Whence the idea?

To begin with, how ‘traditional’ for medieval India was the practice of commemorating historical personages in statues or other visual presentations? From where could Akbar, if Hoyland`s suggestions were correct, obtain the very idea of monuments? Not from orthodox Muslim traditions, it would seem. The Quran has no explicit prohibition against presenting living creatures by the means of visual arts, except in the verses condemning idol-worship. However, some authoritative hadiths do attribute to the Prophet condemnatory statements against painters and sculptors eligible for severest punishment on Judgement Day as sinful usurpers of God's creative power.Footnote ¹⁷ In medieval India, as is well known, many Hindu and Jain temples were destroyed by Muslim rulers, the reasons being, according to Richard M. Eaton, more political-symbolic (uprooting and desecrating the patron deity of a non-Muslim enemy or rebel) than iconoclastic.Footnote ¹⁸ However, apart from the above-mentioned reasons, orthodox repulsion for ‘un-Islamic’ practices of sculpturing and painting living creatures could likewise provoke destruction, especially at the early stages of the ‘Muslim period’. Suffice it to mention, for instance, the temple colonnades flanking the Qutub Minar in Delhi: the faces of deities and celestial dancers ornamenting the columns bear clearly visible marks of sword strokes. In his memoirs Firuz Shah Tughlaq, the Delhi Sultan from 1351 to 1388, referred to the fact that he had strictly prohibited the decoration of clothes, vessels and other household objects with pictures of humans and animals, as well as the keeping of pictures and sculptures at home, as a great achievement and “special mercy of God”:

The above-quoted fragment testifies not only to Firuz Shah`s allegiance to orthodox Islam, but more importantly to the fact that, irrespective of all prohibitions, even members of the Muslim elite – the addressee of the Sultan`s draconian measures – used visual presentations of living creatures to decorate clothes, buildings and household utensils. Orthodox Muslim attitudes towards the visual arts in practice proved no obstacle to the development of miniature painting in various Muslim societies including Mughal India where a school of this art had existed under various Muslim kings before Akbar,Footnote ²⁰ although it was the latter who made it distinctively Indian. Akbar invited master miniaturists from Iran, employed local Muslim and Hindu painters: together they studied a number of artistic styles, including European, and this resulted in a host of masterpiece works. Akbar and his associates, the ‘enlightened philosophers’ from the liberal-minded Hindu and Muslim courtiers,Footnote ²¹ opposed the orthodox stance on visual arts with solid arguments. As explained by Abu-l Fazl:

After Akbar, up to Aurangzeb, subsequent Mughal emperors not only patronised miniature painting but also loved to decorate their residences with portraits. After Akbar`s death William Finch, an early seventeenth-century British traveller, visited the Lahore palace that served as royal summer residence and described a gallery of portraits depicting Mughal emperors such as Babur, Humayun, Akbar and the then ruling Jahangir, along with various court scenes.Footnote ²³ However, this evidence pertains to painting and not sculptures – perhaps the former seemed more agreeable than the latter to Muslim taste.

No doubt, the artistic preferences of the Mughal court, from Akbar onwards, were influenced by Hindu traditions, especially when Akbar and his sons, followed by subsequent generations of imperial princes, established marital alliances with powerful Rajput clans. Many Rajputs joined Mughal service to act, apart from other things, as disseminators of Hindu (to put it more precisely, Rajput) influence upon the Mughal court. This influence was multi-dimensional and observable in many aspects of court culture, whether this was royal family culture, etiquette, fashions, entertainment, the means of communication with subjects, or courtly art and architecture.Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, the worship of visual renditions of deities (mūrti) – installed in temples and homes – has been and remains an essential part of Hindu culture and practice. And a number of scholars have researched in detail the history of technical and aesthetic development, as well as regional schools of temple sculpture.Footnote ²⁵ However, of more importance for the present study is the sculpture commemorating, especially in public spaces, real persons as objects of not religious worship but social veneration and memory.

In medieval India heroes fallen in battle were immortalised in steles, columns or memorial stones known as vīragal or kīrttistambha, in many cases decorated with symbolical presentations of the heroes and their spouse(s), especially when the latter immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre.Footnote ²⁶ In various regions of India, there was a tradition of immortalising – in temple bas-reliefs or statues – kings and queens as builders and donors of the temple. Thus, the royal patrons of celebrated temples in Orissa, Andhra, Karnataka and Tamilnadu were presented in this fashion, including some credited with temple galleries depicting not only them but their ancestors as well. Sculptural presentations of spiritual teachers, mainly the Bhakti mystics, were not infrequent in the South.Footnote ²⁷ Surely, these and other similar sculptures were canonised presentations not of individuals but of ideas – kingly valour and righteousness, wifely virtues and queenly beauty, as well as spiritual prowess of the saints.Footnote ²⁸ Statues of this kind formed elements of temple decoration, placed in the side galleries, special niches or aisles – spaces less holy than the sancta sanctorum and visible to all who had access to the temple.

