The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  He who preserves sami dharam, the essential vira ras,

  [He] is the ideal (sima) among warriors, defending the honor of the kshatriya path.

  Sami dharam is thus exalted to the position of the most important rasa. This norm is exemplified in the figures of the virtuous Goru Rawat and the strong Badil, upon whom therefore the tale is focused (verses 5–7). A political relationship of loyal service to one’s employer and overlord is articulated here as an ethical obligation, as an individual’s dharma: an idiom familiar enough in the period. Hemratan articulates this politico-moral obligation as an aesthetic norm as well; through the celebration of sami dharam as a rasa, the tale is intended to produce aesthetic pleasure by means of its didactic value.

  In the Jain narratives, Gora and Badal first appear only after the king’s capture by Alauddin and the chiefs’ subsequent decision to surrender the queen. Their late entry is explained as the consequence of a prior quarrel with Ratansen and withdrawal from his service:

  They were angry with the Rao, they refused to accept a grant (gras) from the king. They stayed in their homes and did not perform any service (chakri), they left Ratansen and turned away to be free . . . They did not leave [but] they looked after their own expenses (Hemratan verses 367–9).

  This prior quarrel between the king and his chiefs exalts the heroism of the latter since they are described as coming to their king’s rescue in spite of their quarrel with him: they are “exceptionally loyal to their lord” (sami dharama palain savishesha). Secondly, since the conflict with the king serves as a device to prevent the entry of the two chiefs earlier in the narrative, their symbolic proximity with the situation of endangered king, queen and kingdom is emphasized. The chiefs thus replace the king as symbolic saviors of the kingdom. At a historical juncture when kings and chiefs could have conflicting views on their mutual dependence, these Jain narratives reconstructed a past where the latter did not depend upon the king for their status. Further, the chiefs decide to remain at Chitor after their rift with the king in these narratives; nor does the rift hinder their helping the queen in a crisis. Significantly, Gora and Badal address Padmini as mother (mai). The kinship terminology is double-edged: it evokes past and present clan-based relationships, as much as an early modern paternalist idiom of royal authority over all subjects, including Rajput chiefs.

  Similar impulses are behind the invocation of epic ancestries for Gora and Badal, and for the fort and realm they defend. The Jain poets are alive to the gains of retaining Sanskritic terminology: the fort is referred to as Chitrakut, invoking its epic precedent in the Ramayana. All manner of creatures (sura, nara, kinnara) reside here, where Rama spent his years of exile. Further, Badal is like Hanuman: he reassures an anxious Padmini, “I will destroy the enemy’s army single-handed, I will cut off their king’s head. As Hanamati achieved Rama’s tasks, I will overcome your distress” (Hemratan verse 404). The battle between Alauddin and the chiefs is like the Mahabharata battle, so fierce that “Siva collected garlands of skulls” and “chariots could be seen in the sky” (verses 576–7). While such ancestries exalt the chiefs’ heroism, they are not invoked for Ratansen. The heroic Gora and Badal are sharply critical of the chiefs’ decision to surrender the queen. They invoke the norm of khitrivat (the kshatriya’s duty), defined as the defense of honor through loyalty to the king.94 Such khitrivat is invoked as a higher norm governing the political conduct and moral universe of a Rajput chief, and overriding conflicts between king and chiefs. It is noteworthy that the norm is defined by appealing to a shastric varna identity, now appropriated by regional elites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  The Jain narratives reveal the intensity of the contest between king and chiefs in a number of ways. Assiduous in emphasizing the rewards to be gained from khitrivat, all the Jain versions assert that after the victory against Alauddin, Ratansen rewards Badal with half the kingdom and half its wealth.95 The emphasis on material rewards suggests that such demands upon the chiefs may not have been easy to sustain as abstract ideals. Further, in an order where lineage defined membership in the elite, defending the honor of that lineage through proof of loyalty to the overlord was a political necessity, as the guarantee of continued access to networks of entitlement. It is understandable, then, that these Jain narratives encoded the political compulsions of chiefly service in terms of personal and lineage honor through adherence to shastric norms. At the same time, such chiefly valor could be perceived as a threat to the king’s authority. This is apparent from the royally patronized narratives. In the Amarakavyam, the idea of the palanquin procession and Ratnasi’s rescue are attributed to the “very clever” (prayuramatiyuk) Gora. However, Alauddin is subsequently defeated collectively by the chiefs accompanying the palanquin procession (7.16–17). Neither Gora’s death in battle nor Badal’s rewards are mentioned and the two chiefs disappear from the narrative. The focus remains on the valiant princes of the royal lineage, twelve of whom are crowned successively before dying in battle against the emperor of Delhi. The canto culminates with the deaths of Lakshmasimha and his brother Ratnasi in the battle against Alauddin (7.31–2).

