The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen
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A perusal of sixteenth-century sources suggests other possible inspirations for Jayasi’s account of the siege of Chitor in the Padmavat. Babur’s memoirs mention Padmavati, the queen of Rana Sanga and the mother of his second son Bikramajit.76 Sher Khan (Sher Shah Sur whom Jayasi praises) had used the ruse of warriors entering an enemy fort in women’s palanquins during the siege of Rohtas in 1537. Writing in Akbar’s reign, Abbas Khan Sarwani refuted this “commonly known report” as “false and slanderous.”77 Other contemporary accounts elaborated on the palanquin scheme at length, however, and mentioned the friendship between Sher Khan and the Brahmin Churaman of Rohtas:
Ser Khan arranged a good number of dolis, filled with brave Afghan soldiers with arms . . . He had women in a few of the dolis which were in the front . . . When the darbans or guards of the fort commenced to examine the dolis, Ser Khan sent a message that he could not allow the secluded ones, i.e. women of his family to be seen by anybody as it would be a great insult to him . . . The Raja . . . then forbade the searching of the dolis. When all the dolis had passed into the fort, the Afghans took up their arms, and advanced towards the house of the Raja and others went to the gate; and the fort of Rohtas which for its strength had no equal in Hindustan, came into his hand.78
The echoes between such accounts and the Padmavat suggest the kind of common knowledge of the event that may have been available to a poet writing in 1540. The Padmavat retains the figure of the Brahmin aiding a hostile king’s attack upon the fortress, and the latter’s use of guile. On the other hand, the ruse is transposed on to the warriors defending the king and the fortress. Jayasi’s appropriations may point to the jumbled oral accounts that must have traveled through northern India in the three years between the siege of Rohtas and the composition of the Padmavat.
The recall of Alauddin Khalji from the early fourteenth century raises further questions. While, as Ahmad suggests, Jayasi may indeed have confused a fifteenth-century sultan of Malwa with the earlier Khalji sultan of Delhi, it is also possible that local pressures may have shaped the poet’s distinct perspective. It is worth speculating whether the renewed iterations of Alauddin Khalji’s conquests in the early sixteenth century (Narayandas’s Chhitaivarta composed in Malwa c. 1520 and the Padmavat) were a response to renewed attempts at imperial expansion by the Delhi sultan in this period. In other words, the Khalji ruler’s expeditions may have proved a convenient vehicle for articulating contemporary local anxieties about new rulers in Delhi with imperial ambitions. Before the hypothesis is dismissed as farfetched, it must also be remembered that Sher Shah, the Dhilli Sulatanu panegyrized in the Padmavat, had been educated in Jaunpur, and had spent the decade of the 1530s expanding his sphere of influence from his father’s two parganas in South Bihar—moving steadily towards the west and north-west until he gained control over Delhi.
Such a hypothesis becomes more persuasive given the possibility that some of Jayasi’s chiefly patrons and audiences were local Rajput elites immediately affected by Sher Khan’s rise.79 A colonial scholar’s account of the Rajput chiefs of Rae Bareli, collated in the late nineteenth century from local clan genealogies and histories, ascribed Rajput settlement in the area to the exploits of Raja Tilokchand in the late fifteenth century. The same colonial account also recounts “a general conversion to the imperial religion without parallel in the annals of the district” during the reign of Humayun, with every major Rajput zamindar clan contributing a convert.80 This was precisely the period when Jayasi was composing his Padmavat, about the heroic exploits of a Rajput Raja Ratansen, in Jayas—some twenty miles or so from Rae Bareli. We have other evidence as well, of how Bachgoti Rajputs dominated the countryside in the Jaunpur Sultanate in this period, and may have been the major suppliers of fighting men to the Sharqi sultans.81 In the early seventeenth century, a large proportion of land in the region remained under Rajput control. In Gorakhpur (modern eastern Uttar Pradesh), for instance, various Rajput clans together had control over land accounting for almost 70 per cent of the district’s revenue. However, Muslim groups—including Afghans and some local Rajput converts—were also influential. Even though such Muslim elites constituted a smaller group, they had enough power in the villages and towns to provide substantial political patronage locally.82
