Padmini: Entwining History and Poetic- fiction

The Padmini-Ratansen episode has remained in public memory for centuries as an 'accepted truth'. From the 16th to the 19th century, there have been continuous narrative-poetic compositions in the desh (vernacular) languages on this episode and to some extent, these compositions are 'history' and to an extent, they are the narratives in their very nature and appeal. In this tradition some of the significant works available to date are 'Gora-Badal Kavitta' (before 1588 AD) by an unknown poet, 'Gora-Badal Padmini Chupai' by Hemratan (1588 AD), 'Padminisamio' by an unknown poet (1616 AD), Jatmal Nahar’s 'Gora- Badal Katha' (1623 AD), Labdhodaya’s 'Padmini Charitra Chaupai' (1649 AD), Dayaldas’ 'Ranaraso'  (1668-1681 AD), Dalpati Vijay’s 'Khummanraso' (1715-1733 AD) and 'Chittor-Udaipur Patnama' (copy, 1870 AD) by the unknown composers. The Padmini episode remained the centre of a wide-ranging discourse, but in its investigation, the aforementioned compositions were completely neglected as compared to Islamic, Persian-Arabic historical sources. Most modern historians considered the episode as fictitious and these indigenous compositions were drawn from Malik Muhammad Jayasi's 'Padmavat' (1540 AD). They regarded the contemporary Islamic accounts of Allaudin Khilji to be more relevant and completely side-lined the indigenous sources. The present monograph discusses in detail the historical, cultural and literary magnitude of these compositions by preserving them from the perspective of the tradition of Indian historical narrative poetry. A unique feature of the present study is that besides including the texts from indigenous sources translations in Hindi have also been given. For scholars of history and literature, the present work furnishes useful information regarding the Padmini episode research vision but is also eye-opening. It is a ground-breaking academic research work from the point of view of social usefulness on the polemic subject.