The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  These contradictions are all too apparent in Kshirodprasad Vidyavinod’s Padmini, which appeared in 1906 at the height of the Swadeshi movement along with a new spurt of such “historical” plays, including Dwijendralal Rai’s Pratapsingha (1905), Durgadas (1906), and Mebar-patan (1908); and Kshirodprasad Vidyavinod’s Pratapaditya (1906), Padmini (1906) and Palasir prayashchitta (1907). In January 1911, thirteen plays were banned under the 1876 Act, including Girischandra’s Sirajuddoulah, Mir Kasim and Chhatrapati Shivaji; Kshirodprasad’s Palasir prayashchitta and Nandakumar; and Haripada Chatterji’s Durgasur and Ranajiter jiban jajna.77 Kshirodprasad (1863–1927) was a professor of chemistry at a Calcutta college as well as a successful dramatist. He specialized in dramatic fairy tales and mythological plays interspersed with numerous songs, but also wrote “historical” plays like Banger Pratapaditya (1903) and Padmini (1906), and plays on epic themes such as Raghubir (1903). His “historical” plays—Pratapaditya and Padmini (1906), Palasir prayaschitta (1907) and Nandakumar (1908)—were written during the height of the Swadeshi movement and its immediate aftermath.

  In his retelling of the Padmini legend, Kshirodprasad reiterates the bhadralok perspective of honorable Rajputs fighting immoral Muslim invaders. His Alauddin justifies regicide as a new strategy for building and strengthening a kingdom (samrajya pratishtha), and dismisses the distinctions between ethical and unethical conduct (dharma ki, adharma ki). When the young Lakshmansinha espouses the use of guile against the Yavanas, his uncle Bhimsinha reprimands him: “Such words do not befit the lord of Chitor, born from the mouth of the sacred fire and foremost among kshatriyas.”78 Kshirodprasad explicitly ascribes kshatriya status to the Rajputs, and compares the advance of Alauddin’s army to the crescent moon swallowing the sun.79 Thus, Alauddin’s army is also exclusively “Muslim” in the play, quite unlike the multi-ethnic and multi-religious armies of the medieval and early modern periods. The status of the Rajput kingdom as a “Hindu” polity is underlined here: Gora burns with the desire to avenge the subjugation of Bharat, seen in the defeat of its Rajput kings and the plunder of its sacred shrines: “I would avenge the murder of Prithviraj, the destruction of the idol of Somnath, the demolition of Nagarkot.”80

  None of this seems novel. What is novel, though, is Kshirodprasad’s focus on the commoners in Chitor. In particular, the play discusses relations between Hindus and Muslims in this ideal “Hindu” kingdom, a particularly volatile issue in Bengal in 1906. Kshirodprasad’s Alauddin dismisses all distinctions between Hindus and Muslims as he describes his imperial ambitions:

  This throne of Delhi once belonged to the Hindus, now it belongs to the Musalmans. The Musalman says, he earns merit and defends righteousness by seizing the kingdom from the hands of the infidel (kafer). The Hindu says, the infidels (bidharmira) come and capture our righteous kingdom (dharmarajya). I cannot enter into these intricate calculations about virtue and vice (dharma[-a]dharma).81

  Gora expresses a similar sentiment when greeting Alauddin’s exiled Vazir, disguised as a mendicant (fakir): “Once one is a human being, then one is neither Hindu nor Musalman—as soon as I see a human being, I am respectful. That is why I respect you.” The Vazir disguised as fakir agrees.82 Gora even adopts Nasiban—the Vazir’s daughter, whom Alauddin married and then spurned, and who seeks vengeance against the sultan from the Rajputs of Chitor—as his sister, after discovering that she is a Muslim: “From that first human couple you are descended—and we are descended.”83 However, this conviction in the oneness of all humanity surfaces only intermittently. The same Gora also declares the rules by which Muslims can live in this country: “If the infidels (bidharmira) wish to blend in, I would accord each one of them the status of my own brother. If not, I would hurl each one of them over to the other side of the Sulaiman mountain.”84 Clearly, there were limits to the accommodation of Muslims within the ideal kingdom of Chitor, with its “natural” creed, that of the “Rajput” and the “Hindu.” The “Muslim” may be treated with respect, but remains an outsider. However, unlike Jyotirindranath or Yajneshwar, Kshirodprasad in 1906 does not conclude with the destruction of Chitor’s temples by Alauddin, revealing a somewhat less strident perspective on Hindu–Muslim relations at this historical moment.

