The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  43. Chowdhury 1998: 12, 20.

  44. R. Bhattacharya 1998: 167.

  45. The term is Rimli Bhattacharya’s; ibid. 5–6.

  46. Ibid. 170.

  47. Ibid. 167.

  48. J. Tagore 1969: vol. 1, 142.

  49. Ibid. 125.

  50. Ibid. 148.

  51. Unabingsha Shatabdir Bangali Samaj o Bangla Natak, cited in R. Bhattacharya 1998: 184, fn. 29.

  52. R. Bhattacharya 1998: 152.

  53. J. Tagore 1969: vol. 1, 160.

  54. R. Bhattacharya 1998: 6, 141.

  55. J. Tagore 1969: vol. 1, 122.

  56. Chowdhury 1998: 48.

  57. Barat, “Publisher’s Preface,” in Bandopadhyay 1884.

  58. Bayly 1998: 18, 43–4.

  59. Bharatchandra 1974: 328. I am grateful to David Curley for pointing me in Bharatchandra’s direction.

  60. Chowdhury 1998: 44–5.

  61. A second edition was published in 1906.

  62. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 312; Y. Bandopadhyay 1884: vol. 1, 142.

  63. Y. Bandopadhyay 1884: vol. 1, 132.

  64. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 311–12.

  65. For the need to explore the historical processes within which communal discourse was constructed, instead of merely analyzing its internal structure, see J. Chatterji 1994: 155.

  66. S. Banerjee 1989: 120.

  67. R. Ahmed 1996: 2–3.

  68. Risley and Gait 1903: 49.

  69. T. Bhattacharya 2005: 185; Broomfield 1968: 10.

  70. J. Chatterji 1994: 10.

  71. Report on Native Newspapers 1892: Sudhakar, 30 December, cited in R.K. Ray 1984: 120.

  72. S. Sarkar 1973: 306.

  73. R. Ahmed 1996: 96; for a fuller list, see S. Sen (1951) 1993: 109–26.

  74. Ibid. 94, 124–6; see also A. Roy 1983: 65–6.

  75. S. Sarkar 1973: 319–30.

  76. Ibid. 420–2.

  77. Ibid. 300–1.

  78. Vidyavinod n.d.: vol. 2, 6–9.

  79. Ibid. 48.

  80. Ibid. 14.

  81. Ibid. 6.

  82. Ibid. 43.

  83. Ibid. 15.

  84. Ibid. 14.

  85. M. Mukherjee 1985; idem 2003; R. Guha 1988; P. Chatterjee (1993) 1999; idem 1994; Datta 1995; Kaviraj 1998.

  86. For a description of communalism as “vicarious” or “backdoor” nationalism in this period, see Chandra, in Thapar et al. 1969: 44.

  87. S. Sarkar 1998: 16–17.

  88. Kaviraj 1998: 124–36.

  89. M. Mukherjee 1985: 41.

  90. M. Chakrabarti 1997: 43.

  91. P. Chatterjee 1994: 17–18.

  92. P. Chatterjee 1999: 96.

  93. Chowdhury 1998: 48.

  94. Bankimchandra 1997: 311. For this translation, see R. Guha 1988: 1.

  95. P. Chatterjee 1999: 90–5.

  96. Guha-Thakurta 2004: 99–100.

  97. Ibid. 123.

  98. R. Tagore 1961: vol. 13, 477–8.

  99. Ibid. 482.

  100. Sukanta Chaudhuri’s translation. Chaudhuri, ed. 2001: 194. For the original, see R. Tagore 1961: vol. 13, 817.

  101. Ibid. 819, 821.

  102. For a remarkably similar turn to historical fiction by nationalist Marathi intellectuals in the same period, see Deshpande 2007, especially Chapter 6.

  103. J. Tagore, “Letter to the Editor,” Bharat Mitra, 1 October 1901, cited in Chakrabarti 1981: 59.

  104. Chakrabarti 1981: 141.

  105. S. Sarkar 1973: 304.

  106. Guha-Thakurta 1996: 64.

  107. The edition I have used is the sixth reprint of the 1986 edition, published by Anand Publishers. 10,000 copies were published in this reprint. Between the first printing and the fifth in 1993, 56,750 copies were printed and sold. A. Tagore 1994: 2.

