The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  In Jatmal’s version Ratansen belongs not to the Guhila lineage but to the Chahuvan; he is thus held to belong to one of the best-known Rajput lineages of northern India, rather than a particular regional lineage in Mewar. The quest narrative is also refigured and suggests echoes of Jayasi rather than the Rajasthani Jain narratives. Jatmal mentions neither the queen Prabhavati nor a quarrel over food as instigating the king’s quest. Instead, a Bhatta arrives from Singhaldvip and tells Ratansen of its wonders, including the beauty of Padmini. Echoes of Jayasi continue as Ratansen now devotes his life to catching a glimpse of Padmini. To achieve this, he must don the guise of a Nath yogi and forsake his kingdom before embarking on his quest. He reaches the island of Singhal with a Nath yogi’s help; the latter also seems to have preordained their marriage. It is with Ratansen’s appearance as a Nath yogi that Padmini is smitten, before he reveals his kingly identity.

  These refigurations suggest two aspects to Jatmal’s narrative. First, the echoes of the Padmavat are striking enough to suggest that Jatmal may have had access to Jayasi’s Sufi romance. Jayasi’s poem traveled as far west as the Lahore region, through trans-regional Sufi circuits of transmission. Whether Jatmal had access to a manuscript of the Padmavat is not known; however, he seems to have had access to at least parts of it. Second, Jatmal’s narrative foregrounds Ratansen’s Chahuvan identity, his renouncing his kingdom for his quest, his donning of Nath robes, and his winning of Padmini as a Nath yogi. These elements suggest equally that Jatmal was familiar with the tropes of upward mobility encoded in the oral epics of North India, addressed to wider audiences of military groups and fighting men. This is in sharp contrast to the emphasis that emerged in seventeenth-century Rajasthan, on kingly status consolidated and ratified through politically negotiated marriages.

  Jatmal’s version also reveals significant variations in narrating Alauddin’s siege of Chitor. Initially, as in the Jain narratives of Rajasthan, Ratansen is firm in his resistance: he would prefer to die and lose the fort rather than surrender to the emperor. Ultimately, after a twelve-year siege, he accepts the sultan’s terms that Padmini reveal herself. At this point, Jatmal’s narrative takes a different course. When Ratansen is tricked by the emperor and captured, he fears for his life, and sends a message to his chiefs asking them to surrender Padmini without delay so that his life may be spared. The narrator describes this decision as cowardly (kayar). However, Ratansen later changes his mind. When Badal arrives to rescue him with the procession of palanquins, Ratansen rebukes him sharply for contemplating the queen’s surrender. However, the king’s initial decision to surrender his wife points to Jatmal’s perspective as an outsider. In this narrative, Ratansen’s status as king is not absolute. He can relinquish his kingdom and become a Nath yogi as in Jayasi’s Sufi romance. His decision to surrender his wife may be cowardly in the poet’s view, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility as in the Rajasthani Jain narratives.

  Again, Jatmal doesn’t invoke the norm of khitrivat in his treatment of chiefly valor. Thus, his narrative does not encode the political compulsions of chiefly service in terms of lineage purity or adherence to shastric norms. Jatmal diverges from the Rajasthani Jain poems in that he simply assumes the loyalty of the chiefs. There is no prior quarrel between the king and his chiefs; nor are the chiefs related to the queen, as in the Chitor Udaipur Patnama. Their loyalty is simply one of the necessary conditions of the service they render to a superior overlord, whether Rajput king or emperor of Delhi. The autonomy ascribed to the chiefs through diverse strategies in the Rajasthani versions is thus absent from Jatmal’s narrative. As such, the loyalty of the chiefs is not potentially in conflict with the king’s authority. It is in keeping with this more general ethic of politico-military service that Jatmal does not mention the king’s rewarding of Badal for his distinguished service either. He also does not introduce the figure of the king’s recalcitrant son, thus omitting a depiction of the specific pressures of the king’s polygynous household. Jatmal saw no need, presumably, to insert the figure of the rebellious stepson as suggesting the queen’s surrender. Instead, the king himself suggests it, fearing for his life. Nor does Jatmal seem concerned with establishing the pre-eminence of the Sisodia lineage. Produced under Pathan patronage in the vicinity of Mughal Lahore, Jatmal’s poem does not invoke the Khurasani’s malice. It merely speaks of the sultan’s deceit (kapat), that feeds on Ratansen’s greed (ati lobhakara) (verses 76–8). The conflict between Ratansen and Alauddin is one in which both Rajputs and Turks die in great numbers (verse 137), before the chiefs Gora and Badal win the day with their loyalty and valor.

