The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  Among the other political functions that marriage served, a defeated chieftain customarily offered his daughter to the victor as a token of political submission. To cite just a couple of instances, Rana Kumbha (reigned 1433–68) conquered Hamirnagar and married its chief’s daughter.28 Similarly, in 1730 the defeated Rao of Sirohi offered his daughter in marriage to his conqueror Abhai Singh of Jodhpur.29 Genealogies of the period reveal how the custom functioned as an index of a ruler’s status. The seventeenth-century Sisod Vansavali exalts Bappa Raval (commemorated as the founder of the Sisodia lineage), by narrating how the rulers of Kanauj, Ujjain, Gujarat, Marwar, Sambhar, and Delhi fell at Bappa’s feet (page laga) and wedded their daughters to him after their defeat in battle.30 Rajput chiefs had married their daughters to Ghuri and Tughlaq rulers of Delhi from at least the thirteenth century onward, a practice that continued into the Mughal period.31 Rajput lineages thus established marriage alliances with the Mughals for specific political purposes: the first Rajputs to marry their daughters into the Mughal imperial family, Bharmal Kachhvaha and Mertiya Rathor Jagmal Viramdevot, were seeking Mughal help to regain or preserve patrimonial lands.

  Marriage practices also played a role in defining the boundaries of an evolving jati. One instance was the emergence of restrictions on marriage with widows (nata) or with women who had been already married. Neither of these was permissible for ruling families, although nata marriages did take place among non-ruling Rajputs, where such partners were called natrayat. Again, matrimony was not permissible between natrayat and ruling Rajputs.32 Internal stratification of Rajput lineages was thus accompanied by the creation of a hierarchy defined in terms of “purity” of blood, through evolving regulations and restrictions on marriage relations.

  Mewar and the Mughals

  In the late sixteenth century, Akbar’s intervention in the Rajput kingdoms fundamentally altered relations between kings and chiefs. Akbar asserted his sovereignty over Marwar by establishing his prerogative “to exercise the right of granting the gaddi (throne) of Jodhpur” to his own nominee, albeit from within the ruling clan. This development had mutually contradictory results. On the one hand, the chiefs’ support was no longer necessary for succession to kingship, since imperial confirmation sufficed. The king thus became more independent of his chiefs. On the other hand, the Rathor chiefs could now approach the Mughal emperor as the ultimate arbiter of entitlements and disputes within their kingdom.33

  Although the Mughal emperor never wrested the right of deciding the royal succession in Mewar, some Sisodia chiefs recognized him as a rival authority.34 Through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this resulted in a dilution of the Mewar ruler’s authority over his chiefs. During the reign of Pratap, his younger brother Jagmal appealed to Akbar upon being rejected by the chiefs as his father’s heir. The emperor bestowed upon him the pargana of Jahazpur within Mewar’s territory.35 Such a move asserted Akbar’s ability to intervene in Mewar’s affairs at two levels: not only could he bestow a jagir upon the Mewar king’s brother, but he could do so within Mewar territory and enforce the grant militarily.36 From 1567 onward, several revenue districts (parganas) of Mewar were confiscated repeatedly by the Mughals and included in the imperial province (subah) of Ajmer. Control of these localities went back and forth between the Mewar rulers and the Mughals.37

  Akbar also attempted to influence the succession in Mewar, but with somewhat less success than in Marwar. Jagmal’s son Sagar withdrew from Chitor after a disagreement with his cousin Rana Amarsingh, and entered the imperial service through the offices of Raja Mansingh of Amber. After defeating the Devras of Sirohi on Akbar’s behalf, Sagar was rewarded with the title of Rana of Mewar and asked to subjugate his rival Amarsingh. Sagar took his appointment seriously and created new chiefs at Chitor from among the Sisodias by making fresh land grants. He had limited success, however. The land under cultivation in Mewar was appropriated to the imperial revenue (khalisa), and Amarsingh, who still controlled the hills, gradually began to regain his hold over the kingdom.38 After peace was established between Amarsingh and Jahangir in 1615, the Mewar heir presented himself at the imperial court like his peers from the other Rajput kingdoms. From this point onward, the emperor sent ceremonial gifts “ratifying” the Mewar succession. In a gesture indicating the pre-eminent status of the Mughal emperor, his gifts were accepted before the customary gifts from other Rajput rulers and chiefs.39

