Princesses Behaving Badly (5 page)

Khutulun had battle in her blood. Born around 1260, she was the daughter and favorite child of Qaidu Khan, a fierce regional ruler in Central Asia. She was also the niece of Khubilai Khan, the great-great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan, and the only girl in a family of 14 boys. That she took up wrestling is no surprise. But that she turned out to be unbelievably good at it, so good that no man in the kingdom could best her? That was a problem.

Some chroniclers describe Khutulun as “beautiful,” although that might’ve been a bit of artistic license—she was a big-boned, broad-shouldered girl who, from an early age, was taught to ride and to shoot with bow and arrow. In Mongol tribes, both sexes learned to defend their flocks of sheep, and a bow made an ideal weapon for children and women because it required precision rather than great strength to wield. Unlike other Mongolian girls, however, Khutulun also learned to wrestle. She proved to be exceptional at all of it, which endeared her to her father tremendously. As she grew up, her father came to lean on her for strength, support, advice, and battle prowess.

Khutulun’s skills were remarkable enough to attract the attention of outsiders like Marco Polo, the nomadic Venetian merchant whose travel chronicles gave birth to the West’s fascination with the East. But in Mongolian royal tradition, she may not have been so unusual. Besides their skill at archery, Mongolian royal women commanded armies, raced horses, and ruled vast territories. Genghis Khan considered his daughters superior leaders compared to his sons, and he awarded them kingdoms that they defended tooth and nail (oftentimes against their male siblings).

Khutulun was clearly an inheritor of Mongolian X-chromosomal martial strength. When at her father’s side in battle—which was pretty often since Qaidu was perpetually at war with Khubilai Khan’s forces—she
was terrifying. Marco Polo reports that at the right moment, she would “make a dash at the host of the enemy, and seize some man thereout as deftly as a hawk pounces on a bird, and carry him to her father.”

Stories of Khutulun’s battlefield prowess were passed around contemporary chroniclers as lurid, tantalizing tales of war-mad Mongols. But among the tribes, it was Khutulun’s wrestling skills that made her a legend. She was unbeatable. Mongols frequently bet horses on wrestling matches, and she reportedly amassed more than 10,000 by winning all her bouts. And as Marco Polo noted, Khutulun, a veritable “giantess,” refused to marry unless her prospective groom could beat her in the ring.

By 1280, enemies of Khutulun’s family were spreading rumors that the reason she refused to marry was because she was not only her father’s favorite, but his lover as well. Then along came that eligible young prince (and his wager of 1,000 horses) to try his luck. He was quite the catch, according to Marco Polo, “a noble young gallant, the son of a rich and puissant king, a man of prowess and valiance and great strength of body,” not to mention “handsome, fearless and strong in every way.” Seeing a way out of an uncomfortable predicament, Khutulun’s parents pressured her to throw the match.

At first it looked like she would. Polo, history’s favorite tourist, witnessed the event and attests that “they grappled each other by the arms and wrestled this way and that, but for a long time, neither could get the better of the other.” But the match was over when Khutulun threw her opponent “right valiantly onto the palace pavement.… And when he found himself thus thrown, and her standing over him, great indeed was his shame and discomfiture.” Khutulun now had no prince, and another thousand horses to feed.

Eventually, and probably to her parents’ great relief, Khutulun did marry. But it wasn’t to a man who beat her on the wrestling mat—it was, gossips claimed, true love. Little is known about the man who finally tamed her heart, other than that she chose him of her own volition. But not even marriage could bring this princess to the mat. She still fought
alongside her father, venturing ever deeper into Mongolia and China on punishing military campaigns. When Qaidu died of battle wounds in 1301, there was even talk of Khutulun suceeding him as khan.

That didn’t fly with the rest of her family, especially all those brothers. “You should mind your scissors and needles!” one of them said, according to a contemporary Persian historian. What happened to her next is unclear—her detractors claim that she spent the years after her father’s death “stirring up sedition and strife” in support of her brother’s candidacy for the khan. By 1306 she was dead, either killed in battle or assassinated by a rival sibling.

Khutulun’s death signaled a change in Mongolia and the empire that Genghis Khan had built. She was the last of the wild warrior-women leaders of the tribes. One theory posits that as women began to fall away from leadership, the ruling of the empire was left to increasingly indolent men. As a result, the Mongol empire stagnated and disintegrated. Maybe.

Khutulun’s legend might have been forgotten if not for an exotic tale titled “Turandot,” published in a volume of fables by French scholar François Pétis de la Croix in 1710. Pétis de la Croix came across her story while researching his biography of Genghis Khan, and he transformed the brutish wrestling princess into the beautiful 19-year-old daughter of a fictional Chinese emperor who refused to marry unless her suitor could prove himself her intellectual equal. In 1761, the story became
Turandotte
, a play by Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi, featuring a “tigerish woman” whose pride is her undoing.
Turandotte
became Giacomo Puccini’s
Turandot
, the opera he was working on when he died in 1924 (it was completed by a colleague).

In Mongolian culture, Khutulun is remembered by the sport in which she so excelled. These days when Mongolian men wrestle, they wear a sort of long-sleeved vest that is open in the front to prove to their opponents they don’t have breasts. It’s a tribute to the woman wrestler who was never defeated.

