Rescuing Padmini

THE SCANTINESS OF THE ARCHIVE, THE OBSCURING EFFECTS OF EUROCENTRISM, PATRIARCHY AND COSMOPOLITANISM, MAKE PADMINI ALMOST IRRETRIEVABLE.

- Deepika Ahlawat

A FEW HOURS on a rather good road takes one from Udaipur to the old fort of Chittor, now full of the ruins of palaces, some still mired in the dust of their felling, others set in manicured lawns full of gardeners idling at the expense of the Archaeological Survey of India. There are also numerous temples here—still, empty shells, their deities either lost or desecrated.

Until very recently, Chittor was defined by its three-and-a-half sake, a saka being a catastrophic event where the men rode out to their deaths in a last stand, while the women burned themselves rather than be captured as spoils of war. One of these sake was caused by Allaudin Khilji’s attack on the fort in 1303, which he conquered after a long siege, but only for a few years. According to the Padmavat, a 16th century work by Malik Muhammad Jaysi, Alauddin’s campaign was engendered by his lust for the peerless queen of the Mewar ruler, Padmini. As the controversy over fact and fiction rages on, this time more obstreperously, because it involves Bollywood and its ability to cast its version of history into technicolour fact with incredible reach, surely a bigger question is not what the historical facts of this matter are, but what is, in fact, historical fact.

Consider the difficulty in giving a definitive account of what happened centuries ago on the basis of a few accounts, quite often not corroborated by any others, and scant material relics. The process is a difficult one, and one full of gaps so numerous that the bridging of them with a plausible narrative has to be a thing of wonder. Historians of the past tended not to acknowledge their tremendous dexterity in creating something out of nothing. They wrote,rather, with the peculiar, now almost obscene, confidence of the Great White Male, ensconced unproblematically at the centre of discourse creation.