The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  Muhammad60 who is the poet of love, has neither body nor blood nor flesh.

  He who sees such a face laughs, but he who hears has tears in his eyes (23).

  In all four Avadhi tales of love, the hero hears of an exceptionally beautiful princess in a distant land, is literally seized by desire and longing, and sets off on a quest to obtain her. His journey involves becoming an ascetic, finding a guide to help him on to the right path, facing several adventures along the way, and undertaking penance before he can win the heroine. As Jayasi defines the significance of Ratansen’s quest for Padmavati:

  He who is stricken by words of longing (biraha): what is hunger or shade from the sun to him?

  He changes his garb, undertakes penance; he is a ruby hidden in the dust (23).

  Heroines of exceptional beauty figure in a vast range of ancient and medieval texts across cultures. Such beauty is invested with a particular Sufi significance in these Avadhi “tales of love.” As the Madhumalati explains:

  This beauty is manifested in many forms . . . expressed in many emotions.

  This beauty is the light in all eyes . . . this beauty completes the incomplete world.

  This beauty is the beginning and the end . . . (120).

  That is, the light of God, the “light in all eyes,” is revealed in this ideal beauty. Since the heroine manifests this divine principle, the hero’s love for her is invested with spiritual significance. Through the experience of such love, man becomes worthy of heaven; without such love, he is merely a handful of dust (Padmavat 166).

  It has been pointed out that the Avadhi “tales of love” derived their mystical aesthetics from Ibn Arabi, the fourteenth-century Andalusian Sufi philosopher. This tradition defined the final Truth (haqiqat) as Divine Beauty; it also asserted that a transcendent and invisible God could not be apprehended except through His manifestation in the created beings of the world. The first and biggest obstacle to the pursuit of this Truth was the lower or appetitive soul (nafs); the Truth could thus be sought only through renouncing the ego.61 The Avadhi “tales of love” emplot the realization of this divine love (ishq, Avadhi kama) by the lover and his beloved, as their desire for each other is tested and ultimately transformed.

  Since in this theology the pursuit of Knowledge and Beauty demands the renunciation of the appetitive self, the lover faints upon first encountering the ideal beauty, literally taking leave of his senses: “No light on his face, no life in his frame . . . They carried him away, he was beside himself, insensate (Chandayan 154).” Once this happens, the protagonist is impelled to renounce the world, become an ascetic, and set off in search of the beloved: “He gave up his kingdom, the king became a jogi, fiddle in hand and bereaved from love (Padmavat 126).” Love—defined as the quest for Truth-as-Beauty—is experienced most intensely through separation from the beloved (viraha): “Love itself has both the experience of it and separation from it; the hive has both the honey and the [stinging] bee (Padmavat 166).” The seeker is thus cast into a perpetual state of longing in separation from the object of his desire, a condition defining human existence itself: “Viraha came into the world at the beginning of creation; but who can realize this without having acquired the merit of good deeds? (Madhumalati 29).” Further, because the journey towards Truth involves purification through penance, the lover’s suffering in viraha purifies him: “He burns in the fire of viraha . . . awakened by the suffering that is in love; tested on such a touchstone, he emerges true as gold (Padmavat 211).”

  In his quest for his beloved, the seeker necessarily requires a spiritual guide. In the Padmavat, the seeker acknowledges as guru the figure that can lead him to the beloved. This is the parrot Hiraman, who, like any good guru, knows the holy book (ved) and is as learned as any Brahmin: “mark on forehead, thread on shoulder, a poet like Vyas and learned like Sahadev (79).” The hero/seeker renounces the world and, along with it, his ego, anger, and fear. Just as Gandharvsen of Singhal is about to have him impaled, the ascetic Ratansen declares: “What do you ask now of my caste? I am a jogi, a beggar and an ascetic . . . without anger at an insult, without shame at a beating.” At the sight of the stake on which he is to be impaled, he laughs: “Now I will be free of the bonds of affection; now the lover will be united with his love” (Padmavat 261).” The lover must contemplate this Truth singlemindedly: “I contemplate that beautiful woman Padumavati; this life of mine is given up to her name. Every drop of blood that there is in this body, chants Padumavati, Padumavati (262).” Once the seeker has achieved this singleminded contemplation of the Truth and renounced the instincts of his appetitive existence, he arrives at a kind of selflessness or “death” and thus freedom from mortality: “He who has died and then found life, what is death to him? He has become immortal and drinks of honey with his beloved (Padmavat 305).” The seeker can now achieve union with his beloved and thus experience the principle of Truth that her beauty manifests.

