The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  80. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 23.

  81. Ibid. vol. 2, 1077. Zalim Singh was a rival to the throne at the time of his nephew Bhim Singh’s accession, and was banished from Mewar by the latter. He died in the British territory of Merwara in 1799.

  82. Ibid. vol. 2, 764.

  83. Tod 1997: 233. Tod himself was not allowed to enter the archive controlled by the Kharatara gacchha. Gyanchandra had to recite his own lineage in the gaccha from the medieval Hemacharya before he was allowed entry. On his return he described some of its contents to Tod (who waited outside the archive). Most of the Jain monastic authors of the medieval Rajasthani Padmini narratives belonged to the Kharatara gaccha (see Chapter 2).

  84. Tod 1995: vol. 2, 1017.

  85. Ibid. vol. 1, 298.

  86. “. . . from the “Deo Banee” [the Sanskrit], so called by pre-eminence—the language of the Gods, to the uncouth Basha, the Doric of Medpat or the honied words of Brij. My tutor is an adept in every one. The Suruswutti—of which is the Punjabi—the Magadi [Behar], Guzeratti &c &c, and I understand the Rangra and blunder thro’ all.” Letter in Hardwicke Papers, Tod to Col. Colin Mackenzie, dated February 19, 1821; Add 9868, British Library Western Mss Collection, cited in Rudolph 2003: 256.

  87. Menariya 1943, ms. 191.

  88. For the manuscripts in the Tod Collection at the Royal Asiatic Society in London, see Barnett 1940.

  89. It was not only at Udaipur that Tod interacted closely with local informants under royal patronage. For his history of Marwar, Tod relied heavily on the “six metrical chronicles” of the “house” of Raja Man Singh, a personal present from the latter. 1995: vol. 2, 833.

  90. Jain 1993: 204, 209.

  91. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 23.

  92. Tod had a copy made of this late-seventeenth-century genealogy of the kings of Mewar. Tod Collection, Royal Asiatic Society, ms. no. 132. Alauddin’s siege of Chitor is recounted on folios 27b–28b.

  93. I could not find a source in the versions I consulted in Rajasthan or in Tod’s collection at the Royal Asiatic Society.

  94. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 357–8.

  95. Ibid. vol. 2, 711, 723.

  96. Ibid. 725.

  97. Ibid. 709.

  98. Ibid. 714.

  99. Ibid. vol. 3, 1476.

  100. Ibid. vol. 2, 713.

  101. Ibid. 710.

  102. Ibid. vol. 1, 224–5.

  103. Tod returns to this theme when describing the third siege of Chitor by Akbar, referring to the contract between the “guardian goddess” and the rulers of Mewar: that she “had promised never to abandon the rock of her pride while a descendant of Bappa Rawal devoted himself to her service.” And he attributes Akbar’s victory to the fact that on this occasion, “no regal victim appeared to appease the Cybele of Chitor . . . She fell! The charm was broken; the mysterious tie was severed for ever which connected Chitor with perpetuity of sway to the race of Guhilot.” 1995: vol. 1, 377–8.

  104. Tod 1995: vol. 2, 737.

  105. See Mani 1998: 164, 180.

  106. Tod 1995: vol. 2, 737–8.

  107. Ibid. 744.

  108. Ibid. vol. 1, 311.

  109. Mewar had continued, however, to enter into marriages with ruling lineages that had married their daughters to the Mughals, as there were such alliances with both Bikaner and Jaisalmer. Taft 1994: 238, fn. 21.

  110. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 225–7.

  111. Ibid. 147. Emphasis added.

  112. Ibid. 572.

  113. Peabody 1996: 212.

  114. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 147, 399.

  115. Anonymous 1832b: 19.

  116. Tod 1995: vol. 1, 386–90.

  117. Blumhardt 1899: No. 52: Or. 390.

  118. See Busch 2004.

  5

  Exemplary Patriotism in the Late Nineteenth Century

  THE FIRST VERSION OF THE PADMINI LEGEND BASED ENTIREly on Tod’s version—Rangalal Bandopadhyay’s Padmini Upakhyan (1858)—appeared in the new print culture centered around Calcutta, from a social group that emerged under the political economy of direct colonial rule—the Bengali bhadralok. Over the next seven decades and more, the bhadralok retold this version of the Padmini story repeatedly. Notable instances included Jyotirindranath Tagore’s play, Sarojini ba Chitor Akraman (1875); Yajneshwar Bandopadhyay’s prose translation of Tod, Rajasthan (1883–4; a second edition appeared in 1906); Kshirodprasad Vidyavinod’s play Padmini (1906); and Abanindranath Tagore’s Rajkahini (1909).1 Broadly inspired by Tod, these authors forged a distinctive version of the Padmini story in colonial Bengal.

