23. For the conflict between Rana Ratansingh and his stepmother’s brother Surajmal Hada in sixteenth-century Mewar, see Bhati ed. 1984: 51–4.
24. Ziegler 1998: 254.
25. Joshi 1995: 44–5.
26. Ibid. 64–6.
27. Sangari 1990: 1466.
28. Shyamaldas 1986: vol. 1, 335.
29. Taft 1973: 70.
30. Bhati ed. 1995: 26.
31. Ziegler 1973: 61–4. For a list of 27 Mughal–Rajput marriages between 1562 and 1715, see Taft 1994: 221.
32. Joshi 1995: 21.
33. G.D. Sharma 1977: 16–18.
34. Several of Pratap’s younger brothers left Mewar to become Mughal mansabdars. Taft 1994: 228.
35. Shyamaldas 1986: vol. 2, 146.
36. In Pratap’s reign, Akbar had installed garrisons in Untala, Mohi, Madaria, Chitor, Mandal, Mandalgarh, Jahazpur, Mandsaur and other places within Mewar. Ibid. vol. 2, 163.
37. These included the parganas of Pur, Mandal, Khairabad, Mandalgarh, Jahazpur, Savar, Phulia, Baneda, Hurda, and Badnor among others. Ibid. vol. 2, 414.
38. Ibid. vol. 2, 221–4.
39. Ibid. vol. 2, 269.
40. Zaidi 1986: 86.
41. Shyamaldas 1986: vol. 2, 321.
42. Ibid. vol. 2, 414.
43. Zaidi 1986: 90–1.
44. Jagatsingh (r. 1628–52) adopted a conciliatory note every now and then, and sent gifts and men/military levies (jamaiat) in the service (naukri) of the emperor. He would also send his eldest son to mend a more serious rift. The next ruler Rajsingh was more aggressive. Shyamaldas 1986: vol. 2, 402.
45. G.N. Sharma 1962: 151.
46. Zaidi 1986: 87.
47. Shyamaldas 1986: vol. 2, 453.
48. Taft 1994: 235.
49. Menariya ed. 1958: Vilas 7, verses 28–30.
50. Shyamaldas 1986: vol. 2, 437.
51. John Cort points out that the English terms “monk” and “nun” are inappropriate to refer to Jain sadhus and sadhvis, calling up as they do associations of Christian monasticism. I retain these translations for lack of a better alternative. Cort 1991: 667.
52. Jina Vijay Muni ed. 1990: 5.
53. Ibid. 9; Nahta ed. 1961: 31–2.
54. G.N. Sharma 1962: 149.
55. Nahta ed. 1961: 32–3.
56. Shrotriya and Jawalia ed. 1999: 141.
57. For the opinion that Jatmal may have been a Jat rather than a Jain, see Tomar 1954: 22–3.
58. Sharma and Bhatnagar ed. 1985: 10–13.
59. Ziegler 1976: 221.
60. Modern literary historians of Rajasthan use the term “Charan” to encompass narratives produced by Charans, Bhats, Ravs, and even Brahmins, that celebrated Rajput heroic traditions. See Lalas 1988.
61. Cort 1991: 657–9.
62. Jaimal and Ratan Chand, belonging to another Osval clan of the Mehtas, were also among prominent followers of Pratap who were killed at Haldighati. Bhati 1991: 30.
63. Somani 1982: 233–4.
64. The careers of other Osvals such as Naroji Bhandari in Jodhpur and Karamchand Bachavat in Bikaner reveal the sustained proximity between prominent Osval clans and Rajput ruling lineages. Bhutoriya 1995: vol. 1, 329–34.
65. Qanungo 1960: 52.
66. Somani 1982: 78; for earlier traditions of ritual suicide among Jain renunciants in South India, see Settar 1990: 281–94, 313–18.
67. Bhutoriya 1985: vol. 1, 334.
68. Somani 1982: 80.
69. Jain 1990: 213–14.
70. Lalas 1988: vol. 1, 128.
71. The bhandar at Jaisalmer was established by Jinabhadra Suri in 1551. Dundas 1992: 72.
72. See Ziegler 1976.
73. The Sodas established such relations with the Sisodias, the Rohads with the Rathods, and the Dursavats with the Devras. Maheshwari 1985: 12.
74. Ziegler 1976: 228.
75. Ulrike Teuscher has recently shown that genealogies of this later period in Mewar were markedly different in their strategies from the earlier genealogies in the region, composed between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Teuscher 2003: 77. For a wider discussion of epigraphic evidence from early and medieval India, see Henige 1975.
76. For a similar pattern in upper-caste genealogies in sixteenth-century Bengal, in the context of continuing anxiety about the influence of Islam and the newer threat from Gaudiya Vaishnavism, see K. Chatterjee 2005a.
