The Padmini Upakhyan was clearly part of this new, self-conscious project, to forge a new linguistic idiom and new forms appropriate for high literature. And yet, it reveals traces of the same pre-modern puranetihas that Rangalal was so anxious to distance himself from. Thus, the Upakhyan retains a Puranic periodization mentioned without commentary by Tod, as Rangalal inserted Rajput history into a continuum beginning with the epics and lasting until the present moment: “In Treta the Suryavansha took the royal sceptre. In Dvapar the Chandravansha gained renown. At the beginning of Kali the solar lineage again became kings. Shiladitya of this celestial lineage was renowned throughout the earth.”35 There are multiple ironies here. On the one hand, Rangalal narrates how he heard an opinion expressed at a meeting he had attended, that Bengal had not had a great poet because it had been subjugated over centuries. He recounts how this challenge inspired him to compose the Padmini Upakhyan.36 But this assertion of aesthetic independence, published a year after the 1857 Rebellion, was based upon an acknowledged debt to the colonial administrator Tod, who was seen as providing access to an older, and therefore more “authentic,” Rajput past. Rangalal’s version also retained other elements from those older forms for narrating the past: thus the loss of clan and kingdom (rajyalop, vamshalop) is attributed to the demonic thirst (rakshasir kshudhar) of Chitor’s patron goddess, Byan Mata.37
The Puranic perspective also brought with it a characteristic frame in which kshatriya Rajputs battled the asura Alauddin, often with the help of the gods. Thus Rangalal’s Bhimsinha taunts the sultan:
Born in an asura lineage, you desire to taste the nectar . . . For the obliteration of the demonic horde, [this was] the goddess’s trick; she took the form of a young lady in Vindhyachal. Hearing her beauty described by a messenger, the lord of the demons lost his senses, wanting to capture her. He died with his entire clan at the hands of Chamunda. In the same fashion, O evil-minded one, you will go to the house of Yama.38
Of course, in Rangalal’s version he is merely responding to Alauddin’s inflammatory rhetoric: “I will cause the Hindus to give up their worship, rituals, devotions (brata puja yag); by bringing into the [Muslim] fold (imane) the wife of their leader.”39 The anti-Muslim rhetoric visible here in a printed text would become much more prominent in dramatic versions of the Padmini legend performed in the public theater by the 1870s, such as Jyotirindranath’s Sarojini.
Padmini in the Public Theater
In the 1870s and 1880s, new schools were set up to define and preserve “indigenous” values in education, including Nabagopal Mitra’s National School in 1870, and the City College and numerous schools set up by the Brahmos.40 While such efforts were not new, the increase in these institutions suggests the political temper of the bhadralok. From now on, bhadralok accounts of Rajput history were increasingly anti-colonial, especially in the theater. Plays such as Jyotirindranath Tagore’s Sarojini (1875) and Upendranath Das’s violently anti-British Sarat-sarojini (1874) and Surendrabinodini (1875), used the theater for political mobilization; patriotic songs were used as set pieces within plays and became very popular in their own right.41 Colonial authorities were quick to recognize this growing politicization of the drama in particular.42 While the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 was withdrawn four years later, the Dramatic Performances Act enacted in 1876 was never withdrawn.