  Many of the Padmini narratives emerged here at moments of heightened political consciousness. Rangalal’s Padmini Upakhyan was published a year after the 1857 rebellion. Jyotirindranath’s Sarojini (1875) was one among a spate of “historical” plays seeking to instil patriotism in colonial audiences; a year later the government passed the Dramatic Performances Act in an attempt to curb the growing politicization of Bengali drama. Mahendralal Basu’s Chitor Rajsati Padmini appeared in 1886, in the aftermath of the Ilbert Bill agitations and the formation of the Indian National Congress.2 Kshirodprasad’s Padmini appeared in 1906 at the height of the Swadeshi movement, and Abanindranath’s Rajkahini (1909) near its end. In the hands of the Bengali bhadralok writers, the Rajput heroism celebrated by Tod was recast as patriotism in defense of a new political entity, the nation. A reconstructed history was instrumental in redrawing the political boundaries of the contemporary nation. At the same time re-formed language, together with revised canons and standards of taste, sharpened the emerging differentiation of modern Bengali culture along communal lines. Narratives of the past evolved in late-nineteenth-century Bengal under the influence of colonial historiographic and literary conventions, even as pre-colonial narrative traditions persisted in transmuted literary conventions. Many of these narrative contradictions were resolved in the evolution of a new, hybrid genre of historical fiction. The forging of a national past involved marginalizing alternative traditions, however, as colonial Bengali authors ignored Alaol’s Sufi adaptation of Jayasi’s Padmavat. Meanwhile, Urdu narratives of Padmini in late-nineteenth-century North India continued in the Jayasi tradition, suggesting the limits in this period, to the spread of this new “nationalist” history that emerged among the bhadralok of colonial Bengal.

  Map 4: Narratives, editions, and manuscripts about Padmini of Chitor, circa 1850–1930

  The Changing Bhadralok in the Nineteenth Century

  The voluminous scholarship on the bhadralok has characterized them as a Weberian status group,3 or as a class in the Marxist sense,4 or as a colonial, subaltern middle class distinguished by its forging of a new public sphere.5 Other scholars, however, have given us more nuanced analyses of the diverse class origins of the bhadralok, as they shaped both its internal contradictions and its articulation of a nationalist ideology.6 In 1823, one of the earliest descriptions of the Bengali bhadralok (respectable folk) distinguished between wealthy agents to private European traders or administrative intermediaries of the East India Company at the top, a group in the middle, and below them those who served as accountants, poorer but still respectable.7 By the 1850s, few of the bhadralok merchant-princes survived; from this period, the typical occupations of the Bengali bhadralok, who were predominantly from a handful of Hindu upper castes, lay in government service or the professions of law, education, journalism, and medicine. Between 1850 and 1851, for instance, the number of “natives” in the civil administration in Bengal grew from 126,910 (out of a total of 153,713 employees) to 138,142 (out of a total of 165,301).8 Where the number of European employees grew by just 356, the number of “native” employees had grown by 11,232 in a single year. The other attribute of the bhadralok was “a virtually ubiquitous link with land in the form of petty zamindari, or, more often, intermediate tenure holding.” The 1891 Bengal Census found “half the merchants, one-third of the shopkeepers, a tenth of schoolteachers, pleaders and lawyers, one-fourth of the doctors, and one-sixth of the �
��clerical class’” to have “some interest in land, generally as intermediate tenants.”9 These rentier moorings decisively shaped the evolving attitudes of the bhadralok.

