The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  Among the batan that Tod gathered from conversations with the Rana and his chiefs, ministers and bards, it is again unclear which anecdotal traditions he incorporated into the Annals and on what basis. There are further questions about the nature of the archive that was (made) available to him; while he cites the Khumman Raso, he seems to have been unaware of Hemratan’s originary narrative from the late sixteenth century. Nor does he mention the other Padmini narratives in the Jain tradition. Copies of these earlier Jain narratives continued to be made in Rajasthan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the personal library of the Mewar ranas at Udaipur lists a copy of Labdodhay’s Padminicharitra, transcribed in 1766.87 Tod probably overlooked this manuscript in his survey of the rana’s archives, since it is missing from the collection of manuscripts that he later deposited at the Royal Asiatic Society in London.88 On the other hand his Jain informants may not have mentioned the earlier Jain narratives of Padmini, since the Khumman Raso account follows Hemratan’s version closely.

  Company intervention in favor of the Rajput rulers provided a key context for Tod’s reinterpretation of Mewar history; he saw the glory of Mewar therefore in the stature of its kings, rather than in the achievements of its chiefs. Moreover, his close association with the Rajput courts ensured his access to narratives favoring the perspective of the rulers.89 Shrinking networks of chiefly patronage during this period also diminished the space for alternative interpretations of regional history.90 Client chiefs, asserting their status in relation to the ruler, had provided patronage to Jain authors such as Hemratan and Labdodhay. In contrast, the Jain scholar Gyanchandra functioned directly within the ambit of royal patronage in the early nineteenth century.91 Thus, he may not have recognized the subtle articulations of chiefly aspirations in the eighteenth-century Khumman Raso, or indeed the implications of the divergent perspectives between Jain and bardic narratives (see Chapter 3). The net effect was thus a consolidation of monarchical authority and perspectives. This occurred through both Company intervention, and local reinterpretations of the past in response to contemporary anxieties. Tod thus reread the region’s history primarily through its bardic prism, inherently predisposed to recuperate kingly authority.

  Thus, where his source the Khumman Raso mentioned Ratansen as the king of Chitor, Tod substituted Lakhamsi, perhaps perceiving bardic genealogies like the Sisod Vansavali as more reliable.92 Several such bardic versions had made Lakhamsi the king and cast Ratansen as his younger brother. In a significant departure from both Jain and bardic versions, however, Tod omitted all mention of Ratansen. Further, the Annals makes Padmini the king’s aunt—the wife of Bhimsi, an uncle who ruled the kingdom as protector during Lakhamsi’s minority; Tod thus departed from his known sources in naming Padmini’s husband Bhimsi rather than Ratansen.93 Seventeenth-century bardic traditions had already distanced the Sisodia ruling lineage in Mewar from the dishonor of Chitor’s loss by making Ratansen the younger brother of the king Lakhamsi, and tracing the ruling lineage through the king’s surviving son. Tod’s retention of Lakhamsi as king reiterated this perspective in which it was not a king’s wife who brought misfortune upon Chitor. It is apparent that he also followed the genealogies in tracing the succession through Lakhamsi’s sons.

  Padmini was now stated to be from Ceylon, as Tod renamed the Singhal of his sources. While Tod recognized that “Padmini” was a “title” bestowed on the fairest of women, he omitted the association between the fabled island of Singhal and beautiful padmini women mentioned in the Khumman Raso. In omitting this detail, he rid Padmini’s natal home of the romance connotations it had in his Jain sources, including the fabular antecedents of the hero’s quest and the aerial journey to Singhal. Ceylon is thus reduced to neutral geographical location. The redundancy of the king’s arduous journey to obtain a padmini woman in his pre-colonial sources may explain this omission.

