The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  Within the discursive domain of “literature,” as broadly defined by European scholars of India in the late eighteenth century—that included a wide range of narrative, philosophical and discursive texts60—Tod regarded certain genres as particularly relevant to reconstructing Indian history: mythology (such as that found in the Puranas), the epics, and later heroic poetry such as that of the Rajputs (the Prithviraj Raso for instance). However, while “the heroic poems of India” were “a resource for history,” their treatment of events and personages was distinctive: “They speak in a peculiar tongue, which required to be translated into the sober language of probability.” As poems they were further prone to “magniloquence” and “obscurity.” Tod also recognized that the bardic histories were “confined almost exclusively to the martial exploits of their heroes,” since they were written “for the amusement of a warlike race.” Still, “the works of the native bards” offered “historical evidence”: “valuable data, in facts, incidents, religious opinions, and traits of manners.” Thus Tod read “the poems of Chand” as “a complete chronicle of his times,” as “heroic history.” Consistent with the European Romantic valorization of bardic poetry, he argued that “before the province of history was dignified by a class of writers who made it a distinct department of literature, the functions of the bard were doubtless employed in recording real events and in commemorating real personages.” Thus he perceived bards as “the primitive historians of mankind.”61

  This reading of Indian epic and legend as historical was by no means accepted unanimously in the period. Orientalist scholars of Persian inherited Mughal chroniclers’ skepticism about the historicity of the epics. Alexander Dow in his Preface to the translation of Ferishta classified the Mahabharata as “a poem, and not a history . . . rather as a performance of fancy, than as an authentic account of the ancient dynasties of the Kings of India.”62 In 1817 James Mill explicitly attacked Orientalists and Romantics for aspiring to reconstruct India’s past from native myth and legend.63 In the next decade, however, Tod relied on precisely the heroic poetry and verse chronicles of the Rajputs in reconstructing their history. By the time the Annals was published, Tod’s views about heroic poetry, epic and myth were more widely shared. For one, Tod stood within a tradition of enthusiasm, originating in Scotland between the 1730s and 1770s, for the history of “heroic-age societies.”64 This was the period of “Ossian,” the alleged third-century Gaelic poet “translated” by James Macpherson in the 1760s.65 Even as English scholars were convinced that the poems were a forgery, Ossian went through numerous editions and was translated into ten European languages over the course of the next century.

  Since epic and heroic poetry had been recovered as proto-history, conventions were evolved to read them as historical sources. However, as a contemporary reviewer of Tod averred, in ancient mythic narrative the “truth” was “latent,” obscured by “its fictitious or allegoric veil.”66 It was therefore within the emerging discipline of philology that ancient epic and myth were comprehended, as encoded historical narratives. Thus philologists now read the wide range of texts classified as “ancient literature,” for their historical content. This was the strategy by which Tod pushed back the history of the Rajputs beyond the point of their own earliest chronicles, into the Puranas and epic traditions. As a philologist, Tod read all Indian texts, whether ancient or more recent, as characterized by the same degree of “obscurity.” The difficulty of recovering history from such sources was compounded further by problems of transmission and reception: “Doubtless the original Puranas contained much valuable historical matter; but, at present, it is difficult to separate a little pure metal from the base alloy of ignorant expounders and interpolators.”67 In opposition to a domain of literature typified by the “licence of fiction” and “poetic and imaginative colouring,” Tod suggested a different definition for history: “the relation of events in succession, with an account of the leading incidents connecting them . . .” He sought corroborative evidence to identify historical events and establish chronology, often relying on genealogies; he also sought authentic manuscripts of original texts, supposedly untouched by later interpolations. As a Romantic believing in the authenticity of bardic traditions, however, he also regarded orally transmitted bardic couplets as equally reliable historical evidence.68 He overlooked the difficulties of dating such oral traditions, even more subject to interpolation and accretion.

  And yet, Tod was not concerned merely with disentangling the chronology of Mewar’s history from its chronicles and traditions. As he argued in his discussion of poetic narratives: “Whether we have merely the fiction of the poet . . . matters but little, it is consistent with the belief of the tribe.” In other words, the “mythological details, allegory, and improbable circumstances” that obscured Rajasthani chronicles, were significant in their own right. It was in such “traditions” that “the springs of . . . [Rajput] prejudices and their action” resided.69 The Annals not only reconstructed the history of the Rajput kingdoms, it also attempted to comprehend the manners and motives of Rajputs in the colonial present. Tod clearly wished to produce a historical account of the region that would be useful to the East India Company in its relations with the Rajput kings in the early nineteenth century.

  One final strand of Tod’s European moorings is relevant to this discussion of his perspective on Rajput historical traditions. His Romantic perspective on race and nationality had significant consequences for his reading of Rajput history and for East India Company policy. Within early-nineteenth-century Romanticisms, ethnicity was assumed to be inherent in a people, defining them as a nation intrinsically.70 Consequently, elite Rajput perceptions of group identity—articulated through an ideology of descent—were now transformed into a notion of ethnic identity. Tod’s re-presentation of the Rajputs as a “nation” strengthened the dominant Rajput ethos—that asserted a “purity” of blood, inherited from antiquity—even while transforming it. The ruling elite of Rajasthan was now imbued with a primal and transcendent “national” identity as Rajput. Thus Tod’s Romantic nationalism blinded him to historical shifts in the boundaries of Rajput identity, both within and beyond the region. Instead, he echoed the perceptions of the Rajput elite in colonial Rajasthan, in recasting such fluidities in group membership within an idiom of purity and impurity.