  In the seventeenth century, the rulers of Mewar began reasserting their control over neighboring principalities, such as Banswara and Sirohi, whose chiefs had broken from Sisodia dominance by entering Mughal service.40 Raval Samarsi of Banswara (who also belonged to a cadet lineage of the Sisodias) was defeated in a military expedition led by Bhagchand, Labdodhay’s patron, and paid a tribute of two lakhs.41 Rajsingh (r. 1653–80) revived an old custom of tika daud, looting an enemy’s territory in order to ratify his accession. He looted the imperial garrisons of Khairabad, Mandal, and Dariba and stationed his own contingents there. Similarly, the zamindars of Banera were subjugated and forced to pay tribute.42 On the whole, however, the Sisodias garnered fewer benefits from Mughal overlordship than their rivals in Amber and Jodhpur:

  Before Akbar’s expeditions [in the 1560s], Rana Pratap held a principality worth 13,58,72,225 dams, but after joining the Mughal service, the Ranas were never assigned jagirs, including in‘am, of more than 8,80,00,000 dams. In the case of Amber and Jodhpur, too, the whole of the revenues of their erstwhile zamindaris were not assigned to them but the difference was that the chiefs of Amber and Jodhpur were compensated for their lost revenues by the assignment of ordinary jagirs outside their principalities, while the Sisodia chiefs were not.43

  Throughout the seventeenth century, therefore, Sisodia ambitions of regional dominance were repeatedly thwarted by Mughal intervention. While they embarked on campaigns against smaller Rajput principalities, especially those whose chiefs belonged to cadet lineages, they also attempted to conciliate the emperor when faced with the threat of retaliation.44

  This was the context in which successive Sisodia rulers sought to assert their pre-eminence locally. Jagatsingh’s reign saw a spurt in construction activity. The building of new palaces and temples, along with increased grants for charity and religious endowments,45 offered a well-trodden path to the symbolic consolidation of Sisodia authority. The most visible marker of Mewar’s renewed ambitions came at the end of Jagatsingh’s reign, when he repaired the fortress of Chitor. While Chitor clearly retained its enormous symbolic significance, the Mughal emperor imposed substantial penalties for this breach of treaty upon Mewar in 1654, by reassigning several of his revenue districts to other Rajput chiefs.46 During the reign of Rajsingh (r. 1652–80), the Vallabha sampradaya idol of Krishna was brought from Braj to Nathdvara in Mewar. The Mewar chronicles interpreted the event as proof of Rajsingh’s defense of the faith against Aurangzeb’s “persecutions.”47

  It was in the realm of Mughal–Rajput marriages that Rajput identity and honor were mobilized most consistently, around emergent constructions of purity and pollution of jati. One of the best-known instances involved Rajsingh’s marriage to Charumati, the Kishangarh chief’s daughter; the Mewar chronicles recount that after Charumati’s father arranged his daughter’s betrothal to Aurangzeb without her consent, she appealed to Rajsingh, who then married her. To avoid offending Aurangzeb, the Kishangarh ruling family then substituted a younger sister who was married to Aurangzeb’s son Muazzam.48 A contemporary courtly panegyric from Mewar used the episode to demonize Aurangzeb as the asura, the barbarian demon (mlechha pisach) with the appearance of a monkey (langur), from whom the Hindu lord (hindu dhani) must rescue the princess.49 By the early eighteenth century, the opposition to Rajput–Mughal alliances was articulated more formally. In 1708, Amarsingh II of Mewar married his sister and daughter to the rulers of Jodhpur and Jaipur respectively, after extracting “a written commitment from the two rulers, that now they would not marry their daugh
ters to the turks under any circumstances.”50

  This was the context of the Padmini narratives in early modern Rajasthan, dating between the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on the relationship between king and chiefs, these narratives mobilized norms of honorable conduct around perceptions of threat to the order. Such threats were represented as endangering the figure of the queen—who embodied, in the flesh as it were, the network of alliances underpinning the king’s power, as well as the norms of “honorable” conduct essential to upholding this political and moral order.