  He identified Padmini’s father as Hamir Sank Chauhan, following the Sisod Vansavali, although misreading its Hamir Sekh. In the Annals, marriage to Padmini is therefore construed exclusively within the domain of elite Rajput politics, as the king’s uncle marries a daughter of the Chauhan Rajputs. In Tod’s retelling, moreover, Padmini’s natal Chauhan identity and lineage both become redundant after her marriage. His borrowed strategy of distancing Padmini and her husband from the direct ruling lineage has one further consequence: now that she is the king’s aunt there is no mention of the king’s fractious polygynous household, a remarkably persistent element in Tod’s pre-colonial sources. This erasure is consistent with his sweeping denunciations of elite polygyny throughout the Annals: “Polygamy is the fertile source of evil, moral as well as physical, in the East. It is a relic of barbarism and primeval necessity . . .” Ignoring its significance as the crucial mechanism by which the Rajput elite consolidated their political network, Tod argued instead that “the number of queens is determined only by state necessity and the fancy of the prince. To have them equal in number to the days of the week is not unusual, while the number of handmaids is unlimited.” He highlighted the role of the polygynous royal household in encouraging struggles over succession: “The desire of each wife, that her offspring should wear a crown, is natural; but they do not always wait the course of nature for the attainment of their wishes, and the love of power too often furnishes instruments for any deed, however base.”94 And he recovered a glorious past for the Rajputs in which their ancestors were monogamous, as revealed by the example of Rama and Sita from a pristine past, “when Hindu customs were pure.”95

  Padmini herself is divested of the attributes of romance heroine that she retained in the Khumman Raso, including the erotic catalog of her attributes. For Tod, as for his bardic sources, the queen’s beauty was simply a conventional trope, revealing the stature of the king who wedded her. He also reiterated his sources’ unease with the figure of the beautiful queen, as he retained the causal link between Padmini’s beauty and Alauddin’s attack upon Chitor. The Annals articulates this opposition between beauty and virtue for Rajput women more overtly in recounting the Prithviraj–Sanyogita episode:

  We see her, from the moment when, rejecting the assembled princes, she threw the “garland of marriage” round the neck of her hero, the Chauhan, abandon herself to all the influences of passion . . . and subsequently, by her seductive charms, lulling her lover into a neglect of every princely duty. Yet when the foes of his glory and power invade India, we see the enchantress at once start from her trance of pleasure, and exchanging the softer for the sterner passions, in accents not less strong because mingled with deep affection, she conjures him, while arming him for the battle, to die for his fame, declaring that she will join him in “the mansions of the sun.”96

  Tod’s sources persistently underplayed Padmini’s beauty, affirming in its place an alternative norm of female virtue underpinning the warrior ethic demanded by the Rajput militaristic order. Tod echoed this instrumentality to the Rajput woman’s virtue, thereby reaffirming the prescriptions of his pre-colonial sources: “ ‘C’est aux hommes à faire des grandes choses, c’est aux femmes à les inspirer,’ is a maxim to which every Rajput cavalier would subscribe . . .”97

  In a maneuver typical throughout the Annals, Tod extended this “tradition” of exemplary “female devotion” backwards into a quasi-ancient, quasi-mythic past by citing similar instances from the Ramayana, the Uttara Rama Charitra, the Vikramorvashi, and the Mudra Rakshasa.98 In his retelling of the Padmini story, it is apparent that he selected from his sources elements exemplifying this norm, and excluded tropes incompatible with it.

  Elsewhere in the Annals, Tod frowned upon the limited autonomy of elite Rajput women. He argued that the continued affiliation of the women with their natal households engendered intrigue and weakened the husband’s authority: “Though the wedded fair of Rajputana clings to the husband, yet she is ever more solicitous for the honor of the house from whence she has sprung, than that into which she has been admitted; which feeling has engen
dered numerous quarrels.”99 He cited the instance of the Mewar Rana’s daughter, married to the Rajput chief of Sadri, who refused to fetch a glass of water for her husband, considering her rank as king’s daughter to be superior to the chief’s. She was sent back to her father’s household for this disobedience and the Rana himself placated the angry chief: “As my son-in-law, no distinction too great can be conferred: take home your wife, she will never again refuse you a cup of water.”100 While such lessons about the wife’s domestic duties may have been appropriate as cautionary anecdotes, Tod clearly thought them less relevant to his retelling of the Padmini legend, as the tragic narrative of a king’s defeat and the loss of a kingdom. Thus he ignored the Khumman Raso’s domestic parable about the taming of Ratansen’s unruly queen Prabhavati, and the exaltation of Padmini for her culinary skills.

