The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

Each introduces the reader to key moments in the life of the Padmini legend. [...]following a discussion of its literary emergence in sixteenth-century Awadh, the reader encounters seventeenth- and eighteenth-century re-workings of the tale in Rajasthan, the Punjab, and Arakan. In the Awadhi context, for example, these can be seen in the uneasy coexistence of elite polygyny with a Sufi monogamous ethic, or in the Englishman James Tod's ambivalence around Padmini's decision to immolate herself (commit jauhar). [...]even as he denounces it as a "horrible sacrifice" (p. 146) and barbaric custom, he also lauds it as a custom that speaks to devotion and love as well as Rajput virtue. By the late nineteenth century she simultaneously becomes the "symbolic center" of a new national ideal as well as a representative of an idealized Hindu past in which "companionate monogamy" is depicted as the norm (184-86). Besides highlighting the restraints on women through the ages, the book continuously reminds us of how the figure of the woman is used in community identity projects "in the present and in remembered pasts" (14).