The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

by Ramya Sreenivasan

  One could speculate that the unanimity among the Rajput chiefs in Abanindranath’s account was in the interests of a simpler story-line for children, of Rajput pitted against Muslim. However, it also reflects the bhadralok imagining of a Rajput past in which Chitor was under-girded by sacred authority, and chiefs willingly fulfilled their hierarchical obligations. Imagining such a moral order involved the erasure of all internal contradictions in pre-colonial Rajput polity. Thus Rajput history was instrumental in redrawing cultural, religious and political boundaries between communities in the present; bhadralok writers adapted Rajput traditions to suggest that refashioned boundaries of community, culture, and conflict between “Hindus” and “Muslims” were of much older provenance, and extended throughout the subcontinent.

  The forging of this nationalist history around new heroes also involved erasing other memories particular to Bengal. A Shivaji festival was instituted in Calcutta in 1904, honoring Shivaji for founding the ideal “Hindu” nation (rashtra).110 Memories of the Marathas had been especially bitter in Bengal after the Bargi (Maratha mercenary) raids for plunder in the 1740s. By the early twentieth century, however, the memory of these raids had clearly dimmed; in its place emerged a narrative of the founding of an ideal Hindu kingdom. In celebrating Shivaji, Bengali bhadralok writers were evolving a new, pan-Indian pantheon of heroes for their nation, often overwriting local experience and memory that contradicted the new, grand narrative. Thus the bhadralok idealization of Rajasthan, a thousand miles to the west, was equally oblivious to current events there. In 1905, 1913, and 1916 there were peasant agitations in Bijolia, Mewar, against the Rajput chiefs (thikanadar);111 this was the period when Romesh Chandra Dutt, Abanindranath, and Rabindranath were celebrating the chivalry of the Rajputs of medieval Mewar.

  In recent years, several scholars have argued that the bhadralok turned to historical fiction in order to re-create “a popular historical memory”: “In this newly consecrated fictional genre, writing history in the mother tongue could take on a popular emotive dimension, where the historian could enter the realm of affect and inner bonding to forge a national community in the past and in the present.”112 Such formulations clearly align memory with a realm of affect and emotion, in which the national community was being forged. The appeal of historical fiction is clear; it is less clear, however, that these bhadralok intellectuals were aware that they had entirely internalized Mill’s periodization and its implied historical narrative. The ease with which the Muslim invader or conqueror was now recast as demonic, or Padmini was cast as the mother goddess, suggests not merely the appropriation of Rajput perspectives via Tod, but the persistence of an older, Puranic framework. This may have been expelled from the domain of history, but reasserted itself strenuously in the domain of historical fiction. This other genealogy suggests that, rather than see such historical fiction as the forging of a popular memory, we might recognize how much Puranic tropes persisted in the bhadralok environment. The issue is not that such pasts were remembered and recovered, but that they took this distinctive coloring.113

  The increasing stridency from the 1870s of bhadralok discourse, about the emerging nation, its past, and its enemies, was most apparent in the steady growth in Padmini’s stature and significance. Just as anti-Muslim sentiment in these “historical” accounts grew in the context of shifts in colonial policy toward both bhadralok and Bengal’s Muslims, the steady aggrandizing of Padmini and her ilk—heroic mothers, eventually, for the new nation—must be understood as occurring within a historical context in which the position of women became an index of the nation’s stature.

  Heroic Women for the New Nation

  Over much of the twentieth century, historians have accepted the colonial bhadralok’s assessment of itself as a progressive, modernizing social group, instrumental in inaugurating the period of remarkable intellectual ferment that came to be known as the Bengal Renaissance.114 By the 1970s, a new generation of historians began to critique the social composition and class interests of the bhadralok as limiting its potential to reform. Over the last two decades, feminist historians have extended this critique by demonstrating the bhadralok’s ambivalence about women’s issues and their tendency towards conservatism in this regard.115 Female segregation and restrictions on the social intercourse of elite women had existed in pre-modern Bengal,116 as elsewhere on the subcontinent. In bhadralok Bengal, however, the “private” sphere was invested with exclusively affective and moral functions and attributes, and firmly separated from the “public,” political world. As in Victorian England, where this reconstructed private sphere had its antecedents, it was a significant element defining the culture and identity of the new middle class. A new kind of segregation was imposed on bhadralok women as they were defined in opposition to women from lower economic strata. The household was subjected to thorough reform, and the bhadramahila was reschooled into accepting her subordination within a marriage now redefined in companionate terms.117

