases were by no means free from the obsession)
had persisted in constructing it on the lines of the Heroic Poem, it
would indeed have been all up with Fiction. To read Tasso (who, as
we might expect, is not the least reasonable) and others, from
Ronsard and Du Bellay down to Desmarets and Le Bossu (both of
whom, let it be remembered, wrote some time after Davenant)—to
find even Dryden a Martha of “machinery,” and comforting himself
with a bright new idea of getting the deorum ministeria out of the
limited intelligences of angels, so that you might not know at once
which side was going to win, as you do in the ordinary Christian
Epic[488]—is curious. Nay, it is more—humorous, with that touch of
“the pity of it” which humour nearly always has.
The ingenious knight, in explaining his performance and its
principles to his friend the philosopher, takes a very high tone.
Homer, Virgil, Lucan, and Statius are passed successively in review,
and receive each his appropriate compliment, put with dignified
Davenant’s reserves, especially in the two latter cases. Only two
Examen. moderns are admitted—Tasso of the Italians—“for I
will yield to their opinion who permit not Ariosto—no, not Du Bartas
—in this eminent rank of the heroicks, rather than to make way by
their admission for Dante, Marino, and others”[489]—and Spenser of
our own men. But Tasso is roundly taken to task for his fairy-tale
element, Spenser for his allegory and his archaism. And the faults of
all from Homer downwards are charged against “the natural humour
of imitation.”[490]
After a by no means despicable, but somewhat rhapsodical,
digression on this—it is to be observed that Davenant uses
“Imitation” in the frank modern sense—and an apology for it as “the
dangerous fit of a hot writer,” he gives reasons, partly no doubt
drawn from Italian and French sources, why he has made his subject
(1) Christian, (2) antique but not historical, (3) foreign, (4) courtly and
martial, (5) displaying the distempers of love and ambition. Then he
expounds in turn his arrangement of five books (to correspond to
acts), with cantos to answer to scenes,[491] his arguments, his
quatrain-stanza. He asserts that “the substance is wit,” and
discusses that matter at some length, and with a noteworthy hit at
conceits, which reminds us that Davenant was à cheval between the
First and the Second Caroline period. He indulges in not
unpardonable loquacity about his poetic aspirations, with a fresh
glance at the great poets of old, and brings in thereby, with some
ingenuity but at too great length as a finale, the old prefatory matter
of the Arts Poetic about the importance and dignity of poetry in the
world, concluding exactly where most begin, with Plato and that
“divine anger” of his which some have turned to the “unjust scandal
of Poesie.” And so a pleasant echo of Sir Philip blends agreeably
with the more prosaic tone, and time, and temper of Sir William.
Hobbes, as we should expect, is much briefer; and those bronze
sentences of his (though he had not at this time quite brought them
to their full ring and perfect circumscription) give no uncertain sound.
Hobbes’s He is not, he says, a poet (which is true), and when
Answer. he assigns to Gondibert “various experience, ready
memory, clear judgment, swift and well-governed fancy,” it is obvious
enough that all these might be there and yet poetry be absent. He
divides the kinds of poetry “swiftly” enough, and ranges himself with
his customary decision against those who “take for poesy
whatsoever is writ in verse,” cutting out not merely didactic poetry,
but sonnets, epigrams, and eclogues, and laying it down that “the
subject of a poem is the manners of men.” “They that give entrance
to fictions writ in prose err not so much,” but they err. And
accordingly he begins the discussion of verse. He does not quarrel
with Davenant, as Vida would have done, for deliberately eschewing
Invocation; and rapidly comments on the plot, characters,
description, &c., of the poem. On the head of diction he would not be
Hobbes if he could or did spare a sneer at words of no sense, words
“contunded by the schools,” and so forth. And since he is Hobbes,
there is piquancy in finding him at one with Walton in the objection to
“strong lines.” He is rather striking on a subject which has been
much dwelt on of late, the blunting of poetic phrase by use. And
when he says that he “never yet saw poem that had so much shape
of art, health of morality, and vigour of beauty and expression” as
Gondibert—when, in the odd timorousness he had caught from
Bacon, he adds, that it is only the perishableness of the modern
tongues which will prevent it from lasting as long as the Æneid or the
Iliad—let us remember that, though criticism is one thing and
compliment another, they sometimes live in a rather illicit
contubernium. At any rate, there is criticism, and real criticism, in the
two pieces; and they are about the first substantial documents of it in
English of which as much can be said for many years.[492]
Thus, although two of these four were of the greatest of our
writers, the third an interesting failure of greatness, and the fourth far
from contemptible, they were in all cases prevented, by this or that
disqualification, from doing much in criticism.
