Maharani, I say again, what you are going to do, its outcome will be death! Once one wears the jewels and adornments of the goddess, there is no other escape! Within six months one must jump into the fire alive and be burnt! Padmini said, O mother, bless me, this beautiful woman for whom Rajasthan burns today, her cursed beauty may be burnt to ashes in that same fire. The ascetic replied, then so be it. My child, I bless you, that Chitor for which you disregard your own life, your name will be immortal in that Chitor forever. That Mahasati whose ornaments you don today, after your death that Mahasati will keep you at her feet.135
The tropes of self-sacrifice for patriotism, and for preservation of chastity, converge here to create a powerful image of the queen as mother-goddess who inspires her compatriots to defend their honor. Through the device of the priestess’s prophecy, Abanindranath also makes the jauhar a premeditated sacrifice on the part of Padmini, thus exalting the Hindu woman’s willed and voluntary self-sacrifice for a transcendent ideal. Devotion to husband and nation converged seamlessly in such symbolism.
Bhadralok narratives of Padmini thus exalt the queen as embodying the essential values of the normative Rajput order: honor, chastity, and patriotism. The queen functions as the moral guide in times of crisis, inspiring those around her to live up to their ideals. In rallying the Rajputs to heroic action, the queen becomes a patron goddess, as it were, defining the terms on which the Rajputs could preserve their realm and their values even at the cost of their own lives. Such exaltation of the queen serves to further demonize the enemy who poses a threat to her as well as to the kingdom. Bhadralok representations of Padmini thus articulate the role of reformed gender relations in the construction of a nation and the reconstruction of a national history.
Colonial Knowledge: Dominant Discourse?
Even as the Bengali bhadralok were engaged in forging this particular version of the nation’s patriotic past, Tod’s Annals was being put to other uses elsewhere. As William Pinch has demonstrated, in the late 1920s Swami Dharnidharacharya—a young Vaishnava intellectual in the town of Ayodhya—was commissioned to write the history of a wealthy, regional agricultural caste, the Awadhia Kurmis of Patna, Gaya, and Saran districts in Bihar. In a tract published in 1930, Dharnidharacharya demonstrated the kshatriya genealogy of his patrons, the Awadhia Kurmis, by citing and extrapolating from the Puranic genealogy Tod had traced for the epic hero Rama.136 Colonial scholarship, aimed at creating a new equilibrium for a regional ruling elite under indirect colonial rule, became the foundation not only for an emerging nation’s heroic past, but also, in a far more local arena, for a middle-caste group’s claims for superior status in northern India.
Further, other versions of the Padmini legend continued to circulate, both within and beyond Bengal. It must be remembered that Bengali literati until the 1830s, both Hindu and Muslim, had been well versed in Persian language and letters, including the masnavi traditions. I speculated in Chapter 3 that this Persian-knowing literati was bound to have known Alaol’s compositions. The abolition of Persian as official language constituted the critical break. As a prescient William Adam foresaw in 1838:
When, therefore, the measures that have recently been adopted for the discontinuance of the Persian and the employment of the vernacular language in public business shall have full effect, it may be expected, not only that all the Hindus, but that a considerable proportion of the Musalmans, who would have otherwise had their children instructed in Persian, will have recourse to some other medium. The use of the Persian is at present in a state of transition. What the ultimate effect of the present measures may be, is yet to be seen, but it cannot be deemed favorable to the cultivation of the language.137
However, fresh manuscript copies of Alaol’s Padmabati continued to be produced through the course of the nineteenth century. The surviving manuscripts suggest that Muslim scholars and service gentry, especially in the Chittagong region, continued to retell Alaol’s version. In his exhaustive comparative study of Jayasi and Alaol’s texts, Ahsan cites ten manuscripts from the nineteenth century, almost all from Chittagong; four of these, he suggests, date from the mid-nineteenth century.138 A fifth copy was made by one Nazir Ahmed in 1881, again in Chittagong, where, throughout this period, scholarship on Sufi traditions as well as Persian literature had flourished.139 Another complete copy, transcribed by a Munshi Hyder Ali, who owed allegiance to (Sufi) Pir Abdul Gafur Khan, dates to 1863.140 That manuscripts continued to be produced as late as 1881, after the onset of cheap publishing, also suggests the persistence of practices associated with the older scribal literati; Alaol’s Padmabati seems to have circulated in these circles, beyond the social world being remade by bhadralok reformers. We also have evidence from the mid-twentieth century that villagers in East Bengal knew the story Alaol had told, of the parrot Hiraman and the princess Padmabati.141 Clearly a much wider, non-or semi-literate audience was familiar with the narrative through oral circulation, and seems to have interpreted Alaol within its own, “folk” horizons.142
Beyond Bengal, Jayasi’s Padmavat, now transmuted by Ibrat and Ishrat into the popular narrative genre of qissa, continued to flourish in multiple reprints of cheap print editions.143 As Kumkum Sangari has pointed out, with the spread of mass publishing in northern India by the late nineteenth century, “the Hindi/Urdu qissa became more capacious, it mingled and transformed various repertoires—oral, written, Persian, Arabic, Sanskritic. It enfolded multiple linguistic dialects and was intersected by several narrative traditions—folktale, theatrical forms like sangit, and even reformist prescription.”