  The bhadralok saw such recasting of the household and of gender relations as defining their capacity to reform themselves. Colonial and missionary attacks upon Indian social practices constantly highlighted the need for such reform. However, altered official policy toward social reform after the 1857 rebellion, favoring rule through putatively “indigenous” and “traditional” means, strengthened conservative Indian groups, encouraging them to cast the realm of social custom as a domain beyond colonial intervention. This was especially true if the custom in question could be shown to have religious sanction. By the 1880s “Hindu” marriage was identified as “the last unconquered space in colonized Bengal,” threatened equally by reformist campaigns and colonial intervention. Thus, nationalist resistance crystallized around the defense of patriarchy, now defined as the domain of (reinvented) “tradition.” This was accompanied by “a closure of debate and self-criticism in relation to the Hindu family within the most articulate and radical section of the nationalist intelligentsia.”118 While bhadralok nationalists accepted the need for improving the condition of women, they often rejected the colonizer’s authority to initiate reform. Instead, they appealed to a glorious past once again, within which the ancient Hindu woman was imagined as a free, mobile, and intellectual person. As early as 1831, one writer had celebrated companionship between the sexes as “ancient Hindu practice,” and lamented that so many Hindus had “adopted the unnatural Mahomedan custom of considering women rather as slaves than as companions.”119

  Such comments foreshadowed the stance of bhadralok like Romesh Chandra Dutt, who in 1890 exalted the Aryan period as a golden age, when “Hindu” women had enjoyed respect as “the intellectual companions of their husbands, as their affectionate helpers in the journey of life, and as inseparable partners in their religious duties.”120 Dutt’s eloquence reveals the intensity with which the bhadralok projected their own aspirations for a reformed companionate conjugality backward, onto an ancient age. Responsibility for the obviously indifferent position of “Hindu” women was ascribed to the “Muslim” rule that had followed the glorious ancient period. Among the many uses of Mill’s periodization was its ability to provide this convenient narrative for the history of gender relations on the subcontinent. Such a conjunction of political and patriarchal histories is apparent in one typical maneuver within this discourse: the “Muslim” ruler of medieval India, already characterized as fanatical, ambitious and treacherous, was also depicted as lecherous. The purpose of reform, then, was to re-educate the “Hindu” woman into reaccepting the onerous burden of her exalted status.

  Ironically, in resisting colonial intervention within the realm of custom and tradition, the bhadralok were drawing on the idealized reconstructions of Indian antiquity depicted by colonial scholars like Tod, who had confirmed the glory of ancient India and its women by the standards of modern European scholarship. Tod had his more particular uses as well. He had demonstrated for the bhadralok the uninterrupted descent of the Rajputs from ancient Aryans. Thei
r continued survival in spite of “Muslim oppression” proved the resilience of those “Aryan” elements.121 For the bhadralok, as for many Orientalist scholars, the greatness of “Aryan” women was best embodied in the custom of widow immolation. While the practice had been outlawed by William Bentinck in 1829, “voluntary culpable homicide by consent” was re-legalized in 1839, and later retained in the Indian Penal Code of 1860.122 A generation after its abolition, sati retained enormous symbolic import as a sign of the “Hindu” woman’s transcendent devotion to her husband; Orientalists and nationalists both reconstrued the widow’s immolation as demonstrating her love for her husband, self-sacrifice, and superior piety. Even liberal and reformist opinion that had supported abolition, endorsed this romanticization of the custom.123

