The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  Opposition to this view has come largely from secular historians who have insisted on the subcontinent’s traditions of religious harmony. In such a view (in the writings of Tara Chand, for instance), texts like Jayasi’s Padmavat and Kabir’s Bijak are celebrated for being “syncretist,” for fusing elements from the disparate religious and cultural traditions of Hinduism and Islam. These have been the broad modern contexts for the interpretation of Jayasi’s Padmavat with its Sufi (“Muslim”) character, its largely “Hindu” subject matter, and its hostility to the Muslim sultan of Delhi.

  In his influential article, Aziz Ahmad was unable to fit Jayasi into his scheme of Muslim epic and Hindu counter-epic. Instead, he argued that Jayasi’s sympathies and choice of Avadhi were the result of his local affiliations and ignorance of the sophisticated narratives and traditions circulating in elite (urban) culture. In fact, however, Jayasi and the poets of other, similar narratives in Avadhi reveal an easy mastery over Persian and Indic narratives, ranging from the courtly to the “folk” and “popular,” belying Ahmad’s assumption of rural illiteracy in an Islamicate high culture. Equally striking is their intimate knowledge of multiple religious traditions, such as Chishti or Shattari Sufi, orthodox Sunni Islam, Vaishnavite and Nirgun bhakti, or the heterodox Nathpanth. Jayasi’s Sufi poem was located at the intersection of these distinct cultural and religious traditions, whose tropes were transformed when inserted into a Sufi tale of the triumph of ascetic and mystical love. Exploring these articulations may help us to recognize more complicated histories of accommodation between traditions that are now invariably thought of as unconnected and mutually hostile.

  Beginning with Jayasi’s Padmavat, the many versions of the Padmini narrative were persistently used to mobilize specific kinds of community for political purposes. By the eighteenth century, the narratives in Rajasthan articulated an emergent demonization of the conquering enemy as the iconoclastic, unclean Muslim. Such narratives echoed the perspective of their royal patrons, who were combating Mughal power in the region. Subsequently, Tod’s account read the story as exemplifying the general pattern of medieval Indian history, in which chivalrous “Hindus” defended their land against deceitful, idol-breaking “Muslim” invaders. In depicting the rulers of Delhi and their imperial relationship with the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan, the Annals thus reiterated the premises of its Rajput sources while reaffirming English reconstructions of medieval Indian history. Bengali narratives of Padmini in the late nineteenth century invoked the same master narrative of medieval Indian history as Tod. The authors of this refashioned narrative read the legend as exemplifying Rajput and now “Hindu” patriotism in the face of “Muslim” conquest; this reinterpretation was achieved by erasing an alternative tradition of narratives about Padmini. For, Bengali scholars in the early nineteenth century had known the Persian chronicle tradition, while Alaol’s seventeenth-century Sufi adaptation of the Padmavat continued to circulate in manuscript form in Bengal through the nineteenth century. And yet the dominant tradition of Padmini narratives in late-nineteenth-century Bengal seems to have been unaware of Alaol’s version. The reformulation of new national identities along tacitly communal lines was thus accomplished through selective appropriations from earlier traditions.

  The appropriation of female figures such as Joan of Arc and Our Lady of Guadalupe by nationalist historiographies in their regions is well recognized.39 In exploring such nationalist mythmaking, historians have focused on the manner in which particular nationalist ideologies merged the competing memories of diverse constituencies being forged into modern nation-states. More recently, feminist historians have alerted us to the re-forming of gender relations as a critical component of modern nationalist ideologies and politics.40 The present book draws on the insights of both these traditions of scholarship. In the instance of the Padmini legend, the celebration of a heroic queen was an exercise in reconstructing a perceived community’s past history; communities defined themselves through the control of women in the present and in remembered pasts. Such communities coalesced around affiliations of caste, region of origin, or religion, or around their relationship to political power. In other words, the attempt here is to investigate the manner in which reconstructions of memory and the re-forming of gender relations were integral to the constitution of other political collectivities in South Asia, before the emergence of modern nation-states.