Dryden, on the contrary, started with every advantage, except
those of a body of English criticism behind him, and of a thorough
Dryden. knowledge of the whole of English literature. He was a
poet nearly, if not quite, of the first class: and though his
poetry had a strong Romantic spirit in virtue of its perennial quality, it
took the form and pressure of the time so thoroughly and so kindly
that there was no internal conflict. Further, he had what by no means
all poets of the first class have had, a strong, clear, common-sense
judgment, and a very remarkable faculty of arguing the point. And,
finally, if he had few predecessors in English, and perhaps did not
know much of those few except of Jonson, he was fairly, if not
exactly as a scholar, acquainted with the ancients, and he had
profited, and was to profit, by the best doctrine of the moderns.
His Moreover, from a certain not unimportant point of
advantages. view, he occupies a position which is only shared in
the history of criticism by Dante and (in some estimations, though
not in all) by Goethe,—the position of the greatest man of letters in
his own country, if not also in Europe, who is at the same time the
greatest critic, and who is favoured by Fortune with a concentration
of advantages as to time and circumstance. His critical excellence
has indeed never been wholly overlooked, and, except by the
unjuster partisanship of the early Romantic movement in England,
generally admitted with cheerfulness.[493] The want, however, of that
synoptic study of the subject, which it is the humble purpose of this
book to facilitate, has too often prevented his full pre-eminence from
being recognised. It may even be said that it is in criticism that
Dryden best shows that original faculty which has often been denied
him elsewhere. He borrows, indeed, as freely as everywhere: he
copies, with a half ludicrous deference, the stock opinions of the
critics and the criticasters in vogue; he gives us pages on pages of
their pedantic trivialities instead of his own shrewd and racy
judgments. But, despite of all this, there is in him (and with good luck
we may perhaps not fail to disengage it) a vein and style in “judging
of Authours” which goes straight back to Longinus, if it is not even
independent of that great ancestry.[494]
This vein is perceptible[495] even in the slight critical essays which
precede the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, though of course it is much
The Early more evident in the Essay itself. In the preface to
Prefaces. the Rival Ladies (written, not indeed when Dryden
was a very young man, but when, except for Juvenilia, he had
produced extremely little) we find his critical path clearly traced, and
still more in the three years later Preface to Annus Mirabilis. The
principles of this path-making are as follows: Dryden takes—without
perhaps a very laborious study of them, but, as has been said
already, with an almost touching docility in appearance—the current
theories and verdicts of the French, Italian (and Spanish?) critics
whom we should by this time have sufficiently surveyed. He does not
—he never did to the date of the glorious Preface to the Fables itself
—dispute the general doctrines of the sages from Aristotle
downwards. But (and this is where the Longinian resemblance
comes in) he never can help considering the individual works of
literature almost without regard to these principles, and simply on the
broad, the sound, the unshakable ground of the impression they
make on him. Secondly (and this is where the resemblance to Dante
comes in), he is perfectly well aware that questions of diction, metre,
and the like are not mere catchpenny or claptrap afterthoughts, as
ancient criticism was too apt to think them, but at the root of the
pleasure which literature gives. Thirdly (and this is where, though
Aristotle did not deny the fact, the whole criticism of antiquity, except
that of Longinus, and most of that of modern times, swerves
timorously from the truth), he knows that this delight, this transport,
counts first as a criterion. Literature in general, poetry in particular,
should, of course, instruct: but it must delight.[496]
The “blundering, half-witted people,” as in one of his rare bursts of
not absolutely cool contempt[497] he calls his own critics, who charged
him with plagiarising from foreign authors, entirely missed these
differences, which distinguish him from every foreign critic of his day,
and of most days for long afterwards. He may quote—partly out of
that genuine humility and generosity combined which make his
literary character so agreeable; partly from an innocent parade of
learning. But he never pays for what he borrows the slavish rent, or
royalty, of surrendering his actual and private judgment.
In the Preface to the Rival Ladies the poet-critic takes (as indeed
he afterwards himself fully acknowledged) a wrong line—the defence
of what he calls “verse” (that is to say, rhymed heroic couplets, not
blank verse) for play-writing. This was his mistress of the time; he
rejoiced in her caresses, he wore her colours, he fought for her
beauty—the enjoyment authorising the argument. But as he has
nothing to say that has not been better said in the Essay, we may
postpone the consideration of this. There is one of the slips of fact
which can be readily excused to (and by) all but bad critics,—and
which bad critics are chiefly bound to avoid, because accuracy of
fact is their only title to existence—in his mention of “Queen”
Gorboduc and his addition that the dialogue in that play is rhymed;
there is an interesting sigh for an Academy (Dryden, let it be
remembered, was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society);
and there is the well-known and very amiable, though rather
dangerous, delusion that the excellence and dignity of rhyme were
never known till Mr Waller taught it, and that John Denham’s
Cooper’s Hill not only is, but ever will be, the exact standard of good
writing. But he knows Sidney and he knows Scaliger, and he knows
already that Shakespeare “had a larger soul of poesy than any of our
nation.” And a man who knows these three things in 1664 will go far.