  Here, too, the Rajput history recounted in Tod’s Annals proved extremely useful. In the pre-colonial period, female immolation had been construed as asserting the rank and honor of the lineage, rather than signifying the woman’s love for her husband. For the colonial bhadralok writer, who already inferred the Hindu woman’s transcendent conjugal devotion and piety from the act of sati, Tod’s account of Rajput history served to link such conjugal love with the nation’s honor. The custom of mass immolation among pre-colonial Rajputs (jauhar) became a potent precedent—of self-sacrificing women from reconstructed history—for the nation in the present. Again, the practice of jauhar had been linked to lineage status earlier and had not been confined to Rajputs, but had spread across the imperial aristocracy in the Mughal period. To the bhadralok, the practice now signified the defense of the woman’s chastity against the threat posed by “Muslim” invaders. Such perspectives allowed the bhadralok to assert past glory in resisting imperial domination. Within that glorious past, the virtuous woman was positioned as the symbolic center around which the “nation” coalesced. Like pre-colonial accounts from Rajasthan about elite women in politics, and Tod’s perspective on these, bhadralok appropriations of the Annals celebrated those Rajput women who upheld the moral order of their polity; it mattered little that that polity was now not a dynastic realm but an immanent “nation.”

  The figure of the sacrificing queen was thus constituted as the symbolic center of this nation, at the conjunction of recast medieval history and reformed bhadralok patriarchy; the bhadralok Padmini thus gave voice to the central values of Rajput and “Hindu” polity. Thus, in Kshirodprasad’s play it is Padmini who asserts: “To protect the weak from the hands of the oppressor, to preserve the Hindu gods and the Hindu faith, for this the lords of Chitor have ascended the throne.”124 Bhadralok accounts also made the queen symbolic of the realm, by identifying her with the patron goddess, or the land itself.

  Threats to this normative order came not only from Alauddin’s illegitimate desire, but also from the queen’s beauty. In a trope that had endured from the Jain and Rajput traditions of seventeenth-century Rajasthan, through Tod’s early-colonial appropriation, to the bhadralok versions, these narratives repeatedly cast the queen’s beauty as the cause of the kingdom’s destruction. In Rangalal’s narrative Padmini herself curses her beauty and laments the misfortune she has brought on Chitor: “Because of me this battle takes place, there is such ill fortune in the land. I am ill-fated . . . hence this overwhelming sorrow . . . Fie on this life, fie on this youth, fie on this beauty and virtue! Fie on the Lord, why did he make me beautiful” (42–3). Jyotirindranath’s Lakshmansinha asserts, “She is the root cause of all our misfortunes. It is because he is smitten by her beauty that the Pathan king Alauddin attacks Chitor repeatedly.”125 Padmini curses herself similarly in Abanindranath’s account: “Alas, ill-fated Padmini, it is your cursed beauty that has brought about this ruin—this ruin is on account of you.”126 Burdened with the curse of such beauty, the queen must be recuperated in other ways, by her role in upholding the values of this moral-political order.

  Unlike Tod and his pre-colonial sources from Rajasthan, the bhadralok texts insist on the queen’s role in defending the kingdom’s honor. Again, the reasons for these narrative transformations must be sought in the altered historical context of bhadralok reform, which involved the segregation of women in the private sphere and reduced female control over productive resources. Bhadralok writers were also engaged in constructing an idealized Hindu past in which companionate monogamy was cast as the norm; they thus elided both elite Rajput polygyny and the queen’s independent access to resources. Thus, none of these accounts depicts Padmini as one co-wife among many in the king’s household. While the immediate source for this is, of course, Tod’s abbreviated account, Abanindranath and Kshirodprasad emphasized, on the other hand, Alauddin’s multiple women—a detail absent from Tod. Further, while the bhadralok authors retain from Tod the idea that Gora and Badal have accompanied Padmini to Chitor from her natal Sinhal, the chiefs’ presence does not signify the queen’s access to her own independent resources. Instead, it merely indicates the geographical spread of “Rajput” virtue, even in faraway Sinhal.127 While the queen is thus deprived of the limited political autonomy she enjoyed in pre-colonial Rajput polity, the bhadralok writers exalt her symbolic stature. Jyotirindranath’s Sarojini is ready to sacrifice her life to the goddess: “The well-being of Chitor depends upon my sacrifice, knowing this how can I run away and save myself?” At stake are her father’s honor and the freedom of the realm: “Let it not be said my father was the cause for the country’s bonds of slavery, for the blot on the pure lineage of Bappa Rao.”128 As in early modern Rajasthan, the queen is once again made to articulate the moral norm for all Rajputs, both men and women. In Kshirodprasad’s play, Padmini defines the Rajput wife’s duty for Rukma: “Wherever you are, remember, from now you are a daughter-in-law in the lineage of Bapparao . . . This foolish husband of yours is unaware of the distinction between virtue and folly. By setting an example through your good advice and your good deeds, inspire him to defend the country (desh).”129

