IN THE LANDSCAPE OF MEMORY: READING QUEEN PADMINI OF MEWAR

Dr. Atiqa Kelsy

Positive Vibes | CLXIX | 26 Sep., 2026

There are some historical figures whom we know not as people, but as stories. We know their names long before we know anything about them. We meet them in folktales, songs, legends, paintings, and conversations. We hear of their beauty, their courage, their suffering, their devotion and their sacrifice. Their stories are so powerfully long-entwined that sometimes it becomes almost impossible to separate the person from the many meanings that have been attached to them. Queen Padmini of Mewar is one such historical figure. Perhaps that is why reading the translation, Queen Padmini of Mewar: History & Indigenous Narrative Poetry by Prof. Pradeep Trikha, felt like entering a landscape of memory through an unfamiliar doorway. I have read Prof. Trikha’s previous translation, Meera Vs Meera, which was a memorable work on Meera, another historical figure whose association with Chittor has allowed history, poetry, devotion and memory to meet in fascinating ways. But Queen Padmini is a very different kind of presence. Meera’s voice seems to have survived through her own poetry, but Padmini reaches us largely through the voices of those who remembered, narrated, imagined and recreated her.

Translated into English from Prof. Hada's Hindi Rani Padmini: Itihas aur Deshaj Aakhyan, the book is a deeply researched exploration of the historicity of Padmini and the indigenous narrative poetry surrounding the Padmini-Ratansen episode. Yet, as one reads through the pages, one realises that the book is much more than merely establishing whether Padmini existed exactly as later narratives remember her. The book is a scholarly enquiry into how history is written, memory is preserved, and cultural narratives acquire a life of their own.

The book begins by discussing Indian traditions of historiography and the otherwise existent rigid separation between history and literature, fact and imagination, document and narrative in the popular modern tradition. The discussion makes an important case for taking indigenous historical narrative-poetry seriously as a cultural record. Such narratives may not conform to the empirical conventions of modern historiography, but they preserve how communities perceived, remembered and transmitted their past.

This becomes particularly fascinating in the discussion of the many indigenous narratives of Padmini and Ratansen. Works such as Gora-Badal Kavit, Hemratan's Gora-Badal Padmini Chaupai, Hemratan’s Padminisamiyo, Gora-Badal Katha, Padmini Charitra Chaupai, Rana Raso, Khumman Raso and Chittor-Udaipur Patnama reveal not one fixed Padmini narrative but a tradition that has continually remembered and reshaped her. A microscopic examination of these texts, alongside the historical sources, makes the book an important contribution to the study of the relationship between history, literature and collective memory.

Personally, what I found as one of the most engaging aspects of the book is its treatment of myth because Prof. Hada does not simply place myth at the opposite end of a scale from historical truth. Instead, he examines the conventions through which historical fiction and narrative poetry create meaning. The recurring motifs of love at first sight, the talking parrot, journeys, supernatural intervention, separation and reunion remind us that these narratives belong to literary traditions with their own modes of expression. A poem, after all, is not a failed archive. It is a different kind of cultural testimony.

The discussion of historical sources is equally significant. The absence of Padmini from contemporary Persian accounts, particularly Amir Khusrau's Khazain-ul-Futuh, has often been treated as sufficient reason to question her historicity. This does not mean that the importance of documentary evidence is diminished; rather, he places it alongside indigenous sources and asks us to recognise the limitations and contexts of every historical record. The book's discussion of Ratansen, inscriptions, Mewar's political and social structures, and the values of swami-dharma and kshatriya honour further demonstrates that the Padmini narratives preserve much more than a romantic or heroic legend.