  The Allure of Historical Fiction

  Several scholars have explored the attraction of history for bhadralok intellectuals in the late nineteenth century, and commented on the proliferation of historical fiction, poetry, and plays in this period.85 There is general agreement on the emergence of nationalist history in response to colonial rule, colonial education, and colonial historiography. Some scholars have also argued that since the bhadralok writers, frequently in government jobs, could not directly criticize the British, they turned their focus backward on past conquerors and rulers, the Muslims.86 Equally influential was the bhadralok’s internalizing of Mill’s notorious tripartite scheme of ancient, medieval, and modern periods in Indian history.87 The emergence of a new kind of historical fiction presents somewhat different issues. Sudipta Kaviraj has suggested that bhadralok intellectuals turned to the “mythic discourse” of the historical novel to create heroic pasts for the nation, as a particular response to the positivistic and imperialist history that they were being taught in the colonial curriculum.88 However, the persistence of pre-colonial literary conventions in the new, hybrid genre of historical fiction has received less attention, as have the kinds of forgetting involved in forging this new past.

  The domains of literature and history were delineated in the same way in Bengal as elsewhere in northern India in the pre-colonial period. Thus, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, William Carey’s collection of imaginary tales was called Itihasa-mala and subtitled “A Garland of History.” Similarly, Nilmani Basak’s compilation of Persian stories was published in 1834 as Parasya Itihasa. In 1856, however, the same book was reprinted as Parasya Upanyas.89 In the 1830s, the syllabus for history in Calcutta’s elite Hindu College included Hume’s History of England and Gibbon’s History of the Roman Empire, both unabridged; Mitford’s History of Greece, Ferguson’s Roman Republic, Mountstuart Elphinstone’s History of India, and Russell’s Modern Europe.90 By 1857–8, with the founding of Calcutta University, Vidyasagar (the Sanskrit pandit and colonial superintendent of schools) and Ramgati Nyayaratna had translated the two volumes of the missionary J.C. Marshman’s History of Bengal for the instruction of Bengali students.91

  Bhadralok responses to colonial scholars’ denial that Indians had genuine historical traditions evolved over these decades. On the one hand, in his influential Bharatbarsher Itihas (1858), Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay accepted the lack of “authentic sources” for ancient India and therefore agreed that it was not possible to construct a continuous narrative for ancient Indian history.92 On the other hand, an article entitled “Bharatiya Itihas” in the Arya Darshan (1877) stated that the sixth-century Sanskrit Amarakosha had identified history with puravrtta, i.e. descriptions of past events. As the author concluded, “when the word history has been used in this irrefutable sense everywhere, then there can be no doubt that the ancient Aryans actually wrote history.”93 In the same decade, Bankimchandra was issuing his well-known exhortations to educated Indians to write their own history: “Bengal must have her own history. Otherwise there is no hope for Bengal. Who is to write it? You have to write it. I have to write it. All of us have to write it. Anyone who is a Bengali has to write it . . .”94 Bankim emphasized that Bengalis lacked a “national/community pride” (jatiya gaurab) because they did not write their own history. Thus, bhadralok narrations of the past had the avowed intention of arousing such pride, as already apparent in nascent form in Rangalal’s invocation of Rajput history.

  By the 1870s, then, two contradictory trends seem to have emerged. On the one hand historiographic methods and models, evolved in the European Enlightenment and transmitted through colonial education, shaped the bhadralok’s sense of the professional discipline of history. Now, English
-educated Bengalis abandoned explanations such as divine intervention and ethical conduct “in judging the rise and fall of kingdoms;” instead they preferred a model of political history as an amoral struggle for power. Thus emerged a crucial transition from the “history of kings” to the “history of this country.” The English-educated Bengali borrowed from European historiography an equivalence between country, people, sovereignty, and statehood.95 The discipline of history demanded explanations for past events, from within the realm of human action.