  Kshirodprasad’s Padmini thus urges Rukma to put the welfare of lineage and realm before her own husband’s interests, revealing the pressures of a bhadralok nationalism that subordinated women’s autonomy to the demands of symbolic resistance against colonial domination. The honor of this unblemished lineage, frequently invoked in these bhadralok narratives, is ultimately preserved by the sacrifice of the Rajput women led by Padmini.

  The bhadralok fascination with the practice of jauhar is clearly visible in Yajneshwar’s translation, which elaborates on Tod’s brief account of this episode. In Yajneshwar’s words: “Loving women who gave birth, women who sustained by their love (hrdayer pritidayini) and shared the burden of preserving virtue (sahadharmini), and daughters and sisters who gave delight, took their leave for eternity, and before their very eyes were advancing towards the burning fire to give up their lives; still there was not one tear in their eyes!”130 The amplifications and repetitions here reveal the extent of the bhadralok’s investment in the practice. The actress Binodini Dasi testifies to the power of such hyperbole as dramatic spectacle in Jyotirindranath’s Sarojini. She describes how audience sympathy for the doomed Rajputs reached its climactic point during the staging of the jauhar:

  There’s a scene . . . where the Rajput women circle the pyre, singing all the while. This scene with pyres burning furiously in three or four spots and the flames, ferocious and devouring, rising several feet high seemed to madden the spectators. We had no electricity those days; sheets of tin, about four or five feet long, would be spread on the stage and thin sticks of wood would be laid on them and then set aflame. Dressed in red saris came groups of Rajput women, some decked in flower ornaments, some with garlands in their hands . . . Singing . . . they circled the fire and then suddenly, one by one, they threw themselves into the flames . . . The flames would rise and somebody’s hair would be burnt, some others’ clothes would catch fire, but no one cared . . .131

  The almost ritualized descriptions of jauhar in the bhadralok texts present a stark contrast to the terse, one-line menti
ons of the practice in seventeenth-century chronicles from Rajasthan, such as Nainsi’s Khyat (c. 1660).

  By the first decade of the twentieth century, further sanctification of the chaste Padmini is apparent, as she was now associated closely with Chitor’s patron goddess. The first glimpse of Padmini in Kshirodprasad’s play reveals her worshipping the goddess, with whom she is seen to have a special relationship so that the latter cannot be worshipped in her absence. As the priest clarifies, “Parbati has given you all her radiant beauty, and herself become dark and ugly. An assault on you is like her assaulting herself in a frenzy, such a thing is impossible.” Later in the play, a messenger who arrives from Gujarat (asking for the rana’s help against Alauddin), mistakes Padmini for the goddess and prostrates himself before her.132 This impulse towards deification was absent from Tod and his pre-colonial sources. However, Tod’s image of Chitor’s patron goddess demanding the sacrifice of royal blood, would have had enormous resonance for bhadralok authors, who embodied the nation as mother-goddess, exhorted citizens to patriotic sacrifice, and drew upon regional traditions of goddess worship that demanded ritual sacrifices.133 Abanindranath’s painting, “Bharat Mata” (1905), was among the earliest visual instances of such iconography.134 In the Rajkahini, Padmini actually disguises herself as the goddess and demands from Lakshmansinha the sacrifice of royal blood. She secretly dons the robes of the goddess Ubardebi, at the cost of certain death for herself, at a key point in the narrative when she realizes that she has caused Chitor’s destruction and that surrender is imminent. As the priestess warns her: