The making of an Indian nationalist archive: Lakshmibai, Jhansi, and 1857

Abstract

The contested historiography of the 1857 rebellion and its importance in shaping the Indian nationalist imagination make it an excellent entry point into an investigation of nationalist pasts and their archival bases. This paper examines a concatenation of influential narratives of different genres that have become critical sources for a history of the rebel leader Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and for configuring her as an icon of heroic Indian womanhood. It places each of these sources, ranging from late nineteenth-century Marathi texts to mid-twentieth-century Hindi narratives, within their specific spatiotemporal setting and highlights the contradictory regional projects underlying apparently smooth nationalist narratives. Through a close examination of the making of the Lakshmibai archive, the author argues that a consideration of the editorial and textual practices that went into the making of reliable and usable archives for a modern historiography is critical to the unpacking of nationalist historiographies. © 2008 The Association for Asian Studies, Inc.