For their part, local Sufi pirs had to engage with multiple communities as well as political patrons, as revealed by the history of Jayas itself. In 1714, a revenue grant for the maintenance of the khanqah of Saiyid Jahangir Ashraf Simnani (one of Jayasi’s pirs), had to be shifted to a safe area from a village where the keepers of the khanqah (hospice) had begun to encounter serious trouble from “infidels” in the neighborhood.83 Apocryphal stories of Jayasi’s proximity to a “Hindu” ruler such as the Raja of Amethi suggest such ongoing negotiations between Sufis and local Rajput elites. Strikingly, Jayasi’s seeker-hero is a rajaputa. The Avadhi rajaputa is the exact synonym for “son of a king” and thus can denote princes in general, encompassing local military and landed elites, both Rajput and Afghan. While such elites competed for land, wealth, and political influence, their modes of socio-political organization overlapped significantly. The normative rajaputa (princely) ethic in the Padmavat can thus be seen as articulating the values of such competing elites in sixteenth-century North India.84
To provide one instance, when Ratansen embarks on his ascetic journey to acquire Padmavati, he is accompanied by 16,000 companions who vow to fulfill the obligations of their service to him. Such service entails an attack upon the fort of Singhala, and capture and imprisonment with their lord. The trajectory would have been familiar in a region where large numbers of Rajputs, Afghans, peasants, and pastoralists traveled long distances from home in the service of a warlord. Such fighting men stood to gain honor as well as a share of the loot following military success. This would have been one of the commonest avenues for mobility—through military service under an overlord.85 Ratansen’s companions are tied to him by a fidelity (sat) defined in their service ethic, and therefore cannot change their allegiance. The Padmavat’s celebration of such sat—the virtue of constancy—constituted a norm for Rajputs as much as Afghans in this period; elites from both groups would have found such an ethic useful in consolidating the armies they raised from local peasant and pastoralist groups. Of course, sat by itself was never a substitute for material incentives such as a share of the loot following conquest, as Jayasi recognized. Even as the Padmavat applauds Ratansen’s companions for their sat, it is careful to reward them. When Ratansen finally wins Padmavati, her father Gandharvsen also gives 16,000 Padmini women to his new son-in-law’s 16,000 companions from Chitaur. Thus the Sufi quest with a mystical object also doubles as journey for material advancement in a mode familiar to the military elites and fighting men of sixteenth-century North India.
The gearing of the journey to winning Padmavati in marriage is also a trope resonant in the worldviews of both Sufis and lay elites. The importance of marriage for building alliances and settling hostilities among the Rajput elites of medieval Rajasthan is well known to historians.86 Marriage helped to consolidate status and resources for Rajput and Afghan elites in Central and North India as well. One has only to think of the ambitious Sher Khan’s marriages with the widows Lad Malika and Guhar Gusain, who surrendered control of their treasures to their new husband in exchange for the protection of their interests.87 Finding the ideal woman was thus as vital for the king/warrior within the shared norms and practices of these competing elites, as it was for the seeker in the Sufi ethic. Ratansen thus defines his manhood (purukharath) in terms of the fruits of his joga (penance/quest). Through such an endeavor, he has won the object of his desire and achieved ecstatic communion with the divine. He has also sealed an alliance through marriage and won a substantial dowry and additional rewards from the Ocean, as he returns to Chitor with added prestige. And he has fulfilled the expectations of his associates, so that “everybody [became] a king in his own house (331).