In medieval India portraits and sculptures of mortal men and women – kings, queens, ministers, spiritual preceptors and forefathers – were frequent elements of stories narrated in literary works. They appear as important decorations of interior spaces, especially in royal palaces and aristocratic mansions, in many cases serving as crucial elements of story in dramas, poems and prose works.Footnote ²⁹ Of especial interest in this context is the Pratimānāṭaka, a drama by the celebrated early-medieval playwright Bhasa. In the culmination of its story Rama`s brother Bharata visits a gallery in the vicinity of Ayodhya where sculptures of his ancestors, the kings of the Ikshwaku dynasty, are displayed – importantly, accessible to all visitors.Footnote ³⁰ Statues erected by kings and ministers are mentioned in later sources too, for instance in the fourteenth-century Prabandhacintāmaṇi by the Gujarati Jain writer Merutunga.Footnote ³¹ A more detailed analysis of the ‘secular’ sculpture tradition in medieval India, however, would have taken my study quite far from the chosen theme. These brief remarks set out above have been necessary to ascertain that Akbar could borrow the idea of perpetuating the valiant defenders of Chittor from the Hindu and Jain tradition, both of which he knew well enough. However, no sculpture is known now, even in ruins, as part of the architectural legacy of his reign – the forts and palaces of Agra, Allahabad, Ajmer, along with his specially built residence, Fatehpur Sikri. Written sources of the epoch, as will be discussed below, are also silent on this subject.

Versions and counter-versions

Now back to Monserrate and Hoyland. The first thing that attracted my attention was the contradiction between the text and the note: Hoyland was more concerned with correcting Monserrate's statement than commenting upon it. The Jesuit who had spent two years with Akbar's court informed his reader that the statues in question embodied two enemies personally killed by the emperor. More importantly, the aim of constructing the statues, as formulated by Monserrate, was to glorify ‘Zelaldinus’ and his victory, rather than the vanquished enemies. One of the major sources from which Hoyland obtained his version of the events was Francois Bernier, a French doctor who had lived in Delhi during the later period of Shah Jahan's reign and the early years of Aurangzeb's. In one of his letters, Bernier described the Delhi Red fort built by the order of Shah Jahan:

Thus, Bernier's observation became a primary source for Hoyland. But the English translator of Monserrate's account had one more source from which he had quoted but which, for reasons known only to himself, he chose to leave unmentioned. This was the Annals and Antiquities of Rajast`han by the celebrated Scottish Orientalist Colonel James Tod (first published in two volumes, 1829 and 1832).Footnote ³³

In his book Tod gave a full account on the siege of Chittor by Akbar`s army and stated that “Jaimall of Badnor and Patta of Kelwa” belonged to the “sixteen superior vassals of Mewar”.Footnote ³⁴ He eulogised the valour and gallantry of both brave Rajputs, especially the teenage Patta and his mother (his comparison of her with Spartan women was borrowed by Hoyland almost verbatim); described Jaimal's murder by Akbar; and elaborated, in gory detail, on the massacre of the survivors by Mughal soldiers and the jauhar (self-immolation) of the womenfolk. This account ended with the following observation:

By the time of Hoyland's comment on Monserrate, the above-described version had already been established in both academic and popular discourse. Prior to the publication of Hoyland`s translation, it was, for instance, narrated in the 1896 book on Agra history and architecture by Syad Muhammad Latif, who added that even after the elephant statues were moved to Delhi their previous station in Agra fort was known as the Hāthī pol or Elephant gates.Footnote ³⁷

