The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive: Lakshmibai, Jhansi, and 1857 PRACHI DESHPANDE 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 spatio- temporal 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. O F THE MANY REBEL leaders of the Great Rebellion in 1857–58 against the East India Company’ s rule, perhaps the most enigmatic is the rani (queen) of the small state of Jhansi, Lakshmibai. Lakshmibai lost her kingdom to the Company under Lord Dalhousie’ s doctrine of lapse when her husband, Gangadharrao, died in 1853 with only an adopted heir. When Company soldiers stationed in Jhansi rebelled and killed all the Europeans in June 1857, Lakshmibai took charge of the state. A few months later, she joined the rebels Nanasaheb and Tatya Tope in fighting the British and died in battle in early 1858. The historiography of the rebellion is well known for the polarity of positions about its status as a mutiny or political revolt and for the sheer volume of source material, ranging from official documents to personal narratives. Personalities of the rebellion, such as the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (Dalrymple 2006) or the rebel sepoy Mangal Pandey (Mehta 2005; Mukherjee 2005), con- tinue to fuel scholarly and popular debate about their motives and actions. The rebellion’ s representations are also remarkable for the British and Indian nationalist imaginations that they have fired from its immediate aftermath to Prachi Deshpande (pdeshpande@berkeley.edu) is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 67, No. 3 (August) 2008: 855–879. © 2008 The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. doi:10.1017/S0021911808001186