  Jatmal’s version produced outside the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan brings the figure of the king more in line with the adventurer-protagonists of the oral epics of North India. This is in contrast to the Rajasthani Jain versions, which concurred with the Rajput chronicles in exalting the inherited, absolute status of the monarch, even as a guarantee of his personal heroism. Indeed, Jatmal’s narrative seems to echo the oral epic model that privileges tests of heroism and personal prowess. In keeping with this concern to celebrate the heroic stature of its protagonist, Jatmal’s narrative depicts the queen as instrumental. She is merely the pretext for king and chiefs to prove their valor. These variations in Jatmal’s version suggest the degree to which the king’s trajectory in the Rajasthani narratives (royal as well as Jain) was shaped by specific Sisodia imperatives and regional Rajput ideologies. The Rajasthani versions asserted Sisodia dominance by recasting legends of the past in line with contemporary norms of status, underpinned by evolving codes of honor.

  The authors of the Padmini narratives in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rajasthan shaped and reshaped the legend through the prism of their central concerns. In history and in these narratives, the authority of regional Rajput rulers was threatened by powerful external rivals, and by turbulent households and refractory chiefs “within.” Chroniclers under royal patronage marginalized the role of the chiefs Gora and Badal. In contrast, Jain monks—writing at the behest of Osval Jain chiefly patrons—valorized the chiefs’ role at the king’s expense. Further, the Jain Padmini narratives in Rajasthan occupy a somewhat unusual place in the wider Jain tradition, in that they display few of the conventional markers of their Jain moorings. The reasons for this can be found in the location of their Osval elite patrons, distinctive in their proximity to Rajput ruling lineages and their adoption of Rajput mores and practices.

  In keeping with the prime concern with kingship, the Padmini narratives depict Padmini and other queens under the rubric of virtuous wives. Jain monastic unease with sexuality dovetailed conveniently with evolving elite Rajput patriarchy to articulate this norm of the domesticated wife. However, Jain and bardic narratives also diverged. The former ignored the political premises and functions of Rajput marriages, while bardic narratives, emerging under royal patronage, emphasized precisely these elements in their treatment of elite Rajput marriages, including Padmini’s. Threats to this political order were focused upon the figure of Alauddin Khalji. Narratives produced in the early part of this period depicted him as the deceitful enemy. However, his unreliability was located not in his nature as an individual nor in his status as a “Muslim” king, but in the exigencies of kingship and statecraft. Later narratives gradually demonized the figure of the Muslim king and constructed a heroic norm in opposition to this figure. They did so by equating danger to the queen with danger not only to the land but also to “hindu” dharma itself. The reasons for this shift must be sought in the strategies deployed by the Sisodias, as they asserted their autonomy from Mughal imperial power. In this process, claims to regional supremacy and political sovereignty were recast as the defense of dharma, both Rajput and “Hindu.” Jatmal Nahar’s version, a Jain narrative of Padmini produced outside Rajasthan under Pathan patronage, illumines these regional particularities of the Padmini narratives in Rajasthan.

  As I pointed out in the previous chapter, Jayasi’s Padmavat c
ontinued to circulate widely in different parts of the subcontinent during the seventeenth century. One such translation offers rich insights into the character of anti-imperial critiques in the seventeenth century. Around 1651, Saiyid Alaol had translated Jayasi’s Padmavat into Bengali, at the request of his patron Magan Thakur at the Arakan court (in modern Myanmar). Magan Thakur was the prime minister of the Arakan king, Thado Mintari Sad Umangdar, also known as Satuidhammaraja (reigned 1645–52).112 While the Arakan kings were Buddhist, they “absorbed a good deal of Muslim influence from the Bengal Sultanate: they styled themselves ‘sultan’ . . . issued medallions bearing the Muslim confession of faith, and . . . adopted Muslim names alongside their Buddhist names. They lived primarily from the sea, engaging especially in raiding the Bengal delta for slaves . . .”113 Before Arakan was annexed to the Mughal empire in 1666, the flourishing maritime trade brought traders from all over the subcontinent and further afield to its court. Alaol names Arabi, Rumi, Ujbeki, Lahuri, Multani, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Dakkani, Hindi, Kamrupi, Bangladeshi, Karnatakavasi, Mughal, Pathan, Rajput, Hindu, Siam, Tripura, and Kuki among the people at the city of Roshang.

