The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  The account of Padmini concludes with Alauddin’s victory and his destruction of Chitor, a pattern repeated by Tod’s Alauddin in all the kingdoms he conquered; Tod invoked the sultan’s bigoted zealotry, likening him in this respect to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Such demonization of the enemy was absent from seventeenth-century accounts emerging in the context of Mewar’s attempts to negotiate a satisfactory relationship with the Mughal emperor. With the weakening of Mughal authority by the late seventeenth century, however, the Sisodias gradually magnified the import of their early clashes with Mughal authority. In the domain of marital alliances, for instance, they laid claim to “purity” of lineage on the basis of never having married their daughters to Mughal emperors.109 Tod’s description of Alauddin’s conduct suggests his proximity to this eighteenth-century perspective. In the early nineteenth century, the Sisodias invoked such claims during negotiations between the East India Company and the Udaipur Rana. They also recast their conflicts with Mughal imperial authority as resistance to a “Mahomedan dynasty,” claims that Company officials acquiesced to for their own reasons. Tod echoed British consensus when he asserted that the Mughal regime had been characterized by “neglect, oppression and religious interference.” These features had brought about its downfall: “Encroachment on their rights, and disregard to their habits and religious opinions, alienated the Rajputs, and excited the inhabitants of the south to rise against their Mogul oppressors.”110 Such exigencies were responsible for the Company’s expansion on the subcontinent: “Our position in the East has been, and continues to be, one in which conquest forces herself upon us.”111

  Like his more prominent contemporary James Mill, Tod regarded the ancient period as “Hindu,” and celebrated the Rajputs for the “greater purity” of “Hindu manners” among them, attributing this pristine state to the region’s relative isolation.112 Mughal authority had been replaced by Maratha exactions in the eighteenth century, seriously weakening the Rajput kingdoms. Tod argued, however, that the Marathas’ “predatory” nature was not innate, and that “foreign” conquest had “changed their natural habits.” Shivaji was still worthy of “admiration” for having resisted the “foreign” domination of Aurangzeb. It was his descendants’ presence in Rajasthan that needed to be condemned and countered.113 The Marathas could thus be recuperated into the “Hindu” fold. As for the Rajputs, they had consistently defended “the hopes of the Hindu” in heroically resisting “ages of Muhammadan bigotry and power.”114

  Such characterization of Mughal rule and Hindu resistance echoed contemporary European views of the medieval Crusades. A reviewer of the Annals noted the “parallel”: “It is certainly curious that the eternal and hereditary foes, against which the Indian as well as the Christian chivalry signalized itself, should have been the Saracens.”115 Enmity with the “Muhammadan” thus served to confirm the chivalry of the Rajputs, by invoking the familiar horizons of its perceived European analog. In other words, Sisodia representations of their conflict with the Mughals provided Tod with enemies already familiar to him from his European moorings.

  His exaltation of feudal chivalry generated further affinity to Sisodia perspectives, apparent in this celebration of Rana Pratap: “He spurned every overture which had submission for its basis, or the degradation of uniting his family by marriage with the Tatar, though lord of countless multitudes.” The proximity to Sisodia discourse is striking here as Tod echoes Sisodia linkages between marriage customs, “purity” of blood, and resistance to the enemy. He was clearly stirred by Pratap’s resistance to Akbar, pronouncing it worthy subject for that most exalted of feudal literary genres, a “romance.” And he adopted wholesale the Sisodia reinterpretation of Rajput history. Thus he described the desertion of Pratap by his Rajput allies as the “violation” of “Hindu prejudice . . . by every prince in Rajasthan.”116 Tod reconstructed the history of Mewar from the narrative traditions of its elite. In the process, he appropriated from Sisodia ideology elements that converged with his own European intellectual moorings. Such convergence was clearest in the recognition of common enemies.

  The Limits of Colonial Influence

  In 1849, a poet named Keshav Bhatt composed a narrative about Ratan Sen and Sultan Shah in Brajbhasha.117 Nothing is known of the poet, the scribe if different from the poet, or the place of composition or transcription. The plot of this narrative is suggestive, however, of the limits of Tod’s influence in the decades immediately after the Annals was published. Keshav Bhatt’s narrative also reveals the persistence of the Padmavat tradition not only in the Persian–Urdu tradition of Ibrat and Ishrat discussed above, but in the literary community of Brajbhasha as well.

