The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India, c. 1500-1900 - Hardcover

Sreenivasan, Ramya

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0295987324 ISBN 13: 9780295987323

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2007

Synopsis

Winner of the 2009 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies

The 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.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"In an astoundingly original and ambitious piece of scholarship Ramya Sreenivasan answers difficult questions, in modest and accessible prose, about the genres and popularity of an epic legend. She draws on literary analysis and historical research which is combined with acute insight into the changing shape of gender relations in north India. The study explores a range of primary sources in many scripts including several modern Indian vernaculars. This book is going to be immensely important to the new cultural and social history of medieval and modern India." - K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0295987324
• ISBN 13: 9780295987323
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 276