All the same, other specialists contested the version as suggested by Hoyland and his sources. After visiting Delhi the celebrated archaeologist Alexander Cunningham – in two publicationsFootnote ³⁸ – provided a detailed account on the remains of the statues: demolished on the orders of Aurangzeb, they were not fully destroyed but broken to pieces and found, in a dilapidated condition, by the British in 1863 in one of the corners of the Delhi Red Fort. Charles Campbell produced another report on this subject, almost simultaneously.Footnote ³⁹ Both statements provide extremely important evidence: the elephant and human figures were life-size, the former were of black marble, the latter of red sandstone with decorations of white and yellow marble. Cunningham had no doubt that bothFootnote ⁴⁰ statues depicted Hindus “as their dresses open over the right breast”.Footnote ⁴¹ Later on, another celebrity of Indian archaeology, J. H. Marshall, also published a paper on the excavated remnants of the elephant statues. Entrusted in 1903 by Lord Curzon with the task of rebuilding the statues, he inspected the available remnants and criticised the reports of his predecessors, Cunningham, Campbell and Carr, for a number of incorrect statements on the number and physical state of the fragments.Footnote ⁴²

Quoting all available data on the sculptures in question, Cunningham opposed Bernier and Tod only as concerned Akbar's motives'. In contrast, the renowned archaeologist refused to believe that Akbar, who “prided himself on having killed Jaymal with his own hand” and “assumed the title of Ghazi (or warrior for the faith) after putting to death with his own hand in cold blood his able, gallant, and wounded antagonist Himu Footnote ⁴³ [italics in the original]”, could “afterwards erect statues in honour of any infidel Hindus, however noble in blood, or gallant in the field’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Furthermore, Cunningham suggested:

Thus, Cunningham`s version was quite similar to that of Monserrate but which the celebrated archaeologist did not quote: the statues, according to the latter, were erected on the order of Akbar with the purpose of glorifying the emperor and humiliating his foes. Perhaps it was Cunningham with whom – without naming him – Cambridge Shorter History of India (1934) took dispute when it commented:

One more counter-version was suggested by H. G. Keene in his Handbook for Visitors to Delhi and Its Neighbourhood (1882). After repeating Bernier's narrative on Jaimal and Patta, Keene quotedFootnote ⁴⁷ – as an earlier and so more authoritative account – from the travelogue by William Finch who had visited Mughal India during Jahangir's reign and described the statues in question as “two Rājāws in stone who were slain in the King's Darbār before the King's eyes, for being over-bold in speech, they selling their lives bravely, in remembrance of which they are here placed [italics and diacritics in the original]”.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the original version of Finch's travelogue a ‘marginal note’ note was attached to this account: “It is said that they were two brothers, Rajputs, tutors to a prince, their nephew, whom the King demanded of them. They refused, and were committed; but drew on the officers, slew twelve, and at last, by multitudes oppressing, were slain, and here have elephants of stone and themselves figured”.Footnote ⁴⁹ William Foster, who edited Finch's travelogue in 1921, added that “it is uncertain whether this note is by Finch or by PurchasFootnote ⁵⁰, but the former seems more likely”.Footnote ⁵¹ Either way, the testimony by Finch (or Purchas) was, according to Keene, more trustworthy than Bernier's account written half a century later. This version, if accepted, suggests that the statues embodied the Rajput warriors but had to do with neither Akbar nor Chittor, and instead were erected later by order of Jahangir. To strengthen his argument, Keene turned to Jahangir's memoirs. Footnote ⁵²

Indeed, in his Tuzuk-i Jahāngīrī Akbar's successor narrated some ‘strange’ events that took place in the royal palace of Agra on 28 December 1605. Three (not two) sons of a Rajput Raja by the name of Akhairaj Kachhwaha served at Jahangir's court. The elder of the three, Abhai Ram, “had done improper acts” but the king “winked at his faults” for some time. However, when Jahangir was informed of Abhai Ram's intention to send his family away from Agra and to join the Sisodiyas (at that time hostile to both his own clan and the Mughals), the king had had to react. He suggested that some of his Rajput courtiers “become security for them” but as nobody agreed due to “their excessive turbulence and bad disposition”, the king ordered the arrest of Abhai Ram and his brothers. The brothers put up a fierce fight against the courtiers dispatched to arrest them, and were finally killed “as a warning to many”.Footnote ⁵³ The episode of a palace fight, as narrated by Jahangir, hardly suggests the ruler's admiration and desire to glorify the culprits. Nor did the memoirs mention any nephew whom the slain Rajputs refused to surrender. Thus, the testimony by Finch (or Purchas), put forward by Keene, turned out to be similar to the counter versions or ‘red herrings’ so often employed by the authors of detective stories to divert the investigation for some time from its correct path. In making his argument, Keene did not just consider Monserrate's account, published in English some forty years after Keene's Handbook, but he also ignored the most authoritative testimony, that of Abu-l Fazl, who in his celebrated Ā`īn-i Akbarī described the Agra fort and mentioned briefly that “at the eastern gate are two elephants of stone with their riders graven with exquisite skill”.Footnote ⁵⁴ And that was all that Akbar's closest friend and biographer found necessary to relate about the statues: notably, for him, they were not – as for Finch – “two rajas” but just “two elephants of stone with their riders”.

