TY - BOOK AU - Harleen Singh TI - RANI OF JHANSI: Gender,History,and Fable in India SN - 9781107042803 U1 - 954.0317 PY - 2014/// CY - New Delhi PB - Cambridge KW - Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, 1828-1858--Military leadership KW - Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, 1828-1858--In literature KW - Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, 1828-1858--In motion pictures KW - Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, 1828-1858--Legends KW - Women revolutionaries--India--Biography KW - Masculinity--Political aspects--India--History KW - Nationalism--India--History KW - India--History--Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-1858--Historiography KW - India--Colonization--History KW - India--History--British occupation, 1765-1947 N1 - Contents Enslaving masculinity : rape scripts and the erotics of power -- India's Aryan queen : colonial ambivalence and race in the mutiny -- Coherent pasts in Hindi literature and film -- Unmaking the nationalist archive : Gender and Dalit historiography. Colonial texts often read the Indian woman warrior as a cultural anomaly, but Indian texts find recourse in the mythological examples of the female warrior. Rani Lakshmi Bai's remaking transforms the mythologically viable, yet socially marginal, figure of a woman in battle into bounded and meaningful feminine roles such as daughter, wife, mother, and queen. Women and the home were integral to how nationalist discourse envisioned the modern, yet traditional, Indian nation. The Rani remains a metaphoric referent of the home, and is an abiding symbol of the nation, reinvented as authority, power, and tradition. The depictions of the Rani signals what is at stake in representing the unrestricted woman in the public sphere. The book extends the discussion on what constitutes the historical archive of the gendered colonial subject and the postcolonial rebel by being attentive to the vexed figures produced within the competing ideologies of colonialism and nationalism ER -