  108. Ibid. 62.

  109. J. Tagore 1969: vol. 1, 182, 193, 207.

  110. S. Sarkar 1973: 304.

  111. H. Singh 1998.

  112. Guha-Thakurta 2004: 133; for similar formulations earlier, see P. Chatterjee [1993] 1999; idem 1994; and Kaviraj 1998.

  113. The distinctive appropriations of the past by upper-caste nationalists was better recognized and contested in nineteenth-century Maharashtra. See O’Hanlon 1983; idem 1985: 141–92; and Deshpande, forthcoming, Chapter 7.

  114. The term was coined by Susobhan Sarkar in 1946; for a recent critique of the historiography, see T. Bhattacharya 2005: 1–34; for a critique of bhadralok literary history, see Kaviraj 2003.

  115. In a growing literature, major works include Sangari and Vaid eds. (1989) 1993; Ray ed. 1995; Amin 1996; and T. Sarkar 2001.

  116. Raychaudhuri 1976: 20.

  117. For a rich discussion of the relationship between bhadralok nationalism and the reform of “Hindu” patriarchy, see T. Sarkar 1995; idem 2001.

  118. T. Sarkar 1995: 99–100.

  119. Sangari 1999: 154.

  120. Cited in U. Chakravarti 1993: 51.

  121. For an instance of such nationalist ideas on Rajputs and the Aryan heritage of India, see Sangari’s discussion of Madame Blavatsky and her disciple, Annie Besant. Sangari 1999: 90–2, 424, n. 25 and 426, n. 29.

  122. Sangari and Vaid 1993: 15–16.

  123. Chowdhury 1998: 70.

  124. Vidyavinod n.d.: vol. 2, 36.

  125. J. Tagore 1969: vol. 1, 115.

  126. A. Tagore 1994: 76.

  127. Vidyavinod n.d.: vol. 2, 11.

  128. J. Tagore 1969: vol. 1, 185, 202.

  129. Kshirodprasad n.d.: vol. 2, 41.

  130. Yajneshwar 1884: vol. 1, 139–40. For a fuller translation, see Appendix 2.

  131. R. Bhattacharya 1998: 153.

  132. Kshirodprasad n.d.: vol. 2, 8, 37.

  133. For the roots of such iconography in Bengal’s religious traditions and its evocative power in bhadralok nationalist discourse, see Bagchi 1990: 65–71.

  134. Bose 1997: 53.

  135. A. Tagore 1994: 76.

  136. Pinch 1996: 155–60.

  137. Adam 1941: 439.

  138. Ahsan ed. 1968: 111–24.

  139. Subhan 1992: 437–9.

  140. D. Bandopadhyay 1985: vol. 2, 4.

  141. Qanungo 1960: 19.

  142. For comparable folk narratives in rural Bengal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including a story of a fabled bird and a stupid prince, see Stewart 2004.

  143. See Appendix 2 for a list of these print editions.

  144. Sangari 2004: 213–15. The pioneering work on the qissa in English was Pritchett 1985. For the entry of such qissa narratives into performance traditions such as the nautanki, see Hansen 1992.

  145. For a fuller discussion, see Sreenivasan 2005: 74–100.

  146. Metcalf 1964: 134–73; for the culture of these landed elites, see idem 1979: 306–75.

  147. For a nuanced analysis of how the distinct historical trajectory of Rajputs in Uttar Pradesh shaped the social world of qissa narratives, see Sangari 1999: 247–73; idem 2004: 213–50.

  148. Zeba 1926: 83.

  Conclusion

  THIS BOOK HAS EXPLORED SEVERAL DISTINCT VERSIONS OF the Padmini legend and their transmission and evolution in history. Jayasi’s Padmavat, composed in sixteenth-century Avadh, was a Sufi tale that told the story of a Rajput king finding true, mystical love through physical and spiritual discipline. Such was the transcendent power of this love that the lovers Ratansen and Padmavati defeated Alauddin Khalji’s imperial designs by annihilating themselves—and all barriers between themselves and the divine. Anxieties about the imperial aspirations of Sher Shah Sur (to whom Jayasi dedicated his narrative) marked the Padmavat’s contexts of production and circulation in the mid-sixteenth century Sufi networks and regional courts. While Sufi pirs depended on the continuing patronage of the sultans and their noblemen, they also claimed spiritual authority over (and therefore political autonomy from) the worldly sultans. In turn, patronage of Sufi pirs legitimized the authority of rulers and chieftains. In the domain of politics, strong
sultans of Delhi attempted periodically to extend their power by centralizing authority at the expense of local military and landholding elites. Both rulers and local elites consolidated their resources through the exchange of women and the regulation of their entitlements. The patterns of marriage relations that helped to forge political alliances within these military/landholding/aristocratic elite groups were comparable across ethnic and/or religious affiliations. Similarly, the surrender of women to conquerors defined hierarchical political relationships across these elite groups. Given the instrumentality of marriage in negotiating political relationships, elite polygyny was widespread. Regional Rajput and Afghan military elites thus shared certain chivalric and patriarchal values across religious and community boundaries. The Padmavat reveals how Sufi practice evolved its own responses to these practices of its elite patrons, including an accommodation of elite polygyny.