Perhaps the earlier of the hitherto known European attempts to attribute the statues to the defenders of Chittor was made in 1629–30 by the Hindustan Chronicle, today preserved in the Dutch Record Office (in the Hague) in two hand-written versions, one reporting on Jahangir's reign, the other being a continuation of the narrative up to the beginning of Shah Jahan's: the former was reportedly authored by the Dutch trader Pieter van den Broeke, the latter by Francisco Pelsaert.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Dutch document, almost thirty years before Bernier, describes the siege of Chittor by Akbar's army and heroism of its defenders; Jaimal and Patta are merged by the Dutch narrators into one person. And, ultimately, “Akbar had the figures of Jaimal Patta and of another chief, sitting on elephants, carved in stone or plaster and, in memory of this victory, they were placed on either side of the large inner entrance of his castle at Agra”.Footnote ⁵⁶

This narrative is of interest as a transitional one from Monserrate to Bernier. The Dutch agree with the Portuguese missionary that the statues were intended to glorify Akbar's victory and not his adversaries. However, in the Dutch version, those whom Monserrate had styled as “petty kings” were, for the first time as hitherto known, associated with the defenders of Chittor, and this makes the Dutch narrative closer to that of Bernier. Perhaps it was from the Dutch chronicle, published in 1631 as part of de Laet's popular book Description of India and Fragment of Indian history, that the French doctor took his information on the Agra statues. It is difficult now to ascertain from where the Dutch authors obtained the story – it was hardly possible that they had concocted it themselves. Some popular discourse, most probably oral, could have existed.

Henry Beveridge, the renowned British Indologist and translator of Abu-l Fazl's Akbar-Nāma, suggested a further counter-version. As the editor and author of commentaries on the translation of Tuzuk-i Jahāngīrī by A. Rogers, he noted the data on two monuments erected at the order of Jahangir eleven years after the Abhai Ram episode; curiously, these statues also depicted Rajput warriors. As is well known, Jahangir, jealous of Akbar's glory, was especially proud of the fact that it was he, not Akbar, who had ultimately succeeded in subduing the rebellious Sisodiya clan. After a long resistance Amar Singh, the son of the celebrated Rana Pratap, offered allegiance to the Mughals in 1614 and, as per the established practice, sent his son Karan Singh to Jahangir's court. Karan Singh served the king faithfully and enjoyed his favours. In 1616, Jahangir, according to his memoirs, ordered “the quick-handed stone-cutters to carve full-sized figures of the Rānā and his son Karan out of marble. On this day they were completed and submitted to me. I ordered them to be taken to Agra and placed in the garden below the jharoka [exhibition-window] [diacritics and italics in the original]”.Footnote ⁵⁷

It was these statues, according to Beveridge, that Bernier saw in Delhi. In his opinion, the tarkāb in the Persian original, meaning ‘composite’ or ‘complex’, could be read as ‘assembled’, signifying that each statue comprising two ‘assembled’ figures – of an elephant and its rider. Beveridge even went to the extent of suggesting that “even if not originally mounted statues, may they not afterwards have been set up on the Akbar's stone elephants or on the Gwalior elephant?”.Footnote ⁵⁸ Beveridge's suggestion, however, added more confusion to the already intricate case. Firstly, as Beveridge himself admitted in the note to the translation of the Tuzuk-i Jahāngīrī,Footnote ⁵⁹ Jahangir mentioned statues of marble while the remains unearthed in Delhi testified to the elephants being of marble and the riders of sandstone. Secondly, Jahangir, according to his memoirs, ordered the placement of the statues not at the gates of the fortress but in the garden inside. And, thirdly, there is no evidence that the statues of Amar Singh and his son were ‘mounted’ on the marble elephants previously installed by Akbar, and if that was the case, what then had happened to the ‘original’ riders mentioned by all witnesses including the most authoritative one, Abu-l Fazl?