  The conflict between king and chiefs is enunciated most clearly in the Chitor Udaipur Patnama. Unlike the other royally sponsored narratives of Padmini, the Patnama gives the chiefs’ relationship with the king an extra dimension: they are made kinsmen of Padmini’s father Samansi. Along with four other chiefs, Fatiya, Jetmal, Kalo, and Ramo, Gora and Badal are persuaded to accompany Padmini from Sidhal to Chitor after her marriage to Ratansen. Fatiya and Jetmal are Baghela Rajputs.96 Read against the Patnama, the Jain narratives’ silence about Gora and Badal’s lineage is significant: it locates the chiefs outside of any particular clan or “Rajput” identity, to suggest heroism such as that of the narratives’ Osval patrons. To put it differently, the conspicuous absence of lineage for Gora and Badal in the Jain narratives suggests Osval affirmation of emergent relations of clientship—the mode of these patrons’ own consolidation of power in the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan in this period.

  In the Patnama, the six chiefs are exalted above the ranks of ordinary “warriors valiant in battle,” of whom there are many in Ratansen’s army. They are described as “valiant in virtue” in the manner of Nahal Asji, who voluntarily submits to decapitation to prove his loyalty to his king Samansi, and then as a headless torso salutes the king who ordered his death.97 Since Gora and Badal are Samansi’s kinsmen, he cannot compel them to obedience (chakri leba); nor can he gift them to his daughter in dowry. Padmini therefore persuades the chiefs to accompany her by invoking these kinship ties and obligations. The precise argument Padmini uses is significant: she appeals to them as brothers, to protect her from betrayal or danger at Chitor.98 Samansi is reassured by the chiefs’ consent and agrees to send his daughter with Ratansen. As the queen’s kinsmen, the chiefs regard Ratansen as their “brother-in-law” (jija sahab); they agree to accompany Padmini only after due protocol is observed and their status (as kinsmen of the queen, not retainers gifted to her in dowry) is publicly reaffirmed.

  Gora, Badal, Fatiya, and Jetmal retain their privileges and rank in Chitor, autonomous of grants or favor from its king Ratansen. An autonomy that was ascribed to unexplained prior conflict between chiefs and king in the Jain narratives, is given a concrete location in the politics of royal marriages in this bardic narrative. In ascribing the chiefs’ autonomy to their kinship with the queen, the Patnama reveals a sharp awareness of the pressures inherent in marriages between ruling lineages in the period. The resolution to the narrative articulates strikingly the stresses of such alliances. When Gora and Badal achieve what Ratansen’s other chiefs could not, the defeat of Alauddin after twelve long years, Ratansen kills them with his own hands. The account is worth quoting in full:

  Then Rawalji thought to himself; [that] now even the Patsah feels defeated; twelve years have gone by since he arrived here; now he will also depart from here; and I can rest easy in my mind; Shri Eklin
gnath will repair my kingdom; if these two, Goroji and Badalji remain alive, they will always be there to taunt me; they preserved my rule over my kingdom and the fort of Chitor; so these two brothers must be finished off. Thinking thus, he [Ratansen] reached the Sukalya lake; there Shri Hajur cut off the heads of both Goraji and Badalji; their heads fell into the Sukalya lake.99

  To sum up then, the Padmini narratives of seventeenth-century Rajasthan focused on the relationship between king and chiefs. In royally sponsored and genealogical traditions the figure of Ratansen was recast to fit Sisodia reinterpretations of Chitor’s history. In the Jain narratives, the chiefs achieve their heroism practically at the expense of the ruler. In the royal chronicles, they are marginal or are killed by the ruler himself when their heroism threatens his authority. Such divergences must be understood in the context of a patronage network that included the often divergent perspectives and aspirations of both rulers and their chiefs.