77. Ranavat ed. 2003: iv–viii.
78. Lalas 1988: vol. 1, 118–19.
79. Menariya 1968: 229–31.
80. Tawney 1982: 2.
81. Sakariya ed. 1984–93: vol. 3, 58–79.
82. For a rich discussion of history and myth in sixteenth-century Telugu narratives about the past, see Wagoner 1993: 171, 173.
83. For connections between the khyat and Mughal emphasis on historical writing and record-keeping, see Ziegler 1976: 233–4. For a similar connection between bureaucratic power and the rise of the bakhar in seventeenth-century Maharashtra, see Guha 2004b.
84. For a general survey of Mughal imperial historiography, see Mukhia 1976.
85. Abul Fazl, cited in Rizvi 1975: 209.
86. Ranking 1990: vol. 1, 336–7.
87. Jarrett 1996: vol. 2, 274–5, 305–7.
88. Rizvi 1975: 255, 259–61.
89. For the absence of records between 1350 and 1400, and the suggestion that the new kings of Mewar were “possibly chiefs of local origin from Chittaurgarh” who claimed dynastic affiliation with the earlier Guhilas as a legitimizing strategy, see Kapur 2002: 105–9.
90. The Mewar ruling lineage’s hostility towards Ratansen for the loss of Chitor had surfaced as early as 1460, in the major Kumbhalgarh inscription commissioned by Rana Kumbha (r. 1433–68). Kapur 2002: 106.
91. Where “Padmini” refers to a category of woman, I use the lower case.
92. The only manuscript of the Padmavat among these elite circles in Rajasthan that I have found record of, dates to 1733 and is preserved in the Maharaja of Jaipur Museum Library. See Bahura 1971: 68.
93. Ranavat ed. 2003: 325.
94. Hemratan 365, 368, 370, etc.; Labdodhay 67, 68, etc.; Dalapativijay 2573, 2578, 2584, etc.; Bhagyavijay 525, 530, etc.
95. Hemratan v. 588; Labdodhay p.102, dhal 33, v.3; Dalapativijay v. 2827; Bhagyavijay v. 866.
96. Ranavat ed. 2003: 333.
97. Ibid. 329.
98. Ibid. 332.
99. Ibid. 403.
100. Ibid. 296–7.
101. Ibid. 302–3.
102. Ibid. 341–2.
103. For the Rayanaseharakaha as a possible influence upon Jayasi’s Padmavat, see Jain 1981: 41, 47, 183.
104. Ranavat ed. 2003: 351.
105. Ibid. 326–7.
106. Ibid. 398.
107. Ibid. 404.
108. Ibid. 347.
109. See the essays in Gilmartin and Lawrence eds 2000.
110. For the departures from Hemratan in Bhagyavijay and this 1727 manuscript copy of Hemratan, see Bhatnagar ed. 1966.
111. Ranavat ed. 2003: 397.
112. For the political economy of Arakan and the cosmopolitanism of its court, see Gommans and Leider eds 2002.
113. Eaton 1997: 235.
114. Bandopadhyay ed. 1985: vol. 2, 2–3.
115. Eaton 1997: 176.
116. D. Bandopadhyay ed. 1985: vol. 2, 397.
117. Ibid. 408.
118. Bandopadhyay 1985: vol. 2, 8. For the incorporation of Vaishnava idiom into Bengali Muslim mystical poetry in this period, see Roy 1983: 187–97. Roy makes the larger argument that Bengali Islam as it expanded during this period, was fundamentally syncretic.
119. For instances, see Richards 1998; Ziegler 1998.
120. An early, classic formulation was Thapar, Chandra, and Mukhia 1969.
4
Tales of Past Glory under Early Colonial Indirect Rule (c. 1750–1850)
MUGHAL POWER WANED SIGNIFICANTLY BY THE 1720S, AS virtually autonomous regional regimes emerged in
former provinces of the empire like Hyderabad, Bengal, and Avadh. By the mid-eighteenth century, the most visible signs of this decline were the repeated attacks on the imperial capital of Delhi and its environs—by the Persian Nadir Shah (1739), the Afghan Ahmed Shah Abdali (1757), and the Jat Jawahir Singh (1764). However, Mughal authority continued to possess significant legitimizing potential: ambitious groups like the Marathas and Mughal notables like the rulers of Avadh vied for control over the imperial court in Delhi and over the person of the Emperor. Shah Alam II, who had fled Delhi in 1758, entered into negotiations with the British East India Company to restore his imperial capital to him after the battle of Baksar (1765). In exchange, the emperor granted the Company diwani (revenue) rights over Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. Over the next three decades, the British gradually extended their administration in Bengal, and expanded their control across its north-western border with Avadh. Meanwhile, the defeat of Mughal forces led by the Nawab of Avadh at Baksar had already inaugurated the East India Company’s indirect rule over Avadh.