  Instead of concluding at this point, the Padmavat continues by throwing the seeker into a fresh series of crises, of separations from his beloved. Jayasi is not alone in following this narrative path; Qutban’s Mirigavati emplots a similar trajectory where the seeker, after being united with his beloved, dies in a random hunting accident; this is followed by the immolation (sati) of his wives. Jayasi ascribes the return of crisis after the achievement of bliss to Ratansen’s “pride” upon acquiring his new wife. The poet warns against such sin (papa) as the sea promptly punishes Ratansen’s arrogance by sinking his ships (386). The return of Ratansen to the mortal world is signaled by his return to its attributes such as pride. This series of crises is finally resolved through the actual death of the hero. Both the Padmavat and the Mirigavati follow up the death of the hero with the sati of the wives. Starting with Amir Khusrau in the thirteenth century, Sufi tradition had admired sati as the supreme example of love: “Khusrau, in love rival the Hindu wife,/For the dead’s sake she burns herself in life.”62 As a Sufi narrative, the Padmavat ends with this climactic resolution to a tale of “deep love” (gadhi priti), that produces the “suffering of love” in anyone who listens (652).

  As Jayasi’s polyvalent vocabulary suggests, the Sufi metaphysic of love elucidated in the Padmavat also appropriated elements from other systems of spiritual discipline found in North India, such as the Hatha-yoga of the Nathpanth. As early as the thirteenth century, Sufis like Hamiduddin Nagauri and Baba Farid had been aware of Nathpanth practices. By the sixteenth century, Sufi interest in Nath doctrines had reached a point where Shaikh Abdul Quddus Gangohi (d. 1537) identified Sufi beliefs—based on Ibn Arabi’s pantheistic mysticism—with the ideas of Gorakhnath, and found Nath ascetic exercises to be compatible with Chishti practices.63 The heroes in the Avadhi tales of love routinely invoke Gorakhnath before embarking on their quest. Jayasi appropriates Nath doctrine more extensively, however. As the Padmavat explains the indispensability of a guru for a seeker to succeed in his quest, Bikram and Raja Bhoja found Mahesh the lord of the hills through their magic charms (tantu-mantu), but He appeared all too briefly: “Without a guru the path cannot be found . . . The jogi becomes wise (siddha) only when he has met guru Gorakh (212).” Avadhi vocabulary allows for a complete equivalence between the Sufi seeker, his mentor (pir) who initiates him into his quest, and the attainment of spiritual knowledge (ilm) on the one hand, and the Nath renunciant (jogi), his guru Gorakhnath and the attainment of wisdom (siddha) on the other. Jayasi also describes the Singhal fort in terms of Nath esoteric physiology, conceptualizing the body as fortress:

  Its nine gates are made of adamant; a thousand soldiers stand at each.

  Five captains make their rounds; the heart quakes when setting a foot at that gate.

  . . . All nine stories have gates, each with its own doors of adamant.

  Four days it takes to reach the top, if one climbs in truth (41).

  Ratansen’s assault on the fort thus represents the ascetic hero’s spiritual ascent toward his beloved. The fort’s gateways c
orrespond to the seven chakras (subtle psychic centers) of the body. The five captains at each gateway are equivalent to the five calamities that prevent jogis from gaining control over the chakras, and so on.64