  Keshav launches into his narrative without much preamble; his subject is the battle and mutual deceit between Shri Ratansen and Aladin Patsah, who desired Padmini and so arrived at the fortress of Chitor and laid siege to it. Ratansen is clearly identified as a Chauhan. This cursory introduction suggests that the poet and his audience were quite familiar with the legend of Padmini, Ratansen, and Sultan Alauddin that he was about to recount. After recounting the failure of a ten-month siege in one line, Keshav clarifies the stakes involved in this conflict: the sultan’s emissary, Vad Khan Pathan, who is sent to negotiate with Ratansen, promises to bring the Chauhan and surrender him at the sultan’s feet, and thus preserve Dilli’s honor (saram dilli ki rakhau). He also promises to fulfill the sultan’s desire by uniting him with Padmini.

  Vad Khan then persuades Ratansen’s chief minister, Chandrahans Diwan, to assist him. Persuaded by both the sultan’s emissary and his own minister, Ratansen agrees to the familiar meal stratagem. Padmini’s first response is to warn the Rao against the sultan’s possible treachery. She also warns of the danger to the household’s honor from allowing access to a turak. Ratansen disregards her advice, of course, and the plot proceeds. Thunderstruck, literally, at the beauty of Ratansen’s serving woman, the determined Alauddin plots his capture, and the greedy Chauhan falls into the trap. The ministers in Chitor agree to surrender the queen, with the exception of the valiant chiefs Gora and Vadil, the defenders of Hindu manhood (hindu hadda mucchha apani). The narrative ends with Shiva and Parvati watching this new epic battle from the skies, the death of Gora and the sati of his wife Bhanamati.

  In the absence of any further information about Keshav Bhatt, it is difficult to locate this narrative in a particular place, since Braj was a widespread literary medium in the courts of northern India and even the peninsula, from the late sixteenth century onward.118 Traces of a non-Mewar context are apparent, however, in the ascription of Chauhan (rather than Guhila) affiliation to Ratansen. Other elements point to a familiarity with the Jain narratives of pre-colonial Mewar, however: the decision of the chiefs to surrender the queen, the attempts of Vadil’s mother and wife to dissuade him from doing battle with the sultan, and the sati of Gora’s wife Bhanamati after his valiant death in battle. Keshav Bhatt also echoes the tenor of the Mewar Jain versions from the early eighteenth century, in the increased stridency toward the turak, and the concern for “hindu” manhood and honor. At the very least, his narrative suggests the persistence of circuits of transmission for such pre-colonial narrative traditions, two decades after the publication of Tod’s Annals. Beyond that, we can only speculate whether this poet and his audience were beyond the socio-cultural reach of the Mewar court, but still had access to Jain narrative traditions of Padmini from Mewar, or whether he knew of Tod’s account and still chose to retell an older version that resonated with his audience.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, Tod’s Annals had won acclaim in England, and had provided a new basis for continued Rajput hegemony in the princely states of Rajasthan under indirect colonial rule. Beyond Rajasthan, however, versions of the Padmavat continued to flourish in northern India: in new manuscript copies of the Padmavat, and in a new, Urdu adaptation at the Rampur court. Meanwhile, in early colonial Bengal, until Persian was abolished as the language of government
in 1837, both landed and scribal groups continued to be well versed in Persianate literary culture. Persian chronicles (tarikh) continued to emerge until the early years of the nineteenth century. It is not surprising, then, that fresh manuscripts of Alaol’s Padmabati were commissioned throughout this period, especially in the eastern parts of the province.

  The versions of the Padmini legend that circulated between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries provide significant evidence of continuities, rather than ruptures, between pre-colonial and colonial practices, particularly in the domain of culture. Between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Sufis, Jains, Charans, Bhats, Sisodia Rajput rulers, and Mughal courtiers, all read and heard various narratives of the legend, and redacted them selectively. Even as Tod attempted to collate such legends and sift them through the filters of an emerging, positivist historical method, his Annals was shaped fundamentally by the “sources,” both textual and oral, that were available to him, and the assumptions of the Sisodia Rajput rulers who helped him assemble a new history of Rajasthan.