  From the 1870s, holders of such intermediate tenures saw their income from the land shrink, in part due to factors such as new tenancy regulations and peasant resistance. As the emphasis on administrative and professional employment grew, so did an emphasis on the value of education. A small group from among the upper echelons of the middle bhadralok, many of whom had attended elite institutions offering English education like Hindu College (founded 1817), rose to positions of relative, though still modest, prominence within the colonial bureaucracy. Most members of a self-defined bhadralok intelligentsia—including Rangalal Bandopadhyay, Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay—belonged to this group.10 A few members of the group, however, still came from the ranks of merchants who had made their fortunes as agents of European trade in the early nineteenth century, and who had invested their wealth in rural and urban land to become zamindars. The most notable instances were the exceptional Tagores of Jorasanko who, unlike most other bhadralok intellectuals, did not hold salaried positions. English education (to varying levels of competence, depending upon the degree of access to such institutions), and an involvement in the new domain of print were the other attributes of the bhadralok.11

  By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the slow growth of industry and the humanistic emphasis of English education in India “made overcrowding of the liberal professions and government services inevitable.” Official racism provoked intense resentment; the agitation in 1883 by the British community in India against the Ilbert Bill (empowering Indian magistrates to hear cases against Englishmen) was most intense in Calcutta, and brought issues of race, equality before law, and the nature of British governance in India, into sharp focus.12 Thus, from the 1870s onward, the bhadralok intelligentsia began to manifest a distinct shift toward anti-colonial nationalism of various kinds.13 While this intelligentsia perceived itself as reformist, and may even have aspired to emulate its European predecessor and counterpart as a modernizing force,14 its relationship to colonial rule and English culture was complicated—by its material location as well as its cultural worldview, in which earlier forms and practices persisted even as they were being transmuted and reformed. The dominant Bengali culture that emerged through bhadralok reform is thus better understood as the selective reclaiming and reconstituting of elements of inherited, upper-caste Hindu, elite practices15—toward maintaining social authority, rather than as an autonomous, even spiritual domain.16 This pull of inherited forms and practices, as well as the felt need to modernize them for the present, are both apparent in the Padmini Upakhyan (1858), the earliest version of the Padmini legend in Bengal based exclusively on Tod’s Annals.

  A New Past, a New Style

  Rangalal Bandopadhyay (1827–87) was educated at a missionary school in Bakulia village, Bardhaman district, and then at the newly established Hooghly College (founded 1836). It is noteworthy that, within a decade of its establishment, Hooghly College “competed very successfully with the [older and more established] Hindu College in literature, law and mixed mathematics, while in Bengali it left the Calcutta institution far behind.”17 A government employee between 1860 and 1882, Rangalal briefly edited the weekly Sambad Sagar in the early 1850s; he thus straddled the domains of journalism and imaginative literature like his more famous and younger contemporary, Bankim. He translated English poetry (Cooper, Milton, Parnell, Goldsmith) into Bengali as a preparation for his own, original poetry.18 In the Preface to the Padmini Upakhyan, Rangalal describes how he aspired to recount Indic subjects in Bengali, in a style modeled on English examples. His literary works included an essay on Bengali poetry (1852), Padmini Upakhyan (1858), Karmadebi—another verse narrative about a medieval Rajput princess (1862)—and a translation of Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhavam (1872).19 He composed the Upakhyan at the request of Raja Satyacharan Ghoshal Bahadur of Bhukailash, the wealthy zamindar who was a prominent member of the British Indian Association (the first political organization with an exclusively Indian membership). The Padmini Upakhyan was published with the blessings of Rajendralal Mitra and the encouragement of the Vernacular Literature Society (founded 1851). By the 1870s, Mitra would gain prominence as an antiquarian and as one of the first Indian professional archeologists.20 The Vernacular Literature Society’s monthly journal, the Bibidartha Sangraha, edited by Mitra, included historical essays on the Rajputs.21 While the Society considered the Upakhyan to be the “first original composition of real merit,” they did not award it their prize for “original” work because of its verse form.22

  Rangalal spelt out the uses of Rajput history in his Preface to the Upakhyan (1858):

  From the time of the disappearance of Bharatvarsha’s independence (s’adhinata) until the present time, a continuous, genuine history is attainable . . . This land’s/country’s (edesher) former, most exalted genius and whatever remained of its shattered valor, was in the land/country of Rajputana alone. Just as the Rajputs were adorned with many virtues such as valor (birattva), resilience (dhirattva), and virtue (dharmikattva), in the same way their wives were renowned for the virtues of chastity (satittva), wisdom (sudhittva) and courage (sahasikattva). Out of these considerations I have composed the present tale (upakhyan) from the study of Rajput history, so that people can read a poem (padya) about the honor of the people of their own country (s’adeshiya loker garima) and at once be pleased and inspired to follow that example.23

