The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  28. For powerful critiques of such nationalist literary histories, see Pollock ed. 2003: 1–36; and Blackburn and Dalmia eds 2004: 1–24; for an early attempt to trace a different literary history, see S.K. Das 1991.

  29. See Sangari 1990; idem 1999; the essays in Pollock ed. 2003; and the essays in Blackburn and Dalmia eds 2004.

  30. Daud Ali’s recent exploration of courtliness over a millennium in early medieval India represents a remarkable exception to this trend. See Ali 2004.

  31. Pathak 1966: 145.

  32. Ibid. 27.

  33. For the circulation of people and culture in early modern and colonial South Asia, see Markovits et al., eds 2003. For the circulation of Bhojpuri peddlers and narratives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Servan-Schrieber’s essay in that volume.

  34. See, for instance, the essays in Callewaert ed. 1980. For a history of patronage—of art, architecture, and literary texts—see the essays in Miller ed. 1992.

  35. For pioneering work on oral traditions in Africa, see Vansina 1965; for Turkic oral epics, see Reichl 1992; idem 2000.

  36. See for instance Blackburn et al. ed. 1989; Smith 1991; Fleuckiger 1996; and Wadley 2004.

  37. Elliot and Dowson (1867–77) 1996: vol. 1, xx–xxi. For critiques of Elliot and Dowson, see M. Habib 1974; S.H. Hodivala (1939) 1979.

  38. A. Ahmad 1963: 470.

  39. For Joan of Arc, see Winock 1996; for the Virgin of Guadalupe, see Lafaye 1976; and Poole 1995.

  40. See the essays in Kandiyoti ed. 1991; for South Asia, the pioneering intervention was Sangari and Vaid eds (1989) 1993.

  41. Burke 1997: 55–6.

  42. For Meo perspectives on Rajput hegemony, see Mayaram 1997; idem 2003; for Bhil perspectives from the Dangs, see Skaria 1999; for Rajput versus Muslim and Dalit versions of the same narrative traditions, see Hiltebeitel 1999; subjects of the last Rajput ruler of Sawar remember his reign in Gold and Gujar 2002.

  43. P. Chatterjee (1993) 1999; idem 1994; Kaviraj 1998.

  44. B. Chakrabarti 1981; M. Mukherjee 1985; R. Bhattacharya 1998.

  45. For the impact of Said’s work on studies of South Asia, see Trautmann 1997: 19–26.

  46. Said 1978: 11.

  47. For one of the most wide-ranging critiques yet, see Sarkar 1998: 1–49.

  48. See for instance Dalmia (1997) 1999; and Sangari 1999. For continuities with pre-colonial literary forms, see M. Mukherjee 1985; idem 2003; S.K. Das 1991; and the essays in Blackburn and Dalmia eds 2004.

  49. For the active collaboration between Colin Mackenzie and his “informant” Narain Rao in reassembling the history of South India, see Wagoner 2003.

  50. For the wider argument about the connection between print culture and nationalism since the nineteenth century, see Anderson 1983. For this description of the Indian context, see A. Ahmad 1993: 251–4; and the essays in Blackburn and Dalmia eds 2004.

  2

  Sufi Tale of Rajputs in Sixteenth-century Avadh

  AS THE SULTAN OF DELHI BETWEEN 1296 AND 1316, ALAUDDIN Khalji expanded his domains rapidly into Western, Central, and Peninsular India. The regions of modern Gujarat, Rajasthan, Malwa, Maharashtra, Andhra, and Karnataka were brought under the control of the Delhi Sultanate for the first time, albeit for a short period. In the region of modern Rajasthan, Alauddin’s campaigns had a profoundly destructive impact upon ruling lineages: the conquest of the fortress of Chitor seems to have marked the end of the Guhila dynasty in the kingdom of Mewar, and no major ruling lineage emerged throughout Rajasthan for another century.

  Amir Khusrau (1253–1325) provides the earliest account of Alauddin Khalji’s victory over Chitor in his Khazainul Futuh (Treasuries of Victories: completed 1311–12). As the sultan’s court poet and panegyrist, Amir Khusrau accompanied his patron on several military campaigns, including the siege of Chitor. His eyewitness account does not mention Padmini, although its modern translator sees a covert allusion to the queen:

  On Monday, 11 Muharram, AH 703, the Solomon of the age [Alauddin], seated on his aerial throne, went into the fort, to which birds were unable to fly. The servant [Amir Khusrau], who is the bird of this Solomon, was also with him. They cried, “Hudhud! Hudhud!” repeatedly. But I would not return; for I feared Sultan’s wrath in case he inquired, “How is it I see not Hudhud, or is he one of the absentees?” and what would be my excuse for my absence if he asked, “Bring to me a clear plea”? If the Emperor says in his anger, “I will chastise him”, how can the poor bird have strength enough to bear it?1 It was the rainy season when the white cloud of the ruler of land and sea appeared on the summit of this high hill. The Rai, struck with the lightning of the Emperor’s wrath and burnt from hand to foot, sprang out of the stone-gate as fire springs out of stone; he threw himself into the water and flew towards the imperial pavilion, thus protecting himself from the lightning of the sword.2

