Many in South Asia are familiar with the story of Padmini. It is the account of a beautiful fourteenth-century Rajput queen who thwarted the Delhi-based ruler Alauddin Khilji by immolating herself and her female companions rather than lose her honor at the hands of the Muslim king. Padmini's husband—the ruler of Chitor—subsequently died on the battlefield fighting Alauddin Khilji. Though historians doubt Padmini actually existed, the tale of her life has become symbolically and historically charged, conjuring as it does images of valiant Hindus resisting rampaging Muslims as well as of Hindu female honor and self-sacrifice. Indeed, many today believe that Padmini is a historical figure and that these events did happen. And, yet, as Ramya Sreenivasan skillfully shows in her book, the version related above is only the latest avatar in the “many lives” of the Padmini narrative.

Examining scores of renditions of the Padmini tale from the earliest known narrative by Malik Muhammad Jayasi (c. 1540s) across almost four centuries and many languages (including Awadhi, Rajasthani, Bangla, Sanskrit, Urdu, and English), Sreenivasan's scholarship is both analytically complex and deeply satisfying. Four substantive chapters form the core of this book. Each introduces the reader to key moments in the life of the Padmini legend. Thus, 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. The third chapter examines two sets of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century engagements: those by North Indian-based, Urdu littérateurs as well as the earliest British consideration of the legend. The fourth chapter, anchored primarily in the late nineteenth century, focuses on Bengal and the writings of the Bengali literati (bhadralok).

The reader's attention is repeatedly drawn to the intricate interplay between the production of a text and the context in which it is produced. This book pays special attention to the ways in which historiographic traditions, popular memories, and patronage systems helped construct particular renditions of the tale. Not surprisingly, various kinds of elisions and/or contradictions lie at the heart of each account. 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). Thus, 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. Nineteenth-century bhadralok accounts in turn paper over intra-Rajput conflict, histories of Hindu-Muslim accommodation, and the existence of Rajput polygyny.

For all of Sreenivasan's attentiveness to the need to deal with different narrative traditions on their own terms, she nonetheless continuously works to highlight “more complicated histories of accommodation between traditions that are now invariably thought of as unconnected and mutually hostile” (13). Nowhere is this point more starkly rendered than in discussions around Jayasi's ability to simultaneously work with Persian and Indic literary traditions or his deep familiarity with a diverse range of Hindu and Muslim religious traditions.

Ultimately, however, this is also a book about the instability of representations. On the specific question of Hindu and Muslim religious identities, Sreenivasan skillfully highlights their slow evolution by tracing shifting discursive treatments over the centuries. Take the example of Alauddin Khilji. Whereas early Rajput stories of Padmini blame Alauddin Khilji's kingly status for his deceitfulness, later narratives—responding, in part, to souring Hindu-Muslim relations—increasingly foreground his Muslim-ness to explain his dishonorable conduct. Similarly, even as Padmini is a voice of Rajput morality in certain seventeenth-century accounts, she is recast as “a silent pawn” whose honor stands in for Hindu dharma by the early nineteenth century (145). 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). With its combination of powerful insights, cross-disciplinary appeal, and prose that is admirably accessible, Sreenivasan's work marks a real scholarly tour de force. It will be debated and pored over for years to come.