The Preface to Annus Mirabilis[498] is again submissive in form,
independent in spirit. Dryden obediently accepts the prescription for
epic or “Heroic” poetry, and though he makes another slip of fact (or
at least of term) by saying that Chapman’s Homer is written in
“Alexandrines or verses of six feet” instead of (as far as the Iliad is
concerned) in the fourteener, he is beautifully scholastic on the
differences between Virgil and Ovid, the Heroic and the Burlesque,
“Wit Writing” and “Wit Written.” But he does it with unconquerable
originality, the utterance of his own impression, his own judgment,
breaking through all this school-stuff at every moment; and also with
a valuable (though still inadequate) account of “the Poet’s
imagination.”[499]
Yet another point of interest is the avowed intention (carried out in
the poem, to the disgust or at least distaste of Dr Johnson) of using
technical terms. This, one of the neoclassic devices for attaining
propriety, was, as we have seen, excogitated in Italy, and warmly
championed by the Pléiade; but it had been by this time mostly
abandoned, as it was later by Dryden himself.
The Essay of The Essay of Dramatic Poesy is much better
Dramatic known than it was only a couple of decades ago,[500]
Poesy. and it is perhaps superfluous to say that it is a
dialogue in form, and that the interlocutors are Dryden himself
(Neander), his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard (Crites), Sir Charles
Sedley (Lisideius), and Lord Buckhurst (Eugenius). The two last,
though at the time the wildest of scapegraces, were men of distinct
poetic gift and varied literary faculty. And Howard, though no great
poet, and possessing something of the prig, the coxcomb, and the
pedant in his composition, was a man of some ability, of real learning
of a kind, and of very distinct devotion to literature.
The Essay was first published in 1668, but had been written,
according to Dryden’s statement in his Preface to Lord Buckhurst, “in
the country” (at his father-in-law Lord Berkshire’s seat of Charlton
near Malmesbury), when the author was driven out of London by the
Its setting and Great Plague three years before. He had, he says,
overture. altered some of his opinions; but it did not much
matter in an Essay “where all I have said is problematical.” The
“Address to the Reader” promises a second part dealing with Epic
and Lyric, which never appeared, and of which only the Epic part is
represented by later works. This is a pity, for while we have treatises
on Drama and Epic ad nauseam, their elder and lovelier sister has
been, “poor girl! neglected.” It begins with a picturesque setting,
which represents the four interlocutors as having taken boat and
shot the bridge, attracted by the reverberation of the great battle with
the Dutch in the early part of June 1665, when Admiral Opdam’s
flag-ship was blown up. Eugenius augurs victory from the gradual
dying away of the noise; and Crites observes (in character) that he
should like this victory better if he did not know how many bad
verses he should have to read on it. Lisideius adds that he knows
some poets who have got epinikia and funeral elegies all ready for
either event, and the dialogue proceeds for some time in the same
way of literary banter, especial set being made at two poets (one of
whom is certainly Wild, while the other may be Flecknoe) with
incidental sneers at Wither(s) and Cleveland. At last Crites brings it
to something like the quarrel of Ancient v. Modern. Eugenius picks
up the glove, but consents, at Crites’ suggestion, to limit the
discussion to dramatic poetry,[501] and so the “dependence” is settled.
Eugenius thinks that though modern plays are better than Greek
or Roman, yet those of “the last age” (1600-1660) are better than
Crites for the “ours.” As for epic and lyric, the last age must yield.
Ancients. And all the quartette agree that “the sweetness of
English verse was never understanded or practised” by our fathers,
and that some writers yet living first taught us to mould our thoughts
into easy and significant words, to retrench the superfluities of
expression, and to make our rhyme so properly a part of the verse
that it should never mislead the sense. Lisideius having (with the
consent of the company, subject to a slight scholastic objection from
Crites) defined or described a play as “A just and lively image of
human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the
changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and
instruction of mankind,” Crites takes up his brief for the ancients. His
speech is a set one, extolling the classical conception of drama, and
especially the modern-classical Unities,
but rather a panegyric than an argument, and particularly weak in
this—that it takes no critical account of the modern drama at all.