  The Authors

  Hemratan, the author of the first known narrative of Padmini in Rajasthan, was a Jain monk51 of the Kharatara gacchha (monastic lineage); he composed the Gora Badal Charitra in 1589 in Sadri (an important border town in south-western Mewar) at the request of Tarachand, a local official. Tarachand was the younger brother of Bhama Shah, the trusted Jain minister of Rana Pratap. The brothers belonged to the Kavadiya gotra (exogamous clan unit) of the Osval jati. Hemratan was one of the more prominent members of the Kharatara gacchha, from which the spiritual mentors of Bhama Shah and his clan were drawn.52 An accomplished poet and storyteller, he rendered several Jain exemplary narratives into the Rajasthani dialect, for use by Jain teachers in their discourses. Labdodhay, another Jain monk from the Kharatara gacchha, composed the Padmini Charitra Chaupai in 1650 at Udaipur at the request of Bhagchand, whose older brother and father had both served Rana Jagatsingh’s mother as ministers.53 Bhagchand himself led military expeditions against the ruler of Banswara and the Bhils, and forced them both to accept Jagatsingh as their overlord.54 The family belonged to the Katariya gotra of the Osval jati. Among Labdodhay’s other compositions were the Ratnachuda-Manichuda Chaupai and Malayasundari Chaupai, retelling Jain exemplary tales about the virtues of generosity and a woman’s constancy.55 Dalapativijay, author of the Khumman Raso, was a Jain monk from the Tapa gacchha. While he may have been in financial difficulties and did not wish to seek assistance, nothing more is known about him and his lay patrons.56 Jatmal Nahar, who composed the Gora Badal Katha or Gora Badal ri Bat at Simbala village near Lahore in 1628, was the son of Dharamsi and belonged to the Nahar gotra of the Osval Jains.57 This narrative was composed under the patronage of the local Pathan chief Ali Khan Niazi Khan, during the reign of Jahangir. Jatmal’s Osval affiliation suggests the transmission of literary narratives amongst a Jain community dispersed beyond the boundaries of seventeenth-century Rajasthan.

  Ranchhod Bhatt, author of the Sanskrit Amarakavyam (c. 1683–93), was a Telang Brahmin whose ancestors had migrated to Mewar. Members of his lineage were closely associated with the Sisodia ruling lineage of Mewar. They were commissioned to compose Sanskrit inscriptions for various public occasions, and received land grants by virtue of their status as Brahmin scholars, serving the ritual and scribal needs of their Rajput patrons. Thus, villages were granted to them on occasions such as the return of the queen Jambuvati from a major pilgrimage, the consecration of the idol in the Jagannathrai temple at Udaipur, and the construction of the Udaisagar lake.58 Nothing is known about the author(s) of the eighteenth-century Rawal Ranaji ri Bat. The recitation and compilation of such batan was “traditionally the domain of learned specialists of the caste of Maru Charans, who maintained hereditary attachments to particular Rajput families . . . whose histories and traditions they were responsible for preserving.”59 Both the Rawal Ranaji ri Bat and the Chitor-Udaipur Patnama, compiled and transmitted by hereditary genealogists of the Sisodias from the late seventeenth century, enjoyed royal patronage. The Padmini narratives in late medieval Rajasthan thus emerged from two contexts, one Osval Jain and the other “Charan” under royal patronage.60

  Regional Jain Elites in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

  The authors of the Jain Padmini narratives belonged to monastic lineages and were associated with prominent Osval Jain patrons, who aligned their fortunes closely with the Sisodia regime as ministers, financiers, and even leaders of its military expeditions. Hemratan and Labdodhay belonged to the Kharatara gacchha, a Shvetambar Jain monastic lineage closely associated with the Osval jati. Both were monks of the rank of yati, who had taken lesser vows as opposed to samvegi (liberation seekers). A yati could be worldly (sansari) or renunciant (tyagi). Only renunciant mendicants could rise to become the leaders of a lineage of yatis. During this period, such leaders in Rajasthan and Gujarat are known to have lived in great splendor, exercising considerable influence as wizards and royal preceptors, and legitimizing and even helping to establish ruling lineages. Kharatara gacchha yatis controlled great wealth at centers like Udaipur, Bikaner, and Jaipur, and produced a long line of scholars.61 The proximity between Kharatara gacchha monks and Osval Jain laity was a significant factor shaping the exemplary narratives of Padmini composed by Hemratan and Labdodhay.

