Historians remain doubtful of Padmavati's existence

Even as the furore about Padmavati's portrayal in a film refuses to die down, historians question the queen's very existence

After two song and dance routines at the beginning of the Anita Guha-starrer, Maharani Padmini (1964), when Ratan Singh, the ruler of Chittor, tells his queen he cares for her more than his Rajput sword, Padmini demurs. 

Right before the film begins, its makers, having duly thanked the government of Rajasthan and the Archaeological Survey of India, explain to viewers that they relied on sonnets by bards and oral traditions for the story. This may well be how Sanjay Leela Bhansali had planned on introducing his film, Padmavati, starring Deepika Padukone, to present-day audiences, but how would we know? Its release has been delayed because of the howls of protest against the film. 

Those opposed to the film believe that Padmavati, a 14th-century Rajput queen, has been shown in an unfavourable light, and that the film takes liberties with facts. 

In Padukone’s home city of Bengaluru, a massive hoarding showcased the actor as a bejewelled Padmavati in an advertisement for a jewellery brand till only a few days ago. Like at many other places in the country, the advertisement has been taken down following the delay in the film’s release. 

An 18th-century painting of Padmini

After a few representatives of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rajput Karni Sena announced a bounty on Padukone and Bhansali’s heads, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah was quick to announce security for Padukone’s parents, who also reside in Bengaluru. The presence of two policemen outside badminton legend Prakash Padukone’s home is a constant reminder of Padmavati’s unseen presence 700 years after she is believed to have lived.

But in the texts about the siege of Chittorgarh in 1303, where Sultan Alauddin Khalji (or Khilji) is documented to have captured the Chittor Fort after an eight-month-long exercise of military power, there is no mention of Padmavati, or Padmini, the Chittor queen who Khalji was allegedly besotted with. Since there’s no record of Padmavati, there’s no record of the jauhar (self-immolation) she’s supposed to have led.

“The siege of Chittor has graphic evidence, but Padmavati is nowhere in actual historical records,” says historian Irfan Habib. “People may believe in her story, but belief doesn’t account for much,” he adds. 

The first account of Padmavati is from Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s work, Padmavat. Thus Padmavati was born, says historian Harbans Mukhia, in 1540 — a full 224 years after Khalji’s death in 1316 — in an epic poem by Jayasi. “The story of Padmavati is much older than Jayasi’s poem. The format of a beautiful woman pursued by a lusty man exists in folktales as well as the puranas, long before Jayasi came along with his Sufi tale,” says Mukhia, national fellow, Indian Council of Historical Research. 

After Jayasi’s poem, the second mention of a queen resembling Padmavati is an account written in 1611 by Firishta (Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah). Here she appears as Padmini. “The stories we hear of Padmavati are different because Padmavati is from different stories,” says Habib.  

A still from Anita Guha-starrer Maharani Padmini (1964)

In Jayasi’s Padmavat, Padmavati is a princess of the Sinhala kingdom in modern-day Sri Lanka. Upset with his daughter’s closeness to a talking parrot called Hiraman, the king orders the parrot be killed. The parrot escapes, and ends up at Chittor’s Rana Ratansimha, or Ratan Singh’s, court. Enthused by Hiraman’s description of the Sinhalese princess’ beauty, Ratan Singh sets off to see Padmavati, leaving behind his wife, Queen Nagamati. He returns with Padmavati as his new bride.

Even before the film version of 1964, there was Chittor Rani Padmini (1963), a Tamil historical fiction that featured super-stars Sivaji Ganesan and Vyjayanthimala. No Rajputs embarked on agitations when these were released: offence is more evidently more easily taken — and declared — in the age of new-found hyper-nationalism.

According to James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1920), Padmini was the daughter of Hamir Sank, the ruler of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). During this time in Chittor, the ruler was Lachhman Singh, and Padmini had married his uncle, Bhim Singh. 

Though Lachhman Singh being the rana (king) at the time has been disproven, the accounts of jauhar and the Alauddin Khalji-led siege on Chittor remain the same. 

With differing source material, the story has passed on with embellishments depending on the writer’s fancy. For instance, there are three main versions of the story in Bengal: Yagneshwar Bandyopadhyay’s Mewar (1884), Kshirode Prasad Vidyavinode’s Padmini (1906) and Abanindranath Tagore’s Rajkahini (1909). 

