The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  Historians of India have responded in several ways. They have defended the empiricist underpinnings of the historical discipline, even while paying greater attention to the construction of historiographic traditions.8 A notable instance is Romila Thapar’s exploration of multiple historiographic traditions about an eleventh-century raid by Mahmud of Ghazna upon the temple of Somanatha in western India: “The study becomes one of observing the processes by which the intervening stages [of the creation of narratives around the event] are established and how these influence the eventual perception of the event.” As Thapar points out, contextualizing each such narrative historically requires identifying “the ideology which it represented” and the dominant groups involved in its production and reception.9Thapar’s work also retains the crucial distinction between what actually happened, as ascertained by archaeologists from recovered material remains, and subsequent narratives of the event.10 Simultaneously, historians of medieval India have responded to majoritarian pressures, as well as to the methods and insights of the new social and cultural history, by complicating virtually all our earlier assumptions about medieval history. This new scholarship has dramatically overhauled our understanding of formations of religious community and the politics of religious affiliation in this period.11

  Other scholars have sought to engage the wider, popular domain that has invoked a remembered past to counter a reconstructed historical past. Thus, Partha Chatterjee has called for “a redefinition of the grounds of the discipline” to include “popular practices of memory” within its “list of approved practices;” to incorporate within its domain “an appropriate analytic of the popular.”12 In this vein, scholars have focused either on the specific practices by which particular social groups remembered the past,13 or on memory as offering alternative embodiments and institutionalized locations for a variety of remembered pasts. Shahid Amin, strikingly, has excavated popular perspectives on a village disturbance in northern India in 1922 to shed new light on peasant politics and Gandhian mobilization. Other scholars have explored the remembered pasts of subaltern groups in western and central India, such as the Dangs, Meos, and the Gujar subjects of the Rajput “kings” of Sawar.14 Such subaltern memory was constituted and circulated as (often oppositional) oral tradition at the peripheries of imperial, regional, and national states. Implicit in this project is a laudable hope in the potential of such memory to mobilize resistance against continuing injustices perpetrated by the contemporary nation-state.15

  Such critiques of dominant practices within South Asian historiography rely upon the assumption that memory somehow offers a more organic and, therefore, perhaps, authentic relationship to the past than history does. Thus, Chatterjee invokes Pierre Nora’s lyrical paean to memory as that which “wells up from groups that it welds together,” and goes on to cite his critique of history: “At the heart of history is a criticism destructive of spontaneous memory. Memory is always suspect in the eyes of history, whose true mission is to demolish it, to repress it. History divests the lived past of its legitimacy. What looms on the horizon of every historical society, at the limit of a completely historicized world, is presumably a final, definitive disenchantment.”16 And yet, as the most insightful historical scholarship on memory demonstrates, memory too is forged and transmitted deliberately, and forgotten because no longer reiterated, or when no longer relevant to the perceived needs of a community.17 In this sense, memory is no more organic than history—neither in its construction, nor in its circulation, nor indeed in the work that it performs within and for a community. Memory is not history’s Other but is itself a deeply historical practice.18

  In the South Asian context, a growing historiography of medieval and early modern India warns us against assuming that memory is the exclusive preserve of the popular or oral domains, for it has often existed simultaneously in both the oral and literate domains, each feeding the other. Secondly, pasts have been reimagined and reclaimed across a strikingly wide range of social groups: within court-centered and aristocratic contexts, among middle- and lower-level administrators and scribes, among villagers defending inherited entitlements in the law courts, and only then by middle-class nationalists in the colonial and postcolonial periods.19 While the move to recover an “indigenous discourse about the past” has yielded rich insights, it sidesteps the key question of how such narratives of the past were intended and interpreted: as history (“this is how it happened”), or memory (“this, we believe, is what happened”), or romance (“once upon a time . . .”). Three distinguished scholars of early modern South Asia have suggested that “readers or listeners at home in a culture . . . know when the past is being treated in a factual manner” by virtue of their cultural literacy and “sensitivity” to the “texture” of such narratives and literary conventions.20 While this seems plausible, and while Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam’s interpretations of individual narratives are brilliant, proving such sensitivity for the often anonymous audiences of the Padmini narratives discussed in this book seems an uncertain enterprise at best.21