  While Nath physiology and cosmology proved useful to Jayasi, his Sufi worldview required Nath tropes to be significantly modified. The Avadhi Sufi “tales of love” differ from Nathpanth narratives in one crucial respect: while Nath protagonists like Gopichand and Bhartrhari renounce their kingdoms and become ascetics in pursuit of a spiritual goal, their renunciation is a step toward overcoming attachments and conquering passion; love for the queens is here an impediment to spiritual self-realization. In sharp contrast, in the Sufi Padmavat love (ishq) is the final goal of the yogi-king, as Ratansen achieves mystical union through the consummation of his love for Padmavati.65 Ratansen is not transformed into a Nath jogi; instead, Jayasi uses Nath physiology to represent his Sufi meditative exercises, in a maneuver typical of the Chishti tradition. In another instance, the eighteenth-century Nizamuddin Aurangabadi used yogic breathing exercises as “simply one more set of parallel techniques” in his repertoire of spiritual practices. Aurangabadi also defended the use of “expressions in Hindi or Persian or whatever he understands,” for non-Arab disciples.66 The primacy of the Sufi worldview is never in doubt in the Padmavat, as it firmly controls Ratansen’s trajectory throughout the narrative. The issue here is the degree to which Sufi practice was Indianized, so to speak, through such engagement. Scholars of Sufism agree that even as its major, institutionalized orders appropriated particular ascetic and meditative practices from other religious traditions, they were categorical about the recasting of such practice within an overtly Islamic idiom.

  Tropes from lay genres like the dastan and heterodox theologies like the Nathpanth raised the possibility of alternative modes of interpretation, however.67 Sufi masters readily recognized the danger that audiences of initiates could “misinterpret” Hindavi narratives. Sharafuddin Maneri, the pre-eminent Sufi shaikh in fourteenth-century Bihar, commented on the dangers of using Hindavi verse in discourses and in musical sama sessions: “Hindavi verses are very forthright and frank in expression . . . It is very disturbing. It is extremely difficult for young men to bear such things. Without any delay they would be upset . . .”68

  Therefore, careful control had to be exercised over the experience, as apparent in his strict guidelines for the use of verse and music:

  If a person’s heart is captivated by the ardent love of somebody upon whom it is unlawful for him to look, then everything that he hears at a musical gathering would turn out to be understood with respect to this forbidden person. Listening to music is strictly prohibited for such a person . . . Hence it is that a venerable Sufi, when questioned on the matter, said: “Listening to music is desirable for those devoted to God, permissible for those who vacillate, and improper for people given over to sensuality and pleasure!”69

  The perils of misinterpretation also required regulation of the environment in which such verse was recited. Shaikh Nizamuddin Awliya (d. 1325) stipulated several conditions necessary for sama:

  “Whenever certain conditions are met one can listen to sama. Each of these must be right: the singer, what is sung, the listener, and also the musical instrument.” He proceeded to elaborate on the content of each category: “The one summoned to sing must be a man, a mature man. The singer cannot be a boy or a woman. Similarly, what is sung cannot be something lewd or ludicrous. As for the listener, it must be someone who listens to God and is filled with remembrance of Him. As for the instrument of music, one must use the harp or lute or viol or similarly instruments. When these conditions have been observed, sama becomes permissible.70

  Further, audiences at a Sufi khanqah were often differentiated into an inner circle of murids, “formally initiated by the pir into the silsila as heirs to a spiritual path,” and an outer circle of lay persons, “who had not taken any formal pledge of spiritual discipleship but who were attracted to the spiritual power of the pir and accordingly venerated him.”71 Only disciples in the inner circle were initiated into the small sama sessions.

  Such regulation of audiences and interpretation, along with Jayasi’s own glosses (discussed above), generated distinctively Sufi interpretations of the Padmavat. Thus, in 1696 one scribe annotated his manuscript by providing an allegorical gloss that was transmitted thereafter as an intrinsic part of the narrative:

  I asked the scholars (panditanha) its meanings; they said, “We do not know more than this:

  The fourteen worlds (bhuvana), above and below, they are all within man’s body.

  The body is Chitaur, the spirit its king; the heart is Singhal, the mind Padumini.

  The parrot, the guru who showed the way; without him who can find the formless absolute?

  Nagmati is this world and its affairs; none who tied his heart to her was saved.

  Raghava, the messenger, he is Satan; Sultan Alauddin is Illusion (maya).

  Reflect thus on this love-story, learn from it whatever you can.