Except Ben Jonson, “the greatest man of the last age,” not a single
modern dramatic writer of any country is so much as named.
Eugenius, though his discourse is livelier, falls into something the
Eugenius for same fault, or at least the counterpart of it. He rallies
the “last age.” the ancients unmercifully, and has very good game
of the stock plots and characters in Terence; but his commendation
of the moderns has a disappointing generality, and he lays himself
rather open to the good-humoured but forcible interruption of Crites
that he and Eugenius are never likely to come to an agreement,
because the one regards change as in itself an improvement, and
the other does not.
Still, Lisideius gives a new turn to the discussion by asking
Eugenius why he puts English plays above those of other nations,
and whether we ought not to submit our stage to the exactness of
Lisideius for our next neighbours. Eugenius in reply commits the
the French. further and especial defence of the English to
Neander, and Lisideius begins his part as eulogist of the French. For
some forty years, he says, we have not had leisure to be good poets.
The French have: and, by Richelieu’s patronage and Corneille’s
example, have raised their theatre till it now surpasses ours, and the
rest of Europe. Who have kept the Unities so well? Who have
avoided “that absurd thing,” the English tragi-comedy, so
completely? In tragedy they take well-known stories, and only
manageable parts of them, while Shakespeare crams the business
of thirty or forty years into two hours and a half. They make only one
person prominent, they do as much as possible behind the scenes,
keep dying off the stage altogether, and never end their plays with a
conversion, or simple change of will. Nobody, with them, appears on
the stage, unless he has some business there: and as for the beauty
of their rhyme, why, that is “already partly received by us,” and it will,
no doubt, when we write better plays, “exceedingly beautify them.”
To him, Neander—that is to say—Dryden himself.
There is a reminder (though the matter is quite different) of Daniel,
and a comforting augury for English criticism, in the swift directness
with which “the new critic” (as a Webbe of his own day might have
Dryden for called him) strikes at the heart of the question. The
England and French are more regular, he grants, and our
Liberty. irregularities are, in some cases, justly taxed. But,
nevertheless, he is of opinion that neither our faults nor their virtues
are sufficient to place them above us. For Lisideius himself has
defined a play as a lively imitation of nature. And these beauties of
the French stage are beauties, not natural, but thoroughly artificial.
Before Molière, where are the humours of French comedy, save,
perhaps, in Le Menteur and a few others? Elsewhere they work in
comedy only by the old way of quarrels and reconciliations, or by the
conventions of Spanish intrigue-drama. “On which lines there is not
above one play to be writ: they are too much alike to please often.”
Then, as to tragi-comedy. What is the harm of this? why should
Lisideius “imagine the soul of man more heavy than his senses?”
The eye can pass, and pass with relief, from an unpleasant to a
pleasant object, in far less time than is required on the stage. He
must have stronger arguments before he concludes that compassion
and mirth destroy each other: and in the meantime he will hold that
tragi-comedy is a more pleasant way than was known to the
ancients, or any moderns who have eschewed it.
Next, and closely connected, as to single-plot v. plot + underplot.
Why is the former to be preferred to the latter? Because it gives a
greater advantage to the expression of passion? Dryden can only
say that he thinks “their” verse the “coldest” he has ever read, and
he supports this by a close and pleasant beating-up-the-quarters of
Cinna and Pompey, “not so properly to be called plays as long
discourses on reason of state”; of Polyeucte, “as solemn as the long
stops on an organ,” of their mighty tirades and récits. “Whereas in
tragedy it is unnatural for any one either to speak or listen long, and
in comedy quick repartee is the chiefest grace.” Yet again “they” are
praised for making only one person considerable. Why? If variety is
not mere confusion, is it not always pleasing?[502]
The question of narrative against represented action is treated
with less boldness, and, therefore, with less success: but he comes
to the sound, if not very improving, conclusion that, if we show too
much action, the French show too little. He has an interesting
rebuke, however, here to Ben Jonson, for reprehending “the
incomparable Shakespeare.”[503] And he rises again, and makes a
capital point, by citing Corneille’s own confession of the cramping
effect of the Unities, enlarging whereon himself, he has an admirable
exposure of the utterly unnatural conditions which observance of
these Unities brings about. Then, after some remarks on prosody
and the earlier use of rhyme in English—remarks partly true, partly
vitiated by imperfect knowledge—he undertakes to produce plays as
regular as theirs and with more variety, instancing The Silent
Woman. Of this he is proceeding to a regular examen when
Eugenius requests a character of the author: and Neander, after a
little mannerly excuse, not only complies with this request, but
prefixes similar characters of Shakespeare and Fletcher.