  Notes

  1. For a panoramic political narrative, see Sarkar 1964; for Avadh see Barnett 1980; Fisher 1987; idem 1991: 376–86; for Rohilkhand, see Gommans 1995: 177–9; for Anglo-Rajput relations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Bhattacharya 1972.

  2. Crooke 1995: vol. 1, xliv.

  3. In the abundant scholarship, for explorations of continuities from the pre-colonial period, and the role of Indian intellectuals in shaping cultural practices and information-gathering under colonialism, see Bayly 1996: 180–211; and Wagoner 2003. For instances of the rupture thesis, see Cohn (1960) 1987: 320–42; idem 1996: 16–56; and Dirks 1993.

  4. M. Gupta ed. 1952: 3–7; de Bruijn 1996: 312.

  5. De Bruijn 1996: 318–19.

  6. Fisher 1987: 60–79; for the distinctive Lucknow style of poetry, see Petievich 1992: 18–33.

  7. Fisher 1987: 60–89.

  8. Bayly 1983: 25; Gommans 1995: 142.

  9. Gommans 1995: 178–9.

  10. Sprenger 1854: 251–2.

  11. Jalil ed. 1994: 33–4.

  12. Sprenger 1854: 184–5, 189, 239, 241.

  13. For a characterization of the Urdu masnavi in North India during this period as “religiously neutral” for the most part, see Shackle 2000: 59.

  14. Ibrat-o-Ishrat 1928: 11. Subsequent citations of page numbers are in parentheses in the text.

  15. For Faizi, see Alam and Subrahmanyam 2005; for Razi’s description of Hindustan, see Phukan 1996: 50; for the moth and the flame, ibid. 47–8.

  16. D. Bandopadhyay ed. 1985: vol. 2, 4.

  17. Ahsan ed. 1968: 111–24.

  18. For the fluency in Persian of the Hindu zamindars and rajas of the early and mid-eighteenth century, see Curley 2002; for the “Persianized courtly culture” of mansabdar aristocrats, local gentry, and bureaucratic and scribal jatis such as Kayasths and Baidyas into the early nineteenth century, see K. Chatterjee 1998: 917–20.

  19. P. Chatterjee 1999: 80–1.

  20. K. Chatterjee 1998: 936.

  21. Ibid. 942.

  22. Adam 1941: 150.

  23. Ibid. 281, 284.

  24. Ibid. 156, 291.

  25. Ibid. 439.

  26. Bhattacharya 1972: 4; for the foundation of Alwar state in the late eighteenth century under such circumstances, see Haynes 1978.

  27. Jain 1993: 10; Shankar 1988: 8–12.

  28. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 182–3.

  29. Ibid. vol. 1, 509.

  30. Jain 1993: 7–10; 20–1.

  31. Bhattacharya 1972: 16–17.

  32. With Mewar’s declining power in the late eighteenth century, the temple’s growing control over its rents and trade would have greatly increased its wealth, making it an easy target for Holkar. Peabody 1991: 744.

  33. Bhattacharya 1972: 122–34.

  34. Ibid. 138.

  35. Ibid. 229–37. For rich analyses of a similar trajectory in the relatively newer Rajput state of Alwar, see Haynes 1978; idem 1989. For a wider survey of the establishment of indirect colonial rule in large parts of India, see Fisher 1991.

  36. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 224. For further instances of English anxiety about Russian invasion in the 1820s and 1830s, see Peabody 1996: 202.

  37. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 547–8.

  38. Anonymous 1830: 89.

  39. Tod 1995: vol. 1, v, vii.

  40. Peabody 1996: 206–9.

  41. Brookes 1859: 23.

  42. Bhattacharya 1972: 242.

  43. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 174.

  44. Bhattacharya 1972: 242–4.

  45. For comparable attempts by the Kota ruler to strengthen his authority under Company patronage in the early nineteenth century, see Peabody 2003: 147–67. British policy was by no means set in stone, however. For shifts in colonial policy toward Alwar through the nineteenth century, see Haynes 1978; idem 1989; for Jaipur, see Stern 1988.

  46. The powerful Chundawat chief of Salumbar took advantage of soldiers’ uprisings at Neemuch and Nasirabad to reassert his demands to the rana; he threatened to install a rival king of Mewar at Chitor if his demands were not met within eight days. Paliwal 1971: 34–5.