Like his kin in the Tagore family, Jyotirindranath Tagore (1848–1925) was actively involved in the nascent bhadralok patriotism. Co-founder of the Patriots’ Association in 1865, he was also actively involved in the Hindu Mela. At this annual fair held between 1867 and 1880, along with lectures and songs, exhibitions of agricultural produce, animals, birds, machinery and handicraft items, plays such as Kiran Chandra Bandopadhyay’s Bharat Mata were staged.43 The song Satyendranath Tagore composed for the inaugural mela, depicted the country as the Mother shackled by “Subjection and Ignorance,” and exhorted the “children of Bharat” to rise. Jyotirindranath later used the song in his historical play Purubikram (1874).44 Sarojini ba Chitor Akraman appeared in 1875, just a couple of years after the first public performance of a play in Calcutta. Except for some prominent actresses, almost all the “enthusiasts”45 involved in this new public theater—playwrights, producers, male performers and patrons—were overwhelmingly from the bhadralok. Thus the public theater became a significant site for the forging of bhadralok identity and culture.46 As the bhadralok confronted shrinking opportunities for advancement and turned to nationalism, the proliferation of historical plays celebrating valiant patriots resisting unjust tyrants is understandable. The spectacle value of such clashes would have made these themes even more attractive for theatrical companies dependent on box office receipts for their survival.47
Jyotirindranath’s play takes its title from its central character, a daughter of Rana Lakshmansinha of Chitor, who is betrothed to the valiant Rajput chief Vijaysinha. Meanwhile, the Pathan king Alauddin threatens the kingdom, demanding the surrender of the beautiful queen Padmini. The Rana’s priest, who is actually Alauddin’s trusted associate, informs Lakshmansinha that he must sacrifice his beloved daughter to the goddess to rescue his kingdom from Alauddin. This triggers a crisis within the Rajput kingdom, as a defiant Vijaysinha resists the king’s decree to protect his fiancée Sarojini. With Alauddin at the gates, the priest has been successful in distracting the Rajputs, He then agrees to sacrifice another woman to the goddess; the men go out to fight Alauddin one last time, and the women, led by the beautiful Padmini, commit jauhar. The dramatic value of the subplot, involving young lovers, disguise, and treachery, is obvious. So is its effect in exalting the patriotism of the Rana of Chitor, determined to sacrifice even his daughter to preserve his kingdom. What is striking, though, is the stridency in depicting the Muslim on the public stage. The sultan, Alauddin, declares his intent to raze to the ground each and every temple of the Hindus.48 In Jyotirindranath’s version, as in Rangalal’s earlier, he threatens not only Padmini but all Rajput women. As the commander of Lakshmansinha’s army reminds him, “The Creator has entrusted such a heavy burden on your shoulders: the lives, honor, happiness and freedom of lakhs and lakhs of Rajput girls depend on you.”49
In contrast to the lascivious “Muslim” conqueror, however, the Rajputs treat women honorably. Jyotirindranath’s play introduces the character Roshenara, absent from Tod’s account like Sarojini, to demonstrate this. This woman of noble birth is captured from Alauddin’s camp by Vijaysinha, and befriended by Sarojini. Her captor reassures her, “O beautiful one! . . . Do not fear. Come with us. Rajput warriors know to honor women.” In fact, Vijaysinha behaves so chivalrously that Roshenara falls in love with him.50 However, the narrative thwarts the Muslim woman’s desire for her Rajput captor, as Roshenara is sacrificed to the goddess by the false priest Bhairavacharya, who then discovers that she is his long-lost daughter. Nilufer Ibrahim has pointed out how a Hindu-Muslim marriage could not be shown on stage in the public theater during these years, such was the audience’s hostility to the idea.51 Jyotirindranath’s play demonstrates a striking instance of continuity between the drama and the social values of its audience.
Evidence available about the staging of Sarojini reveals further such continuities. As Sarojini is about to be sacrificed, Vijaysinha runs on to the stage to reveal that Bhairavacharya is not a Brahmin priest but a Muslim in disguise. The prominent actress Binodini Dasi recounts what followed in one particular show: “At this, the entire audience grew so agitated that they could not restrain themselves any more and leapt over the footlights crying murder. Immediately, they [the performers] swooned in excitement. The curtain was dropped right away and they were picked up from the stage and restored to consciousness. Only when they were restored to normalcy did the performance continue.”52 Audience ire was directed toward other Muslim figures as well, such as the commoner Fateullah—Alauddin’s messenger to the false priest Bhairavacharya. Jyotirindranath has this character speak dobhashi, so that his language betrays him as �
�Musalman,” “foreigner,” and “spy”.53 In another instance of such anti-Muslim sentiment spilling over from the fictional realm to the real world, Binodini herself seems to have believed that “Musalmans” routinely attacked and persecuted young women in places such as Lahore, when they “ruled over the land.”54
The Sacred Nation and its Enemies
Equally noteworthy in Jyotirindranath’s version is a new sacralizing of the land as nation: the priest Bhairavacharya names a network of pilgrimage sites defining the sacred nation: Brindavan and Gokul, Kashi and Kurukshetra, Jagannath and Chandranath, Jwalamukhi and Hardwar.55 The trope seems to have been common in these years. In 1876, Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, intending to write a “mystical history” of India in his allegorical Pushpanjali, demarcated the nation’s geographical boundaries by having the sages Markandeya and Vyasa visit places of pilgrimage all over the subcontinent.56 And a few years later Aghornath Barat, in his Preface to Yajneshwar Bandopadhyay’s Bengali translation of the Annals, evoked the image of a land revivified by a new strength coursing through it, a strength carried “along the blessed waters of the Bhagirathi.”57
Such demarcations of an organically unified territorial space were not new in the Indian context. Pre-modern dynastic realms had deployed notions of a regional territory characterized by a distinctive biological-ethical essence, often tied to the memorials or burial sites of its heroes, kings, saints, and preachers.58 Bhudeb’s evocation of a transregional sacred landscape was thus of older provenance; holy men, scholars, and pilgrims had long traveled across the subcontinent, attesting to the notion of a sacred landscape marked by holy sites extending well beyond their own region. In pre-colonial Bengal, Bharatchandra’s Annadamangal (1752) narrates one such journey when the zamindar Bhavananda takes Man Simha on a circuitous return journey to the Mughal capital Delhi, through several pilgrimage centers: Puri, Kashi, Marhatta, the land of the Bargis, Gujarat where Kalaketu lived, Mathura, and Brindavan. The travelers do not visit Rajasthan.59 And yet, colonial bhadralok mappings of the “nation” invoked these older “sacred landscapes” for a new purpose. In Barat’s description of the geographical expanse of Bharatvarsha, the idea of a “bio-moral” essence survives only as allusion to the blessed, life-giving waters of the Bhagirathi; Barat substitutes for such an essence a shared history and culture, emphatically asserted. Such a claim departed from pre-modern sacred landscapes that invoked a community of religious practice, not the transcendent historical-cultural boundaries of the nation.