The first of these is universally, the second and third should be
Coda on pretty well known. It must be sufficient to say here
rhymed plays, that nothing like even the worst of the three (that of
and Beaumont and Fletcher, which wants the adequacy
conclusion.
and close grip of the other two) had previously been
seen in English, and not many things in any other language, while to
this day, with all faults, the character of Shakespeare is one of the
apices of universal criticism. The characters are followed by the
examen—also admirable and quite new in English, though with more
pattern elsewhere. And he ends with a short peroration, the keynote
of which is, “I ask no favour from the French.” Lisideius is going to
reply; but Crites interrupting, diverts the discussion to a particular
point already glanced at—the use of rhyme in plays. He (sensibly
enough) declines to investigate very carefully whether this was a
revival of the old English custom or an imitation of the French, but
attacks its legitimacy with the usual, obvious, and fairly sound
argument that since no man without premeditation speaks in rhyme,
he ought not to do it on the stage, anticipating the retort, “neither
does he speak blank verse” by urging that this at any rate is “nearest
nature” or less unnatural. Neander, taking up the glove for “his new-
loved mistress,” practically admits the weakness of his case by first
advancing the very argument as to blank verse which Crites has
disallowed by anticipation. The rest of his answer is a mixture of true
and not so true, of imperfect knowledge and ingenious argument,
constantly open to reply, but always interesting as a specimen of
critical advocacy. He represents himself as pursuing the discourse
so eagerly that Eugenius had to remind him that “the boat stood still,”
and that they had come to their destination at Somerset stairs. And
with a pleasant final patch of description the dialogue closes.
In reading it we should keep in mind what he says a quarter of a
century later to the same correspondent,[504] that he was at this time
seeking his way “in a vast ocean” of criticism without other help than
the pole-star of the ancients and the rules of the French stage
Conspicuous amongst the moderns. He has given the reading of
merits of the the pole-star to Crites, and has pointed out the
piece. dangers of mere dead-reckoning by it. He has put
into the mouth of Sedley (with a touch of malice which that ingenious
good-for-nothing must have noticed, and which it is to his credit that
he did not resent) a similar reading of the bearings of the different
French lights, and has shown how little they assisted the English
mariner—indeed, how some of them actually led to rocks and
quicksands, instead of warning off from them. In the mouth of
Buckhurst, and in his own, he has put the patriotic apology, inclining
it in the former case towards laudation of the past, and in the latter to
defence of the present: and he has allowed divers excursions from
the immediate subject—especially that on “verse,” or rhymed
heroics, as a dramatic medium. One of the chief of the many merits
of the piece is precisely this, that at the time Dryden had read less
than at a later, and was less tempted to add quotations or
comments. He was following chiefly a very safe guide—Corneille—
and he bettered his guide’s instruction. It may be said boldly that, up
to the date, nothing in the way of set appreciation—no, not in
Longinus himself—had appeared equal to the three characters of
Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher; while almost greater still is the
constant application of the “leaden rule,” the taking of book, author,
kind, as it is, and judging it accordingly, instead of attempting to force
everything into agreement or disagreement with a prearranged
schedule of rules.
After the publication of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden
(English literature can hardly give too many thanks for it) had more
than thirty well-filled years of life allowed him; and to the very last,
and at the very last, criticism had its full share of his labours. The
The Middle “Prefaces of Dryden” never fail to give valuable
Prefaces. matter; and we shall have to notice most, if not all of
them, though the notices may be of varying length. The immediate
successor and, in fact, appendix to the Essay, the Defence thereof,
was only printed in one edition, the second, of The Indian Emperor,
and is very far from being of the best. Sir Robert Howard was, as
has been said, a man conceited and testy, as Shadwell’s nickname
for him in The Sullen Lovers, Sir Positive Atall, hints. He seems to
have been nettled by his part of Crites, and replied with some heat in
a Preface to his own play, The Duke of Lerma. Dryden, who never
quite learned the wisdom of Bacon’s dictum, “Qui replicat
multiplicat,” and who at this time had not yet learnt the easy disdain
of his later manner, riposted (1668) with more sense but with not
much more temper. The piece (which was practically withdrawn
later) contained, besides not too liberal asperities on Sir Robert’s
own work, a further “defence of Rhyme,” not like Daniel’s, where it
should be, but where it should not. It is redeemed by an occasional
admission, in Dryden’s usual and invaluable manner, that he is quite
aware of the other side, and by an unhesitating assertion of the
primacy of Delight among the Objects of Poetry.
In none of the next three or four of the pieces do we find him quite
at his best. For some few years, indeed, the popularity of his
splendid, if sometimes a little fustianish, heroics, the profits of his
connection with the theatre (which, added to other sources of
revenue, made him almost a rich man in his way), and his
association with the best society, seem to have slightly intoxicated
him. He saw his error, like other wise men, all in good time, and even
the error itself was not more than human and pardonable.
