The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  57. Rizvi 1978–83: vol. 1, 366.

  58. Ernst and Lawrence 2002: 19.

  59. Ibid. 5.

  60. The name by which the poet refers to himself in the poem, Malik Muhammad of Jayas.

  61. For a summary of Ibn Arabi’s ideas, see Rizvi 1978–83: vol. 1, 103–8.

  62. Cited in Rizvi 1978–83: vol. 1, 363.

  63. Ibid. 336–49.

  64. Ibid. 368–9. For further instances of Nath imagery in the Padmavat, see White 1996: 198–9, 238.

  65. De Bruijn 1996: 80–1.

  66. Ernst and Lawrence 2002: 32–4.

  67. For a discussion of hierarchies of response, see Behl, forthcoming.

  68. Cited in Schimmel 1982: 135.

  69. Jackson 1980: 387.

  70. Lawrence 1992: 355–6.

  71. Eaton 1996: 165–6.

  72. For instances of Sufi engagement with the political world of sultans, rajas and courts, see Rizvi 1965; Husain 1972; Digby 1975; idem 1986; Eaton (1978) 1996; idem (1993) 1997; Alam 1989; idem 1996; Ernst 1992; and Aquil 1995–6.

  73. Rizvi 1997: vol. 1, 268–70.

  74. See Busch 2005 for a comparable interplay between historical events and poetic reconstructions in seventeenth-century Orchha.

  75. Ahmad 1963: 475–6.

  76. Thackston 2002: 416.

  77. Ambashthya 1974: 264.

  78. Ibid. 323–4, fn. 58.

  79. For Afghan–Rajput relations in this period, see Aquil 2003; idem 2004.

  80. Benett 1895: 15, 26–7.

  81. Digby 2003: 164–74.

  82. Alam 1996: 165.

  83. Ibid. 167.

  84. For a similar, lower-status Rajput–Afghan audience for oral epics in the vernacular languages of North India, especially the Alha cycle, see Hiltebeitel 1999: 297–363. The first Avadhi Sufi romance was Maulana Dawud’s Chandayan, drawing on episodes from the same narrative cycle.

  85. For the character of such armies and the military labor market in North India between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, see Kolff 1990.

  86. Ziegler 1973; Sangari 1990; Joshi 1995; for the importance of such marriages to the early Mughal imperial household, see Lal 2005.

  87. Kolff 1990: 47–8.

  88. For Rajput narratives of Alauddin’s conquests, see Entwistle 1999.

  89. Elliot and Dowson 1996: vol. 4, 428–32.

  90. Kolff 1990: 96–102.

  91. Lawrence 1992: 103.

  92. Ernst and Lawrence 2002: 50, 86.

  93. Elliot and Dowson 1996: vol. 3, 380.

  94. Lawrence 1992: 103.

  95. Eaton 1996: 168.

  96. Ernst and Lawrence 2002: 88.

  97. Pandey 1982: 190–2.

  98. Schimmel 1982: 150–5.

  99. Rizvi 1957: 60.

  100. Ahmad 1963: 475.

  101. Behl forthcoming.

  102. Digby 1986: 63, 68–9. For instances in Sufi tradition celebrating the power of love rather than imperial conquest as the preferred mode to attract believers, see the discussion of Nizamuddin Awliya in Aquil 1995–6: 192–3.

  3

  Rajput Kings and their Pasts in the Mughal Period

  SEVERAL POETIC ACCOUNTS ABOUT PADMINI CIRCULATED IN Rajasthan from the late sixteenth century onward: Hemratan’s Gora Badal Padmini Chaupai (c. 1589) was followed by Jatmal Nahar’s Gora Badal ki Katha (c. 1623), Labdodhay’s Padmini Charit (c. 1645), and Bhagyavijay’s Gora Badal Chaupai (c. 1702). The Padmini story also figured in verse narratives eulogizing past and present rulers of Mewar, such as Man Kavi’s Raj Vilas (1677–80), Dayaldas’s Rana Raso (c. 1718), Dalpati Vijay’s Khumman Raso (c. 1710–34), and Ranchhod Bhatt’s Sanskrit Amarakavyam (c. 1683–93). From the same period, the legend began to appear in chronicles and genealogies: in the Sisod Vansavali (c. 1657), and in Nainsi’s chronicle of the kingdoms of Rajasthan, Muhta Nainsi ri Khyat (c. 1660). The story figures in great detail in the chronicle Chitor Udaipur Patnama (late seventeenth century), composed and transmitted by hereditary genealogists of the Sisodia Rajput lineage. Accounts of Padmini were also composed as vat (bat) (pl. vatan/batan), anecdotal prose narratives of varying length transmitted both orally and in manuscript collections such as the Rawal Ranaji ri Bat (not earlier than 1691), about the rulers of Mewar.1 These versions of the Padmini legend in Rajasthan between the sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries celebrated the queen’s virtue and heroism, and the valor of the chiefs Gora and Badal who rescued her captive husband Ratansen.