The qissa thus became popular in several senses: in the heterogeneity of its audiences, in its circulation between print and oral narration, and as preferred entertainment.144 Ibrat and Ishrat’s version, which had already shorn the Padmavat of its Sufi allegorical moorings and its Rajput ethos, gained popularity as a prototypical romance narrative; new editions appeared in 1858, 1874, 1879, 1885, 1889, and 1928, from places throughout the Hindustani belt, including Lucknow, Kanpur, Bijnor, Agra, and Delhi. Jayasi’s Padmavat entered the domain of print in the same period, with editions appearing in 1865, 1870, 1880, 1892, 1896, and 1899 from Lucknow, Delhi, Farrukhabad, Calcutta, Kanpur, and Banaras. In addition, Nawal Kishore of Lucknow, the canon-forming publisher, published reprints or editions in 1871, 1873, 1881, 1920, and 1960. Many of these early print editions of Jayasi carried commentary, marginal notes, glossaries for words seen as difficult, or explanations of each couplet, or interlinear Hindustani translations. While these printed versions deserve a fuller investigation, the presence of such elements in them suggests a degree of engagement—on the part of their publishers, authors, and audiences—with Jayasi’s Padmavat, manifested in a concern to comprehend language and narrative that may have become archaic or arcane by this period. I have not been able to ascertain printruns for each of these versions either; however, multiple reprints from the same publisher point to the popularity of both Jayasi’s and Ibrat’s versions. At the same time, landed patrons in small princely states and zamindaris in the region of Uttar Pradesh continued to patronize poetic narratives and genres linked to perceived predecessors in the culture of Indo-Persian Mughaliyat. Hafiz Khalil Hasan Manikpuri composed a new masnavi version of the Padmavat in 1914 at the Balrampur court, noted for its patronage of Urdu poets and poetry.145 Given the significant differences in patrons and audiences between the Urdu masnavis and the new nationalist “histories” of Padmini in colonial Bengal, an alternative portrayal of Alauddin Khalji was circulating here, quite different from the bhadralok narrative. As I argue in Chapter 3, while Alauddin is misguided in the Urdu Padmavat tradition, he is still the conqueror and refuge of the world. With the annexation of the region’s largest princely state, Avadh, in 1856, the political relationships characterizing this earlier era—of an uneasy, often contested, equilibrium between fealty to an overlord, and local autonomy—began to disappear. After the 1857 rebellion, the colonial government confiscated the lands
of some old gentry (Rajput, Jat, and Muslim), and redistributed them to new, loyalist “landlords” (taluqdar).146 The residual memory of the older political order persisted, however; this was particularly the case in a region where the landed elite included Rajputs with a different history of engagement with the Mughal empire, from their counterparts in Rajasthan.147 Thus, in romance narratives such as the Urdu Padmavat, Alauddin actually restores Kanvalsen, the son of Ratansen, to the throne of Chitor, and retires graciously with his imperial authority reconfirmed.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, a few authors, such as Rudar Datt and Dev Datt (1914) and Kishan Chand Zeba (1926), began to produce versions in Urdu that incorporated the new Bengali nationalist narrative. However, such authors emerged from the peripheries of Urdu literary culture—in Arya Samaj circles in Delhi and Lahore. Their versions, consciously addressed to a distinctively Hindu nationalist audience, would have found few readers in the mainstream of Urdu literary culture, even though they used the Urdu script. The disjunction between the authors’ perspective and dominant literary conventions in Urdu leaves its imprint on these texts, in the somewhat clumsy attempts to fit a consciously Sanskritic vocabulary within the very different demands of Urdu orthography. To provide one instance from Zeba’s version, Padmini’s husband Bhimsingh contemplates the surrender of his goddess-like wife (devi) to the demon Alauddin (ek rakshas). The episode becomes a test of Padmini’s virtue:
Yadi dridh dharam par hai to vo bigdi bana legi
Main apna dharma to palun vo apna dharam palegi.