There were other versions also put forward by different scholars. For instance, in the opinion of C. Campbell, the statues unearthed in Delhi had been brought by Shah Jahan from Gwalior rather than from Agra, and so had nothing to do with the Chittor heroes.Footnote ⁶⁰ Beveridge too suggested Gwalior as the origin of the elephants in the ‘composite’ statues. J. H. Marshall and E. B. Havell strongly argued that the remains of the statues exhumed in Delhi had certainly not been the ones erected in Agra. They insisted that the size of the elephant footprints visible on the stone plinths that had housed the statues in AgraFootnote ⁶¹ did not match the size of the Delhi fragments.Footnote ⁶² All in all, the discussion about the elephant statues discovered in Delhi and the problem of their attribution proved rather active in late nineteenth-early twentieth-century academic discourse; new versions may also appear in future as well.Footnote ⁶³ Perhaps it will now be impossible to ascertain whether the statue remains in Delhi corresponded to the sculptures described by Abu-l Fazl and European visitors to Mughal India. Nor is it possible to have a clear idea of what Bernier really saw in Delhi – copies of the Agra sculptures (what happened to their originals in that case?) or the original statues, associated or not with Jaimal and Patta of Chittor?

Telling Silence

Of more interest is another discrepancy that emerges from the data discussed above. Why was it that Akbar's contemporaries – Abu-l Fazl and Monserrate – did not associate the construction of the statues with the emperor's chivalrous attitude towards his enemies, while some decades later the Dutch travellers and Bernier (or, more precisely, those from whom these Europeans obtained their information) were sure that the sculptures in question had been built by Akbar to glorify Jaimal and Patta?

The silence of Abu-l Fazl appears to be especially suspicious. He was Akbar's biographer, friend and confidant, one of the ideologues of his reforms aimed at turning the Mughal empire into a mighty state, strongly founded upon the Mughal-Rajput union. Akbar was eulogised by Abu-l Fazl as an ideal ‘perfect man’, a wise, generous and merciful king, capable of pardoning his enemies and glorifying their valour. Indeed, Akbar's policy was aimed at turning the Rajputs from ever-rebellious foes into faithful vassals and ‘supporting pillars’ of the empire. With this purpose in mind, Akbar, and his successors in due course, entered into marital alliances with the most powerful Rajput clans and offered Rajputs high positions at the court. Against this background, the story of building monuments to the valiant Rajputs could be extremely useful for both the imperial policy and Abu-l Fazl as its ideologue and historiographer. However, neither the well-informed minister nor the observant missionary, Monserrate, mentioned the defenders of Chittor in connection with the statues. In Monserrate's record, the statues referred to a certain war and “petty kings” killed by Akbar, which makes it possible to associate the statues with Chittor, but the latter was not the only fortress where Akbar personally participated in the storming attacks. Abu-l Fazl's narrative described the statues as a decorative object and nothing else; he did not even clarify whether the sculptures had been specially built on Akbar's order or brought from some place, possibly Chittor itself.Footnote ⁶⁴

Nevertheless, perhaps Abu-l Fazl, due to some reason, did not find it necessary to refer to the history of the monuments that he just briefly mentioned in one phrase, and we should turn for detailed information to other contemporary sources – primarily the official documents and chronicles narrating the story of the siege of Chittor? The Fatḥ Nāma- i Chitor, dated 9 March 1568, seems to be one of the earliest records on the subject.Footnote ⁶⁵ Such ‘victory communiqués’ were usually sent, after major victories, to the capital, provincial centres and Indian principalities outside the Mughal realm. Apart from the Fatḥ Nāma- i Chitor, the story of the Chittor siege was related in four contemporary and near contemporary chronicles, well-known to all Mughal history students: the Akbar Nāma by Abu-l Fazl, the Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī by Nizam ud-din Ahmad, the Tārīkh-i Akbarī by Muhammad Arif Qandahari and, last but not least, the ‘oppositional’ Muntakhab ut-tavārīkh by Abd al-Qadir Badauni.Footnote ⁶⁶

Differing in some details, these texts describe the Chittor campaign almost identically. The casus belli, according to all four, was the refusal by Rana Udai Singh Sisodiya, the ruler of Mewar, to acknowledge Mughal suzerainty. When Akbar was on a hunting expedition near the borders of Mewar, the Rana did not come to pay obeisance to the emperor, nor did he send his son with tribute, as per the existing rules.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, the Rana demonstratively strengthened the fortifications and garrison of Chittor. Such behaviour could be viewed by Akbar as open defiance, especially sensitive and provocative in circumstances when Mughal sovereignty over the Rajput principalities had been to a considerable extent formal, based primarily upon Mughal armed dominance and facilitated by the seemingly never-ending hostility between Rajput clans. Despite the fact that Akbar did not have a big army to hand, he invaded Mewar and besieged Chittor. Udai Singh fled the fortress and left its defence to his trusted vassals, Saindas JaimalFootnote ⁶⁸ and Udaibhan Patta. Thereafter, the Fatḥ Nāma- i Chitor and the chronicles offer a detailed description of the labours and losses of the siege, the failed attempts of frontal assault and the mining of the walls (the untimely explosion of a mine caused heavy losses among the Mughal warriors), the emperor's personal gallantry, his sniper shot that killed Jaimal,Footnote ⁶⁹ the breach in the wall, the final assault, the self-immolation of the women, the bloody massacre of the survivorsFootnote ⁷⁰ – in other words, everything except Akbar's intention to glorify the defenders by building monuments to them.