  Other missing elements from Tod’s account include the elaborate narrative devices framing the sultan’s beholding of the queen. Tod’s pre-colonial sources circumscribed or even omitted the alien gaze upon the queen, given how female segregation and veiling were indices of respectability and status across community boundaries. The Jain-authored Khumman Raso had described Padmini’s resistance to the idea of showing herself before Alauddin; the queen attempted to deceive the sultan by having her equally beautiful maids serve the meal instead. When the emperor finally caught a glimpse of her, it was by accident. Tod omitted such details entirely and recounted the episode in a single sentence. Elsewhere, he defended the Rajput order against the common European accusation that the seclusion of elite Rajput women pointed to the oppression of women: “From the knowledge I do possess of the freedom, the respect, the happiness, which Rajput women enjoy, I am by no means inclined to deplore their state as one of captivity . . . Of one thing we are certain, seclusion of females could only originate in a moderately advanced stage of civilization.”101 It is clear, thus, that he did not comprehend his sources’ translation of these social norms into principles of aesthetic decorum, and simply omitted all the narrative maneuvers that preserved the queen’s purdah in his sources.

  Raghav Chetan, who played such a key role in both Jain and bardic versions in pre-colonial Rajasthan, is absent from the Annals. Again, Tod seems to have followed here the short account of a genealogy such as the Sisod Vansavali. On Alauddin’s entry into the fort, however, Tod chose to follow the Khumman Raso instead of his shorter bardic sources. But where the Khumman Raso described Alauddin’s armed escort of 30,000 soldiers as he entered Chitor, Tod’s Alauddin enters the fort “slightly guarded”—an element that Tod ascribed to his “relying on the faith of the Rajput.” In narrating Bhimsi’s escorting the sultan outside the fort, though, Tod echoed the Khumman Raso in attributing this to the Rajput’s misplaced “confidence” in his guest.

  The discussion among the chiefs of Chitor about Padmini’s surrender is mentioned without elaboration in the Annals; unlike his Jain sources, Tod did not suggest any difference of opinion among the chiefs. Nor did he retain from the Khumman Raso the figure of the king’s resentful son plotting against his stepmother Padmini, following the bardic accounts instead in omitting this detail. Secondly, he made Gora and Badal Padmini’s kinsmen and did not mention any conflict between the king and his queen’s clansmen. As we have seen, such conflict was powerfully dramatized in the bardic Patnama where a jealous Ratansen beheaded the two chiefs. Further, the Jain narratives consistently depicted Gora and Badal not as Padmini’s kin but as having quarreled with the king, and being therefore independent. Tod excluded just as firmly this possibility of conflict between the king and his own subordinate chiefs.

  The account in the Annals cursorily outlines the plan to rescue the king from the emperor’s camp: the 700 litters and the farewell interview between the “Hindu prince and his bride.” Badal’s role in devising the plan and Alauddin’s credulity, details elaborated with gusto in the Khumman Raso, are excised. Instead, in describing the rescue Tod emphasized Alauddin’s “treachery”: the latter had “no intention of letting Bhimsi return.” The loading of the dice in favor of the “kingly” perspective also shaped Tod’s treatment of the rescue by Gora and Badal. While Gora and Badal are motivated by “the noblest of sentiments . . . the deliverance of their chief and the honor of their queen,” the outcome is foregone, unlike in the Khumman Raso. The “choicest of the heroes of Chitor” had “devoted their selves to destruction,” unlike in the Khumman Raso which ended with the triumph of the Rajputs. Tod’s shifts of emphasis make this a temporary reprieve obtained at great cost: “the flower of Mewar” has already been slaughtered. Where the Khumman Raso ended with the king’s rescue and Rajput victory, the account in the Annals diminishes the import of this first victory and already looks forward to the ultimate sacking of the fort narrated in the other bardic accounts. For Tod, that tragedy reasserted the heroic stature of the kings of Chitor even in defeat, as he carefully traced the unbroken continuity of the ruling lineage. The resolution in the Jain versions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rajasthan was linked to their patronage context, as they articulated perceptions of chiefly valor and kingly status strikingly at odds with the royally sponsored chronicles (see Chapter 3). In his limited use of the Khumman Raso, Tod overlooked these tensions between the aspirations of rulers and chieftains in pre-colonial Rajput kingdoms.