If she is steadfast in her duty she will find a way to set things right.
Let me fulfil my duty, she will fulfil hers.148
Comparing the bhadralok version with the trajectories of the Padmini legend in northern India during the same period, forces us to recognize several processes at work simultaneously. On the one hand the bhadralok narratives of a new nationalist history had not yet become the dominant version of the Rajput past. Even within Bengal, in social enclaves where small Muslim gentry survived and gradually adapted to the new colonial order, Alaol’s Padmabati continued to circulate. The bhadralok’s complete exclusion of this alternative Bengali tradition provides eloquent testimony about the class and caste boundaries invoked in their shaping of a nationalist culture. In northern India, Jayasi’s Padmavat continued to circulate in a Hindustani-Urdu, elite, literary culture. At the same time, the Padmini legend entered the domain of popular print, ridding itself of elements now perceived as arcane or redundant, and transforming itself in the process into a prototypical romance, read primarily for entertainment. The Padmavat tradition persisted even as Tod’s Annals gained prominence throughout northern India. And as William Pinch has shown, in northern India outside Rajasthan the significance of the Annals was not restricted to Rajput elites, but to upwardly mobile groups engaged in claiming kshatriya genealogies for themselves. It is thus apparent that different constituencies used Tod’s scholarship to their own ends; the Bengali bhadralok appropriation was neither singular nor normative.
The popularity of Tod’s Annals in colonial Bengal points to the urgency of the bhadralok’s need for a heroic past; their distinctive appropriation of Rajput history reveals the new geographic and cultural boundaries of their nation. The Padmini legend epitomized the perennial conflict between two newly homogenized communities, one seen as indigenous and the other as alien to the subcontinent. Thus the bhadralok narratives of Padmini celebrated an exemplary history in which heroic Rajput warriors and sacrificing queens resisted “Muslim” conquest. When threatened by impending conquest, this bhadralok Rajput order preserved itself, ironically, through the self-destruction of its agents. The ritualized mass immolation of the Rajput women became the ground on which the bhadralok narratives of Padmini reconstructed an uninterrupted, heroic past for Rajput kingdom, “Hindu” patriarchy, and ancient, “Hindu” civilization.
Well into the twentieth century, however, even in regions under direct colonial rule such as the United Provinces (that incorporated the territories of Avadh in 1856), Tod’s version of the legend, recast by Bengali middle-class nationalists, did not dominate the popular imagination across India. These trajectories of the Padmini legend then suggest that the reasons for the contemporary domination of a particular “nationalist” version, must not be located automatically within an assumed dominance of colonial knowledge and its institutional structures, as the scholarship has tended to do. Rather, it must be situated within institutional contexts in the post-colonial nation-state: in the evolution of the school system with its nationalist history curriculum; in construction within the Chitor fort since around 1900, that has produced a modern palace of Padmini; in the burgeoning of tourism among a pan-Indian middle class since Independence, that then sees new “proofs” of the historicity of the Padmini legend; in commemoration in English-language comic books that articulate a pan-Indian middle-class culture; and in the forgetting of alternative traditions, linked closely to the waning of patronage and audiences for courtly cultures in Indian languages—especially where those cultures invoke boundaries at odds with the recent history of community formation, and mobilization along narrowly sectarian lines. The process by which Rajput history has come to be fully integrated into a dominant, nationalist history in the post-colonial Indian nation-state, deserves a fuller investigation that is, however, beyond the scope of this book.
