THE plot was made for Bollywood: a princess so beautiful that a lustful prince besieges a spectacular fortress to catch her, and so virtuous that she hurls herself into a fire rather than surrender. Movie producers were not the first to be inspired by the story of Padmini, the loyal wife of the Rana of Chittor. The French composer Albert Roussel’s “Padmavati”, an opera about this paragon of princesses, debuted in Paris in 1923. A century before that James Tod, a British officer and amateur historian, incorporated the tale in his “Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan”, a work widely translated and reprinted in India. His romantic version appealed especially to Rajputs, the Hindu warrior caste that supplied the rulers of numerous princely states in western India. The image of the radiant Padmini foiling a Muslim invader fitted a narrative of heroic resistance that was far more enchanting than the messy truth, which was that Rajput rulers generally fought each other as much as they did...Continue reading
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