  While Tod’s sources articulated the stresses within Rajput polity, he ironed out these contradictions to recast an internally fraught order as a stable, hierarchical polity. Tod’s sources from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rajasthan had extolled the ideology of swamidharma as a response to the challenges confronting the Rajput kings. It would appear that he, on the other hand, read these prescriptive accounts of normative conduct literally. Thus he saw past conflicts between kings and chiefs as an aberration in the political order rather than as defining contradiction, and the hostility between chiefs and king as an “occasional” expression of “turbulence” and “refractory spirit.” Tod then exalted the Rajput for his implicit devotion: “Gratitude with him embraces every obligation of life, and is inseparable from swamidharma, fidelity to his lord.”102

  Tod’s Padmini does not protest against the plan to surrender her; she acquiesces quietly, only providing the “wherewithal to secure herself from dishonor.” This is in sharp contrast to the Khumman Raso, where the angry queen lamented the decline of Rajput virtue and valor, and actively mobilized support. In retaining the planned surrender of the queen, however, Tod followed the Khumman Raso rather than the bardic accounts. Tod’s pre-colonial sources mobilized norms of honorable conduct around perceptions of threat to the Rajput order, embodied in its queen. In Tod’s recasting of the Padmini legend we see the reiteration of these political imperatives, overlaid with the values of a reshaped Rajput polity in the nineteenth century. While many Charan accounts were acutely uncomfortable with the possibility of the queen’s surrender and excluded it altogether, the Jain narratives including the Khumman Raso used the episode to constitute the queen as the voice of Rajput morality. Padmini lamented the state of Chitor, defined ideal Rajput conduct, and was firm in her resolve not to surrender, thereby spurring the Rajput chiefs to heroic action. By excluding these details Tod’s account casts Padmini as the silent pawn around whom a kingdom was defended and lost; a newly “domesticated” figure of the queen now functioned as the symbolic heart of Rajput polity.

  From this point in the narrative, Tod relied exclusively on the bardic accounts. The shorter bardic accounts did not mention the patron goddess of Chitor appearing to the king in a dream and demanding a blood sacrifice of twelve kings. However, the longer Patnama elaborated on the patron goddess’s continuing relationship with the kings of Chitor. This account also described the goddess appearing before Ratansen and explaining her desertion, because of Alauddin’s pollution of Chitor and its sacred sites. In the Patnama, however, the goddess did not demand the sacrifice of twelve sons as the price of her continuing protection. Tod’s account suggests that he had a
ccess to another longer bardic account, comparable to the Patnama but not identical with it. Alternatively, oral tradition may have supplied him with this detail.103

  In a narrative that celebrates the king and his chiefs who chose certain death in battle over surrender, the immolation of their women provides the climactic instance of such Rajput heroism. Tod’s description of the “horrible sacrifice” of female immolation betrays an ambivalence missing from his sources. Many of the pre-colonial bardic accounts merely mentioned the jauhar in a terse sentence. The custom was central, however, to mobilizations of Rajput identity and honor. Tod reaffirmed such premises in reading “the practice of female immolation” as confirming “that heroism of character inherent to the Rajputni.” “A memorable lesson,” it was an “act of faith” by which “the Sati not only makes atonement for the sins of her husband, and secures the remission of her own, but has the joyful assurance of reunion to the object whose beatitude she procures.”104

  However, the colonial scholar-administrator’s ambivalence about female immolation also constrained Tod from unambiguously celebrating sati. On the one hand, he read into the custom “companionate marriage and conjugal love,” thereby subscribing to the notion of “voluntary” sati born out of such love.105 On the other hand, though, he agreed with many Company officials that the custom had to be abolished, characterizing it as “a cruel pledge of affection,” “a custom so opposed to the first law of nature.”106 His stance to sati thus reveals a tension between his convictions about Rajput virtue and his colonial ambivalence about widow immolation. Jauhar (mass immolation before the impending death of the men in battle), however, presented Tod with a different set of circumstances. In that instance, he believes, Rajput women were driven by “preservation of their honor.” He traces the custom to the practice of capturing vanquished women after battle, and recognizes that this was commonplace among the Rajputs as well.107 However, he echoed his sources from eighteenth-century Mewar that painted the enemy as Muslim when describing jauhar. Thus he emphasized the threat posed by “Tatar lust,” in justifying the jauhar at Chitor before Alauddin’s victory: “We can enter into the feeling and applaud the deed, which ensured the preservation of their honor by the fatal johar, when the foe was the brutalized Tatar.”108 None of Tod’s cited sources provided this specific explanation for Padmini’s jauhar; they merely invoked the broad concept of Rajput honor and glory.