Quite understandably, each of these texts described the Chittor siege in the tone and mood corresponding to the respective author's views and intentions. The Fatḥ Nāma- i Chitor unequivocally relayed this campaign as a jihad, and its whole narrative breathes religious bigotry. It was, however, also possible that the ‘victory communiqué’ was written in accordance with existing canons and clichés that prescribed a certain form of expression in such documents narrating the ‘Islamic conquest’. In Zilli's opinion, Indo-Muslim historiography prior to Akbar's period knew no idiom but that of jihad when describing war.Footnote ⁷¹ It is likewise possible that the jihad rhetoric of the text in question corresponded to the genuine ‘ideological stance’ of Akbar and his court at the initial phase of his reign. This stance was, as is well known, abandoned later in favour of the strategies of Hindu-Muslim political integration in a strong centralised empire.

From the perspective of Badauni, Nizam ud-din Ahmad and especially Qandahari, the Chittor campaign was simply the war of a Muslim king against infidels. According to Qandahari, it was Satan himself that opposed Akbar in the form of Jaimal and his warriors.Footnote ⁷² Abu-l Fazl, however, narrated the Chittor campaign in a different vein, as a war not for the sake of religion but for the consolidation of the state, against an insurgency of local chieftains. It was not by chance that he listed not only Muslim but also Hindu names among the warriors who had died or distinguished themselves during the siege of Chittor. Indeed, Rajputs from clans, such as the Kachhwahas, that were hostile to the Sisodiyas of Chittor and loyal to the Mughals participated in the siege.Footnote ⁷³ But Abu-l Fazl, like other recorders of the event, did not mention Akbar's desire to commemorate his brave foes.

In order to listen to the other side of this story I turned to Rajput historical narratives. While I could not explore all of them, most of those available to me described the Chittor events in more or less detail, and praised the bravery of the defenders, but like their Mughal counterparts said nothing about the statues. For instance, the Sanskrit poem Rājpraśastiḥ mahākāvayaṃ by Ranchod Bhatta, inscribed in 1661 upon the order of Raj Singh Sisodiya of Mewar on the stone slabs of the Rajsamand lake dam near Udaipur, narrates the history of the Sisodiyas in its fourth canto. As a member of this clan and Udai Singh's direct successor, Raj Singh would presumably have been interested in making the episode of the statues a part of the narrative. However, in the lines on Udai Singh, the bard mentioned the foundation of Udaipur but omitted Udai Singh's flight from Chittor (a shameful deed for a Rajput whatever the efforts by the bards to justify it),Footnote ⁷⁴ and then briefly stated: “His [Udai Singh's] warriors Jaimal Rathor and Patta Sisodiya along with the hero IshwardasFootnote ⁷⁵ attained glory fighting against the Delhi ruler Akbar”.Footnote ⁷⁶ And that was all.

One of the forms of Rajasthani oral narratives on the past are historical songs or ballads (gīt) performed by professional bards. In the 1950s and 60s two multi-volume collections of such historical ballads appeared: Prācīn Rājasthānī Gīt Saṅgrah in twelve volumes and Rājasthānī Vīr Gīt Saṅgrah in four volumes. Unfortunately, the publishers did not attach any historical research or commentary worth its name to these volumes. Similar to all other oral genres, it is virtually impossible to produce historical attribution for such songs. Both collections contain ballads on the siege of Chittor and the gallantry of Jaimal and Patta. In lucid poetic style they narrate the bloody battle, Jaimal's and Patta's feats of valour and their proud refusal to surrender and thus betray their sovereign, even if the latter had abandoned Chittor – everything but the story of the statues.Footnote ⁷⁷

A special case is the celebrated seventeenth-century historian Munhta (Mehta, Munhato) Nainsi from Jodhpur. In his Khyāt, a collection of dynastic histories of major Rajput principalities, he narrated the Chittor siege very briefly and impartially:

Then, quite unexpectedly, Nainsi revisited the Chittor siege in his chapter on the Hada dynasty of Bundi. In 1568-9, Akbar besieged their fortress Ranthambhor and, unlike the Chittor war, after five weeks of siege and with Bhagwant Das Kachhwaha as mediator, the ruler Surjan Rai entered into negotiations with Akbar. He ultimately surrendered, acknowledged Mughal suzerainty and received a rich fief in return.Footnote ⁸¹ Describing these events, Nainsi was extremely scornful of Surjan Rai who, being Udai Singh's vassal, yielded the fort without his consent and betrayed his suzerain. Nainsi wrote with disdain:

Analysing the story of Surjan Rai, Cynthia Talbot (to whom I am obliged for bringing this important episode to light) has styled Nainsi's testimony as “anecdote” and “gossip that Nainsi found worth repeating”. Indeed, as Talbot has rightly suggested, it was “counterproductive” for Akbar to insult his newly recruited vassal and officer in such a public and rude manner.Footnote ⁸⁴ But for the context of this study it is important that a certain narrative on Akbar's building of statues in commemoration of his Rajput foes did exist, perhaps in oral form, to be recorded by the Dutch merchants, Nainsi, Bernier and Tod.

The statues story as compensatory narrative

The huge body of narratives on Rajput principalities’ resistance (albeit not in the modern nationalist meaning) to the two waves of Muslim invasions in the twelfth-fifteenth and sixteenth-seventeenth centuries represents a mighty and tragic ‘counter-epic’ to the ‘epic of conquest’ as embodied in the chronicles of the Delhi sultanate and Mughal empire.Footnote ⁸⁵ This resistance in an absolute majority of cases ended in the defeat of the Rajputs, who, given that their valour was recognised and praised even by their enemies, were ultimately powerless in the face of the more effective military organisation and tactic of both the ‘Turks’ and Mughals. As a result, almost all episodes of Rajput ‘counter-epic’ were elaborated upon by the narratives of different epochs, genres and authors as one and the same story: namely, invasion of ‘Turks’, siege of the fortress, final battle in which Rajput warriors display wonders of gallantry, fighting even with severed heads, the heroic death of all Rajputs, their wives’ self-immolation, and the meeting of the fallen heroes and their spouses (as well as with the celestial damsels) in heaven. As Harlan has aptly observed, most of the heroes glorified and worshipped by modern Rajputs, especially in Mewar, are “much-adored losers”.Footnote ⁸⁶ Hence, the specificity of the Rajput martial ethos: valiant death in battle or ‘departure of a hero’ (vīrgati) was viewed as a sacrifice to the patron goddess of the hero's clan (kuldevī) and thus more desirous and glorious than victory itself. Only by valiant death could a warrior be ‘useful in battle’ (for example, the Hindi idiom for heroic death in battle, yuddh mẽ kām ānā ⁾.Footnote ⁸⁷ Such an attitude worked, I would suggest, as a psychological compensation of sorts: Rajput warriors died, lost their land to the invaders but attained moral victory and glory. Going to heaven, they received a reward that compensated for, in mass consciousness, the trauma of defeat.

Similar compensation was required when some Rajput clans acknowledged Mughal suzerainty and entered marital alliances with the Mughal ruling family. Starting from Bharmal Kachhwaha of Amber, they married their daughters to Mughal emperors and princes to become, according to their own old tradition, vassals of the groom's family, and thus served their in-laws on the battlefield and at the royal court. This practice did not work in reverse: no Mughal princess was ever married to a Rajput, testifying to the inequality of Mughal-Rajput power relations. However, many Rajput princes accepted this unequal union with the Mughals not only succumbing to military pressure and preferring life to the ‘departure of a hero’. Contemporary political realities and mutual interests brought the Mughals and Rajputs into alliance: on the one hand, the emperors wanted to stabilise their power and needed Rajput military might and prowess, while, on the other, the Rajputs viewed Mughal power as protector from aggressive rivals, mainly hostile clans.Footnote ⁸⁸