  Secondly, the recasting of Rajputs as a nation also transformed the “outsiders” whom they defined themselves against, into “foreigners”: a classification that invoked the organic affiliations asserted in the nineteenth century between nations, peoples, and territory. Again, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Rajput kingdoms had not achieved absolute territorial integrity: especially at the peripheries of realms, control over localities shifted between various kings, chiefs, and Mughal emperors. By the sixteenth century, however, regional ruling lineages had begun to emphasize their ancient bonds with the lands they ruled. Tod’s Romantic premises worked to reinforce such claims by linking the identity of the Rajputs as a “nation,” to an indissoluble bond with their declared territories. This also led to active collaboration between the Company and the Rajput rulers in the 1820s and 1830s, in the ruthless suppression of rebellions by other groups within “Rajput” territories, such as the Bhils and Mers.

  Arguably, such Romantic ideas of nationhood were at the root of Tod’s overwhelming reliance on the bardic traditions of the Rajputs themselves. The German Romantics invoked the concept of a “national literature” as a “particular national possession, as an expression of the national mind, as a means toward the nation’s self definition.”71 Early colonial scholars in India borrowed this conception in their explorations of the subcontinent’s literature.72 Tod’s overwhelming reliance on the Rajputs’ own accounts may have stemmed from such a conception of a “Rajput literature,” as the authentic, unmediated record of their own history. Rajput historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had emerged through negotiations between the new historical ge
nres in Rajasthan and the Persian histories of the Mughal courts. Tod seems to have been unaware of this traffic between Persian and regional sources. Moreover, his Romantic premises are revealed in his stance to the Mughal chronicles, which he regarded only as “corroborating” evidence for the Rajputs’ own historical traditions.73 Where accounts diverged, Tod relied on the Rajput narratives as a more authentic record, with his Romantic understanding of literature as vehicle of national identity. This is particularly evident in his version of the Padmini legend, where he disregarded Dow’s translation of Ferishta’s account of the siege of Chitor, and assembled his account of Alauddin’s conquest exclusively from Rajput accounts.

  Philological assumptions further guided Tod’s treatment of his Rajput sources. Where the Rajput chronicles regarded received traditions and texts as authoritative, they did not necessarily distinguish between older and more recent narratives. Their notions of canonical value were constituted in a complex grid of social and aesthetic norms, including shifting hierarchies between Sanskrit and Marwari, and the authority wielded by the carriers of the historical traditions, the Charans and Bhats. Tod reconstituted the value of Rajput narrative traditions as historical sources, within the premises of philology. Now, the older the provenance of a text, the more valuable it was as a record of the past. In addition, he misrecognized the historicity of Rajput narratives. Some seventeenth-century texts like the Rajvilas were composed during the reigns of the rulers they took their titles from. Tod extended this assumption to all Rajput texts, thus assuming that the Khumman Raso was originally produced during the ninth-century reign of Khumman, and the Prithviraj Raso similarly in the twelfth century. He then hypothesized repeated interpolations and accretions in order to explain the late provenance of all manuscripts for these narratives; thus he declared that the Khumman Raso was reworked substantially in the sixteenth century, disregarding the absence of evidence for a ninth-century date of “original” composition.

  Further, the effect of European distinctions between “literature” and “history” is revealed when we compare Tod’s treatment of poetic sources with his stance to genealogy and chronicle. While he seems to have relied on the Khumman Raso as a source for half his version of the Padmini legend, he pieced together the rest of the narrative by collating from his other (genealogical and chronicle) sources, rejecting the Khumman Raso’s conclusion with the victory of the chiefs and the rescue of queen and king. This suggests that Tod placed greater reliance on the royally sponsored (prose) genealogies and chronicles than on verse narratives. Such a stance was in accordance with evolving standards for historical scholarship in contemporary Europe, even if it conflicted with Tod’s own predilection toward bardic narrative. Thus, he selected those narrative details from the Khumman Raso that he found repeated in the genealogical and chronicle sources, as “historical”; he discarded its other elements as “fictitious.” Similar tensions between the “historical” and the “fictitious” are apparent in his reading of other Rajput heroic narratives such as the Prithviraj Raso. On the one hand he accorded it the status of “a universal history of the period in which he [Chand] wrote,” invaluable as “historic . . . memoranda;”74 on the other hand he missed the repetition of poetic tropes across narratives. For instance, the marrying of a padmini woman was tied to a quest in the Prithviraj Raso as well. From the Raso manuscripts that he was familiar with, Tod provided a rough summary in English of the “Pudmavtee Sunceah” [sic], narrating “Prithi Raj’s marrying the daughter of Bijeswar of Kumud Sikkur” in the “Sowalukh Mountains.”75 Even more strikingly, in Tod’s own manuscript of the Khumman Raso, the king embarked on a successful quest to marry a padmini woman in an earlier canto narrating the reign of Khumman. In this case, Padmini was the daughter of the Tuar king in the eastern kingdom (puravades) of Delhi, on the banks of the Yamuna.76