  Bhama Shah and Tarachand (Hemratan’s patron) were the sons of Bharmal Kavadiya, a military commander at Ranthambhor under Rana Sanga who moved to Chitor after Sher Shah conquered the former fortress. Bhama Shah became Rana Pratap’s pradhan (chief minister), while Tarachand was given charge of the strategically important Godwar region bordering Marwar. Both brothers commanded troops at the battle of Haldighati.62 When Pratap was compelled to retreat by the Mughal forces, Bhama Shah made available to the king his entire personal fortune, sufficient to maintain 5000 men for twelve years.63 Bhama Shah’s son and grandson inherited his office of pradhan. The likelihood that such political office could be inherited further elevated the status of the particular Osval clan.64

  As indicated in the previous chapter, wealthy Jain merchants extended their influence by advancing loans to rulers and aspirants. Bhama Shah’s support for Rana Pratap, however, points to more sustained Osval involvement in the Rajput kingdoms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: he also participated in Sisodia military campaigns, including a successful raiding expedition into the Mughal province of Malwa.65 Similarly, Labdodhay’s patron Bhagchand led an expedition against the Rajput chief of Banswara for Rana Jagatsingh. It is in this context that the Osval Jains’ additional claims about proximity to the ruling Rajput elite must be understood, as they modeled their practices on those of their Rajput patrons. Thus, when Tarachand died, his four wives and one concubine committed sati in the manner of elite Rajput women.66 In the early seventeenth century, the women of Karamchand Bachavat’s family committed mass immolation (jauhar) in Bikaner, when Raja Sursingh put Karamchand’s sons to death for their suspected involvement in a plot against his father.67 Jain lineages built memorial stones (jujhar, warrior) for those killed in battle.68 Members of Jain mercantile groups had claimed Rajput origins earlier, too, and Jain sectarian biographies dated the “conversion” to Jainism precisely, to 743 CE.69 The close affiliation between prominent Osval clans and Rajput ruling lineages in seventeenth-century Rajasthan is a significant factor, however, in explaining the sustained role of the Osval Jain laity and their chroniclers and spiritual mentors in the Kharatara gacchha, in propagating the Padmini story.

  Jain laity and monks had been active in the emergence of a regional linguistic-literary culture in Rajasthan from the late fifteenth century, when Kushallabh—a Kharatara gacchha monk—wrote exclusively in the local dialect while his peers were still composing in Prakrit and Apabhramsha, in the traditional languages of Jain narratives and philosophy. Kushallabh made didactic material on traditional Jain themes available in Rajasthani dialect; he also composed the Madhavanal Chaupai on the basis of a local legend. He compiled the scattered verses of the regional oral epic of Dhola and Maru into the poetic text Dhola Maru ra Duha.70 Such narratives did not reveal an overt Jain didacticism. During this period, Jain monastic lineages also established large libraries (bhandar) where such manuscripts were compiled and preserved.71 Like Kushallabh’s Dhola Maru ra Duha, Hemratan’s and Labdodhay’s Padmini poems did not adhere to a Jain teleology; instead, like the earlier Jain prabandhas of Gujarat (see previous chapter), the latter subtly recast
regional narratives in a mode compatible with a Jain ethic. The Jain authors of the Padmini narratives in seventeenth-century Rajasthan thus accommodated the virtue of a Rajput queen and the heroism of Rajput chieftains within a Jain ethical framework.

  Narrations of the Past

  The Rajput past was narrated in a range of genres—royal inscriptions, chronicle histories in prose (khyat), heroic verse narratives about legendary or historical figures (raso), genealogies of chiefly lineages (vansavali), and anecdotal traditions (batan).72 Batan, transmitted both orally and textually, dealt with particular episodes in the life of an important individual, such as the settlement of hostilities (vair), battles, conquest and marriages. Such anecdotal traditions were recited at the homes of Rajputs before their families, when Charans were summoned specifically for that purpose, as well as on more public occasions.

  Hereditary rights to customary gifts—including revenue-exempt (sasan) land grants—were established between lineages of Rajput patrons and corresponding lineages of Charan clients.73 In return, the Charan performed the vital function of affirming his Rajput patron’s status: by celebrating his valor and reasserting his rank for an audience of the latter’s kin, patrons and clients. In the case of inherited rights to sasan land especially, Charan clients became entrenched in their relationships with particular Rajput lineages; land grants thus forged inherited relationships of allegiance, between patrons among the political elite, and clients authorized to continually reaffirm the former’s membership within that elite. Established patron–client relationships did not preclude prominent bards and poets from competing for the favor of royal and chiefly patrons, however.