  Alaol was born in Faridpur or Fatehabad in Gauda-Banga in the first decade of the seventeenth century. His father was a minister in the court of Majlis Qutb, one of the local chiefs in Bengal who opposed Mughal expansion in the region. Portuguese pirates killed Alaol’s father in a skirmish, captured the son and sold him in Arakan. Alaol ultimately found himself in the Arakan court, where he won respect for his scholarship, musical skills, appreciation of poetry, and his knowledge of many languages including Persian and Hindavi. He translated the Arabic romance Saif-ul-mulk-badi-uj-jamal and Nizami’s Persian Haft Paikar and Iskandernameh into Bengali. Alaol was initiated into the Qadiriya Sufi order by Qazi Saiyid Masud of Roshang.114 Like many of his peers among the Sufis of Bengal, he also composed a number of Vaishnava padas. This oeuvre demonstrates his familiarity with North Indian Islamicate, courtly, and romance traditions, as well as his mastery over several devotional idioms and mystical traditions. In terms of intellectual, cultural, and religious horizons, Alaol’s proximity to Jayasi thus transcended linguistic-cultural regions in early modern South Asia.

  The political cultures of North India and Bengal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also reveal striking proximities. The ruling elite in Mughal Bengal spoke a form of vernacular Hindi-Urdu as their “mother-tongue,” and shared assumptions about honor and political service “nurtured in North India within the matrix of Rajput culture”—including instances of jauhar. Just as Jayasi’s declared spiritual preceptors were deeply involved with rulers and elites in the period of Sultanate, Sur and Mughal expansion in North India, in Mughal Bengal too, “Sufism’s world-renouncing vision formed, not an antithesis to the worldly business of running an empire, but a complement to it.”115 Alaol’s own career illustrates this seamless interlacing of political intrigue with courtly literary practices and Sufi mystical aesthetics. Nine years after he completed his translation of Jayasi’s Padmabati, Aurangzeb’s brother and rival Shuja took refuge in the Arakan court in 1660. In the ensuing tensions between Mughal prince and Arakan king, Shuja and his family were murdered. Alaol suffered grievously for his perceived proximity to the Mughal prince: he was imprisoned for treason. Although he was released in fifty days, his property was confiscated and he was impoverished.

  The resonance of Jayasi’s poem for Alaol and his courtly audience in Arakan must be understood in the context of such continuities, of political culture and Sufi practice, between North India and Bengal during the seventeenth century. In one respect, though, Alaol’s narrative diverges significantly from the Avadhi Padmavat. In Alaol’s Padmabati Ratansen recovers from the wounds inflicted by the Rajput Devpal’s poisoned sword, rules for a few more years, and a son is born to Padmabati. As in Jayasi’s Padmavat, however, the two queens Nagmati and Padmabati commit sati upon the king’s death. In the most significant divergence from the Padmavat, Alaol narrates a rapprochement between the dying Ratansen and Alauddin, that the former undertakes out of concern for his kingdom and his two young sons.116 Alaol’s seventeenth-century narrative then has Alauddin becoming the guardian of Ratansen’s sons, who enter the imperial service. In due course, Ratansen’s son Chandrasen becomes the king of Chitor, his father’s kingdom (pitribhumi).117 Thus, Chitor does not “become Islam” as in Jayasi’s narrative.

  Alaol’s modern editor attributes this final rapprochement between the two kings to the influence of the Vaishnava ideology of love dominant in medieval Bengal.118While this may have been so, Alaol’s altered conclusion also suggests that the figure of Alauddin Khalji signified different things in seventeenth-century Arakan as opposed to North India. It is reasonable to speculate that Alaol’s family history and his location in Arakan, itself battling Mughal control over Bengal, would have made the Padmavat’s narrative of Khalji imperialism peculiarly topical. However, Alaol’s modifications indicate altered perceptions of the Khalji sultan in the courtly memory of seventeenth-century Arakan, at a moment when the latter was appealing to the chiefs of Bengal as potential allies against Mughal expansion. As much as Jayasi, then, the Sufi courtier in Arakan could equally assert the triumph of the normative politico-moral order in his narrative. Thus Alauddin’s false “love” for Padmabati is defeated by Ratansen’s superior, self-abnegating quest for love. Further, Ratansen’s son ultimately inherits his pitribhumi from a reformed sultan, suggesting an alternative from the Arakan court, to the perceived Mughal model of political relationships between overlord and potential vassal.