  This chapter focuses on the ethics that these narratives articulated—an ethics focused on gendered heroic norms, in political situations culminating in battle. Through such an ethics a normative Rajput identity was defined. While B.D. Chattopadhyaya demonstrates the mixed origins of the Rajputs of Rajasthan between the seventh and twelfth centuries, he argues that a distinctive Rajput clan structure was in place by the end of this period.2 Most other historians of Rajasthan have treated “Rajput” identity as changeless between the twelfth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead, they have focused on the strategies of particular lineages for consolidating power—marriage, monopolies over resource extraction, and the trappings of kingship.3 Such an emphasis on “state” formation has led historians to pay less attention to continuing histories of jati formation, in which Rajput elites and their chroniclers defined evolving boundaries for the jati through an ideology of “purity.”4 By the late seventeenth century, Rajput states like Jodhpur and Jaipur were also intervening in village-level disputes to enforce jati boundaries among their subjects.5 The Padmini narratives of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Rajasthan emerged in a historical context when this regional Rajput elite patronized the composition of narratives commemorating a heroic past, in order to elaborate norms of heroic conduct for the present. The articulation of such norms was one vehicle for defining Rajput status in the turbulent seventeenth century.

  Map 2: Narratives and manuscripts about Padmini of Chitor, circa 1590–1750

  In adopting this perspective, I also depart from most literary scholars of Rajasthan, who evaluate “literary” narratives against the aesthetic standards of a poetics of rasa ultimately derived from Sanskrit. Since most Rajput narratives celebrate the vir rasa (the heroic “flavor”), literary scholars confine themselves to its appreciation and to celebrating the real-life heroism which is assumed to precede this pervasive endeavor.6 Further, other scholars exploring cults of hero-worship or constructions of kingship in modern Rajasthan have only recently begun to acknowledge how such practices are shaped by contemporary histories of caste and community mobilization in the post-colonial nation-state.7 For their part, historians reading such genealogies and heroic chronicles have largely been concerned with fidelity to historical fact rather than with the functions of such narratives at particular historical moments. Instead of adopting this instrumentalist approach to sources, I follow the precedent suggested by Norman Ziegler and Norbert Peabody’s treatment of Rajput materials,8 which entails exploring how the Padmini narratives in seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century Rajasthan were shaped by the politics and values of their Rajput and Jain courtly patrons. I suggest that these narratives evoked distinctive versions of a remembered past in a particular historical context.

  Rajput polity in this period was characterized by competitive warfare, contests over entitlements between rulers and their chiefs, and elite polygyny that provided alternative resources to rulers and chiefs. At this historical moment, the Rajput kingdoms contended as much with internal pressures as with Mughal expansion. The interests of chieftains and royal patrons generated distinct perspectives in their accounts of Padmini, on the king Ratansen, the chiefs Gora and Badal, the queen Padmini and the enemy Alauddin Khalji. However, all of these accounts reveal a Rajput ideology specific to Mewar in this period. Two other accounts produced in the seventeenth century—the Jain Jatmal Nahar’s account, produced under Pathan patronage near modern Lahore, and the Sufi Saiyid Alaol’s adaptation of Jayasi’s Padmavat produced in
the Arakan court in modern Myanmar—diverged significantly from the versions that emerged in Rajasthan. Alaol’s Padmabati (c. 1660) is particularly revealing of the diverse contexts from which anti-imperial polemics could emerge in the seventeenth century, and of their differing hues.

  Kings, Chiefs, and Queens: Rajasthan c. 1500–1750

  The Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan witnessed increasing attempts to consolidate monarchical power from the sixteenth century. The inherited rights and entitlements of the major lineage chiefs were frequently incompatible with new assertions of royal authority. Elite polygyny provided an alternative to rulers in this period: military resources and a network of alliances, to be used both against refractory chiefs and in the service of Mughal imperial expansion. Throughout the period, however, these structural features of Rajput polity threatened its ruling lineages as much as Mughal expansion did.

