The best part of Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi is seeing images of an Indian heroine, who is fierce, powerful and in command throughout. Patriarchal Bollywood rarely allows a woman to be as physically powerful as she is, hacking an array of men on the battlefield. She is also politically intelligent: her marriage into the royal family of Jhansi is a political alliance for the nationalist cause. And she’s well-read: her husband Raja Gangadhar Rao woos her with books.

Of course, there is Dangal and Mary Kom, but the heroines in those films played a wrestler and a boxer respectively; here, a spunky woman became a queen and warrior because of circumstance. The film, starring Kangana Ranaut, is directed by Radha Krishna “Krish” Jagarlamudi and Ranaut (he gets top billing in the trailer, she in the film). This is a biopic of Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi (née Manikarnika), one of the earliest patriots of India’s freedom movement, a queen who resisted British control after she was widowed, and who died fighting them in battle in 1858, at just 29. We all remember her statue, astride a horse on the battlefield, with raised sword, and her baby strapped to her back. Jagarlamudi has directed about nine feature films in Telugu, including Vedam with Allu Arjun and Manoj Bajpayee, and NTR Kathanayakudu with Nandamuri Balakrishna and Vidya Balan, which also released last month.