Barat states explicitly in his Preface that this shared history and culture of Bharatvarsha are “Aryan” and “Hindu,” while Bhudeb’s imagined nation omits the Muslim sacred landscape of the subcontinent, peopled by its own numerous saints and shrines. By the 1880s, such exclusions were achieved through claiming racial and historical descent, used in turn to assert transregional affiliations now seen as inherited from antiquity. Scholars like Rajendralal Mitra asserted that the topographical map of the lands settled by the ancient Aryans corresponded to present-day northern India. This identification of the Aryans as ancestors of the “Hindus” provided the latter, including the Bengali bhadralok, a “superior” ancestry and heritage that provided equality with the “civilized races” of Europe.60 Tod’s speculative explorations of such shared origins in the Annals thus provided bhadralok intellectuals with a master text that ratified their search for putative “superior” origins.
Yajneshwar Bandopadhyay’s embellishment of Tod’s account (in his widely read translation of the Annals, published in 1884) suggests how entrenched this discourse was becoming.61 Tod’s brief mention of Alauddin’s “bigoted zeal” is now magnified: “Under his harsh and terrible assault, how many hundreds of kingdoms of Rajasthan were . . . uprooted for all time by the Hindu-hating Alauddin! Those kings of the sacred Agnikula in whose courts once all of Bharatvarsha’s destiny was decided, today they have been eradicated with their entire lineages for eternity, by the terrible atrocities of the Musalman warrior.”62
Further, in Yajneshwar’s account, Alauddin’s forces are mere “Yavana soldiers” (Yavana sainya gan), while the Rajputs are “valiant warriors” (Rajput bir gana). Such portrayals reveal the distance the bhadralok Padmini narratives had traveled from pre-colonial Rajput narrative traditions, that had readily acknowledged their enemy’s valor. The latter had emerged between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, in the context of a competitive military labor market and a political culture shared by North Indian ruling elites across region and ethnicity; in such an ethos, an acknowledgment of the enemy’s valor only highlighted one’s own prowess. In contrast, the bhadralok authors appropriated from Tod the idea that the Rajputs were a “race” or a “nationality,” thus reasserting his premise of the inalienable bond between the “people” and the “land.” The aspiring imperialist’s claims were recast therefore as inherently illegitimate, so that the enemy was wily, not valiant. The index of Bharatvarsha’s decline was the treacherous politics of new rulers like Shahabuddin and Alauddin. Yajneshwar laments Alauddin’s capture of Bhimsinha: “Alas! Did the wicked, treacherous Yavanas return the pure and boundless trust of the Rajputs in this fashion! The simple-minded Bhimsinha was oppressed in the most horrible way by the deceitful and treacherous (kapatachari) Yavana.”63
The translation reveals how the Bengali bhadralok reinserted the Rajput narratives received via Tod into older, more familiar, frames of reference. Tod had acknowledged Alauddin’s military success, while comparing him to Aurangzeb in his “bigoted hypocrisy.”64 Yajneshwar sees in Tod’s “Pathan Emperor” an old enemy from the Puranas: the Yavana barbarian. While Tod had already recast the resistance of regional kingdoms to imperial conquest as Rajput patriotism, the bhadralok authors reinterpreted this phenomenon within a Puranic idiom, as kshatriya defense of dharma. The emergent nation thereby acquired a political ethic asserted to be continuous with its ancient norms.