  The narratives of Padmini in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rajasthan reveal how a regional past was reconstructed, as Rajput kings sought to consolidate their authority and resources against external enemies and internal threats. Two distinct traditions of narratives about Padmini emerged within this particular historical context: dynastic chronicles and genealogies produced under royal patronage, and Jain narratives produced by monks under the patronage of powerful Osval clients of the Rajput kings. The chronicles and genealogies helped to constitute and preserve the status of their patrons among prominent Rajput lineages, by asserting their glorious past. Bhats also facilitated matrimonial alliances between different lineages within a military-aristocratic elite where clan membership was the basis of economic and political power. Further, the Rajput chiefs used lineage, consolidated in an evolving network of marriage relations, to assert rank within the contested hierarchies of the extended Rajput jati. These were the dual contexts for Charan and Bhat narratives about purity of lineage defended by heroic Rajput conduct. Given their subtle differences of location, bardic and Jain versions of Padmini within Rajasthan diverged in their treatment of kingly valor and chiefly heroism. However, they converged in their depiction of queenly virtue, central to upholding the Rajput politico-moral order. Such symbolic investment in virtuous queens must be understood in its historical context, where elite polygyny was again critical to constituting the Rajput state and extending its military and political resources.

  At the turn of the nineteenth century, the East India Company intervened in Rajasthan to alter the balance of relations between the Rajput kings and their chiefs. The Company moved to centralize authority, to ease negotiations over political and trading concessions for itself. It therefore intervened often to empower the Rajput kings at the expense of the chieftains. The decline of the Rajput military elite and the consequent shrinkage of its material base entailed transitions in elite polygyny as well. Where marriage alliances had earlier been significant in consolidating political and military resources, they were now reduced increasingly to markers of ritual and symbolic rank. James Tod, actively involved in this reforming of the Rajput elite, reinterpreted the legend of the heroic queen yet again in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, investing it with new symbolic significance in a changed context. At this historical conjuncture, Tod’s own assumptions about literature, historiography, and the universal history of mankind, played an important part in shaping his reading of his Rajasthani sources. Equally significant to his recasting of the Padmini narrative were his Orientalist and Romantic assumptions about subcontinental history, chivalric values, and medieval nostalgia.

  British colonial policy in Bengal encouraged the emergence of an English-educated middle class, mainly from the ranks of landlord-gentry and holders of intermediary tenures in the land. Colonial intervention thus empowered certain groups at the expense of others. As further changes in land relations and productivity in the late nineteenth century restricted economic opportunity for this middle class, exposure to Western education proved a catalyst for the emergence of nationalism amongst its members. Colonial Bengali writers appropriated the account of Padmini that they found in Tod’s Annals, and recast it to their own ends. A narrative that had celebrated Rajput heroism in Tod’s account was now reread to signify the virtues both latent and worthy of emulation in the emergent nation. The lines of conflict in Tod’s narrative were appropriated and redrawn to demarcate the social and religious boundaries of the new nation. The comprehensive reforming of social and cultural practices in colonial Bengal reinforced these new boundaries; gender relations were reconstituted as a key axis aligning formations of class, community, and nation. The Padmini story now signified the desired norms for the new nation and its new subjects, both male and female, as much as it excluded from its bounds, re-identified aliens and enemies. The bhadralok version did not readily achieve the dominance it aspired to, however. While Alaol’s version continued to flourish among Bengali Muslim peasantry, small gentry, and Sufi circles, Urdu adaptations of Jayasi’s Padmavat continued to circulate in northern India well into the twentieth century.