  When the Rathors of Marwar initially established their control over Jodhpur in the mid-fifteenth century, the ruler’s “sons and brothers . . . were allowed to occupy the various territories [they] conquered” as their “estates” (thikana), under the practice of bhai-bant (division among brothers).9 In the mid-sixteenth century, the Jodhpur ruler renegotiated his relationships with his clansmen and chiefs. Seeking to assert that a chief “was dependent for his position on the good-will of the Raja rather than on his inherent rights,” he began the practice of assigning land-revenue grants (patta) to the chiefs in exchange for service. The assignment of new lands to chiefs, in a period of territorial expansion through conquest, had contradictory consequences. On the one hand the chiefs were more willing to accept their new, contractual relations with the king because of the immediate gains. On the other hand the extended kinship network was implicated in the kingdom’s territorial expansion, and kinship ties continued to guarantee status and access to entitlements.10 The new revenue grantees still belonged to the monarch’s extended clan and still claimed rights over patrimonial domains.11

  The trajectory of Mewar was comparable. The Sisodia ruler of Mewar was dependent upon support from his clan network, especially on the issue of royal succession. Since primogeniture was not firmly established, succession struggles were intense in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Mewar. When Rana Kumbha was murdered by his son Udaisingh in 1473, the clan chiefs intervened and recognized Kumbha’s younger son Raimal as ruler over Udai. The chiefs could even overlook a king’s preferred heir after the former’s death: Rana Pratap became the ruler in 1572 even though his father had nominated the younger son Jagmal.12 Loss of chiefly support could seriously undermine a king’s authority. During the reign of Vikramaditya (r. 1531–5), the chiefs withdrew to their thikanas; some chiefs (including the king’s cousin and Medini Rai Purbiya of Chanderi13) even helped Bahadur Shah of Gujarat during his first siege of Chitor.14 The support of the chiefs continued to be vital through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the prolonged conflicts between Mewar and the Mughal empire. It was under pressure from his chiefs that Rana Amarsingh negotiated for peace with Jahangir.15

  The Sisodias had achieved their first round of territorial expansion during the reign of Rana Kumbha (r. 1433–68), who defeated the Hadas of Bundi and the Devras of Abu, and fought the Khalji sultans of Malwa repeatedly.16 However, such military campaigns were often indecisive; even within Mewar, the Palvi Rajputs of Godwar did not accept Sisodia overlordship in the reign of Kumbha’s successor Raimal (r. 1473–1508), and had to be subjugated militarily.17 Sisodia control over Mewar expanded gradually, however, as other Rajput lineages sought their aid. The Solankis of Toda came to Chitor when Lalla Khan Pathan seized their ancestral lands, and were granted the revenue assignment (patta) of Badnor. Subsequently, Raimal’s son Prithviraj defeated Lalla Khan and restored Toda to the Solankis.18 Each such intervention increased Sisodia power, since it brought lesser lineages into relations of service and clientship with newly acknowledged overlords. Clan chiefs who aided a ruling lineage’s territorial expansion continued to assert, however, their customary entitlements based on kinship with the ruler.19 Thus, kingship and kinship generated conflicting expectations, since the customary rights attaching to kinship coexisted at this juncture with the emerging obligations and rewards of clientship.20 The evidence for Mewar reveals that rulers whose authority was tenuous among the clan-based chiefs attempted to generate support by creating new clients through a spate of grants in exchange for service.21

  These dual structures of relations between chiefs and kings provide one context in which the Padmini narratives were produced in early modern Rajasthan. In the new political order, revenue assignments were made in exchange for service. This practice was inserted into an older political order in which the mutual obligations of monarch and clansmen/chiefs were defined differently, and when it had not always been possible for the monarch to enforce his writ. By the sixteenth century, however, clan membership did not necessarily guarantee the same access to resources and power. A new client’s exceptional service was often rewarded with land grants deliberately rivaling those of older clan-based chiefs. This was the juncture at which the Osval Jains rose to prominence in Mewar. Hence the Jain Padmini narratives exalt loyalty to the overlord (sami dharam) as an absolute norm. The kings of the period were keenly aware of the value of such an ethic, endorsed by an Osval elite distinct from clan-based Rajput chiefs.