It was the Marathas, however, who finally helped the Mughal emperor return to Delhi in 1772, in exchange for territorial concessions. Maratha and British forces thus confronted each other in northern India in the late eighteenth century, in regions such as the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan and in Rohilkhand, just south of Avadh. As the British collaborated with the Avadh nawab to annex Rohilkhand to the latter’s territories in 1774, the lone survivor of the Afghan Rohilla ruling lineage was allowed to preserve his personal jagir around Rampur, which thus continued as an autonomous princely state under Indirect Rule until 1947. In the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan, Maratha raids and exactions since the 1730s were accelerated by the Anglo-Maratha Treaty of Salbai in 1782, that agreed to preserve the peace between the two parties for twenty years. By 1818, however, most of the Rajput kingdoms had signed Subsidiary Alliance treaties with the East India Company, after the latter had trounced the Marathas decisively. It was one such treaty, bringing Indirect Rule to the kingdom of Mewar, that brought James Tod to the Udaipur court as Company Resident in 1818. By 1856, the Company had also formally annexed the kingdom of Avadh.1
Map 3: Narratives and manuscripts about Padmini of Chitor, circa 1750–1850
This chapter traces the narratives of Padmini that were produced and circulated in these turbulent years from Rajasthan in the west to Bengal in the east. Jayasi’s Padmavat and Alaol’s Padmabati continued to circulate as fresh manuscripts were commissioned in today’s northern India and Bengal respectively. Jayasi’s Padmavat also continued to be adapted in places like Rampur by poets such as Ziauddin Ghulam Ali Ibrat and Ghulam Ali Ishrat. Within Rajasthan, the Jain versions discussed in the previous chapter were still current, as apparent from new manuscripts of Labdodhay’s narrative in 1766 and 1808. In 1829–32, James Tod published his magisterial Annals, based on considerable first-hand experience in the Rajput kingdoms, as well as his own research, and collaboration with the Jain scholar Gyanchand at the Udaipur court. The Annals has been celebrated as “the most comprehensive monograph ever compiled by a British officer describing one of the leading peoples of India,” and as the basis for any “new history of the Rajputs.”2
There is little consensus about the nature of colonial knowledge systems and information networks, especially for the period between 1750 and 1850. Scholars like C.A. Bayly assert the continuity of pre-colonial networks, and even the existence of an Indian “ecumene,” well into the nineteenth century; on the other hand, Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks, among others, have argued that colonialism brought with it a fundamentally different epistemic regime, and therefore fundamentally altered the nature of indigenous cultural and information-gathering practices.3 This chapter argues that in its own period Tod’s narrative of Rajput history (and within it the Padmini legend) was only one of several competing versions. The British were expanding their territories, administration, and influence in these hundred years; however, cultural forms, practices and circuits from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries persisted across northern India, especially under Indirect Rule in the princely states.
The Padmavat Reworked in Northern India
Literati in the small towns of the region that is now Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, continued to commission fresh manuscripts of the Padmavat in the late eighteenth century. Among multiple surviving manuscripts from this period is one copied by Ishwarprasad, resident of Ganga Gauroni (1780) in Persian script; another by Jhabbulal Kayasth, resident of Sultanganj, Bihar (1785) in the kaithi script, and a third by Than Kayasth of Mirzapur.4 This indicates that the Padmavat was still read and circulated among scribal groups like the Kayasths in northern India during this period. At the same time, poets produced new adaptations in Urdu (rather than Persian), the new literary language of courtly elites in northern India. One such adaptation, produced around 1713, made its way into the royal library of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (r. 1782–99).5
The poets who adapted the Padmavat narrative into Urdu flourished at regional courts such as Avadh and Rampur, known for their patronage of poets and scholars in the late eighteenth century. The intensive cultural patronage of Nawab Asaf-ud-daula of Avadh (r. 1775–97), his drive to develop Lucknow as an architectural and literary center surpassing Delhi, and the emergence of a distinctive school of Urdu poetry in Lucknow, have all received scholarly attention.6 It has also been suggested that Asaf-ud-daula’s patronage of culture intensified precisely when the Avadh nawabs’ political power began to wane, with the onset of colonial Indirect Rule after 1765.7 The Rampur court, which emerged as another distinguished center for Indo-Persian literature and scholarship, awaits further scholarly scrutiny. A few suggestive circumstances present themselves, however. The Afghan Rohilla mercenaries who created autonomous kingdoms around Rohilkhand and Rampur did not belong to local land-controlling clans; scholars have pointed out how these Rohilla rulers forged close ties of patronage and fealty with local Rajput clans in order to strengthen their position.8While Rampur remained autonomous unlike the rest of Rohilkhand after 1774, it remained within the political and cultural ambit of its bigger neighbor Avadh, as during a succession dispute in 1794–5.9 In this context, it seems plausible to speculate that the Rampur court used similar strategies of cultural patronage to buttress its prestige for the benefit of multiple audiences—within its modest territories, and at the courts and among literati in Avadh and Delhi.
