Rani of Jhansi's letters (Re: Devanagari, ..)

Yashwant Malaiya malaiya at CS.COLOSTATE.EDU
Mon Mar 26 01:35:57 UTC 2001


I have placed images of two letters by Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi
to the Raja of Banpur at

http://malaiya.tripod.com/jhansi.html

I think they are in the hand of some scribe, with the Rani's
stamp. The dialect is Bundelkhandi. They are quite readable,
both the language and the script are fairly modern (1857CE).
Commercial letters can be much harder to read because
of the speed of writing.

Yashwant

-----------------------

On Thu, 15 Mar 2001 I <malaiya at CS.COLOSTATE.EDU> wrote:


>However in much of the rest of North India, Devanagari was
>the main script for Hindus. I have seen stacks of business
>correspondence (mostly postcards) from the early part of
>the century in some families, almost all in some form of
>Devanagari.

>I have a book on Banpur town (Bundelkhand region) that has
>photographs of letters from Rani of Jhansi to the Raja of
>Banpur. They are in Devanagari. I have seen nothing to
>suggest that in my region (MP) the common people ever
>learned the Urdu/Farsi script. Those in the business
>of writing government doucments did learn Urdu.





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