What stayed with me most strongly, however, was the way Padmini emerges as a figure shaped by successive acts of remembering. She has been remembered as a beautiful queen, a woman of honour, a symbol of sacrifice and an embodiment of Rajput ideals. Yet somewhere beneath these layers lies the historical woman who has become increasingly difficult to see. Padmini has become almost a palimpsest, with each age writing its own anxieties, ideals and aspirations over the woman remembered by the age before it. The book does not just recover a historical character; it makes us conscious of the processes through which historical characters are created and recreated. The Padmini of Jayasi's Padmavat, the Padmini of Rajasthani narrative poetry and the Padmini of later cultural memory are not identical, and the Padmini of this book is a careful comparative reading that allows these distinctions to emerge without diminishing the extraordinary cultural power of the story.

I also found myself consciously pausing often over Prof. Pradeep Trikha's translation. Having read his translation of Prof. Hada's Meera Vs Meera, I came to this book with an appreciation of the remarkable balancing act that translation demands and Prof. Trikha so adroitly executes. To carry Prof. Hada's scholarship, with its deep roots in Hindi literary criticism, Rajasthani traditions and indigenous narrative forms, into English is not merely to translate words. It is to carry across a cultural sensibility.  Prof. Trikha in the Translator's Note, with its description of translation as a process of listening, discovery and “transcreation,” made me particularly conscious of this invisible labour. He confesses, “we live different lives in different languages. Hada’s book tended to excite readers and critics alike, and I do hope the translation will do the same. One feels compelled to see it as an adventure with language, which is creative and self-challenging.”

I am sure this challenge has made Prof. Trikha go back to the text innumerable times, leading to infinite discussion with Prof. Hada over single words, phrases, sentences and finding themselves eternally lost in the labyrinth of sense over meaning, metaphorical over literal and being in the process of “a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” as T. S. Eliot had said. That is exactly what this nuanced translation does. It effortlessly conveys sense and meaning, both literal and metaphorical – “to enliven the flavours of sounds and explore sensitive nuances of every word”. To a reader who hasn’t read the original, this translation acts as an important doorway to inhale and bask in the scent of the times as conveyed in the original.

Prof. Trikha succeeds remarkably because the reading flows like a river, uninhibited, and the reader rolls along with it like a pebble that only smoothens and shines after completely giving in to the waters. The translation flows with an ease that almost conceals the difficulty of the task. The careful handling of regional and culturally rooted expressions reveals the translator's effort to preserve the flavour of the original without allowing the translator's own voice to overshadow that of the author. There is something especially satisfying in seeing these two scholars meet again, allowing Hada's scholarship on Mewar and its literary traditions to reach a wider readership through its English translation.

The book reminds us that history does not live only in archives. Sometimes it lives in poetry, in oral traditions, in the memories of communities and even in the stories that generations refuse to let disappear. This is what makes the book such a rewarding journey. I entered it through what seemed like a familiar doorway, expecting to encounter the Padmini I had known through history and popular memory. I emerged with a landscape far more layered and expansive — one in which history, poetry, myth and memory do not stand apart, but continually meet and reshape one another.

I think what I finally took away from Queen Padmini of Mewar is not a definitive answer about Padmini, but a deeper respect for the many ways in which a culture remembers, and memory survives, and a deeper appreciation of the landscape in which her memory has lived and grown. Padmini's historicity may remain debated, but the life of her story is undeniable. For centuries, poets have remembered her, storytellers have reshaped her, communities have given her meaning, and scholars have continued to revisit her. Through Hada's scholarship and Trikha's sensitive translation, that long journey of memory reaches yet another reader.

Some stories endure not because they remain unchanged, but because every generation finds a new way of remembering them. Some figures survive history not because history has managed to preserve them, but because memory has refused to let them die. And somewhere in that ever-changing landscape of memory, Padmini continues to live. And that, for me, is the enduring strength of the collaborative efforts of Prof. Madhav Hada and Prof. Pradeep Trikha’s Queen Padmini of Mewar.

Dr. Atiqa Kelsy, Assistant Coordinator IQAC, Asst Professor, Dept of English. St Xavier's College,  Jaipur

atiqakelsy@sxcjpr.edu.in +91 9772753357