#RaniOfJhansi #RaniOfJhansi160thDeathAnniversary
Today June 18 2018 is 160th death anniversary of Rani of Jhansi
When I saw this attractive looking,
Wonder-woman-alike Joan of Arc , I started wondering if she really looked anything like this
Artist: Albert Lynch (1851-1912)
Kathryn Harrison writes in
'Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured', 2014:
"...We have no verifiable likeness of Joan and little physical
description. Portraits made during her lifetime, including her profile pressed
into, as stated in the trial record, “medals of lead or other metal in her
likeness, like those made for the anniversaries of saints canonized by the
Church,” would have been destroyed in the wake of her execution, no longer
devotional objects but devil’s play. The single surviving contemporaneous image
of Joan is the work of a man who never saw her, more doodle than drawing...
...The Duke of Alençon, who, like others of Joan’s
comrades-in-arms, “slept on the straw” with her and had occasion to see her
disrobe, praised her young body as beautiful, quickly adding that he “never had
any carnal desire for her” and attributing the failure to Joan’s ability to
banish the lust of any who might admire her, a power to which other men in her
company bore witness. “Although she was a young girl, beautiful and shapely,”
her squire, Jean d’Aulon, said, and he “strong, young, and vigorous,” and
though in the course of dressing her and caring for her wounds he had “often
seen her breasts, and … her legs quite bare,” never was his “body moved to any
carnal desire for her.”...
...Given a blank canvas, many of the painters who have taken
Joan as a subject summoned a comely blonde, more Valkyrie than French paysanne,
just as they fabricated features for the equally unknown face of Jesus, every
portrait not only homage but also projection. The hero must always be handsome
and the heroine beautiful, attended by light, not dark, to reveal the
perfection virtue demands. The black robe in which a witch could expect to be
burned is almost without exception whitewashed for Joan, more often depicted in her glory, a majestic
figure clad in shining armor and mounted on a white horse. To avoid revealing
the immodest outline of a woman’s legs, the painted Joan’s armor tends, like a
bodice, to terminate at her waist; from it flows a skirt usually originating
under an incongruous peplum fashioned of plate mail..."
Saul David, 'The Indian Mutiny', 2002:
"...One Briton, who met her in 1854, wrote: ‘Her face must have
been very handsome when she was younger, and even now it had many charms . . .
The eyes were particularly fine, and the nose very delicately shaped . . . Her
dress was a plain white muslin, so fine in texture, and drawn about her in such
a way, and so tightly, that the outline of her figure was plainly discernible —
and a remarkably fine figure she had. What spoilt her was her voice, which was
something between a whine and a croak.’ (Lang, Wanderings in India, 93-4.)...
...At the time of her death, so General Rose told the Duke of
Cambridge, the Rani was ‘dressed in a red jacket, red trousers and white
puggary’. She was also wearing ‘the celebrated pearl necklace of Scindia, which
she had taken from his Treasury, and heavy gold anklets’. Rose added: ‘As she
lay mortally wounded in her Tent she ordered these ornaments to be distributed
amongst her Troops; it is said that Tantia Topee intercepted the necklace. The
whole rebel army mourned for her; her body was burned with great ceremony under
a tamarind tree under the Rock of Gwalior, where I saw her bones and ashes.’...
... ‘The Ranee was remarkable for her beauty, cleverness and
perseverance,’ wrote General Rose, ‘her generosity to her subordinates was
unbounded. These qualities, combined with her rank, rendered her the most
dangerous of all the rebel leaders.’..."