  In the context of this fraught dynamic between kings and chiefs, evolving marriage practices provided alternative resources to rulers, as political alliances thus cemented were crucial to underpinning the power of ruling lineages. Rajputs were divided into kul (patrilineal clans) such as Rathor, Chauhan and Sisodia. Within the kul was a subdivision called the khamp, often identified in the Rajput instance with the gotra membership that defined the boundaries of exogamy. Gotra exogamy and endogamy within a larger, evolving jati, together created a powerful network of alliances, transcending the territorial boundaries of kingdoms. Evolving patterns of marriage alliances reflected shifts in the relative status of Rajput clans. Thus when the Rathors of Marwar rose to prominence in the mid-fifteenth century, marriage alliances with them were keenly sought after. Similarly, the entry of clans like the Shekhawat and Baghela into the Mughal mansabdari system increased their prestige in the matrimonial arena as well.22

  Rulers negotiated the balance of power within their clans, through exogamous marriages that brought military resources from other clans. Such clans related through marriage were called saga or genayat; when based in a different kingdom, they were outsiders to the political intrigues within the ruler’s clan and kingdom. However, subsequent relations between the two parties could be fraught. While the king could use his wife’s natal lineage as a buffer against his own fractious kinsmen, the power of the queen’s party could also generate considerable anxiety in her husband’s household.23

  The political compulsions driving these elite Rajput marriages affected the status of the women involved. In part the rank of such women in the marital household derived from the status and power of their natal clans. Since the queens represented a political alliance, they were often allocated independent entitlements. These were negotiated with more or less success before the marriage, depending on the relative clout of the clans involved. After marriage, the woman would continue to be referred to as sister (bai) or daughter (beti) of her natal clan.24 The identification of saga was so important that it figured in genealogies, that listed individuals as daughter’s son (dohit) or sister’s son (bhanej). Such ties came into play both against external enemies and during succession disputes: Man Singh Sonigara helped his nephew (Rana) Pratap claim the throne over his elder brother and nominated heir, Jagmal.25

  Succession disputes were thus often aggravated by polygynous households. The rivalry between co-wives was manifested in contests on behalf of minor sons, in which queens readily used their natal clans’ resources. Such competition was intensified by the fact that the heir’s mother had the highest position as pat-rani (chief queen) in the zenana hie
rarchy, and as such, enjoyed special privileges even after the death of her husband. Compounding the potential for strife was the fact that the pre-eminent wife was not always the first queen to produce a son. Therefore, the oldest son did not necessarily have the backing of the most powerful clans, which could demand the succession to kingship of the son from a proposed marriage.26 Disputes over succession were thus chronic at this conjuncture.

  Rajput polity between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries thus accentuated the importance of the kinship network, both agnatic and affinal, in mobilizing support for the ruler. Membership and rank within specific kinship networks determined relative access to resources within the clan. This was equally true for men and women. For elite Rajput women, membership in the natal clan continued to impinge upon their status in the marital household; their roles as sisters were as material as their roles as wives, particularly in a polygynous environment with competing wives. Natal lineage was also a key factor shaping the fortunes of their progeny. Thus, marriage practices were woven into “a system of gaining land, influence, power, honor, status and alliances.”27 Since the place of elite Rajput women was tied to the needs of clan status, regulating them was a matter of urgent concern for the ruling elite. Such anxieties were articulated in an evolving code of Rajput “honor.”

  Given that it was one of the fundamental units of Rajput polity, membership in the clan (kul) demanded the upholding of its honor. This honor—defined as the fulfillment of obligations to spouses, clan, and state—was the key norm underpinning Rajput kingdoms and their networks of alliances. For Rajput women honor was vested in their “chastity” (sat), that demanded sexual abstinence from the unmarried and widows, and monogamous fidelity to their husbands from married women. The protection of this honor upheld the status of the conjugal unit, household, lineage, and state. This continuity in obligations was represented in the Rajput trope of the honorable queen, located within both the elite household and the realm. For Rajput men, again, honor was vested in obligations to each of these distinct entities. Ideally, these obligations were expected to overlap, so that loyalties to conjugal unit, household, lineage, and state reinforced each other in a seamless continuum. Rajput history during the period, however, reveals repeated disjunctions between these distinct obligations; in reality, the affiliations between elite household and state were constantly being tested and renegotiated.