  This book has not examined every single narrative of the Rajput queen, but has focused on broad traditions of narratives that emerged within particular regional and/or political-cultural circuits. While some authors, patrons and audiences were aware of other narratives of Padmini, other versions seem to have evolved in ignorance—wilful or otherwise—of alternative narratives. Such relationships of knowledge and ignorance themselves illumine how and why narratives traveled from one audience-community to another, or, for that matter, did not travel. As Jayasi’s reputation in the Sufi hagiographic traditions and the several adaptations in Persian, Dakkani, Urdu, and Bengali indicate, his Padmavat circulated through Sufi and Islamicate-courtly networks all over northern India from Lahore in the north-west to Arakan, 1200 miles to the south-east. By the late sixteenth century, however, local origins had become one measure of authenticity for narratives about the past in the formal historiographies of both Rajput and Mughal courts; Rajput bardic and courtly traditions thus gained authority as definitive renditions of the region’s past. The versions of the Padmini legend that emerged in seventeenth-century Rajasthan diverged strikingly from the Padmavat in their narrative, firmly moored in the local contingencies of Rajput polity at this historical moment. While internal evidence in Hemratan’s narrative from sixteenth-century Rajasthan suggests that the Jain authors of the version in Rajasthan may perhaps have known of Jayasi, I have found no further evidence to confirm this.

  The instance of Alaol raises similar issues, about cultural shifts within a single region in this instance. Alaol’s familiarity with the Padmavat demonstrates the cosmopolitan nature of Islamicate courtly culture across the Mughal empire, to its peripheries. Courtly patronage for Persian continued into eighteenth-century Bengal under the nawabs’ successor regime. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, bhadralok authors in colonial Bengal had evolved a middle-class culture that was as scrupulous in forgetting particular aspects of the region’s past and culture, as it was in recovering and canonizing other aspects. Alaol’s relegation to the domain of punthi literature in the late nineteenth century meant that he disappeared from the new bhadralok canon; however, Muslim small gentry and service literati in the countryside continued to commission manuscript copies of the Padmabati; while Alaol’s queen and the parrot Hiraman continued to be well known in the villages of East Bengal well into the twentieth century.

  What we are confronted with, then, is the coexistence of several versions of the legend at any given moment. Between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sufis, Jains, Charans, Bhats, Rajputs, Mughal courtiers, Bengali bhadralok and Urdu poets, all used the same narrative frame to represent, and relate to, the past in different ways. Whether in the instance of Avadh, Rajasthan, or in that of colonial Bengal, the circulation and currency of a given version was shaped by social, political and cultural boundaries for authorship, patronage and audience. This book suggests the locations of those boundaries between audience-communit
ies for specific narratives, at particular points in time and space. The continuing transmission and evolution of the Padmini legends also illumines the very constitution of such audience-communities, along axes that intersected, overlapped and diverged by turn: axes of region (Avadh, Rajasthan, Arakan, Bengal), “jati” (Rajput, Afghan, Jain, bhadralok), religious group (Sufi initiates, Jain monks) and occupational group (courtier, warrior, landed elite, scribe, poet, middle-class professional/intellectual). Tracing the travels of the Padmini legends thus provides us with glimpses of the varied affiliations within any of these “groups”.

  To put this another way, Jayasi’s narrative improves in comprehensibility when we recognize that his target audience was one or more of these simultaneously—Sufi, initiate, lay, courtly, gentry, Rajput, Afghan. Similarly, the subtle distinctions in the Padmini narratives in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rajasthan become intelligible when we consider that their patrons were Jain, Rajput, chiefs, kings, courtiers. At the same time that these groups were defining social and cultural boundaries to exclude perceived outsiders, however, they were also participating in the construction and transmission of shared cultural idioms, styles, and modes for remembering the past. Viewed this way, Sufi, Jain, Charan, and later bhadra redactions of the Padmini legend, turn out to be historically contingent adaptations, from polyglot circuits of symbols and narrations across the subcontinent.

  The trajectory that I chart in this book emphasizes the active refashioning of the past by particular elite groups. Paying attention to this long-range trajectory of the Padmini legends has the advantage of uncovering much-needed context for colonial intervention in the reshaping of Indian historiography. Tracing the legend’s careers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals how colonial scholars were actually intervening in an older and familiar process in which ruling groups had always reimagined the past to legitimize their authority in the present. It was this familiar dynamic that scholars and chroniclers in the Rajput kingdoms recognized, perhaps, as they collaborated with Tod to envision remembered pasts afresh. And it was this dynamic that English-educated Bengalis were repeating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in their fresh symbolic appropriations of the Padmini legend.