  Sumit Guha’s work on the Marathi bakhars of western India provides a more useful counterpoint to the Padmini narratives. Produced in “judicial disputes over heritable property,” the bakhars “contested alternative stories, and . . . grounded themselves in witness testimony, documentary evidence, and the ‘common knowledge’ of the local community.”22 In contrast, whether produced as courtly poetic narratives or as parts of aristocratic genealogies or as courtly and then popular romances, the Padmini narratives reveal neither internal nor contextual mechanisms of authentication. On the other hand, however, they did circulate in acknowledged traditions, within which they were in dialogue with other narratives. Skaria has argued that the Dangs in West-Central India “make multiple connections between narratives [of the past, vadilcha goth], that there is a deep cross referentiality made possible by simultaneous knowledge of many goth.”23 This “reflexivity”24 is an attribute shared by several Padmini narratives—the Jain and Rajput traditions in the Mewar court, for instance, or the adaptations and translations of Jayasi’s Padmavat. Within the Mewar court, then, multiple versions of the past emerged, with subtle but distinct variations. The Padmavat tradition poses another problem. While internal evidence suggests that Jayasi himself may have been remembering Alauddin Khalji’s conquest of Chitor at a particular historical moment in the mid-sixteenth century, it is not clear whether his literary successors were remembering the Khalji sultan or the Padmavat. In other words, the Padmavat itself can be seen as a work of memory reinterpreting Rajput resistance to the sultan of Delhi, but its subsequent translators, with the significant exception of the mid-seventeenth-century Saiyid Alaol, were often remembering the Padmavat as literary predecessor and model, rather than its historical characters.

  Within such a literary tradition, as A.K. Ramanujan has pointed out, “texts do not come in historical stages but form a “simultaneous order,” where every new text within a series confirms yet alters the whole order ever so slightly, and not always so slightly.”25 In other words, not every community that “remembered” Padmini automatically remembered events believed to have occurred around the siege and conquest of the kingdom of Chitor in 1302. Some communities from the seventeenth century onward remembered Padmini as the beautiful heroine celebrated by a Sufi poet in lyrical Avadhi verse. Other communities, barely glimpsed in the scholarship, remembered the folk tale of the beautiful queen and her parrot Hiraman.26

  The point seems obvious but is worth reiterating—not all narratives of the past involve conscious acts of historical remembering and reinterpretation. The Padmini narratives explored in this book ask us to consider two kinds of tradition—one of memory, and the other of literary romances, whether within the Indic context of kavya or the Indo-Persian context of masnavi.

  Literary Histories and Narrative Traditions

  Most twentieth-century historians of Indian literatures have defined the literary traditions of the past within t
oday’s linguistic and regional boundaries. Thus, they separate the literature of medieval Rajasthan from the literary traditions of medieval Braj or Avadh.27 Further, nationalist literary historians have been active in forging a “national” literature since the late nineteenth century. While scholars in this dominant tradition of literary history have richly explored the impact of one classical literary tradition, namely Sanskrit, they have largely restricted their exploration of the other classical language, Persian, to studies of the rise of Urdu. Such literary history fails to recognize the anachronism inherent in comprehending pre-modern India through contemporary regional, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.28

  For one, the choice of scripts for particular languages has evolved in the course of history. Scholars now agree that Jayasi’s Padmavat was likely written in the Persian script. It is also likely that Saiyid Alaol, who composed a Bengali adaptation of the Padmavat in the seventeenth century, had access to a manuscript of Jayasi’s Avadhi poem written in the Persian script. Sufi poets writing in Avadhi—such as Maulana Dawud, Qutban, Jayasi, and Manjhan—were adept in both regional and classical linguistic-literary traditions, ranging from Sanskrit and Apabhramsa to Persian and Arabic.

  The instance of Alaol is even more striking. Not only was he aware of classical (Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian) and local (Bengali) traditions, he was also thoroughly familiar with Avadhi Sufi poets like Maulana Dawud and Jayasi, who were composing in a different region and dialect some 700 miles to the north-west. Brahmin scholars in early colonial Bengal were still familiar with the Persian chronicle tradition of the Mughal courts in Delhi and Agra, such chronicles having been available in the courtly culture of Bengal from at least the late seventeenth century. A Jain version of the Padmini narrative composed under Pathan patronage in seventeenth-century Lahore points in the same direction. Internal evidence suggests Jatmal’s familiarity with both the Rajasthan tradition of Padmini narratives (some 150 miles to the south-east in a different linguistic-cultural region), as well as Jayasi’s Avadhi poem composed some 500 miles to the south-east. The Padmini narratives discussed in this book thus demonstrate that regional and social boundaries between linguistic-literary traditions were drawn differently in the medieval and early modern periods from those that obtain now; they also encourage us to move beyond the existing categories of classical and vernacular traditions.

  Literary scholars studying South Asian narrative traditions have begun to move beyond formalist analyses of genre and rhetoric towards considering the embeddedness of literary narratives in particular historical contexts.29 Meanwhile, historians have typically paid scant attention to literary form and the rhetorical imperatives of genre when reading such literary narratives as “sources.”30 In the conventional hierarchy of sources, historians have also regarded such narratives as least reliable, since their very literariness colors their depictions of historical events. In a brilliant but under-acknowledged book in 1966, V.S. Pathak suggested a different mode of historicizing courtly epic narratives from the fourth century CE onward. He argued that “mythological and metaphysical interpretations,” used earlier by etymologists, were then “accepted . . . in the itihasa–purana tradition especially . . . [where] there was no historical tradition to fall back on.” Pathak thus suggested that “supernatural causation” in such courtly narratives about the past was a “literary idiom,” and not an article of faith for these poet-historians.31 He pointed out how, from this period, the genre of itihasa was “narrowed down to an account of events culminating in the achievement of royal glory by the king.” Poet-historians now “represented the abstract idea of royal glory in the form of a beautiful princess symbolizing the goddess of Royal Fortune . . . whose love the king wins after overcoming insurmountable difficulties.” However, Pathak attributed the emergence of this distinctive trope to “the romantic spirit of the age” and to epic precedent.32 His profound insight into the distinctive and entirely conventional mode by which such courtly epics encoded the past was thus abruptly short-circuited by the invocation of an ahistorical, “romantic spirit of the age.”