  In its multiple variants, the story has always been instrumental in defining such gendered norms. This study explores a number of historical contexts in which the Padmini story emerged in new or significantly modified versions—the socio-political and cultural horizons of Sufi Islam in sixteenth-century North India; Rajput kingdoms in north-western India between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and then in the early nineteenth century under growing colonial power; and emerging nationalism in late-nineteenth-century in Bengal. In each of these contexts, elite groups built their authority around particular forms of the regulation of women. Particular modifications of the Padmini narratives are intelligible within, and in turn illumine, these historical processes, as some elements of the received story became redundant for particular memory-communities,41 while other tropes, resonant of emergent practices and concerns, were added.

  Comparisons of these multiple versions of the Padmini legend also reveal the concurrent circulation of several versions among particular audience-communities from the late sixteenth century, raising the possibility of resistant or subversive readings. This is so particularly as each version exhorted its audience to adhere to particular norms of conduct which were seen as appropriate to the given socio-political order. Thus, Jayasi may have written an allegory that his Sufi initiate audiences recognized and celebrated, but in the seventeenth century the merchant Banarasidas read narratives like the Padmavat for the pleasure of reading powerful stories of love. More sustained evidence of resistant readings, or of the relative success or failure of these narratives to persuade their audiences, has been difficult to recuperate. Thus, it remains to be discovered how elite Rajput women in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rajasthan may have actually construed the Padmini legend, and how they may have responded to the powerful normative pressure exerted on them through the retelling of such legends. Recent scholarship has begun to show, however, that Rajput perspectives on their past and present authority have been contested profoundly by the perspectives and narrative traditions of the ruled.42 Even within the Rajputs themselves, individual, oral narrations of such legends are inflected with subtle variations based on sub-regional, local, and clan affiliations: a level of contestation that this book, with its focus on manuscript and print versions, cannot adequately address.

  The Colonial Transition

  Tod’s Annals, based on reinterpreted Rajput historical traditions, was accepted as the region’s definitive history by readers in England and India, and by the Rajput elites themselves, soon after its publication. Tod’s premises have since been subjected to extensive critique; the Annals reinterpreted Rajasthan’s history and society within a nineteenth-century European perspective on feudalism. Further, in order to justify British intervention as immediate improvement, Tod represented eighteenth-century Rajasthan as bordering on chaos. Historians also broadly agree now that nationalist historiography in the late nineteenth century, especially in Bengal, was tacitly “communal” and that its assumptions were derived substantially from Orientalist and colonial scholarship.43 Literary scholars have also explored representations of Rajput history in colonial Bengal (including the Padmini story).44 Much of this scholarship has privileged the moment of colonial intervention as decisive—as triggering a systematic production of knowledge of the colony, knowledge needed by the colonial state in order to govern. This thesis is extended theoretically to comprehend all knowledge about the “East” produced under “western” influence.45 As first stated polemically by Said in Orientalism, “all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, vio
lated by, the gross political fact.”46 Thus, British Orientalists and “native informants” are seen to have collaborated in an unequal relationship to produce knowledge about the subcontinent that served the ends of colonial administration. Such forms of knowledge are then implicitly ascribed the potential for unlimited domination. Further, since the onset of colonialism is seen as decisive, colonial discourse theory postulates a rupture between pre-colonial and colonial forms of knowledge.47

  This book follows in the tradition of recent scholarship that has suggested a more complex relationship between colonial intervention and South Asian cultures.48 The reception and transformation of Rajput traditions in the nineteenth century cannot be understood simply as collusion between colonial power and (tainted) orientalist knowledge, which then provided the master narrative for subsequent nationalist historians and ideologues.49 To attribute the emergence of twentieth-century social and cultural formations exclusively to the impact of colonialism is to neglect two vital issues. First, indigenous elites and other groups negotiated with a colonial government intent on creating bases for stable political authority and administration. Colonialism, in these instances, empowered some groups at the expense of others; while some pre-colonial elites reconsolidated their power, new groups also rose to prominence. Second, in the domain of cultural practice, modern literary genres and practices emerged through selective appropriations of both colonial models and pre-modern modes. Whether in reshaping social institutions and hierarchies, or in transforming cultural practices, the transitions were neither abrupt nor absolute.

