The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen by Ramya Sreenivasan

Author:Ramya Sreenivasan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2007-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

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 He consulted the records of “Jain priests at Jawad in Malwa” and had access to the “historical documents possessed by several chiefs.”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”

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