Padmavati, in a sense, is a neighbourhood story. My village, Mustafabad, happens to be in Rae Bareli, which embraces numerous Chishtiya Sufi shrines or places where the saints spent some time. One of the saints was Khwaja Ashraf Jehangir Semnani, whom Malik Mohammad Jayasi, the author of Padmavat, was devoted to.
Jayasi would faint at the controversy surrounding his masterpiece.
Naeem Ata Shah, in his flowing orange robes and headgear, often visited Mustafabad. Jayasi, who preceded Tulsidas, in the list of the great poets of Awadh, was an endless source of quotations. So was Tulsidas, whose correspondence with emperor Akbar's premier courtier, Abdul Rahim Khan-e-Khana, on meter and structure of poetry, one heard about later and which is something one would have expected more scholarship on.