  Queens and Wives

  In a polity where marriage alliances were central to the political order, the symbiotic relationship between the domestic and political domains was articulated in norms defining the Rajput woman’s obligations—to her husband, lineage, and kingdom. In royally sponsored traditions dedicated to consolidating Rajput polity, the representation of the queen Padmini was clearly geared to these ends. The marginalization of the queen is striking in the historiographic genres of bat, khyat, and vanshavali: Nainsi’s Khyat merely mentions “the matter of Padmini” while the Rawal Ranaji ri Bat makes her the reason for Alauddin’s attack on Chitor. The dates of both these accounts (late seventeenth century) would suggest that their authors had access to the narrative emerging in the Hemratan tradition. Since Hemratan celebrates the beauty and virtue of the queen at some length, it would seem that the narrative conventions and political premises of these bardic genres generated this cursory mention of the queen. Here, brevity engendered by a discomfort with the defeat of king and loss of realm, would seem to be reinforced by an understanding that queens are strictly instrumental in the history of kings.

  In contrast to these accounts, the Jain narratives follow the conventions of kavya and treat the figure of the queen in some detail. These narratives define the normative place of queen and wife in the political order through their depiction of several Rajput women: Padmini, the chief queen Prabhavati, Badal’s mother, and the wives of Gora and Badal. Ratansen’s favorite queen Prabhavati triggers his quest for a padmini woman. Her relationship with the king revolves around her feeding him to his satisfaction; it is her skill at preparing seventy different kinds of food that earned her the privileged position of chief queen (patrani) in the first place. Prabhavati’s culinary skill (guna, talent) is reiterated in all the Jain narratives over two centuries; her culinary proficiency is a mark of her devotion (bhagati) to her husband. When Ratansen criticizes the food she has cooked, she challenges him to find a padmini woman instead. Thus the first reference to a padmini woman is also made in the context of feminine, culinary skills: these Jain narratives were clearly redefining a system of classification of women derived from medieval erotics (koka shastra), within the idiom of domesticity. Such redefinition may perhaps be located in Jain monastic proscriptions around sexuality, and the consequent imperative to construct different norms of femininity. Both Hemratan and Labdodhay see Prabhavati’s challenge to her husband’s authority as the mark of an unwarranted pride that is responsible for her downfall. Rajput and Jain concerns overlap closely, as her challenge to Ratansen’s authority is equally a flouting of the norm of sami dharam. The situation of domestic quarrel is useful in defining both a good wife and a good queen, for a wider Jain audience: “The lady became proud, and lost the privilege [of her favored position] she had earned by her humility. Without humility [the] good fortune [of having a husband] does not remain, without [such] good fortune there is no destiny [left] at all” (Hemratan verse 35).

  The figure of the fractious queen suggests equally the ubiquitous conflicts between queens in the polygynous households of Rajput kings and chiefs. The Jain narratives omit clan affiliations consistently for both chiefs and queens, thereby orienting the Padmini narrative to their own concerns. The Patnama works by precisely the opposite logic: Ratansen’s thirteen queens are named individually and by clan affiliation in the genealogical list which opens the narrative of his reign.100 During the quarrel over food between Ratansen and his queens, the chief queen is not named individually but referred to by her natal clan-affiliation as the Pariharni. This suggests the location from which she challenges the king, rejecting his expectation that his queens should know how to cook: “We are the daughters of kings . . . we are daughters of Rajputs with land, homes and horses, what do we know of cooking. Until today, we have not even boiled water in the kitchen, nor have we seen it being done.”101 Ratansen is as enraged as in the Jain narratives, and leaves similarly to find a Padmini who can “prepare such food” and serve him. The Patnama thus recasts within a distinctively Rajput perspective, the Jain narrative of the fractious queen challenging the king’s authority within his household. The queens in the Patnama are more independent of the king’s authority by virtue of their natal clan-affiliations. They reject the domestic demands he makes upon them, and remain unrepentant and unaffected by the arrival of Padmini as Ratnasen’s fourteenth queen.102

  These differences between the Jain and the Rajput-bardic narratives continue in the depiction of Padmini herself, first invoked as an abstracted feminine norm of culinary virtuosity—an unusual skill in the conventional descriptions of beautiful women in the romances of early modern north India. Heroines in distant lands as the objects of quest narratives—including heroines on the island of Simhala, land of diamonds and jewels to which the hero gained access through an aerial journey—were already an element of early-medieval Jain romance narratives. In the fifteenth-century Rayanaseharakaha by Jinaharshagani, the king Ratnasekhara and the princess Ratnavati meet in the Kamadeva temple in Simhaladvipa.103 In narratives of Rajput heroism in seventeenth-century Rajasthan, however, such heroines in distant lands were an unfamiliar phenomenon. In the mores of this regional Rajput elite, princes did not set off for distant lands to marry princesses of unknown lineages.

