The Rani of Jhansi Regiment

A doctor with a clinic for plantation workers in Singapore raised a thousand-strong women's regiment in four months, and went on running out of forgotten firsts for the next seventy years.

In July 1943 Dr Lakshmi Swaminathan was given about a week to find recruits for an all-women regiment of the Indian National Army. She built it out of teenagers from the Malayan rubber estates, commanded it, sat in the Azad Hind cabinet, and walked out of Burma under arrest. In 2002 she became the first woman ever to stand for President of India.

The Clinic on the Corner

It is a morning in early July 1943, in Japanese occupied Singapore. A doctor in her late twenties is seeing patients in a small clinic she runs for the poor. Most of them are Tamil plantation workers from Malaya, people who came to the rubber estates for wages and stayed for a lifetime. The room smells of carbolic soap. Outside, a queue waits on the step.

Her name is Lakshmi Swaminathan. She is twenty eight. She has an MBBS from Madras Medical College, taken in 1938, and a diploma in gynaecology and obstetrics from the year after. She came to Singapore in June 1940, alone, after her first marriage ended. She has spent the years since delivering babies and treating men who could not pay her.

Word has gone round the Indian community that Subhas Chandra Bose has arrived in the city. At a public meeting he has said something nobody expected. He wants the women of Singapore, Malaya and Burma in the fight, not as nurses but as soldiers, in a regiment of their own.

Dr Lakshmi asks for a meeting. She gets it. In the room, Bose does not ask whether the idea will work. He asks her how many women she can bring, and he gives her about a week to find out.

She had never held a rifle. Within four months she would be drilling a camp full of teenagers, and within two years she would be walking out of Burma with them on foot.

Who She Was Before Any of This

Lakshmi was born on 24 October 1914 at Anakkara, in what was then Malabar district. Her father, S. Swaminathan, was a criminal lawyer at the Madras High Court. Her mother, Ammu Swaminathan, was a social worker who went into the freedom movement and later sat in the Constituent Assembly that wrote India's Constitution.