In 1797, a new retelling of the Padmavat emerged in Rampur. Mir Ghulam Ali Ishrat completed an adaptation of the Padmavat, the Mudallil-i Shama-o-Parvana (Testimony of the Flame and the Moth), that had been begun by Mir Ziauddin Ghulam Ali Ibrat a few years earlier. Alternately known as the Qissa-e Padmavat or the Padmavat Urdu, this text was reprinted widely through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mir Ziauddin Ghulam Ali, who wrote under the pen-name Ibrat, was born in Shahjahanabad (Delhi) in the second half of the eighteenth century, grew up in Rampur, and joined the service of Mustafa Khan in the Rampur court. As he indicates in the Shama-o-Parvana, he was instructed in the art of poetry by Nawab Muhabbat Khan “Muhabbat,” a well-known poet in late-eighteenth-century Lucknow who drew a handsome allowance from Asaf-ud-daula and then from the British government.10 As for Ibrat, he died in 1789–90 before completing his adaptation of the Padmavat. Mir Ghulam Ali Ishrat, also in the service of the Nawab of Rampur, was instructed in the art of poetry by Mirza Ali Lutf—who in turn had been instructed by Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda, one of the most prominent Urdu poets of the eighteenth century. Ishrat used to participate in the weekly mushaira (gathering of poets) at the house of a friend, Mirza Qudratullah Shauq, and completed Ibrat’s incomplete poem at his friend’s suggestion.11 Both poets seem to have been known in the wider social world of Indo-Persian and Urdu poetry: both figured in various collections of biographies (tazkira) of such poets, compiled in Delhi in 1831 and 1834,12 before the Padmavat Urdu began to be printed.
In the absence of specific evidence, it is difficult to ascert
ain if the recitation of excerpts from the Padmavat continued within the Sufi network in this period. However, the Urdu adaptations of the Padmavat reveal the gradual marginalization of characteristically Sufi interpretations of its narrative. Whereas a poet like Aqil Khan Razi (who had produced a Sufi reinterpretation of the Padmavat in the seventeenth century), was a practising Sufi himself, there is no evidence of such affiliations for Ibrat and Ishrat. Thus the latter omitted the well-known allegorical key to the Padmavat narrative, according to which Chitor stood for the body, Singhala for the heart, Padmini for wisdom, and so on (see Chapter 1). The erasure of this allegory in the Padmavat Urdu suggests that Ibrat and Ishrat replaced the Sufi-mystical frame of interpretation with the conventions of secular romance.13 Ibrat describes his narrative as providing testimony (mudallil) of the madness of Ratansen’s love, and of how lover and beloved (Padmavat) both burnt at the same time, like the archetypal moth and flame.14 Ishrat, in turn, describes how he completed the poem after drinking “a draught of love (ulfat ka ek jam)” (32). The ideal topos for such exemplary love is, of course, Hindustan: that paradise on earth (jannat nishan) where the sparks of love blaze brighter, just as the sun shines more brightly (10–11). This symbolic topography of Hindustan as the abode of a perfected love was not new, but borrowed from earlier Indo-Persian romances such as Faizi’s Nal Daman and Aqil Khan Razi’s earlier adaptation of the Padmavat. Ibrat and Ishrat also borrowed from Razi the stock trope of the moth as paradigmatic lover, suffering in its impossible love for the flame.15
Along with the Sufi perspective, Ibrat and Ishrat also abandoned any distinctively Rajput ethos. Neither the king nor his queens are depicted as Rajput; while the queens’ immolation demonstrates the exalted status of love in Hindustan, neither such immolation nor such love is the monopoly of any single group such as the Rajputs. Among the patrons for such Urdu masnavis were local Rajput elites—successors to the Rajput groups among Jayasi’s audience. With the onset of colonial Indirect Rule in the late eighteenth century, and the increasing monopoly over warfare by the British, old avenues for mobility through military service with rival rulers disappeared. Particular elements of Jayasi’s narrative—embodying the aspirations of his patrons from local warrior groups—thus lost their significance for the authors of the Urdu masnavi. Where Jayasi described Ratansen’s resistance against the Sultan as illuminating his Rajput valor, Ishrat perceives it as the natural response of any self-respecting man.
The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen Page 15
