The exact age of the "Indian Boadicea" was never accurately determined. While one journal styles her "this girl, barely twenty years of age," another assumes her age to have been at least thirty. An employé of the East India Company who visited Jhansi in 1854, and accidentally caught a glimpse of this oriental heroine, describes her as "a woman of about the middle size—rather stout, but not too stout. Her face" he says, "must have been very handsome when she was younger, and even now it had many charms—though, according to my idea of beauty, it was too round. The expression, also, was very good and very intellectual. The eyes were particularly fine, and the nose very delicately shaped. She was not very fair, though she was far from black. What spoilt her was her voice, which was something between a whine and a croak."
All agreed as to the extreme licentiousness and immorality of her habits; and the rooms in her palace are said to have been hung with pictures "such as pleased Tiberius at Capri."
It was formerly the custom with many of the native princes to maintain female warriors to guard their zenanas. The tyrant Ferokshere, who was murdered in 1719, kept up an Amazon corps at Delhi, composed of Abyssinians, Cashmerians, Persians—in short, drawn from every nation whence slaves could be easily procured. They were armed with matchlocks, bows and arrows, spears and targets, and other weapons, according to their nationality. When the Emperor took refuge from his assailants in the zenana, the female guards held the entrance bravely for some time, and exchanged shots with the rebels; but they received more wounds than they gave, and were so easily driven away.
In the harem of the Nizam, at Hyderabad, there was, so lately as the time of the Mutiny, a regiment of Amazons who wore scarlet tunics, green trousers, and red cloth hats, trimmed with gold lace and mounted with a green plume. Their arms were the customary musket and bayonet. Whenever a distinguished foreigner visited the Palace, the female guard received him with military honours. "The extreme youth, and delicate appearance of these interesting warriors," says Prince Soltykoff, "at once attracted attention." Though, despite these feminine attractions, he says their aspect was so decidedly military, he would never have known they were females but for their long hair and the fulness of their bosoms. Their hair was tied in a knot, though in place of concealing it under their caps, they let it fall over the collar of their tunics.
An interesting sketch of the female sepoys at Lucknow is given in the "Private Life of an Eastern King."
"Of the living curiosities of the Palace, there were none the account of which will appear more strange to European ears than the female sepoys. I had seen these men-like women pacing up and down before the various entrances to the female apartments for many days before I was informed of their real character. I regarded them simply as a diminutive race of soldiers with well wadded coats. There was nothing but that fulness of the chest to distinguish many of them from other sepoys; and one is so accustomed to see soldiers in England with coats stuffed so as to make their wearers resemble pouter-pigeons, that I took little heed of the circumstance.
"These women retained their long hair, which they tied up in a knot on the top of the head, and there it was concealed by the usual shako. They bore the ordinary accoutrements of sepoys in India—the musket and bayonet, cross-belts and cartridge-boxes, jackets and white duck continuations, which might be seen anywhere in Bengal. Intended solely for duty in the Palace as guardians of the harem, they were paraded only in the court-yards, where I have seen them going through their exercise just like other sepoys. They were drilled by one of the native officers of the king's army, and appeared quite familiar with marching and wheeling, with presenting, loading, and firing muskets, with the fixing and unfixing of bayonets; in fact, with all the detail of the ordinary barrack-yard. Whether they could have gone through the same marches in the field with thousands of mustachioed sepoys around them, I cannot tell—probably not. They had their own corporals and sergeants; none of them, I believe, attained a higher rank than that of sergeant.
"Many of them were married women, obliged to quit the ranks for a month or two at a time, occasionally. They retained their places, however, as long as possible.... Of these female sepoys there were in all two companies of the usual strength, or weakness, if the reader will have it so. Once, during my residence at Lucknow, they were employed by the king against his own mother."