  Turkish, Arabic and Hindui, all the languages there are,

  Which show the path of love, they all praise this story.

  Although the stanza is probably spurious because of its late provenance, it reveals a seventeenth-century scribe’s interpretation of the Padmavat within a particular system of Sufi symbolic equivalences.

  Those modern scholars who treat this gloss as authentic, focus on the first half of the narrative—up to the marriage of Ratansen and Padmavati and the return to Chitaur. Such readings assume that the Padmavat actually stitches together two disparate halves: the first half narrating a spiritual quest, and the second half reconstructing the past, in which the symbolic mode recedes. The underlying premise here is the firm separation of two distinct modes of narration and meaning, one Sufi-symbolic and the other historical. However, in his Sufi-symbolic narrative Jayasi engaged deeply with his contemporary context: with the values and politics of military and courtly elites in sixteenth-century North India.

  Past and Present for a Sixteenth-century Sufi Poet and His Patrons

  As described above, the Avadhi tales of love circulated widely beyond Sufi networks, in the courts of regional rulers and noblemen in the courts of Jaunpur, the Sur and Mughal empires, and beyond. While the ethos of many regional courts in North India during the Sultanate and Mughal periods may have been broadly Islamicate, local networks for the circulation of such narratives were by no means exclusively Muslim. In fact, such taxonomies of religious affiliation may not even be useful in considering the lay patrons and audiences for such narratives. Further, Sufi practices did not constitute an autonomous terrain but emerged through sustained negotiation with the political context in which Sufis were carving out a space for themselves.72 In its normative political order, the Padmavat articulated the practices and aspirations of this wider target audience in the sixteenth century.

  Jayasi’s acknowledged spiritual guides would have offered precedents in their engagement with politics. Saiyad Ashraf Jahangir Simnani, the early-fifteenth-century Sufi acknowledged in the prologue to the Padmavat, was one of the most important Sufi pirs in the Jaunpur Sultanate, and was in touch with several regional rulers. He exhorted Ibrahim Shah Sharqi to liberate Bengal from the domination of Raja Ganesh, and advised Hushang Shah of Malwa on the duties of a Muslim ruler. Simnani combined this involvement in regional politics with authoring several commentaries on Ibn Arabi’s teachings for the benefit of novice mystics.73 Jayasi’s Mahdawi preceptors were similarly involved in both contemporary politics and mystical pursuits. Jayasi’s pir, Shaikh Burhanuddin Ansari of Kalpi, retired early in his life to a small cell where he meditated, practised breathing exercises, and recited praises of God. On the other hand, armed Mahdawis under the leadership of Shaikh Alai of Bayana sought to compel adherence to their norms and ways of life, abetted by followers in the local administration. Jayasi’s invocation of these dual lineages, Chishti and Mahdawi, thus locates h
im within a Sufi tradition of both mystical practice and sustained involvement with rulers and politics.

  The Padmavat’s engagement with its contemporary moment is suggested by its treatment of historical figures, and events of the early sixteenth century that may have been transposed on to events from two centuries earlier. Such engagement with contemporary politics was by no means unusual for court poets in the period; half a century after Jayasi, the Braj poet Keshavdas composed three historical narratives about the evolving relationship between the Rajput ruling lineage of Orchha in central India and the Mughal empire.74 Ratansen was a contemporary rana of Chitor (reigned 1527–32); he shared his name with the earlier ruler of Chitor defeated by Alauddin in 1303. In 1531, nine years before the Padmavat was composed, mass immolation (jauhar) had occurred at Chitor before its conquest by Bahadur Shah of Gujarat. Aziz Ahmad speculates on further confusion between two distinct historical moments:

  There might have been a conscious or unconscious confounding in Jaisi’s mind of Ala al-din Khalji with Ghiyath al-din Khalji of Malwa (1469–1500) who had a roving eye, and is reported to have undertaken the quest of Padmini, not a particular Rajput princess, but the ideal type of woman according to Hindu erotology. Ghiyath al-din Khalji, according to a Hindu inscription in the Udaipur area, was defeated in battle in 1488 by a Rajput chieftain Badal-Gora, multiplied by Jaisi into twins.75