Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

Winner of the 2009 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian StudiesThe medieval Rajput queen Padmini - believed to have been pursued by Alauddin Khalji, the Sultan of Delhi - has been the focus of numerous South Asian narratives, ranging from a Sufi mystical romance in the sixteenth century to nationalist histories in the late nineteenth century. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen explores how early modern regional elites, caste groups, and mystical and monastic communities shaped their distinctive versions of the past through the repeated refashioning of the legend of Padmini.Ramya Sreenivasan investigates these legends and traces their subsequent appropriation by colonial administrators and nationalist intellectuals, for varying different political ends. Using Padmini as a means of illustrating the power of gender norms in constructing heroic memory, she shows how such narratives about virtuous women changed as they circulated across particular communities in South Asia between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries.This book will interest historians of memory, gender, community, culture, and historywriting in South Asia. Illustrating how enduring legends emerged out of particular precolonial repositories of "tradition," the book also addresses the nature of colonial transitions and precolonial historical consciousness.

Sreenivasan has produced a nuanced and inventive work of South Asian history combining disciplined textual and archival research with compelling historical arguments. Her book places literary production and changes in literary form firmly into a social history framework that enlivens the South Asian historical field. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen, given its range, detail, and originality, is destined to occupy a familiar place on the bookshelves of not only South Asian historians, but scholars of literary culture, early modern literary history, and the sociology of literature., [A]n important contribution to cultural and social history. Sreenivasan's analysis of the mutations of the Padmini legend reveals the changing gender relations over the centuries. . . . A comprehensive bibliography and summaries of selected versions of the legend included as an appendix add to the value of the book., A welcome contribution. . . . Meticulously researched, Many Lives of a Rajput Queen is located within the context of the very real and often politically-charged debates over the relationship between any historical event and the multiple perspectives on it that are subsequently generated., This wide-ranging monograph effortlessly traverses regions and genres to study the evolution of a historical memory . . . . Sreenivasan analyzes Padmini's story through its entire narrative trajectory, deploying at once the skills of a historian who combines an understanding of religious thought and social history and those of a literary scholar deeply familiar with gendered tropes in narrative and discourse., A masterful and admirable scholarly achievement. . . .Sreenivasan's singular accomplishment in this meticulously researched account is to demonstrate more convincingly and thoroughly than I have ever seen done before the wonderfully complex entanglements of literature and politics, of history and legend.

Ramya Sreenivasan is assistant professor of history at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York.