The Preface to An Evening’s Love promises, but for the time
postpones, an extension of the criticism of “the last age,” and
intersperses some valuable remarks on the difference between
Comedy and Farce, between Wit and Humour, with a good deal of
egotism and some downright arrogance.[505] The Essay of Heroic
Plays prefixed to The Conquest of Granada (1672) is as yet
unconverted as to rhyme on the stage; but contains some interesting
criticism of Davenant’s essays in the kind, and a curious defence
(recurred to later) of supernatural “machinery.” The main gist of the
Preface, besides its defence of the extravagances of Almanzor, is an
elaborate adjustment of the Heroic Play to the rules of the much-
talked-of Heroic Poem. But though there is a good deal of self-
sufficiency here, it is as nothing to the drift of the Epilogue to the
second part of the play, and of an elaborate Prose “Defence” of this
Epilogue. Here Dryden takes up the position that in “the last age,”
when men were dull and conversation low, Shakespeare and
Fletcher had not, while Jonson did not avail himself of, access to that
higher society which delighted to honour him, Dryden. Divers flings
at the “solecisms,” “flaws in sense,” “mean writing,” “lame plots,”
“carelessness,” “luxuriance,” “pedantry” of these poor creatures lead
up to a statement that “Gentlemen will now be entertained with the
foibles of each other.” Never again do we find Dryden writing like
this; and for his having done it at all Rochester’s “Black Will with a
cudgel” exacted sufficient, as suitable, atonement in the Rose Alley
ambuscade, even from the lowest point of view. From a higher, he
himself made an ample apology to Shakespeare in the Prologue to
Aurungzebe, and practically never repeated the offence.
The curious State of Innocence (1677) (a much better thing than
rigid Miltonists admit) is preceded by an equally curious Apology of
Heroic Poetry, in which, yet once more, we find the insufficient sense
in which Imagination (here expressly limited to “Imaging”) was used;
while the Preface to All for Love (1678) is a very little ill-tempered
towards an anonymous lampooner, who was, in fact, Rochester.
Troilus and Cressida (1679) was ushered by a set preliminary
Discourse on the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy. No piece
illustrates more remarkably that mixed mode of criticism in Dryden,
to bring out which is our chief design. On a canvas, not it must be
confessed of much interest, woven out of critical commonplaces
from Aristotle and Longinus down to Rymer and Le Bossu, he has
embroidered a great number of most valuable observations of his
own, chiefly on Shakespeare and Fletcher, which culminate in a set
description of Fletcher as “a limb of Shakespeare”—a thing happy in
itself and productive of happy imitations since. The Preface to the
translation of Ovid’s Epistles (1680) chiefly consists of a fresh
defence of that ingenious writer (for whom Dryden had no small
fancy), and the Dedication to Lord Haughton of The Spanish Friar
(1681) is mainly notable for an interesting confession of Dryden’s
changes of opinion about Chapman and Du Bartas (Sylvester
rather), and a sort of apology for his own dallying with these Delilahs
of the theatre in the rants of Almanzor and Maximin.
But that to the Second Miscellany, five years later, after a period
chiefly occupied with the great political satires, ranges with the
Essay, and not far below the Fables Preface, among Dryden’s
critical masterpieces. The thing is not long—less than twenty pages.
But it gives a coherent and defensible, if also disputable, theory of
translation, a singularly acute, and, it would appear, original contrast
of the faire of Ovid and of Claudian, more detailed studies of Virgil,
Lucretius (singularly good), Horace, and Theocritus, and the best
critical stricture in English on “Pindaric” verse. After it the note of the
same year on Opera, which ushered Albion and Albanius, is of slight
importance.
The Dedication of the Third Miscellany (specially named Examen
Poeticum, as the second had been sub-titled Sylvæ) contains some
interesting protests against indiscriminate critical abuse, the final
formulation of a saying sketched before (“the corruption of a poet is
the generation of a critic”), illustrated from Scaliger in the past and
(not obscurely though not nominatim) from Rymer in the present;
and, among other things, some remarks on prosody which might well
have been fuller.