  The instance of Alaol’s Padmabati raises particularly important issues when juxtaposed with the Padmini narratives in Mewar (a thousand miles to the north-west), and the Rajput perspective on the Mughals more generally. The historiographic consensus at present emphasizes the integration of the Rajput chiefdoms into the expanding Mughal empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A running theme in this scholarship has been the extent to which Mughal authority was articulated in an idiom successfully incorporating political loyalties from diverse religious and ethnic groups.119The exception to this pattern was the kingdom of Mewar, which from the late sixteenth century self-consciously positioned itself as resisting Mughal power. Alaol’s Padmabati suggests that anti-Mughal politics could emerge from diverse politico-geographical peripheries of the empire. As we have seen in this chapter, the official perspective in Mewar increasingly posited its anti-Mughal politics as defense of a besieged “hindu dharma” against Muslim aggression, particularly from the later seventeenth century onward. Alaol’s Padmabati demonstrates how a Sufi poet in the Arakan court could articulate an anti-Mughal politics equally by celebrating the triumph of mystical love, even in bringing about a rapprochement with imperial power. In this wider perspective, the regional kingdoms of Mewar and Arakan suggest to us the differing hues of anti-Mughal politics, even during the seventeenth century, as the Empire reached its pinnacle. They also suggest, crucially, that “communal” interpretations of the Mughals were not a product of the colonial period, as modern scholars have suggested,120 but had emerged in anti-imperial projects in the seventeenth century itself.

  Notes

  1. For the language of these narratives, see Smith 1975.

  2. Chattopadhyaya 1994: 57–88.

  3. See, for example, G.N. Sharma 1962; G.D. Sharma 1977; Rudolph and Rudolph1984; Ziegler (1978) 1998; Taft 1994; Kapur 2002; and Peabody 2003.

  4. In contrast to the historiography of Rajasthan, for North and Central India several scholars have demonstrated the open-ended and assimilative nature of Rajput identity, as well as ongoing histories of “Rajputization” throughout this period. S. Sinha 1962; Kolff 1990; Guha 1999; for a comparable dynamic in the Jat community in the colonial period, see Dutta 1999.

  5. See D. Singh 2003; Sahai 2005a; idem 2005b.

  6. See, for instance, Menariya 2000.

  7. Notable in this respect are Harlan 2003: 29–70; and B
alzani 2003.

  8. Ziegler 1973; idem 1976; Peabody 2003; and Saran and Ziegler 2001.

  9. G.D. Sharma 1977: 5.

  10. Sangari 1990: 1465.

  11. G.D. Sharma 1977: 12–13.

  12. Shyamaldas 1986: vol. 2, 145. This nineteenth-century chronicle is the earliest known “comprehensive” history of the kingdom of Mewar; Shyamaldas, himself a Charan, based the Vir Vinod upon bardic traditions and documentary evidence, assembled in a new Historical Records Office in Udaipur under royal patronage. Where Shyamaldas’s own biases are not apparent, I have used him as the earliest reliable comprehensive source available for Mewar’s history between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  13. For a fuller account of Medini Rai’s career, see Kolff 1990: 85–97.

  14. Shyamaldas 1986: vol. 2, 27.

  15. Ibid. vol. 2, 234.

  16. Ibid. vol. 1, 322–32.

  17. Similarly, the Gauda ruler of Chanderi rebelled against the Rana, and had to be subjugated forcibly. Ibid. vol. 1, 344, 355.

  18. Ibid. vol. 1, 347.

  19. In late-fifteenth-century Mewar, Rawat Surajmal (the grandson of Rana Mokal) and Rawat Sarangdev (the great-grandson of Rana Lakha) demanded and obtained grants from Rana Raimal on this basis. They were forced to flee to Mandu when Raimal’s son Prithviraj challenged these entitlements and marched against them. Ibid. vol. 1, 347.

  20. Ziegler 1998: 257.

  21. Sagar created new chiefs at Chitor when he was made a rival Rana to Amarsingh by Akbar. Shyamaldas 1986: vol. 2, 224.

  22. For an explanation of Rajput kul, khamp, and gotra, see Ziegler 1973: 38–46. For the Shekhawat and Baghela, see Joshi 1995: 53.