Sometimes, living in Bengaluru makes me pathetically homesick for the north, so I readily agreed to lead a writer’s workshop in Jaipur. Rajasthan is home turf for me—I have cousins in almost every city, and the Rajput spice box (hing, garlic, saunf, red chillies, mustard oil) is the taste of my childhood and my nani’s cooking. My mother-in-law served as governor of the state for several years, so I have had the chance to spend grown-up time there, too—and was lucky enough to cheer the Rajasthan Royals to victory in the inaugural IPL.
I spent a very happy week wandering around the pink city (not as salmon pink as it used to be—more of a tandoori marinade orange, but maybe the general ‘saffronisation’ and ‘sindoorisation’ in the air impacted the shade card issued to the Jaipur Development Authority painters this year?). But, the food, the shopping, and the hospitality more than compensated—precious stones, blue pottery, the softest of block-printed cotton, amiable shopkeepers, skilled craftsmen, fantastic new clubs and pubs, and a new eight-lane highway as broad as an undammed Indus.
The only sour note was reading in the local papers that Rajasthan Governor Haribhau Bagade took it upon himself to declare—at a public meeting in Udaipur—that the marriage between Mughal Emperor Akbar and a Rajput princess, Jodha Bai, is a “fabrication” and “one of many historical inaccuracies introduced due to the early influence of British historians”. He further claimed that “there was a king named Bharmal, and he got the daughter of a maid married to Akbar”.
Imaging: Deni Lal
The governor’s source—which he cited with great conviction—was simply that “there is no mention of Jodha in the Akbarnama”. He failed to provide any source to support the second half of his claim: that a maid was passed off as a princess and married to the emperor.
Now I am not even going to get into the many historical evidences that point at a mutually respectful relationship between the two martial races, the fact that Rajput generals fought in the Mughal armies and vice versa, or even that a Rajput empress quite definitely went on to become the mother of a Mughal emperor.
I am not even going to deep dive into the obvious contradiction. Like, please make up your mind—if the British policy of divide and rule (which lead to the creation of India and Pakistan) was to fan the flames of hatred between Hindus and Muslims, then why on earth would they invent a romantic story in which they happily intermarried? Shouldn’t they have been inventing stories in which they offed each other?
I am just going to focus on the casually casteist, entirely tone-deaf entitlement inherent to the suggestion that a Rajput princess was too ’high born’ to accept a Mughal proposal—so her family bid a “lowly” serving maid to do the dirty, dangerous job instead.
Surely, as a community famed for its courage, Rajputs would be offended by the implication that a Rajput princesses hid behind her maid—someone she was meant to protect—rather than face the emperor herself. I know I am!
The governor went on to encourage a false equivalency between Maharana Pratap and Akbar—this even though the latter’s empire extended from Bengal in the east to Afghanistan in the west, from the Himalayas in the north to the Godavari river in the south, and the former ruled Mewar, which is just about half of modern day Rajasthan.
Bhavani kassam, so embarrassing. Not for Rajputs, though. For him.
editor@theweek.in