Within a cultural-intellectual history such as this, it is important to distinguish between the influence of colonial ideas, institutional intervention by the British, and social change triggered by shifts in colonial policy but initiated by Indian groups rather than by the colonial state. In the instance of the Padmini legend, the colonial administrator’s scholarship was determined and shaped fundamentally by what his informants provided him—and to a far greater extent in such a narrative history, than in the bureaucratic-statistical compilations of data from the later nineteenth century onward. It would seem, then, that intelligentsia and elites in the later nineteenth century essentially reworked what elites and scholars had shaped elsewhere, half a century earlier. Influential as he was perceived to be, Tod had merely mediated this transaction, even though he provided it with the vital seal of colonial approval. Further, the contours of this reworking of Rajput history were shaped as much by bhadralok culture actively re-forming itself in class and community terms, as by Tod’s imagining of a particular Rajput past based on his Rajput, Charan, and Jain sources. It is apparent, then, that local elites and scholars were much more actively involved in selecting and appropriating elements from “colonial knowledge,” than the scholarship has acknowledged until recently. In the instance of the Padmini legend, such colonial knowledge was itself woven out of particular pre-colonial narrative traditions and histories, not out of an over-determined mis-recognition assumed to follow inevitably from European intellectual moorings.
Notes
1. In addition to these, Barun Chakrabarti lists at least eight other instances of retelling among the Bengali bhadralok between 1858 and 1926. See Chakrabarti 1981: 214–15.
2. R. Bhattacharya 1998: 184, fn. 27.
3. Broomfield 1968.
4. Mukherjee 1970; P. Sinha 1978.
5. P. Chatterjee [1993] 1999.
6. R.K. Ray 1984; Sarkar 1998; and T. Bhattacharya 2005.
7. Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay, cited in T. Bhattacharya 2005: 38.
8. Figures compiled in S.N. Mukherjee 1970: 40.
9. S. Sarkar 1998: 169, 228.
10. T. Bhattacharya 2005: 60.
11. S. Sarkar 1998: 167–78.
12. S. Sarkar 1995: 81–2.
13. R.K. Ray 1984: 11–81; S. Sarkar 1995: 81–2.
14. P. Chatterjee 1999: 35–6.
15. For a discussion of how this dynamic shaped debates over Hindu conjugality and womanhood in the late nineteenth century, see T. Sarkar 2001.
16. P. Chatterjee 1993; idem 1999.
17. McCully 1966: 81.
18. Zbavitel 1976: 231.
19. Bandopadhyay 1951, Editors’ Introduction, 7–8.
20. For a discussion of Mitra’s career and writings, see Guha-Thakurta 2004: 85–111.
21. Chakrabarti 1976: 117.
22. Report of the Transaction of the Vernacular Literature Society, 10, cited in T. Bhattacharya 2005: 130.
23. Bandopadhyay 1951: 13.
24. The most recent discussion is in Kaviraj 2003: 514–32.
25. Basu 1982: 7.
26. Letter dated July 16, 1853, cited in Hatcher 1996: 104.
27. Chakrabarti 1976: 101, 118.
28. Bandopadhyay 1951: 11–12.
29. T. Roy 1996: 51.
30. Ibid. 54.
31. Bandopadhyay 1951: 13.
32. T. Roy 1996: 56.
33. Calcutta Review XIII, xxvi (1850). Cited in Banerjee 1989: 120.
34. W. Ahmed 1992: 358.
35. Bandopadhyay 1951: 24.
36. Ibid. 11.
37. Ibid. 26.
38. Ibid. 58.
39. Ibid. 56.
40. S. Sarkar 1973: 154.
41. S. Sarkar 1973: 296–7.
42. In 1874 alone, at least six “patriotic allegories” were written that recalled the long-past glory of Mother India and lamented her enslavement by foreign barbarians. These included Kunjabihari Basu’s Bharat adhin and Haralal Ray’s Banger sukhabasan. Zbavitel 1976: 228.
The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen Page 24