  The regional contexts explored here reveal how such changes were contested and uneven. In other words, colonial intervention did not constitute a decisive rupture in the trajectory of the Padmini legend in the nineteenth century. In both Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, literary canons were reconstituted in the nineteenth century. This process was catalyzed by the introduction of print and new classificatory practices borrowed from European precedents. Languages and their literary traditions were mapped in terms of growing “print archives, authorial oeuvres and reading publics.” Authorship was transformed as well, from a pre-modern context in which it was “layered” and “sedimented,” and texts were “distributed between word and performance.” In a society that was still predominantly non-literate, the new dominance of print led to a privileging of the printed form as decisively constitutive of “literary” value. The establishment of print capitalism also coincided with the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism.50 In colonial Bengal, one consequence of this reform of language and literary tradition was the gradual marginalizing of the genres and narratives circulating among Muslim rural gentry and peasantry. In Uttar Pradesh during the same period, Urdu adaptations of the Padmavat conformed to reshaped conventions of love poetry within a courtly literary culture; the same version also entered the print domain in multiple editions, however, pointing to the variety of audiences for the same text.

  In focusing on the trajectory of a single legendary figure across diverse narrations and communities in time, this book traces particular circuits for the transmission of these narratives and memory in South Asia between the sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Via the chronological and geographic sweep of this book, I attempt to suggest a comparative perspective on synchronous social and cultural formations, that are often separated both physically and in the scholarship. I rely on the historiography, therefore, while reading it critically, to flesh out the particular historical contexts outlined here, and in order to build a discussion about the emergence of cultural practices and their circulation in comparative context.

  Chapter 1 discusses the emergence of the first narrative about Padmini in the mid-sixteenth century, Jayasi’s Padmavat. I argue that the Padmavat articulated its distinctive perspective on the conquests of the Delhi sultan and Rajput resistance in the context of Sufi practices that had been shaped by competition with rival religious traditions for influence, and the patronage of a composite military elite—both Afghan and Rajput.

  Chapter 2 traces the Padmini narratives that emerged in the Rajput kingdom of Mewar in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as it sought to negotiate a satisfactory relationship with the Mughal empire. These narratives of Padmini were composed both by bardic authors under royal patronage and Jain monks under the patronage of chiefs. While the two groups of authors diverged on the significance of chiefly heroism and kingly stature, they agreed on the heroism of the virtuous queen that preserved the Rajput kingdom and its moral order. In the same period, Jayasi’s Padmavat continued to circulate across northern India—from Lahore in the north-west to Arakan (in contemporary Myanmar) in the south-east. The relationship of the local chief or king to the imperial order shaped the several distinct versions of the legend that emerged in this period.

  Chapter 3 traces new adaptations of the Padmavat tradition in Urdu and Braj, in the context of indirect colonial rule, consolidated gradually over the course of a century—from 1757 to 1857. As the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan came under indirect rule by 1818, the new Resident of the East India Company in the Mewar court compiled a history of the region and its ruling elite, the Rajputs. Company policy in the princely states of Rajasthan strengthened the Rajput kings at the expense of their chiefs, and Tod’s account of the Padmini story articulated these political premises as much as his own intellectual moorings in the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Orientalism. Local Rajput elites and the Resident Agent of the East India Company thus collaborated to reconstruct and renew Rajput traditions of the past.

