Tatya Tope
leader in the Indian Rebellion of 1857
Tantia Tope (also spelled Tatya Tope, Marathi pronunciation: [t̪aːt̪ʲa ʈoːpe]; 16 February 1814 — 18 April 1859) was an Indian general in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 against the British East India Company.
Early life
Born as Ramachandra Panduranga Yewalkar to a Marathi Deshastha Brahmin family, in Yeola, (near Nasik). A personal adherent of Nana Saheb of Bithoor, he progressed with the Gwalior contingent after the British reoccupied Kanpur (then known as Cawnpore) and forced General Windham to retreat from the city. Later on, Tantia Tope came to the relief of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and with her seized the city of Gwalior. However, he was defeated by General Napier's British Indian troops at Ranod and after a further defeat at Sikar, he abandoned the campaign.
According to an official statement, Tantia Tope's father was Panduranga Yewalkar and his mother was Rukhma Bai. Tope was a Maraṭha Vashista Brahman by birth. In a government letter, he was said to be the minister of Baroda, while he was held identical to Nana Saheb in another communication. A witness at his trial described Tantia Tope as "a man of middling stature, with a wheat complexion and always wearing a white chukri-dar turban".
Initial engagement at the Indian rebellion of 1857
After the rebellion in (Kanpur) broke out on 5 June 1857, Nana Saheb became the leader of the freedom fighters.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tatya Tope” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.