They were unlikely revolutionaries: plantation workers who traded rubber-tapping gear for guns, marching toward a country they had never seen, in the hopes of overthrowing the British Empire. The anti-colonial Indian National Army (INA) may have failed in its bid to liberate India during World War II, but its short-lived all-woman Rani of Jhansi Regiment (RJR) lives on in memory.
“What motivated these women and girls to join the Regiment with so much enthusiasm?” scholars Carol Hills and Daniel C. Silverman wonder. “Incredibly, some of the most committed of the Rani of Jhansi recruits had never even set foot inside the Motherland.”
The RJR, which took its name from a nineteenth-century queen who died in battle against the British, was the brainchild of Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose. The charismatic leader had Axis support to build an army in Japanese-occupied Malaya and enter India overland through Burma (now Myanmar).
The RJR was part of Bose’s plan for “mobilizing the Indian communities in South East Asia for the liberation of India,” as Tobias Rettig puts it. When Bose arrived in Malaya in 1943 to rally supporters, his insistence that the nationalist movement needed female guerrillas was initially greeted with shock by many.
But Rettig notes that Bose had long appealed to women to join up—even forming a women’s section of the Bengali Volunteers in 1928, which Rettig calls “an early prototype” for the RJR. He adds that the RJR couldn’t have filled its ranks by the hundreds without the efforts of Bose’s right-hand woman, longtime nationalist Lakshmi Sahgal (née Swaminadhan), a twenty-eight-year-old obstetrician and gynecologist who was swiftly appointed the regiment’s commander.
Captain Lakshmi, as she became known, traveled the Malay Peninsula—up to Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Ipoh—to not only marshal donations of jewelry but to convince girls and women to sign on for military training at the RJR’s Singapore camp.
“Once accepted for service, rigid routine and strict discipline were imposed,” Hill and Silverman report. Reveille took place at five o’clock in the morning, followed by weapons drills and marches.
Hill and Silverman argue that Bose won recruits by playing up the role of women in ancient Indian culture and by connecting the “powerful mother figures” of Hindu religion with “Mother India.” Similarly, Rettig writes that the RJR “matched [Bose’s] ideals of a more egalitarian and non-communal India…in which communal differences could be overcome by training, eating and living together.”
However, historian Arunima Datta notes that most RJR members were illiterate Malaya-born women who hailed from rubber plantations that were cultivated mainly by Tamil coolies. She argues that “[t]o understand the range of experiences of women in the RJR and what made Bose’s leadership so appealing to them, it is essential to unearth the voices of the majority of Indian women in the RJR who came from the Malayan estates.”
Educated women like Captain Lakshmi made up the officer class and continued to serve in civil society long after the war, Datta observes—yet she found that former officers “can barely recall the names of any non-elite recruits from the estates.” Memoirs and oral histories from more privileged RJR members “dominate the historical discourse” because they were literate, “but the absence of material on the RJR, especially its less privileged soldiers, in mainstream narratives made me uncomfortable,” she adds.
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For instance, one key source tells Datta that estate women joined the RJR because “[t]hey were uneducated, they were totally exploited…. When [Bose] spoke of being ‘free’ they were moved.” In this case, exploitation referred to male domination by husbands and fathers.
Captain Lakshmi made this assessment clear when she wrote in her memoir that “[t]he Regiment for the first time made them feel as ‘humans’ who had more value than being objects of desire for sexual or labour purposes.”
Datta writes that “educated recruits showed a hint of ‘othering’ in their views of estate women,” noting that their sweeping claims about estate women’s lives “illustrates how class identity is woven into narratives of the nationalist movement.” She adds that “it seems reasonable to suggest that women were not joining the RJR only to escape troubled marriages…but also and perhaps primarily to escape the horrors of estate life.”
Datta writes that Indians had faced violent treatment at the hands of Japanese forces, even if the Chinese community bore the brunt of the Japanese hostility. And Indian rubber laborers, in particular, suffered badly when the Malayan rubber industry was taken over by Japanese companies. If they were fortunate enough not to be put out of work, they still had to endure meager wages—up to 40 percent lower than the pre-war rate—while facing sky-high food prices.
“In this context, many estate men and women became emboldened to get involved in the Indian National Army and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment,” explains Datta. Once enlisted, however, recruits from the estates struggled with other barriers, since Bose had decreed that Hindi would be the working language of the RJR.
“[T]his policy created problems at the basic level of intra-regiment bonding. Moreover, as language diversity and knowledge were closely linked to educational and class backgrounds, and also to caste, language emphasized ‘we’ and ‘them’ identities with the regiment,” Datta writes.
Even though they marched with the main INA contingent through Malaya and Burma and endured heavy fighting with British troops, the RJR was kept out of direct battle.
“[I]n spite of its combat readiness, the unit’s first assignment was the caretaking of wounded INA troops,” write Hill and Silverman. “Perplexed and dismayed by this limited custodial duty, they proclaimed their frustration in a petition signed in blood.”
And, when the INA was defeated and World War II came to an end, “women recruits from the estates had to face another shock when they returned to Malaya,” Datta reports.
Though Bose had arranged for RJR veterans to further their studies, these scholarships were of little use for women who did not already come from educated backgrounds.
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“[T]here were no provisions to improve the lives of Ranis who came from the plantations and no plan for their future… [T]he less-privileged Ranis returned to the estate life they had perhaps hoped to escape, and today they have faded from memory,” Datta writes.
As author Meira Chand, who was inspired to write a novel about the RJR, reflects, “those Ranis I interviewed or those whose recorded testimonies I have read or listened to, all remember their service in the regiment—whatever the dangers and privations they endured—as the best time of their lives.” This makes it even more “sad that the endeavours of these brave women have been largely forgotten by history.”
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