Why Did Bhansali Apologise, Especially If Padmavati Didn’t Exist?

Why did Sanjay Leela Bhansali feel the need to bend over backwards to appease the Rajput Karni Sena?

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s understanding of love and longing might be the best in Bollywood, but he’s clearly not one who learns from his own history. After having fingers pointed at him for factual inaccuracies in Bajirao Mastani, he’s playing with fire once again in his next period film, Padmavati. The controversy surrounding his Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh and Shahid Kapoor starrer, is at best pre-mature. The Rajput Sabha and Karni Sena, self-appointed protectors of Rajput history, are violently crying themselves hoarse about his interpretation of the valiant Rani Padmini. They claim that Bhansali is hell bent upon bursting their bubble with a dream sequence in the film, that hints at a blasphemous romance between the Hindu queen and the Muslim raider from the 12th and 13th centuries. How are they so sure of Bhansali’s intentions? Well, baseless rumours did that job rather well.

So they roughed up Bhansali and his crew on his film’s sets at Jaipur’s Jaigarh Fort on Friday, and have reportedly been demanding to see the film’s script and rushes before the its nationwide release. For the sake of the film, Bhansali and his team have officially clarified that there’s no such scene in the magnum opus. But the Rajputs can’t let this die down that easily, they have their valiant image to protect after all. I’ll get to why their demands are crazier than they sound in a minute, but first, let’s look at what history has to say about the lady in question.

Did Rani Padmini Even Exist?

Well, to begin with, history itself is divided over the very existence of Rani Padmini. Padmavat (1540 AD), a Sufi mystical poem written in Avadhi by a poet named Malik Muhammad Jayasi, is the first known narrative of the legend. It takes us back 250 years to the late 13th century, when North India was largely divided between the Delhi Sultanate and Rajput kingdoms. Ruling the Delhi Sultanate was the king of its second dynasty, Alauddin Khilji. But 14th century accounts, both the sultanate and Rajput annals, are silent about Padmini. Amir Khusrau gives the earliest account of Khilji’s conquest, but apparently doesn’t talk of her at all.

Padmavat tells the story of Rani Padmini, the princess of Singhal, who had skin so unblemished and pure that one could see the water she drank, or the betel leaves she chewed, through it. Tales of her beauty spread far and wide through a parrot named Hiraman. King Ratan Rawal Singh, the ruler of Chittor was smitten when he heard of her from the talking parrot.

But the parrot didn’t fly all the way to Alauddin Khilji. While some accounts mention that the Mughal king heard of Rani Padmini from Raghav Chetan, a Brahmin artist who was banished from Ratan Singh’s court for using black magic, but others suggest that it was Ratan Singh’s own brothers who aroused Khilji with lustful stories of her. They did this out of vengeance, as they weren’t given any part of the dowry that she brought to Chittor.

Khilji lustfully set out to conquer Mewar in 1303 and forcibly wed the Hindu queen he was now obsessed with. There are contradictory accounts of Padmini’s reaction to Khilji’s attack too. Some say that she committed jauhar with other queens before Khilji could get to them, while other versions suggest that she tricked him into believing that the convoy accompanying him back to Delhi was hers, whereas it hid soldiers with swords. There’s a parallel narrative about Khilji himself being a pedophile and a homosexual, which I’m sure the Rajputs would’ve been only too happy to see in the film.

So, wait. Is the valiant queen a fictional character too? It’s hard even for historians to agree on how much of the Padmavati legend is fact or fiction. But Bhansali’s film is not the only dramatised version of the popular legend. Jai Chitod (1961) and Maharani Padmini (1964) are faithful renditions of Jayasi’s Padmavat. In fact, if there’s anyone who can tell the story with conviction, is it Sanjay Leela Bhansali. He previously directed the opera Padmavati in 2008 at the Theatre Du Chatelet in Paris, based on French composer Albert Roussel’s work from 1923.

Padmavati’s story is not sad because I find that there is a whole paradox of finding her as a warrior in her last moments of destroying herself. Because her husband lost the war and she did not give herself to Allaudin Khilji, she said, ‘No, I will not die.’ Now that needs so much more courage, to walk into the fire and say, ‘The enemy doesn’t get us. Our pride, our dignity remains.’ So it is not tragedy, it is for me a great ending.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Filmmaker (in an interview to Anupama Chopra in 2008)

According to Ramya Sreenivasan, the author of The Many Lives Of A Rajput Queen (2007) there is evidence that Jayasi remembered the Khilji conquest on Chittor, but one can’t be sure of his literary successors. Pandit Ramchandra Shukla, writer and historian, is of the view that while the first half of Padmavati’s story might be pure imagination, but the second half from the Brahman traitor Raghav’s arrival in Delhi down to Padmini’s self immolation, seems to be based on historical facts.

So Why The Compromise?

Sanjay Leela Bhansali hates endings where two lovers walk into the sunset and live happily ever after. So he reaches into history and brings out emotions that are buried deep under hefty text and years of blurry narratives. The world gets history wrong all the time because we interpret the past and its learnings based on our current situations. So why should a group of people be allowed to stand in the way of a filmmaker’s creative interpretation, especially when much of the history they’re holding on to so dearly, is based purely upon folklore and blurry memories from 5000 years ago? Bhansali’s film is only further fictionalising a what seems to be piece of fiction to begin with.

So what was the fuss about? Bhansali had already clarified that his film will not hurt the sentiments of Mewar. So then why did he feel the need to bend backwards to appease the Rajputs, despite the fact that for once even Bollywood stood behind him in complete unison?

Also Read: Bhansali & Team ‘Padmavati’ Clears All Issues With Rajputs

It’s a price that a storyteller with merit and fame has to pay in a country like ours, while those loitering around outside heritage monuments calling themselves guides, continue to add their own mirch masala to a history that we’ve already forgotten.