  47. The Rana complained subsequently of straitened circumstances. Ojha 1994: vol. 2, 716.

  48. “The gift of a lakh” is a figurative expression, the real value of the gift on this occasion being considerably lower. Tod 1995: vol. 2, 742.

  49. By 1879 the Mewar court sought to bar Charans and Bhats from other states from coming to Mewar during marriages among its elite. Jain 1993: 121.

  50. Bhattacharya 1972: 217–18.

  51. “Queen Mother Chandrawat at Jaipur in 1768 and later in 1778, Rani Jhali at Mewar in 1772 and 1777, Kamnabai at Pratapgarh in 1774, Rani Kishori in 1780 and Rani Laxmi after 1824 at Bharatpur, Shubh Kunwari at Dungarpur after 1790, and the Sisodiani and Bhatiani queens at Bikaner during the minority of Swaroop Singh had regulated state affairs.” Jain 1993: 126.

  52. For similar processes in colonial South India, see Price 1996: 74–5. While elite women in Tamil country were marginalized “formally in relation to the affairs of the state,” they did attempt to claim entitlements in the colonial law courts. For the comparable narrowing of Telugu elite women’s autonomy in the colonial period, see Price 2004: 192–221. More research is needed for Rajasthan, to ascertain the responses of elite Rajput women to such colonial transitions. I am grateful to David Gilmartin for pointing out the parallels between Rajasthan and South India.

  53. Ibid. vol. 1, lxv.

  54. Ibid. vol. 2, 652.

  55. As David Hume argued, “Would you try a Greek or Roman by the common law of England? . . . There are no manners so innocent or reasonable, but may be rendered odious or ridiculous, if measured by a standard unknown to the persons.” Cited in Gay 1969: vol. 2, 381.

  56. Peabody 1996: 189.

  57. Ibid. 197.

  58. Chapman 1986: 33–9.

  59. “One characteristic incident concerning this hero of the Indian bard of chivalry . . . will remind the reader of a striking passage in the Lady of the Lake, though the Fitzjames and Roderic Dhu of the Rajpoot legend carry their courtesy in the midst of their death-feud to a more extraordinary height.” Anonymous 1832b: 25.

  60. Dharwadker 1993: 161.

  61. Tod 1995: vol. 1, lvii–lxii.

  62. Dow 1973: vol. 1, iii–iv.

  63. Ludden 1993: 264.

  64. Butler 1988: 46.

  65. Black 1926: 8.

  66. Anonymous 1832b: 1.

  67. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 30.

  68. Ibid. vol. 2, 802–4.

  69. Ibid. vol. 1, 310, 378.

  70. A loosely invoked notion of race, suggesting shared linguistic, cultural and environmentally shaped behavioral attributes, also aided this understanding of nationality. Bayly 1995: 172; Peabody 1996: 188.

  71. Wellek 1973: vol. 3, 84.

  72. Dharwadker 1993: 167.

  73. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 297–
8. Emphasis added.

  74. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 297–8.

  75. Tod, “Translations from Cand the Bard—Prithi Raj Raso,” a series of four handwritten large notebooks, uncataloged, with unnumbered pages, in the Tod Collection at the Royal Asiatic Society, London. I am grateful to Jason Freitag for pointing me to these notebooks, which suggest that Tod was working towards a translation of the Prithviraj Raso at the time of his death. The summary of the Padmavati Sankhya is from Notebook 4. Tod cites as his source Ms. no. 159 (Selections from the Prithviraj Raso in Braj). Barnett 1940: 151.

  76. “Khumman Raso,” Tod Collection, Royal Asiatic Society. The manuscript was copied for Tod in 1819. Khumman’s quest for Padmini, folios 27a onwards; the lines cited here, folio 27a, v. 553; folio 27b, v. 560.

  77. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 250–1.

  78. Ibid. vol. 1, 436, fn. 1. Bernier’s influential account was published in French in 1670–1. The English translation appeared from London in 1671 in six parts, as The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogul. See Teltscher 1997: 3. Tod possessed a copy of the 1684 edition.

  79. For the collaboration between Colin Mackenzie and Narrain Row in southern India at the same time, see Wagoner 2003.