Between this and the Fables, besides some lesser things,[506] there
appeared two of the longest and most ambitious in appearance of
Dryden’s critical writings, the Essay [strictly Discourse] on Satire
prefixed to the Juvenal, and the Dedication of the Æneis, with,
between them, the first writing at any length by a very distinguished
Englishman of letters, on the subject of pictorial art, in the shape of
the Parallel of Poetry and Painting prefixed to the translation of Du
The Essay on Satire and Fresnoy De Arte Graphica. All, being
the Dedication of the Dryden’s, are, and could not but be,
Æneis. admirably written and full of interest. But
the Juvenal and Virgil Prefaces are, in respect of permanent value,
both intrinsically and representively injured by an excess of critical
erudition. The time was perhaps not yet ripe for an honest and
candid address straight to the English reader. The translator was
bound to recommend himself to classical scholars by attention to the
paraphernalia of what then regarded itself as scholarship (“other
brides, other paraphernalia” no doubt), and to propitiate wits, and
Templars, and the gentlemen of the Universities, with original or
borrowed discourses on literary history and principle. Dryden fell in
with the practice, and obliged his readers with large decoctions of
Rigaltius and Casaubon, Dacier and Segrais, which are at any rate
more palatable than the learned originals, but which make us feel,
rather ruefully, that boiling down such things was not the work for
which the author of Absalom and Achitophel and of The Essay on
Dramatic Poesy was born.
As for the Parallel, it is of course interesting as being nearly our
first Essay, and that by a master hand, in a kind of criticism which
The Parallel of has later given excellent results. But Dryden, as he
Poetry and most frankly admits, did not know very much about
Painting. the matter, and his work resolves itself very mainly
into a discussion of the principles of Imitation in general, applied in
an idealist manner to the two arts in particular. Again we may say,
“Not here, O Apollo!”
We have nothing left but the Preface to the Fables, the
extraordinary merit of which has been missed by no competent critic
The Preface to from Johnson to Mr Ker. The wonderful ease and
the Fables. urbanity of it, the artfully varied forms of reply to the
onslaughts of Collier and others, are not more generally agreeable
than are, in a special division, the enthusiastic eulogy of Chaucer (all
the more entertaining because of its lack of mere pedantic accuracy
in places), and the interesting, if again not always rigidly accurate,
scraps of literary history. It winds up, as the Essay had practically
begun, a volume of critical writing which, if not for pure, yet for
applied, mixed, and sweetened criticism, deserves to be put on the
shelf—no capacious one—reserved for the best criticism of the
world.
We have seen, over and over again, in individual example; have
already partially summed more than once; and shall have to re-sum
with more extensive view later, the character and the faults of the
critical method which had been forming itself for some hundred and
Dryden’s fifty years when Dryden began his critical work. It
general would be absurd to pretend that he was entirely
critical superior to this “Spirit of the Age”—which was also
position.
that of the age behind him, and (with rare
exceptions) of the age to come for nearly a hundred years. But,
although it may be paradoxical, it is not absurd at all, to express
satisfaction that he was not so entirely superior. He was enabled by
his partial—and, in so far as his consciousness went, quite sincere—
orthodoxy, to obtain an access to the general hearing in England,
and even to influence, long after his death, important literary
authorities, as he never could have done if he had set up for an
iconoclast. Furthermore, it was not yet time to break these idols.
Apollo winked at the neo-classical ignorance and heresy because it
was useful. We are so apt—so generously and excusably apt—to
look at the Miltons without considering the Clevelands, that we forget
how absolutely ungoverned, and in some cases how near to puerility,
the latest Elizabethan school was. We forget the slough of shambling
verse in which true poets, men like Suckling in drama, men like
Lovelace in lyric, complacently wallowed. The strait waistcoat was
almost necessary, even after the fine madness, much more after the
madness not so fine, of mid-seventeenth-century verse, and, in a
less degree, prose. And so, when we find Dryden belittling the
rhymes of Comus and Lycidas,[507] shaking his head over
Shakespeare’s carelessness, unable with Chapman, as Ben had
been with Marlowe, to see the fire for the smoke, we need not in the
least excite ourselves, any more than when we find him dallying with
the Dowsabels of Renaissance school-criticism. In the first place, the
thing had to be done; and in the second place, his manner of doing it
went very far to supply antidote to all the bane, as well as to
administer the “corsives,” as they said then, in the mildest and most
innocuous way possible.
His special Dryden’s moly, an herb so powerful that—herein
critical excelling its original—it not only prevented men like
method. Addison from becoming beasts like Rymer, but had
the virtue of turning beasts into men,—of replacing the neo-classic
jargon by the pure language of criticism,—was that plan of actual
comparison and examination of actual literature which is not merely
the via prima but the via sola of safety for the critic. By his time there
was assembled a really magnificent body of modern letters, in
addition to classical and mediæval. But nobody in the late
seventeenth century, except Dryden, really utilised it. Italy and Spain
were sinking into premature senility. The French[508] despised or
ignored all modern literatures but their own, and despised and
ignored almost equally their own rich and splendid mediæval stores.