However, the very possibility of marital alliance with and service to those who from an orthodox Hindu view were nothing but barbarians seemed unacceptable to many Rajputs. The Sisodiya rulers of Chittor and Udaipur declined to acknowledge Mughal sovereignty and put up an armed fight against the empire. The Sisodiyas refused the status of Rajputs to those who had allied with Mughals; according to oral tradition, the prudent rulers of Udaipur would not share food with the Kachhwahas during friendly gatherings or political talks. Udai Singh's son Maharana Pratap Singh (1540–97) fought against Akbar to the death and did not surrender even after defeat at Haldighati (1576) by the Mughal army led by Bhagwant Das Kachhwaha and his son Man Singh.Footnote ⁸⁹ But the steady Sisodiyas could not escape inter-family discord: some of Pratap's relatives served Akbar and even fought on his side in the fateful Haldighati battle, with Pratap's son, as mentioned above, later surrendering to Jahangir. The Sisodiyas served later Mughal emperors as well. All these events for many Rajputs signified a total breakdown of their traditional world, which helps to explain why they needed compensatory narratives that (to a certain extent) could provide psychological comfort to those who served the Mughals as well as those who fought them. It was important in Akbar's period and perhaps even more so in subsequent times, especially during the reign of Aurangzeb whose policies provoked the Rajputs, including Raj Singh Sisodiya of Mewar, to rebel against the Mughals.Footnote ⁹⁰

One important study of these compensatory narratives has been carried out by B. L. Bhadani from Aligarh Muslim University. Based upon a wide range of sources, his work offers a convincing, though too brief and cursory, analysis of Rajput historical ballads and other medieval texts praising Akbar as a second Rama. These narratives compared the conflict between Akbar and Maharana Pratap to the battles of Arjuna and Karna, two equally valiant and noble Mahabharata heroes who fought, due to the adverse course of destiny, in two hostile camps. In one of the ballads Akbar, having received the news of Pratap's death, publicly mourned and eulogised the brave Rajput for his refusal to surrender.Footnote ⁹¹ In another ballad, Akbar praised the valour of Ishwardas, the companion of Jaimal and Patta.Footnote ⁹² Such a motif seems to be frequent in Rajput narratives outside Rajasthan as well.Footnote ⁹³

In the presentations of Rajput bards Akbar emerges as a generous, brave, worthy, and, more importantly, equal (in both valour and status) antagonist of the Chittor heroes and Maharana Pratap. That was why, in Nainsi's narrative, Akbar reacted to the Chittor resistance and Ranthambhor surrender in a ‘very Rajput’ way. He glorified Jaimal and Patta who had fought the Mughal army to the end as valiant foes and, no less significantly, as loyal vassals of their suzerain; at the same time he put to public shame Surjan Rai who had surrendered contrary to his overlord's will. To what extent this ‘anecdote’ corresponded with historical truth was of little interest to the Jodhpur historian; he seemed more concerned with the task, which Talbot has styled as “justifying defeat”.

Some Rajput historical narratives analysed by Ziegler straightforwardly declared the Mughals to be a branch of Rajputs.Footnote ⁹⁴ A contemporary poet Narottam unhesitatingly defined Akbar's reign as a “hendū rāj” or Hindu state.Footnote ⁹⁵ This looks similar to some North Indian Bhakti narratives claiming Akbar to be a Brahman yogi, Balmukund, who by mistake had swallowed a cow's hair in milk, and consequently was punished by becoming a Muslim in his subsequent birth. The sub-conscious ‘memory’ of his Hindu origin explained, in the view of Bhakti hagiographers, Akbar's extremely benevolent and reverential conversations with the sants (even those who in reality lived well before or after his reign).Footnote ⁹⁶ All these narratives, written and oral, created the image of a king who was Muslim only ‘on the surface’ but in essence exhibited the valour, generosity and piety of a good Hindu raja. There was no shame in serving this king,Footnote ⁹⁷ nor in giving a daughter or sister in marriage or even in losing a battle to him – a social and cultural equal. Such an Akbar could, in an oral or written narrative, glorify his enemies, vanquished but nevertheless respected and, more importantly, not alien; he could immortalise them in mounted statues – no matter if in reality the statues had nothing to do with the Rajputs of Chittor.

Some well-known works on late medieval Indian history offer a convincing analysis of the supra-communal alliance, and to a certain extent merger, of two North Indian martial elites, the Mughals and the Rajputs.Footnote ⁹⁸ They were connected by blood (some Mughal emperors, including Jahangir and Shah Jahan, had Rajput mothers), by common values, their military ethos and aristocratic lifestyle; in more than one case the members of the two groups fraternised, exchanging their turbans according to the old Rajput tradition.Footnote ⁹⁹ Up to the disintegration of the Mughal empire, Mughals and Rajputs pursued the same political goals and fought the same enemies, irrespective of religious persuasion.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The legend of the Agra sculptures was, I would therefore suggest, a part of a broader narrative, which was to provide ideological, social and psychological substantiation of this unique socio-cultural and political alliance in late medieval India.