  Map 1: Narratives of Padmini of Chitor, circa 1540–1590

  In his romance Diwal Rani Khizr Khan (completed c. 1315) about the love between Alauddin’s son and the princess of Gujarat, Amir Khusrau again described the conquest of Chitor without mentioning Padmini. Ziauddin Barani, chronicler of several Khalji and Tughlaq reigns, narrated the episode in one sentence in his Tarikh-i Firuzshahi (completed late 1350s): “Sultan Alauddin came out of the city with his army and marched to Chitor, which he invested and captured in a short time and then returned to Delhi.”3

  Alauddin departed from the policy of his Turkish predecessors among the Delhi sultans in key aspects. In the core regions of the Delhi Sultanate in western and central Uttar Pradesh, he attempted to eliminate intermediaries between cultivators and the state; this entailed infringing upon the entitlements and authority of local chiefs, many of whom belonged to the social group identified in later sources (from the sixteenth century onward) as “Rajput.” In exerting such pressure upon local chiefs and landed elites in the core regions of a nascent empire, Alauddin established a precedent emulated by later rulers like Sher Shah (r. 1540–5) and Akbar (r. 1556–1605). His reign was also significant for other innovations in policy. The ruling elite was no longer confined to individuals and clans of Turkish origins, as it had been in the previous century. The sultan also asserted his absolute power over religious scholars and institutions by confiscating the royally granted rent-free lands (waqf, inam) that typically sustained them. The chronicler Barani thus lamented that sharia was no longer the basis of governance under Alauddin, and that birth no longer guaranteed status and authority, since individuals of “lowly” birth could now rise to positions of great power.

  Even by the mid-fourteenth century, then, Alauddin Khalji’s consolidation of authority and the sweep of his territorial conquests provoked contradictory responses, ranging from the panegyrics of Amir Khusrau, to Barani’s condemnation of his overreaching ambition and disregard for the established hierarchies of elite Muslim polity.4 This trend—by which Alauddin’s reign signified different things to different constituencies—continued over the next several centuries. In Rajasthan, from the mid-fifteenth century, new Rajput ruling lineages claimed lineal (and therefore political) descent from declared predecessors whose power had been destroyed by the Khalji campaigns. This was the period when Rajput memory of Alauddin’s conquests began to be actively reshaped. Thus, it was a descendant of the Chauhan chief of Jalor, defeated by Alauddin, who commissioned the production of the Kanhadade Prabandh in the mid-fifteenth century, celebrating the valor of his ancestor who had resisted the mighty sultan.5

  Modern historians of the Delhi Sultanate have focused largely on the strategies by which particular sultans between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries expanded their domains and accommodated or incorporated Muslim and Hindu political elites, as well as Muslim religious figures such as Sufis.6 This Delhi-centered perspective has been less alert to the scholarship on other groups, such as the Jains, that are perceived to have been at the socio-political peripheries of the Sultanate. While Jain communities were concentrated larg
ely in Western India in this period, wealthy Jain merchants were among the beneficiaries as Delhi sultans, starting with Alauddin, incorporated other—non-Turkish and non-Muslim—elites into their expanding regimes. Jain merchants had held important administrative positions in the regional kingdoms of Gujarat and Rajasthan since the eighth century,7 and now entered the administrations of Khalji and Tughlaq sultans in Delhi. For instance, Shah Thakkar Pheru held charge of precious stones in the royal treasury of Alauddin Khalji; he was later given charge of the royal mint during the reign of Qutbuddin Mubarak Shah, and continued in the same capacity during the reign of Ghayasuddin Tughlaq.8

  In turn, Jain mercantile elites often offered substantial financial resources to the Muslim sultans of Northern and Western India. In the mid-fifteenth century, the brothers Dharana Shah and Ratna Shah advanced a loan to the son of the Malwa sultan, Hoshang Shah, which the prince repaid with interest upon becoming Sultan Muhammad Shah Ghori. Subsequently, the family of Ratna Shah settled in Malwa. The other brother, Dharana Shah, settled in Mewar and financed the construction of the major Jain temple at Ranakpur, having obtained a land grant from Rana Kumbha for this purpose. Similarly, in the early sixteenth century Karma Shah advanced a loan to Bahadur Shah when the latter was at Chitor. When Bahadur Shah became Sultan of Gujarat, he permitted the renovation of an important Jain temple.9