  In the Jain literary tradition dominated by monastic authorship, the heroine’s conventional beauty could signify the illusions of mortality. In the Rajput bardic traditions, while the queen’s beauty is a conventional trope, she is not the narrative trigger for the Rajput king’s quest or conquests. The contrast with the heroic romance and oral epic conventions of Jayasi’s Padmavat is striking. In the Padmini narratives of seventeenth-century Rajasthan, distrust of feminine beauty (as a marker of sexuality) from a Jain monastic angle of vision would seem to have coincided with evolving strictures within elite Rajput patriarchy. Thus, Padmini’s beauty is overwritten with other significations in all these narratives, Jain katha as well as royal chronicles.

  In the Jain narratives the first description of her beauty occurs when Ratansen is marrying her: “Bees hummed and buzzed [around her], Padmini’s fragrance was so intoxicating. The lost bees could not tear themselves away from her. Who can describe her beauty, she surpassed Indrani” (Hemratan verses 86–7). This paves for the way for a more elaborate description in the context of their conjugality. Labdodhay elaborates Hemratan’s erotic detail into a full-fledged nakha-shikhavarnan (21–3, verses 1–19). In both these descriptions, Padmini’s beauty is geared firmly to her love for her lord (sami). In other words, Padmini’s beauty is constantly directed towards being “legitimately” experienced, by her husband and by no one else. Up to this point, these narratives also do not reveal that the figure of the padmini woman and the sensuous descriptions of her beauty are drawn from medieval traditions of erotics. Instead Hemratan justifies the erotic detail by appealing to generalized conventions of kavya: “The essence of poetry and narrative is [erotic] desire (kavita katha rasa kama rasa)” (verse 117). Even as they celebrate the couple’s conjug
al bliss the Jain narratives deploy an image that reveals their unease with the erotic: the king is trapped in the bliss of his newfound love like a sandal tree weighed down by the beautiful creeper clinging to it (Hemratan verse 116).

  The unease persists. Padmini’s beauty is held responsible for attracting toward itself the improper gaze of Ragho Chetan and Alauddin, thus threatening queen, king, and realm. Significantly, Ragho Chetan describes Padmini to Alauddin in a complete nakha-shikha-varnan (conventionalized “description from toe to head” of the heroine), where his gaze travels over the entire female body. Similarly, it is Ragho Chetan with his brahminical learning who recites the padminichitrini-hastini-shankhini catalog of the erotics tradition, in describing Padmini’s beauty to the mlecchha emperor Alauddin. Given the circumscribing of the queen’s beauty and king’s desire just discussed, Ragho Chetan’s descriptions of Padmini are clearly transgressive; they violate the aesthetic and political decorum that required the queen to be removed from the public gaze. A comparison with Jayasi’s poem here is revealing. The nakha-shikha-varnan is deployed on several occasions in the Padmavat, indicating the degree to which the figure of the beautiful queen was an autonomous norm in Jayasi’s Sufi romance.

  In instigating Alauddin to attack Chitor after this intimate description of Padmini’s beauty, Ragho Chetan thus doubly betrays his obligations to his lord (samidharam nai didhu chheha). His role in the Jain narratives draws on the sustained anti-Brahmin polemic of Jain scholastic tradition. In a revealing variation, the bardic Patnama casts Ragho Chetan as two genealogists, who quarrel with Ratansen over their customary entitlements to gifts upon his marriage with Padmini. The king dares them to bring the enemy Alauddin to attack Chitor, a challenge that they accept. However, once they have fulfilled this “commitment” they return to the fold, switching allegiances again and aiding Ratansen against the emperor. The Patnama’s genealogist-authors clearly sought to rescue the genealogist(s) within the narrative from the charge of betrayal.