  While the Bengali bhadralok’s use of “Rajput history” as a source of inspirational narratives will be discussed later in this chapter, Rangalal’s Preface, in its heavy use of compound words of Sanskrit origin, gestures toward linguistic innovation. For Rangalal, such a re-formed language was one aspect of a new, “pure style” (bishuddha pranali). Like most of its vernacular counterparts in the subcontinent in the medieval period, the Bengali language had evolved through the blending of Persian, Sanskrit, and local dialects.24 The drive on the part of Rangalal and his peers to generate a new literary language, by introducing a heavily Sanskritized vocabulary, thus points to an emerging sense of linguistic differentiation between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal.

  This move toward Sanskrit emerged in the context of the colonial government’s language policy. In 1837, Persian was abolished as the language of government in all of Bengal Presidency and replaced by English and the vernacular Bengali. By 1844 the governor-general, Lord Hardinge, announced that Indians who had received English education would be preferred in official employment.25 Further, the pandits and ulema—employed as specialists in the colonial courts since the 1780s—were phased out by the 1840s as the British began to rely increasingly on legal texts and accumulating precedent. While the Sanskrit College in Calcutta (established 1824) had flourished until this period, by the early 1850s its graduates were finding suitable employment increasingly hard to come by. The Sanskrit pandit Vidyasagar, now principal of the College, suggested that they be deployed in the growing numbers of vernacular schools, since Wood’s Despatch (1854) declared the government’s intention to invest in vernacular education at the primary level. This was the context for Vidyasagar’s assertion, in 1853, that only good Sanskrit scholars could carry out the much-needed improvement of the Bengali language: “The creation of an enlightened Bengali literature should be the first object of those who are entrusted with the superintendence of education in Bengal . . . An elegant, expressive and idiomatic Bengali style cannot be at the command of those who are not good Sanskrit scholars . . .”26 Thus, patriotic calls for cultivating the mother tongue in newspapers and journals in the 1840s and 1850s,27 emerged in the context of a dramatically altered relationship for the bhadralok between Persian, Sanskrit, Bengali, and employment opportunities.

  Along with a new language, Rangalal also saw himself as using a new style, distinct from the “great proportion of this land’s language-poetry” with i
ts “obscenity and impurity, which until now had been so dear to the young and the old and women, to every sort of person.”28 The emergence of a new aesthetic, defined in opposition to popular taste, is apparent from a survey of the books published on various subjects between 1853 and 1867. While 37 titles were published around the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, 113 titles were published on contemporary social issues, 140 titles in the category “Bengali tales,” 250 titles in Bengali poetry and 225 in Bengali drama.29 Another aspect of this refashioning of literature was the popularity of the new literary reviews that defined and mediated literary taste.30 Rangalal amplified on what was wrong with the old literary forms: “I have this to say, that the various episodes (akhyan) described in ancient/Puranic history (puranetihas) are known to all people all over Bharatvarsha; . . . all those tales from having many supernatural (alaukik) descriptions are not respected to that extent by modern educated youth.”31

  With a prescient eye to the re-formed expectations of his target audience, Rangalal departed from what Bankim would later call “the endless repetitions of the mythological tales from the Puranas.”32 The new mode for Bengali literature was distinct not only from the old Puranic, but also from the modes and genres popular among Bengal’s Muslims. One observer in 1850 commented on the differentiation: “Their [the Muslims’] favorite books are of a totally different nature from those of the Hindus. True, they are printed in the Bengali character, and profess to be Bengali poetry, like all the rest; but the language contains a large admixture of Hindustani, and the subject matter usually consists of Muhammadan legend.”33

  This “language” with a significant proportion of Hindustani, or dobhashi (bilingual), had been used by poets such as Garibullah and Amir Hamza, in retelling narratives from the masnavi tradition popular in Indo-Persian courtly culture, such as Yousuf Zulekha (1753) and Madhumalati (1790). The authors of such narratives came from towns like Hughli, Chittagong, and Noakhali.34 By the mid-nineteenth century, the bhadralok intelligentsia was beginning to question whether dobhashi and its romances could be included within the bounds of a modern Bengali literature, and to relegate them to the “unlettered” domain of the Bengali Muslim peasantry.