  Jain narratives in the period between the tenth and sixteenth centuries reflected these affiliations and values. Jain authors, both monastic and lay, propagated Jain religio-ethical values in a number of ways: by celebrating Jain religious heroes, or by adapting Puranic material whereby the protagonist converted to Jainism at the end of the narrative.10 A romance narrative—of a king’s love, the obstacles to it, and its successful resolution—was recast as a story involving a shreshthi (merchant) instead, the latter having been the most significant patrons of Jainism.11 Along with the recasting of such genres into a Jain teleology, contemporary heroes were incorporated into the Jain fold. Prabandha chronicles composed in Gujarat between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries constructed a “historical” lineage of ideal kings conforming to Jain ethical norms. Birth as a Jain was not a prerequisite for attaining this ideal: Merutunga’s fourteenth-century Prabandhachintamani extended the pantheon of Jain heroes by including legendary heroes like Vikrama and Bhoja while chronicling the kings of Gujarat and Malwa. The genre of royal chronicle typically defined the perfect king and claimed that normative status for its royal patron and his ancestors. Merutunga’s Jain adaptation, with its emphasis on the moral history of the individual, produced the figure of the perfect king (successful in battle) who was also the perfect man, following Jain norms of personal conduct.12 In the context of accommodation between the sultans and Jain merchants, a Jain source, composed in 1336 in Rajasthan, the Nabhinandana-jinoddhara-grantha, described the conquest of Chitor by Alauddin Khalji in neutral terms: it described the Chitor “ruler being made to move from one village to another, after being deprived of his wealth” by the Sultan.13 There is no mention of a queen Padmini. More strikingly, a fifteenth-century inscription at the Jain temple of Ranakpur included Sultan Alauddin in its genealogy of the kings of Mewar.14

  The first available text for the story of Padmini of Chitor, then, is the Sufi Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat (composed c. 1540) in Avadhi (a dialect of Hindi in what is now central Uttar Pradesh). In this work Ratansen, the king of Chitaur,15 hears of the beauty of Padmavati, daughter of Gandharvsen (king of Singhal) from the parrot Hiraman. Intent on obtaining her, Ratansen renounces his kingdom and is led to Singhal across the seven seas by Hiraman. After overcoming several obstacles and nearly losing his life, Ratansen is successful in his quest and returns to Chitor with Padmavati. A Brahmin scholar at the Chitor court is expelled for misconduct, and in revenge carries word of the queen’s beauty to Sultan Alauddin. The latter then marches on Chitor and ultimately conquers it, but Ratansen has already died in single combat with a rival Rajput ruler who also coveted his beautiful queen, and Padmavati has immolated herself on her husband’s pyre. As Jayasi points out, a victorious Alauddin failed in his quest, after all, even as “Chitaur became Islam.”16

  Heroic romances, in which a prince embarked on a dangerous quest to woo and wed a princess of fabled beauty and riches, were common to many literary traditions in North India from the early centuries of the Common Era, as the Jain adaptations of the genre described above indicate. A beautiful heroine named Padmavati was a staple figure in such romance narratives from at least the second century, across Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions.17 The Padmavat, the first narrative about Padmini of Chitor, belongs with a range of Sufi mystical adaptations of this genre, written in Avadhi between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its manuscripts and transmission point to the interpretive horizons within which the narrative was read in its own period. Further, as a Sufi “tale of love” it was deeply embedded in its particular historical moment and articulated a distinct perspective on elite gender relations drawn from that context. The overlays between mystical and political narratives in the Padmavat can be seen as connected to commonalities among its heterogeneous audiences. The emergence and circulation of such narratives must be understood in the context of a wider world—of courtly and urban elites with shared assumptions and practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among whom such Sufi “tales of love” were resonant.

  The Poet in History

  There has been much debate about Jayasi’s dates of birth and death,18 but the dates of composition provided within his works seem reasonably reliable. Thus, he states that he composed the Akhiri Kalam in 936 AH (1529–30), and that Babur was the current ruler. He similarly provides a date of 947 AH (1540–1) for the Padmavat and begins the narrative with a eulogy to Sher Shah, the sultan of Delhi. There is some debate about whether Malik Muhammad was born in Jayas (an important town and Sufi center in the fifteenth-century Sharqi sultanate of Jaunpur), or arrived there to complete his religious education. According to legend, he lost his father when he was very young, and his mother a few years later; he was then brought up by groups of wandering ascetics. He may have lost an eye and had a face disfigured by smallpox. He is believed to have married and lived a simple life of piety, blessed with seven sons. However, he mocked a pir’s addiction to opium in a work called the Posti-nama, and as punishment lost all his sons when the roof of his house collapsed. After this loss he devoted himself completely to the religious life, first at Jayas and then at nearby Amethi. According to some legends, Raja Ramsingh of Amethi invited him to his court after hearing a mendicant recite a lyrical celebration of the passing seasons (barahmasa) from the Padmavat. Another legend claims that Jayasi’s blessings helped the king beget two sons. He is believed to have spent the last years of his life in the forests near Amethi; and to have died at the hands of the king’s hunters, who shot him when he turned himself into a tiger (as he was apparently wont to do). The king ordained that Jayasi’s memory should be kept alive by burning a lamp at his tomb and reciting the Quran.19

