From Poem to 'Fact': How a Sufi Allegory Became Rajasthan's History

The central historiographical fact is plain: Padmini appears in no contemporary account of the 1303 siege of Chittor, including Amir Khusrau's own record as a chronicler present at the time, and she first surfaces two centuries later in Malik Muhammad Jayasi's 1540 Padmavat, an Awadhi Sufi allegory in which Padmini's own beauty and the siege itself operate as spiritual metaphor rather than as reportage. What is less often traced is how that allegory came to be read as literal history. The nineteenth-century British colonial official James Tod, compiling Rajput oral tradition and bardic chronicles into his widely read Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, treated the Padmini story as historical fact rather than as a later literary elaboration, and his retelling shaped how generations of readers, Indian and British alike, encountered the episode. Twentieth and twenty-first century nationalist and regional historiography continued to build on that same foundation, treating a story with no contemporary source as settled Rajput history. The historian Ramya Sreenivasan's scholarly study traces this transmission directly, showing the legend accumulating new political and communal meanings at each retelling across five centuries rather than transmitting one fixed historical memory.