A 19th-century widow is legally stripped of her titles and quietly pensioned off by a continent-spanning colonial corporation. A few years later, that same woman dies in frontline combat, sword in hand, and the British general sent to destroy her officially reports her as the "best and bravest" of all the rebel leaders. This episode unpacks the complicated life of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, from her unconventional childhood in an exiled Maratha court, where a motherless girl absorbed swordplay, horsemanship, and firearms alongside future rebel commanders, to her marriage into a throne the East India Company was waiting to swallow.

When her husband died in 1853, the Company invoked the Doctrine of Lapse, refusing to recognize her adopted son and annexing the state in what amounts to a hostile corporate takeover. She fought back first with an ...