  It is apparent that the legends about Jayasi gradually constructed the stock figure of a Sufi pir (charismatic spiritual guide). Ghulam Muinuddin Abdullah Khweshgi’s Maarijul-Wilayat, a collection of biographies (tazkirat) written in 1682–3, was the earliest Sufi hagiography to refer to Jayasi and list works ascribed to him; the poet thus entered the hagiographic tradition more than a century after his death. Referring especially to his knowledge of the traditions of al-Hind, the Maarijul-Wilayat called Jayasi muhaqqiq-i hindi, “knower of the truth of al-Hind.”20 He was endowed gradually with the conventional attributes of sainthood, as is common in such hagiographies: the practice of meditation, the power to change form and to bestow blessings.21

  In contrast to this paucity of biographical information, however, Jayasi tells us more about his spiritual lineage. The Akharavat and Padmavat both identify two distinct lineages of Sufi pirs from whom he received instruction or inspiration. The first was the lineage of
Saiyad Asraph, better known as Saiyid Ashraf Jahangir Simnani (d. 1436–7), one of the most prominent Chishti pirs in the Jaunpur sultanate. Jayasi mentions three other shaikhs in the “house” of Simnani (unha ghar): Shaikh Haji or Shaikh Ahmad, Shaikh Mubarak and Shaikh Kamal. Local tradition in Jayas holds that Jayasi’s instructor was Shaikh Mubarak Shah Bodale. Since the dargah of Simnani had branched out to the local towns of Rasulpur, Jayas, and Basorhi after his death—each center headed by a different descendant—Jayasi’s pir was probably one of Simnani’s descendants at Jayas, in this sense literally from Simnani’s “house.”22 The other lineage Jayasi mentions is that of Saiyid Muhammad of Jaunpur (1443–1505), who proclaimed himself mahdi in 1495–6.23 The line of descent Jayasi traced in this Mahdawi tradition, from Saiyid Muhammad through Alahdad and Shaikh Burhan, is corroborated by several tazkirat. Jayasi’s preceptor Shaikh Burhanu was better known as Shaikh Burhanuddin Ansari of Kalpi, famed for his eloquent discourses on the Quran and mystical verse, mostly in “Hindi.” The prominent Sufi commentator Abdul Haqq Muhaddis Dehlavi attested to the continuing popularity of Shaikh Burhanuddin’s verses at the end of the sixteenth century: “His Hindi dohras are very popular and are not lacking in ecstatic emotion and inspiration.”24 By invoking such lineages, Jayasi located himself in particular spiritual and poetic traditions.

  The Padmavat Manuscripts and Their Transmission

  The available early manuscripts of the Padmavat reveal considerable variety in their script and length, like the manuscript traditions of other Avadhi Sufi narratives such as the Chandayan and the Mirigavati.25 Mataprasad Gupta’s critical edition of the Padmavat is based on five early manuscripts, the earliest dating to the late seventeenth century.26 An earlier manuscript in Persian script was discovered in Rampur subsequently, with interlinear Persian translations and diacritical marks specifying the pronunciation of the Avadhi. This manuscript was copied in 1675 in Amroha by Muhammad Shakir, pupil in the khanqah of Abdul Qadir Jilani. The early manuscripts are in Persian (nastaliq), nagari, or kaithi scripts, with nastaliq manuscripts forming the oldest layer of the textual tradition. Numerous manuscripts have been found in the shorthand kaithi script (known for its use among Kayasths in the Mughal administration and beyond). However, these are often incomplete, carelessly transcribed, and reveal large numbers of additional verses. This variety in the manuscripts is not necessarily related to their age or distance from an original text, but rather suggests the loose nature of textual transmission for the Padmavat. Sufi traditions were transmitted both textually and through oral performance, the latter inevitably adding layers of interpretation to the narrative. The Padmavat manuscripts suggest that both these processes were at work simultaneously. The scrupulous attention to detail in some manuscripts suggests literate scribes and authors who emphasized accurate textual transmission. Equally, the abundance of variant material in other manuscripts reveals the gradual accretion of interpretations that reshaped the text over the centuries.