Lakshmibai

1834–J
UNE
17, 1858
J
HANSI
,
NORTH
-C
ENTRAL
I
NDIA

R
ani Lakshmibai of Jhansi died in the heat of battle with the reins of her horse in her teeth and a sword in each hand. Or maybe she was turning to cut down the soldier who’d just shot her in the back. Or maybe she was only wounded and survived long enough to distribute her jewelry to her men and have them build her funeral pyre. Accounts vary. However death came, Lakshmibai did die and in death became
a legend, a symbol of India’s struggle against colonial oppression.

But the truth is, she didn’t set out to be a rebel. She was the young widow of a maharaja in the state of Jhansi when the Indians rebelled against the British East India Company in 1857, and her intent was to hold on until the British regained control. But when the British labeled her a sympathizer at best and a rebellious whore at worst, Rani Lakshmibai decided to show them just how rebellious she could be.

Before she was Rani Lakshmibai (
rani
means “princess” or “queen” in Hindi), she was just Bithur Manu, a little Brahmin girl who’d lost her mother when she was very small. Growing up in the luxurious court of the deposed chief minister of the defunct Maratha Empire, Manu played only with boys, and so she did the things they did. She learned to read and write and was taught to ride horses and elephants, use a sword, and fly a kite. She was said to be exceptionally brave. Once, when a rampaging elephant was loose in her city, Manu leapt onto its trunk and calmed the beast before it could do any more damage. It’s unclear how much of this tomboy tale is true—the elephant probably is not—but little Manu was destined for greatness.

In 1842, she was married to a childless widower, the much older maharaja of a city-state in north-central India that had sworn allegiance to the British East India Company (EIC). Traditional sources claim that she was only 8 years old at the time, not an uncommon marrying age for Indian royalty in the nineteenth century. The union gave her a new name, Lakshmibai, put an end to her carefree childhood, and tied her to Jhansi, a hot, dry place where the wicked dust storms were called “the devil’s breath.”

By the time Lakshmibai was 14, her marriage was consummated; by 17, she was pregnant. But the birth of her son and the maharaja’s heir brought only short-lived happiness—the boy died at just 3 months old, followed soon after by her devastated husband.

So in November 1853, Rani Lakshmibai was a teenaged widow. A
vulnerable
widow, the British probably thought. Just before his death, the old maharaja had tried to keep the EIC from seizing Jhansi lands by adopting
a 5-year-old boy and naming him as heir; administration of the state would be vested in Lakshmibai until the child came of age. But Lord Dalhousie, governor general of the EIC, refused to recognize either Lakshmibai or the boy as rightful rulers. In early 1854, the EIC annexed Jhansi, claiming it would be better for the inhabitants if they were under direct company rule. Rani Lakshmibai was given a life pension and allowed to remain in the palace. She demanded the governor general reconsider, writing letters pointing out various aspects of British and Indian law that upheld her claim. Dalhousie refused, and Jhansi was swallowed up by the EIC.

British presence in India would have been ludicrous if not for the money the country brought in and the pretensions of empire it afforded. The EIC had ruled since around 1773 through a combination of outright landownership, mostly acquired through wars and annexation, and by using existing royal families as puppet administrators. But India was hot and full of diseases to which the colonials were unaccustomed. Local populations chafed under the restrictions placed on their autonomy as well as British residents’ general disregard for local religious institutions, laws, and customs. It was only a matter of time before things got nasty.

In May 1857, Indian sepoys (native troops recruited by the EIC) decided they’d had enough. The spark that lit the powder keg was the decision by EIC army commanders to use greased-cartridge rifles. It was common practice to bite open the cartridges to release the gunpowder, meaning that the soldiers would probably inadvertently consume some of the grease. In a ridiculous oversight, the grease in question was made from cow or pig fat, angering both the Hindus, whose religion regards the cow as a sacred animal and the pig as disgusting, and the Muslims, whose faith explicitly disallows the consumption of pork products. The grease was replaced, but the damage was done—several sepoys refused to use the cartridges.

On May 10, after the protesting sepoys were court-martialed and sentenced to hard labor, revolt began in the city of Meerut. The British were slaughtered as they left church; looting, rape, murder, and arson swept
through the city. Chaos thundered into nearby Delhi, where the last Mughal emperor gave his support to the rebellion and nominated his own (inexperienced) son to command the military forces.

Within a month, revolutionary fire spread to Jhansi, where British adminstrators had not exactly endeared themselves to the local population after taking control four years earlier. First, they’d lifted the ban on the slaughter of cows, an outrage to the Hindu population. Then they demanded that revenues earmarked for a Hindu temple be remitted to the East India Company. Finally, they forced Lakshmibai to pay some of her husband’s state debts out of her private pension and cut her off from funds left by the late maharaja for the couple’s adopted son. The rani’s appeals on behalf of her people went unanswered, and by the time rebellion reached Jhansi, anger had long been building.

The simmering resentment exploded into the June 8, 1857, massacre of 61 English men, women, and children who’d taken refuge at the fort in Jhansi before surrendering to rebel forces. Contrary to later reports, Lakshmibai seems not to have taken part in that uprising—she was besieged in her palace by mutineers at the time.

When the insurgents left Jhansi later that month, the remains of British authority left with them. The rani took control and began to deal with the defense of her lands by enlisting troops, casting cannons, and making weapons. Popular legend claims that Lakshmibai trained her own regiment of female soldiers. Whether or not that’s true (most likely not), the military wasn’t created to fight the British. Rather, her army was defending Jhansi from neighboring rajs looking to exploit the power vacuum and build their own empires. In September and October of 1857, the rani successfully fended off assaults from two would-be emperors.