  Chapter 4 traces the emergence of a nationalist version in the hands of Bengali middle-class intellectuals who appropriated Tod’s version. This process involved the obscuring of other traditions emerging from a context of Sultanate and Mughal rule in pre-colonial Bengal, and the marginalizing of practices now identified as Muslim. The story of a heroic Rajput queen immolating herself rather than surrendering to a lustful Muslim conqueror gained new significance within the heroic traditions of a largely Hindu nationalist historiography. Other versions of the Padmini legend persisted, however, as Alaol’s Padmabati continued to circulate among Muslim literati in East Bengal, and the Padmavat entered the world of mass printing in Urdu. Both within and beyond Bengal, the nationalist version of the Padmini legend did not immediately gain the dominance that it aspired to.

  This book traces the genealogies of these multiple traditions of the Padmini legend.

  Notes

  1. Harlan 1994: 182–204.

  2. Sharma 1996: Preface.

  3. See Amin 2002; Thapar 2004; and Deshpande forthcoming.

  4. Abidi 1962.

  5. See Kemper 1991; Daniel 1996; and the essays on Sri Lanka in Seneviratne ed. 1997.

  6. For the history of the controversy since the colonial period, see the essays in Gopal ed. 1991, especially N. Bhattacharya (122–40) for the relationship between myth, history, and contemporary politics.

  7. News reports on the attacks from November 2003 to the present on James Laine, author of a book on Shivaji published by Oxford University Press, and on the school history textbook controversy, are archived at http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/archive_southasia.asp? The online petition attacking Romila Thapar following her appointment to the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress in 2003, is available at www.sacw.net/Alerts/IDRT300403.html.

  8. The early classic on the invention of tradition was, of course, Hobsbawm and Ranger eds (1983) 1993; in the Indian context, see Sarkar 1998: 1–49; the essays in Chatterjee and Ghosh eds 2002; Thapar 2004; and Guha 2004b: 1084–90.

  9. Thapar 2004: 1–3.

  10. Ibid. 195–7. For the comparable figure of Li Yan in seventeenth-century China, see Des Forges 1982.

  11. Notable studies include Richards (1978) 1998: 285–326; Hardy (1978) 1998; Digby 1986; Eaton (1993) 1997; Wagoner 1993; Talbot 1995; the essays in Gilmartin and Lawrence, eds 2000; and Aquil 1995–6; idem 1997–8; idem 2004.


  12. P. Chatterjee 2002: 19.

  13. For an early instance of such “ethnohistory” in the South Asian context, see Dirks 1987. For a critique of Dirks, see Rao et al. 2003: 12–14.

  14. For the Dangs, see Skaria 1999; for the Meos, see Mayaram 1997; idem 2003; for the Gujars see Gold and Gujar 2002.

  15. Especially noteworthy in this regard are Mayaram 2003; and Mayaram, Pandian, and Skaria eds 2005.

  16. Nora 1996b: 3. However, the contributors to the collective project Realms of Memory, under Nora’s direction, delineate a much more nuanced dialectic between memory and history.

  17. For a discussion of the issues involved, see Fentress and Wickham 1992; Halbwachs 1992; Burke 1997; for a critique of the historiography, see Confino 1997.

  18. For the construction of such contested pasts in thirteenth-century France, see Spiegel 1993, especially 214–68.

  19. Pioneering studies include Wagoner 1993; idem 2000: 300–26; Talbot 1995; idem 2001: 174–207; Ali ed. 1999; Rao et al. 2003; Guha 2004a; idem 2004b; and Deshpande 2007.

  20. Rao et al. 2003: 5.

  21. For a longer critique, see Guha 2004b: 1089–90.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Skaria 1999: 17.

  24. Ramanujan (1999) 2004a: 8.

  25. Ibid.

  26. For villagers in twentieth-century East Bengal retelling Alaol’s narrative, see Qanungo 1960: 19; for folk narratives in Awadh, see Rohatagi 1971: 20.

  27. See, for instance, Maheshwari 1980; and other histories of regional literatures published by the Sahitya Akademi.