The Rani of Ramgarh
Avantibai Lodhi of Ramgarh in Mandla, 1857 to 1858: a queen the Company refused to recognise, who took the field anyway
The Company declared Avantibai Lodhi's husband unfit, put the Ramgarh estate under a Court of Wards, and refused to recognise her as regent. In 1857 she took the estate back, raised the landholders of the Mandla country, and checked a British column at Kheri. Cornered at Devharigarh in March 1858, she used her own sword rather than be captured, and the record the Raj left of her is thinner than the memory her district kept.
The Letter and the Bangles
Sometime in the middle of 1857, a rider left Ramgarh with a bundle of letters. Ramgarh was a small estate in the Mandla hills, on the upper Narmada, in what the Company called the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories. The letters went to the landholders of the surrounding country. Each one, tradition holds, carried two things: a few lines calling the men out, and a set of glass bangles.
The message of the bangles needed no reading. Come and fight, or sit at home and wear these.
The woman who sent them was Avantibai Lodhi, and on paper she ruled nothing at all. Her husband, Vikramaditya Singh, the holder of Ramgarh, had been declared unfit to manage his own estate. The Company had put Ramgarh under a Court of Wards, appointed its own manager, and refused to recognise her as regent for the house. She had a fort, a name in the district, and no legal standing whatsoever.
Within a year she would be dead on a hillside a few miles away, by her own hand. What she did in between is one of the least documented fights of 1857, and one of the hardest to look away from.
What the Company Took
To understand why a woman in a hill estate raised men against the Empire, you have to understand what the Court of Wards was.
When a landholder in Company territory was a minor, or was declared incapable, the government did not hand the estate to his family. It took the estate into official management. A British officer or his appointee collected the revenue, paid the family an allowance, and ran the property until the government decided otherwise. The logic was protective. The effect was that a family lost control of its own land to a clerk.