Sufi trop
es and lay elite values overlaid each other most strikingly in the resolution of this narrative. A Sufi metaphysic of love defined the relationship between the lover/king and the beloved/queen as fragile and fleeting. At the same time, heroic narratives among lay elite groups elaborated a normative, masculine ethic around the defense of threatened queen and clan or territory. In the Padmavat, Jayasi invokes Hammir, the chief of Ranthambhor, who cut off his own head rather than surrender the woman in his house (gihini) to Alauddin (491). A few years before Jayasi, Narayandas narrated the conquest of Deogir by Alauddin in the Chhitaivarta, composed probably in the court of Silhadi (the Rajput chieftain in Malwa). Narayandas explicitly linked Alauddin’s conquests of Ranthambhor, Chitor, and Deogir, and ascribed them all to the sultan’s desire for their queens. The link between queen and territory was not peculiar to the Padmavat therefore.88
Such a link may have been especially resonant in a context in which the surrender of daughters by vanquished chiefs to victors was a widespread practice among ruling elites. At least for some local elites, therefore, defense of their women was actually tied to control over territory. Rajput and Afghan elites thus shared an ideology of masculine honor forged around the protection of elite women from unwanted marriage alliances. Furthermore, since kinship determined access to resources within an extended community for both Rajput and Afghan clans, “purity” of blood defining the boundaries of lineage may have been equally important for both groups. Abbas Khan Sarwani’s Tarikh-i Sher Shahi refers to a tribe of Sambhal Afghans in Roh that defied the (Afghan) Sur ruler in Delhi when the latter’s governor wanted to marry their chief’s daughter. The tribe opposed the match because the governor’s mother had been a slave. Prevented from escaping back to Kabul with their women and children, these Sambhal Afghans refused any offers of mediation or conciliation. “It is better to die with our wives and families than to live dishonored; for it is a well-known proverb—The death of a whole tribe is a solemn feast.”89
Elite women were also especially vulnerable around military conflict. In the early sixteenth century, Purbiya chiefs took women from the harem of the defeated Malwa sultan into their households. The status of these captured women was a key issue in the prolonged conflict between Silhadi Purbiya and Bahadur Shah of Gujarat.90 Thus it may have been that the real and perceived vulnerability of women in the households of ruling elites impelled contemporary poets to recast the Delhi sultan’s imperial conquests of territory as triggered by his desire for queens. This is persuasive particularly when one remembers the turbulence of sixteenth-century North India during transitions between three dynasties in Delhi, and the attendant fluidity of political alliances. In such a context, it is entirely comprehensible that defense of the queen was a key norm in the warrior ethic.
In the Padmavat, the terms of Ratansen’s negotiations with Alauddin Khalji are clear: he is willing to pay tribute and accept the Sultan of Delhi as his overlord, but will not cede his wife. Alauddin tries to tempt Ratansen by offering to bestow Chanderi on him in exchange for Padmavati’s surrender. As Ratansen responds:
If the woman (grihini) leaves the home, of what use is Chitaur or Chanderi.
One lives for the home; only an ascetic (jogi) gives up his home.
I am not Hammiru of Ranthambhaur, who severed his head and gave up his body.
I am Ratansen, famed warrior; [like Arjuna] who pierced the fish and won Sairindhi.
. . . He [Alauddin] can accept wealth (darab) [from me], I would serve at his feet.
But if he wants a padumini woman, let him go to Singhaladip (491).
Given the stakes involved in defending his queen, control over additional territory would be meaningless for Ratansen if he failed to prove himself as a warrior. He has no option but to refuse.
Mystical and Heroic Love: Overlapping Perspectives
Sufi practice between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries evolved particular perspectives on gender, as it engaged with the values of heterogeneous target audiences and elite patrons. Literary conventions from disparate genres that Sufis employed, such as the Avadhi tales of love, presented additional challenges with the diverse tropes that such narratives appropriated.
