Rani of Jhansi

"She inspires us till today and shall continue to inspire future generations till eternity. None would have imagined that Manikarnika Tambe, as Lakshmi Bai was known before marriage, belonging to a simple Marathi Brahmin family from Varanasi, could weave a chronicle of valor, courage, queenship, and sacrifice."

"[Rani Lakshmibai is] "personable, clever and beautiful"... "the most dangerous of all Indian leaders"."

"Whatever her faults in British eyes may have been, her countrymen will ever remember that she was driven by ill-treatment into rebellion and that she lived and died for her country, we cannot forget her contribution to India.'"

"The British Raj in India has treated Savarkar’s book as most dangerous for their existence here. So it has been banned. But it has been read by millions of our countrymen including my humble self. In trying to elevate the events of 1857, which interested historians and administrators had not hesitated to call for decades as an ‘Indian Mutiny’, to its right pose of Indian War of Independence, albeit a foiled attempt at that, it is not a work of patriotic alchemist turning base mutineering into noble revolutionary action.... But the greatest value of Savarkar’s book lies in its gift to the nation of that Torch of Freedom in whose light a humble I and a thousand other Indians have our dear daughters named after Laxmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi. Even Netaji Bose in a fateful hour had to form an army of corps after Rani of Jhansi. But for Savarkar’s discovery of that valiant heroine, Rani of Jhansi should have been a long-forgotten ‘mutineer’ of the nineteenth-century."

"Although a lady, [she] was the bravest and best military leader of the rebels."