  Although Tod recognized that the “legends of the princes” were “obscured . . . by mythological details, allegory, and improbable circumstances,” he automatically attributed the status of legend, with a kernel of historical data, to all narratives (including heroic poetry) that positioned themselves overtly as describing the past. As I have argued in earlier chapters, pre-colonial Indian narrative genres had been delimited differently, with myth, history, tale, and folk-epic frequently located in a narrative continuum rather than opposing each other. Tod’s nineteenth-century European horizons of interpretation were superimposed on these pre-colonial Indian semiotics of genre. From a very different perspective, therefore, Tod re-read Rajput narrative traditions within a comparable continuum of genres. The premises of the colonial scholar overlaid those of his sources, albeit unevenly, as we shall see.

  Tod and His Sources: Padmini for Colonial Rajasthan

  Tod’s cited sources for compiling the history of Rajasthan in the Annals encourage us to explore what he may have borrowed from his Jain, Brahmin, and bardic informants, and how he recast their perspectives. For Mewar, Tod mentions sources such as genealogies of the ruling family obtained “from the rolls of the bards;” “a chronological sketch, drawn up under the eye of Raja Jai Singh of Amber, with comments of some value by him, and which served as a ground-work;” and “copies of such MSS. as related to his history, from the Rana’s library”: “The most important of these was the Khuman Raesa [sic], which is evidently a modern work founded upon ancient materials, tracing the genealogy to Rama, and halting at conspicuous beacons in this long line of crowned heads, particularly about the period of the Muhammadan irruption in the tenth century, the sack of Chitor by Alaud-din in the thirteenth century, and the wars of Rana Partap with Akbar . . .”

  He goes on to mention the Rajvilas and the Rajratnakar, both composed in the reign of Rana Raj Singh (r. 1658–80), and the Jaivilas, written in the reign of Jai Singh (r. 1680–98), all containing genealogies of the Mewar rulers. In addition to the inscriptions “in the temple of ‘the Mother of the Gods’ at Kumbhalmer,” he collected “genealogical rolls of some antiquity” from the widow of “an ancient family bard,” and procured “other rolls . . . from a priest of the Jains residing in Sandrai, in Marwar, whose ancestry had enjoyed from time immemorial the title of Guru.” He consulted the records of “Jain priests at Jawad in Malwa” and had access to the “historical documents possessed by several chiefs.” Extracts “made from works, both Sanskrit and Persian, which incidentally mention the [Sisodia] family,” included the “Commentaries of Babur and Jahangir, the Institutes of Akbar, original grants, public and autographed letters of the emperors of Delhi and their ministers.” To these he added “traditions or biographical anecdotes furnished in conversation by the Rana, or men of intellect among his chiefs, ministers, or bards.” However, he seems to have been unaware of Jayasi or of any Sufi adaptation of the Padmavat. As Tod describes his method of collating the accounts that were available to him, “every corroborating circumstance was treasured up which could be obtained by incessant research during sixteen years.”77 While he does not mention accounts by European travelers in earlier centuries, his footnotes reveal his familiarity with accounts such as Francois Bernier’s Travels in the Mogul Empire.78

  For the Padmini legend, Tod had access to both the Jain and Rajput sources discussed in Chapter 2. However, he provides little information about the particular texts he relied on, their interpretation by the local scholars he worked with, and his reliance on the latter.79 He acknowledges his teacher Gyanchandra, a Jain monk who helped him with his sources in the local language. Gyanchandra presided over the “body of [learned] pandits” that helped him read the genealogical lists in the Puranas from the library of the Udaipur Rana; he is said to have “surpassed all the bards at Udaipur” in his “skill” at “reciting poetry.”80 The Jain monk attributed his extensive knowledge of Rajput history and his literary skills to his training with the Rajput Zalim Singh, an uncle of Rana Bhim Singh (r. 1778–1828).81 This suggests a continued proximity between Rajput and Jain perspectives in this period, inherited from the pre-colonial con
text. Tod continued to collaborate with Gyanchandra for ten years: “To him I owe much, for he entered into all my antiquarian pursuits with zeal.”82 He also traveled extensively with the Jain monk, becoming the first Englishman to gain access to the Jain archives at Patan (Gujarat).83 Gyanchandra recounted stories from the chronicles that he read for Tod, who translated his collaborator’s accounts into English.84 For instance, Gyanchandra read verses from the Prithviraj Raso aloud as Tod “rapidly translated about thirty thousand stanzas,” since he was “familiar with the dialects in which it is written.”85 Gyanchandra did not speak English, however, while Tod himself was more circumspect about his competence in the local dialects elsewhere.86 The evidence makes it difficult to gauge the precise dynamics of Tod’s compilation of the Annals—what he “translated” on the basis of his limited language skills, and how and to what extent his Jain teacher helped.