  While acknowledging the importance of literary precedent, I am interested in a somewhat different issue: what aspects in particular historical contexts could have endowed such tropes with added resonance for communities reappropriating such genres or narratives. Further, in tracing the literary antecedents of such tropes, I attempt to identify those precedents that particular authors and audiences would most likely have been familiar with—from what we know about their historical and cultural contexts. The poets and chroniclers discussed here have in many instances acknowledged such familiarity. This narrower definition of literary precedent helps us to start sketching a history of circulation for particular cultural texts and practices.33 A more comprehensive history of particular tropes from their first occurrence onwards would, no doubt, reveal richer histories of circulation between the early centuries of the Common Era and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—but that calls for a collective endeavor beyond the scope of this book.

  The other mode by which I have attempted to outline the broad contours of a history of circulation is by tracing the production of manuscript copies of particular versions. In the South Asian context, only scholars of oral and “folk” traditions, art historians, and historians of medieval devotional and sectarian traditions have paid any attention to the circulation of manuscripts. In general, social as well as literary historians of South Asia have preferred to regard published critical editions of pre-modern texts as their stable and original versions. For historians of culture, in particular, the attractions of using such critical editions are obvious—it makes the task of reconstructing cultural history much less arduous than it would be by tracing all the manuscript variants and traditions for each text. The consequence, however, has been an understanding of culture in textual rather than social terms. And yet, as historians of bhakti, in particular, have shown, paying attention to manuscripts—Who made copies? Who were the patrons? How were manuscripts preserved and handed down?—can reveal hidden histories of cultural circulation, transmission, and persistence.34

  Paying heed to the circulation of variants of the Padmini legend alerts us to another aspect of such narrative traditions in the Indian context: they existed simultaneously in oral performance and manuscript form. This simultaneity distinguishes India from predominantly oral cultures in Africa and Central Asia.35 Even as manuscripts were copied, read, and preserved, scribes, genealogists, bards, or (as in the instance of Jayasi’s Padmavat) wandering mendicants, recited excerpts in varying contexts. As scholars of oral epic in India have long known, this simultaneity of oral and textual modes has shaped both the form of such narratives and their circulation.36 The transformation of such narratives—oscillating between orality and text—in modern critical editions has ended up fixing the resultant text as a stable entity. This has obscured the complex histories of circulation and continuous interpretation that shaped such pre-modern narrative traditions.

  This book explores the actual circuits of transmission for the traditions of Padmini narratives between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such circuits were constituted within trans-regional religious networks such as Sufi khanqahs. Equally, as the Mughal empire expanded, the entry of regional ruling elites into the Mughal aristocracy and revenue apparatus encouraged circuits of literary patronage that transcended the boundaries of local and regional cultures. In historicizing the Padmini legend’s transmission and mutations, this book traces how the narrative was reimagined when it crossed regional, socio-political, and linguistic-literary boundaries over a period of four centuries.

  Community and Gender in History

  Much of the historiography of medieval and early modern India compartmentalizes its political history and cultural practices into the watertight and mutually antagonistic categories “Hindu” and “Muslim.” As is well known, colonial historiography was one source of these modes of categorization. Henry Elliott’s widely cited P
reface to The History of India as Told by its Own Historians characterized the medieval period, in what was becoming a familiar litany, thus: “The few glimpses we have . . . of Hindus slain for disputing with Muhammadans, of general prohibitions against processions, worship, and ablutions, and of other intolerant measures, of idols mutilated, of temples razed, of forcible conversions and marriages, of proscriptions and confiscations, of murders and massacres, and of the sensuality and drunkenness of the tyrants who enjoined them, show us that this picture is not overcharged . . .”37

  In the mid-twentieth century, Aziz Ahmad elaborated a similar model of homogeneous religious communities with antagonistic cultures. He described narrations of the Turkish conquest of North India: “Muslim impact and rule in India generated two literary growths: a Muslim epic of conquest, and a Hindu epic of resistance and of psychological rejection. The two literary growths were planted in two different cultures; in two different languages, Persian and Hindi; in two mutually exclusive religious, cultural and historical attitudes confronting the other in aggressive hostility. Each of these two literary growths developed in mutual ignorance of the other . . .”38