Dryden’s freedom from this worst and most hopeless vice is all the
more interesting because, from some of his utterances, we might
have expected him not to be free from it.[509] That theory of his as to
Mr Waller; that disastrous idea that Shakespeare and Fletcher were
low people who had not the felicity to associate with gentlemen,—
might seem likely to produce the most fatal results. But not so. He
accepts Chaucer at once, rejoices in him, extols him, just as if
Chaucer had taken lessons from Mr Waller, and had been familiar
with my Lord Dorset. Back his own side as he may in the duel of the
theatres, he speaks of the great lights of the last age in such a
fashion that no one has outgone him since. He cannot really take an
author in hand, be he Greek or Latin, Italian or French or English,
without his superiority to rules and systems and classifications
appearing at once, however he may, to please fashion and fools,
drag these in as an afterthought, or rather (for Dryden never “drags”
in anything save the indecency in his comedies) draw them into the
conversation with his usual adroitness. And he is constantly taking
authors in hand in this way,—we are as certain that this, and not
twaddling about unities and machines, was what he liked doing, as
we are that he wrote comedies for money, and satires and criticism
itself for love. Now this,—the critical reading without theory, or with
theory postponed, of masses of different literatures, and the
formation and expression of genuine judgment as to what the critic
liked and disliked in them, not what he thought he ought to like and
dislike,—this was what was wanted, and what nobody had yet done.
Dryden did it—did it with such mastery of expression as would
almost have commended a Rymer, but with such genuine critical
power and sympathy as would almost have carried off the absence
of merits of expression altogether. He established (let us hope for all
time) the English fashion of criticising, as Shakespeare did the
English fashion of dramatising,—the fashion of aiming at delight, at
truth, at justice, at nature, at poetry, and letting the rules take care of
themselves.
Perhaps in no single instance of critical authorship and authority
does the great method of comparison assist us so well as in the case
Dryden and of Dryden and Boileau. This comparison is
Boileau. absolutely fair. The two were almost exact
contemporaries; they represented—so far at least as their expressed
and, in both cases, no doubt conscientious, literary creed went—the
same sect. Enfin Malherbe vint is an exact parallel, whether as a
wonderful discovery or a partly mischievous delusion, to the exploits
on our numbers by Mr Waller. Both were extremely powerful satirists.
Both, though not comparable in intrinsic merit, were among the chief
men of letters of their respective countries. Both had a real, and not
merely a professional or affected, devotion to literature. Both applied,
with whatever difference of exclusiveness and animus, a peculiar
literary discipline, new to the country of each. And in the case of both
—it has been decided by a consensus of the best judges, with all the
facts before them up to the present time—there was an insufficient
looking before and after, a pretension to limit literature to certain
special developments.
We have seen what, in carrying out the scheme which was in
effect the scheme of both, were the defects of Boileau. Let us see
what, in contra-position to them, are the merits of Dryden.
That, though he makes mistakes enough in literary history, these
mistakes are slight in comparison with Boileau’s, matters not very
much; that, though his satiric touch was more withering even than
the Frenchman’s, he has no love of lashing merely for the sport, and
never indulges in insolent flings at harmless dulness, suffering
poverty, or irregular genius; that, though quite prone enough to
flatter, he declined to bow the knee to William of Orange, while
Boileau persistently grovelled at the feet of William’s enemy,—these
things matter even less to us. The fact, the critical fact, remains that
the faults of his time and his theory did the least harm to Dryden of
all men whom we know, while they did the most to Boileau. And the
reason of the fact is more valuable than the fact itself. Boileau, as we
have seen, has not left us a single impartial and appreciative
criticism of a single author, ancient or modern. Dryden simply cannot
find himself in presence of a man of real genius, whether he belongs
to his own school or another, without having his critical lips at once
touched by Apollo and Pallas. He was sadly ignorant about Chaucer,
—a board-school child might take him to task; but he has written
about Chaucer with far more real light and sympathy than some at
least of the authors of the books from which the board-school child
derives its knowledge have shown. His theory about Shakespeare,
Fletcher, and Jonson was defective; but he has left us criticisms of
all three than which we have, and are likely to have, no better. About

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Female Fighters in Armed Conflict 1st

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Béatrice Hendrich is a professor of Turkey studies at the University of Cologne,

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List of contributors vii

1 Female fighters in armed conflict: Introduction1

2 A woman in power in 19th-century South Asia: An inspiring life

3 Fighting for peace, fighting for the country?: The inclusion of

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List of contributors vii

1 Female fighters in armed conflict: Introduction1

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