Both Vidyavinode and Tagore’s version of Padmavati are from Tod’s accounts. In Tagore’s, there’s a singing girl who informs Khalji of Padmavati’s famed beauty. 

In Bharat Ek Khoj, written and directed by Shyam Benegal (Habib was also part of this team), it is Raghav Chetan, a dishonoured tantric, who approaches Khalji with stories of Ratan Singh’s wealth, and Padmavati’s beauty. 

An illustrated manuscript of Padmavat

At the very outset of the episode dedicated to the Delhi Sultanate’s dealings with Chittor, Om Puri’s instantly-recognisable voiceover also sums up the context for modern-day reactions. As visuals of Rajasthan’s forts queue up, Puri says, “In this story, moral instructions hold more importance than historical facts.”

In Bharat Ek Khoj, Khalji asks Chetan why he should pursue Padmavati when he already had 1,600 wives. Khalji was never known to historians as a lustful man, says Mukhia. Instead, he was known for his conquest of large territories, for enforcing low prices of commodities for the common people, and his defiance of the Shariat in matters of governance. 

In 1301, when Khalji conquered Ranthambhore, Sufi poet-scholar Amir Khusrau chronicled the account, noting how the women had committed jauhar. Khusrau did not write about Padmavati or jauhar when Khalji marched towards Chittor two years later.  

According to Baijiraj Trivikrama Kumari Jamwal, daughter of Mahendra Singh Mewar, the 76th maharana of the Mewar dynasty, perhaps the sole mention of Padmavati is in Vir Vinod by Shyamaldas Dadhavadhia, a 19th-century writer.

“It’s a historical record that shows she was there as Rawal Ratan Singh’s wife and she was only an excuse that Alauddin Khalji used to invade Chittor,” Jamwal said in a recent interview. 

Visitors to Chittorgarh Fort are often shown mirrors and a pond where Khalji first saw Padmavati’s face, but that’s just packaging of melodramatic stories for the benefit of credulous tourists, she believes. “Padmini was not in the picture at all, except now [in] what has been made into a tale, which is a figment of [the director’s] imagination,” she added.

A contemporary book that traces the mutations Padmavati’s story has gone through is Ramya Sreenivasan’s The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen (2007). It notes how early modern regional elites, caste groups, and mystical and monastic communities have shaped their distinctive versions by refashioning the legend of Padmini. At a time when emphasis was being built on Rajput honour, when Padmavati’s story reached Bengal, the focus was on a heroic queen committing jauhar to save herself from a Muslim invader.  

“Khalji is painted as evil, a womaniser, the lustful devil himself,” says Mukhia, “but these attributes are being used to see to the entire community Khalji represents.” It’s a transfer of attributes from an individual to a community. “Khalji was known to be many things, good and bad, but a womaniser wasn’t one of them,” Mukhia adds.

“Have those protesting (against Padmavati’s portrayal alongside Khalji) ever said a word about colonial history, about what’s wrong or should be rewritten?” Mukhia asks. “It’s only India’s medieval history, or the so-called Muslim history, they’re saying there’s something wrong with,” he adds. 

Ramya Sreenivasan’s The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen (2007)

For the agenda of turning India into a Hindu rashtra, you need a “demon” figure, says Mukhia. “This agenda is now coming to fruition.”

Be it the Taj Mahal, Akbar or Padmavati, “an image created to further a particular agenda begins to take precedence over facts,” says Mukhia. The events unfolding today aren’t as much of a rewriting of the past as they are an attempt to mould the present and the future, he adds.

After protests and death threats for a queen who may be more alive in today’s imaginations than in a 700-year-old memory, there’s a move to build a memorial for Padmavati. 

The government of Madhya Pradesh has also announced an award, the Rashtrmata Padmavati Puraskar, and declared that Padmavati will soon be part of school curriculum. 

Perhaps, hundreds of years from now, another government will announce a memorial for Chandrakanta, the fictional princess who first came alive in 1888 in Devaki Nandan Khatri’s epic fantasy novel and was later seen on Indian television in the early 1990s. Anything’s possible.