  However, aspiring historians were confronted with material obstacles in gathering evidence that would satisfy the new norms. Access to government documents would obviously have been closely controlled in colonial Bengal. And other enterprises to collect “sources”—material artifacts and manuscripts—began only in the 1870s. Tapati Guha-Thakurta has pointed to the difficulties inherent in such endeavors, given the reluctance of traditional repositories—such as Jain bhandars or Hindu temples and monasteries—to grant access to manuscript collections, let alone sell them, to the new collectors.96 Moreover, most such endeavors at building archives and museums were carried out by individual bhadralok (sometimes sponsored by wealthy zamindar patrons), or by local learned bodies they formed.97 This was the material context for a second trend, in which bhadralok intellectuals lamented how the new positivist history had no place for the evocation of national pride in heroic pasts. Such tensions were resolved in the newly dominant genre of historical fiction.

  In a series of exchanges with the noted historian Akshaykumar Maitra in 1898, Rabindranath applauded both the “newly aroused love for one’s own country” and the new “thirst for history” (itihasakkhudha), attributing these to the spread of education and awakening. He linked the elaboration of a historical record to the consolidation of a national identity that transcended narrower sectarian identities, “when men experience their unity not merely as a religious community (dharmasampradaya) but as a people (janasampradaya).”98 Rabindranath emphasized the need for such a history of India under British rule: to “rescue our history from the hands of others” and “see our Bharatvarsha with our own independent perspective,” was an essential first step in the rediscovery of a genuine national identity.99

  In an essay on the historical novel in the same year, he pointed out how the discipline of history had separated itself from the realm of literature in modern times:

  The Ramayana and the Mahabharata were once history. What is history today feels deeply ashamed to acknowledge kinship with them: they have lost caste by tying the knot with poetry. So hard is it for them to regain their standing that history wishes to pass them off as poetry. Says poetry: “Dear History, you have a lot of falsehood and I have a lot of truth: come, let us live in amity as we used to.” History replies: “No, brother, it’s better to divide up our property between us and go our own ways.” The surveyor named knowledge has set about that task of division. He is determined to draw a firm line between the realm of truth and the realm of the imagination.100

  While recognizing the new distinctions between history and literature, Rabindranath defended the hybrid genre of historical fiction (aitihasik upanyas). He argued that the novel as a literary genre depicted the joys and sorrows, the ebb and flow of individual lives. In doing so, it generated enjoyment (ananda) in the reader. There were, however, a few individuals whose personal joys and sorrows were tied to the great affairs of the world; they had to be seen as heroes upon the grand stage of the past. In depicting the lives of such individuals, the writer drew upon the tools of history. History had to be read for the truth it offered, literature for the pleasure (ananda) it gave. And the genre of historical fiction gave to the reader a pleasure so distinct as to be classified as a distinct rasa—the historical rasa.101 Rabindranath acknowledges Enlightenment norms classifying history as the “kingdom of truth” and literature as the “kingdom of imagination;” however, he defends historical fiction as a mediatory genre between these distinct realms. In allowing the “imaginative” embellishment of historical “truth,” historical fiction aided in a better understanding of history and allowed for the celebration of heroes, unlike historical narratives that merely recorded the lives of significant agents.102

  In 1901, Jyotirindranath explained the presence of invented characters in his historical plays in the same terms. He wrote of the play Ashrumati (1879), based loosely on the Annals: “I accept that Pratapsinha did not have any daughter called “Ashrumati.” She is solely a product of my imagination. I have only this to say, the imaginary events that are described in this play, have the effect not of diminishing Pratapsinha’s lofty character in the least, but of increasing it all the more.”103 His Sarojini had similarly exalted the heroism of the Rana of Chitor by introducing a fictitious daughter, Sarojini, whom Lakshmansinha must sacrifice to the goddess for the redemption of his kingdom from Alauddin’s threatened conquest. While Tod’s Annals was received in colonial Bengal as an authoritative account of Rajput history, its primary use was as a source of inspirational narratives about heroic personages, that bhadralok writers freely adapted. History as a discipline demanded accuracy of facts, evidence, and proof before conclusions. Historical fiction effectively sidestepped these requirements. Therefore, sustained accuracy to historical fact was not even an issue for these authors.

  It is important to recognize, however, that pre-colonial conventions distinguishing “literature” and “history” continued to be invoked throughout this period, affecting the reception of both domains. On the one hand a history rediscovered within dominant European standards of historiography, such as Tod’s Annals, could still be re-read in the light of archaic conventions such as those of the katha and the charitra. And on the other, pre-modern genres such as the epic, narrativizing a mythic past, could be reread as “history.” Bipinbihari Nandi’s verse translation of the Annals, the Sachitra Sapta Kanda Rajasthan (1911), illustrates such readjustments in generic classification. Nandi located his translation in the tradition of the medieval Bengali translations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.104 Tod’s text was thus comparable to the epics in its didactic value, and was read within similar generic horizons: the epics and the Annals were equally exemplary narratives about characters believed to have been historical figures. The new pantheon of heroes for the “nation” thus incorporated figures from both history and myth. Sarala Debi’s Birashtami celebrations in 1902 included the recitation of a Sanskrit verse listing the heroes of the new nation, including the figures of Krishna, Rama, Bhishma, Karna, Arjuna, Bhima, and Meghnad from the epics, along with the historical figures of Rana Pratap, Shivaji, Ranjit Singh, and Pratapaditya.105

  Bhadralok appropriations of Tod’s Annals in this period thus point to a process of partial and incomplete transitions in the history of narrative genres. For these Bengali authors, historical fiction offered itself as a mode of mediation between received narrative forms such as the katha, kavya and charitra, and modern historiographic modes now endowed with factual authority. The recourse to Tod endowed bhadralok celebrations of Rajput tradition with the authority of colonial scholarship, while the sustained recourse to historical fiction allowed writers and audiences to retain the familiar interpretive horizons of pre-colonial narrative genres.

  The power of this mode is apparent from the enduring success of Abanindranath Tagore’s Rajkahini, retelling the Padmini legend again in 1909, this time for an audience of children. Abanindranath (1871–1951) achieved renown as “the leading artist and ideologue of the nationalist art movement in Calcutta.”106 His discontent with his European-style training and his search for an indigenous aesthetic in pre-colonial miniature traditions are well known. His Rajkahini (1909) was a children’s account of episodes from the history of Mewar. It has sold innumerable copies, gone through countless editions, and continues to be one of the most widely read popular accounts of Rajput traditions in Bengali to this day.107

  The account of Padmini in the Rajkahini reveals another persistent attribut
e of the bhadralok versions. If the search for patriotism required the construction of Muslims as enemies, it also required a papering over of conflict within the Rajput domain. So, where Tod had represented the dissension of the Rajput chiefs as an aberration from his inferred norm of stable monarchies, bhadralok authors erased or deflated such conflict between kings and chiefs. In Abanindranath’s account, “patriotic” (rajbhakta) Rajput chiefs disregard Bhimsinha’s offer to surrender Padmini, and decide unanimously that they must fight Alauddin and avenge the insult to the kingdom.108 Such unanimity is in stark contrast to the courtly intrigue surrounding the decision to fight Alauddin in the pre-colonial Rajasthan versions.

  In other bhadralok versions, conflict between the Rajput king and his chiefs was seen as endangering the kingdom, but was deflated in the interests of aggrandizing the central conflict between Rajput patriot and Muslim conqueror. In Jyotirindranath’s play, a defiant Vijaysinha resists the king to protect his fiancée Sarojini from being sacrificed. Angered at this challenge to his authority, Lakshmansinha expels the rebel from his realm. Although the inflamed Vijaysinha defies this decree, the conflict between king and prominent chief is deflated abruptly when the priest alters his interpretation of the goddess’s demand for a sacrifice.109 Kshirodprasad echoed Jyotirindranath’s depiction, of internal rifts among the Rajputs preventing them from mounting an adequate response to the Delhi sultan. Here, the crisis is provoked by Lakshmansinha’s recalcitrant son Arunsinha. Distracted by romantic love, he fails to present himself for the first battle against Alauddin. For this dereliction of duty his father the Rana expels him from the kingdom. Lakshmansinha continues to rebuff Arun’s subsequent offers of help even when he sorely needs reinforcements. This conflict is resolved when Arunsinha dies defending Chitor after his father’s rumored death, and finally lives up to the “Rajput” ideal.