In practice, many Sufis readily acknowledged that women could be as exemplary in their conduct as men. Thus Nizamuddin Awliya praised “a woman from Indraprasta named Fatima. She had been such a model of chastity and virtue that Shaykh al-Islam Farid ad-din—may God sanctify his lofty secret—used to say repeatedly of her: ‘That woman is a man whom the Creator has sent to earth in the bodily form of a woman.’ ”91 Instances of female piety and virtue were also acknowledged in the hagiographic tradition: Abdul Haqq Dehlavi’s Akhbarul Akhyar (completed 1591) included fourteen pious women from within India in an appendix. However, most of these “saintly women” were noted “because of their relationship to ‘famous’ male saints.”92 The presence of female devotees at Sufi tombs (dargah) and hospices (khanqah) provoked more ambivalence. In the late fourteenth century, Firuz Shah Tughlaq attempted to ban “respectable Musulman” women from going on pilgrimage to Sufi tombs, “a custom and practice unauthorized by the Law of Islam [which] had sprung up in Musulman cities.”93 Women were equally part of the audience at khanqahs: thus Amir Hasan Sijzi mentions the presence of women at the discourses of Nizamuddin Awliya.94 Some pirs—such as Shah Hashim Pir “Alawi” (d. 1646) in the Deccan—even allowed women to enter the inner circle of initiates as murids.95 However, the instance of Shahjahan’s daughter Jahanara, who described herself as faqira (female faqir) to denote “her own spiritual vocation as a Sufi woman,” remains an unusual departure from the customary practice of Sufi initiate communities, in which women were either secondary or absent.96
At first sight, the Avadhi “tales of love” seem to invert conventions of gender in other medieval love-stories; they endow their protagonists with attributes associated with the heroines in the latter. Whereas in non-Sufi tales the heroine first experiences love and therefore a sharper pining in separation (viraha), in the Sufi “tales of love,” love and viraha, with their mystical underpinnings, are the domain of the male lover.97 The Padmavat alludes explicitly to this inversion of gender roles; as the lover in viraha, Ratansen explicitly compares himself to such pining heroines as Shakuntala, Damavati (Damayanti) and Kamakandala (200). The anguished lover’s searing viraha threatens to become a pyre literally, in the typical narrative mode of the poem where the symbolic slides into the literal and the psychological into the physical. Unable to bear the burden of separation (biyog) any more, Ratansen sets out to immolate himself (204). It is at this point that Shiva and Parvati are forced to intervene since such a fire—reflecting as it does the intensity of a lover’s viraha—would burn down the entire world.
The inversion of gender is limited, however. In all of the Avadhi narratives, the seeker of Truth is a man who pursues an idealized heroine, representing a transcendent norm of Beauty and Truth. She is thus the pretext for the elucidation of a system of spiritual discipline that privileges the spiritual and emotional progress of a male protagonist. In other words, the heroine’s response to the protagonist’s wooing, and her own spiritual journey (if any), are not elaborated to the same degree as those of the hero. It is noteworthy that no divine intervention is forthcoming when Padmavati and Nagmati immolate themselves upon their husband’s death, even though their self-obliteration in turn demonstrates the intensity of their viraha and the triumphant culmination of their passionate love (prema). The flames of this viraha will not annihilate the world, presumably.
The significance of the protagonist’s masculine gender is emphasized on two distinct occasions in the Padmavat when the queen is afflicted by viraha and wishes to renounce the world and seek her lover. Nagmati wishes to follow her husband as a renunciant, as he departs for Singhaldvip on his quest. Padmavati wishes to do the same when Ratansen has been captured by Alauddin Khalji and taken to Delhi. Both women are explicitly dissuaded from doing so. Nathpanth ideas remained persistentl
y useful for Jayasi, this time for their misogynistic elements. Nagmati is reminded of the Nath protagonist Bhartrhari: “You are a woman, of inferior mind . . . Raja Bhartrhari, O ignorant one, in whose house there were sixteen hundred queens . . . became a jogi and took none with him (132).” Padmavati is told later that donning the robes of an ascetic will not bring back her husband. For her, the appropriate mode of ascetic contemplation (sadhana) is silent grief for her husband within her own home (606). The Padmavat thus implicitly reserves mystical revelation of the Truth, through the indispensable ascetic renunciation, for men. In doing so, it echoes and reinforces lay conventions of appropriate gendered conduct. For women, it would seem, the experience of separation and longing (viraha) is an end in itself and not the route to higher revelation.
Their masculine gender is not an indispensable attribute for protagonists of all Sufi romances, however. In Punjab and Sind, Indo-Muslim folk tradition “developed another peculiar facet . . . the symbol of the woman soul.” The Hir Ranjha was the “best known example of the complete spiritualization of a medieval folk tale in which the woman Hir is identified with the soul, and her beloved Ranjha with the longed-for Divine Beloved.” The stories of Sohni–Mahiwal and Sassui–Punhun belonged to the same tradition.98 Since feminine gender was a typical attribute of the seeking soul in another regional set of Sufi narratives, it would seem that masculine gender was not an essential attribute for the Sufi protagonist. I argue that the male protagonist in Avadhi tales of love thus owed his existence to other reasons: the genres of narrative these tales borrowed from, and their intended lay audience.