While it is difficult to pinpoint the precise historical reasons for this gradual intensification of anti-Muslim sentiment among the bhadralok, their overwhelming monopoly of government jobs and the professions, and the near-absence of Muslims from these sectors, would certainly have contributed to shaping this discourse in particular ways.65 Official statistics compiled in these decades present a stark picture. In 1876, only 16.5 per cent of Calcutta’s Muslim male population could read and write, as compared to 42 per cent of the city’s Hindu men.66 In the 1881 Census, more than 90 per cent of Bengal’s Muslims were recorded as belonging to agricultural or service groups. Of these, the vast majority were actual tillers of the soil, only a handful being non-cultivating landowners.67 According to the 1901 Census, Bengal’s total population was 78,493,410 persons.68 18,950 persons were recorded as employed in government services, and 22,530 persons as working in the “professions.” Brahmins, Baidyas, and Kayasths, who constituted 5.2 per cent of the population, had 80.2 per cent of the total appointments to high government positions, where lower-caste Hindus had 9.5 per cent and Muslims 10.3 per cent.69 In the same year, Hindus constituted 94 per cent of all students in arts colleges, 96.2 per cent of the students in professional colleges, and 88 per cent in high schools.70
Educated Muslim resentment against “the Bengali of the Hindu pathshalas” had been growing, but public debate intensified after 1871, when the government recommended “greater encouragement to the creation of a vernacular literature for the Mahomedans.” The provincial government in Bengal Presidency also determined at this time that the vernacular of Bengali Muslims was Bengali and not Hindustani or Urdu. By 1892, the Muslim newspaper Sudhakar, published from Calcutta, protested against the historical novels of bhadralok writers such as Bankim and Romesh Chandra Dutt: “The Mussalmans of Bengal . . . are greatly pained to see their race vilified in every page of every work of these authors. Literature is the true mirror of the national mind, and Bengali literature being so full of abuse for the Mussalmans, it is easy to see how deep is the Bengali’s hatred of the Mussalman.”71
/> Such protests came even from “journals broadly sympathetic toward nationalism, like the Soltan and the Mussalman.”72 Further, just as the Hindu bhadralok was engaged in constructing a glorious history for their new “nation,” Muslim journals and historical literature emerged with a mirror image by the end of the nineteenth century, asserting the glories of pre-modern Islam. Histories such as Abdul Karim’s Bharatbarshe Musalman Rajatver Itihas (1898), Muizuddin Ahmad’s Turashker Itihas (1903), and Shaikh Abdul Jabbar’s Makka Sharifer Itihas (1906), and Madina Sharifer Itihas (1907) suggest that it was not only the glories of “Muslim rule” on the subcontinent that were recuperated.73 The history of “Muslim” kingdoms elsewhere was seen to be equally relevant for this audience in Bengal, as it now asserted its affiliation with a new, transregional and pan-Islamic community. Over the next three decades, educated Muslims published works on Islamic subjects in modern Bengali, “aimed particularly at the educated, or semi-educated, youth.” By the early twentieth century, “Muslim identity was perceived to be totally incompatible with local symbols, dress and language.”74
The growing tensions were visible in the nature of political mobilization in Bengal at the turn of the twentieth century. As Sumit Sarkar has pointed out in his landmark study of the Swadeshi movement against the Partition of Bengal in 1905, Swadeshi tactics included the use of “traditional weapon[s] of the Hindu samaj,” such as social ostracism against sellers and buyers of foreign goods. The zamindars’ role in propagating Swadeshi ideals often translated into measures such as the forcible closing of local markets (hat) that serviced a predominantly Muslim peasantry. Nationalist mobilization often implied “a considerable degree of intimidation of the lower orders (in many East Bengal districts predominantly Muslim).” British divide-and-rule tactics in the late nineteenth century had aggravated pre-existing social and class divides, so that the Swadeshi period was marked by the outbreak of rioting by Muslims in Bengal.75 This was in spite of attempts to evolve secular symbols that would unite Bengali Hindus and Muslims in the nationalist struggle, including suggested festivals honoring Mir Kasim and Akbar. And the Swadeshi movement had taken up “Hindu-Muslim unity as one of its principal themes, and broadcast it through innumerable speeches, pamphlets and songs.” And yet, by the 1900s, the idiom of traditional Hinduism had become “the primary communication medium between the intelligentsia and the masses.”76
The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen Page 21
