Winner of the 2009 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies The medieval Rajput queen Padmini - believed to have been pursued by Alauddin Khalji, the Sultan of Delhi - has been the focus of numerous South Asian narratives, ranging from a Sufi mystical romance in the sixteenth century to nationalist histories in the late nineteenth century. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen explores how early modern regional elites, caste groups, and mystical and monastic communities shaped their distinctive versions of the past through the repeated refashioning of the legend of Padmini. Ramya Sreenivasan investigates these legends and traces their subsequent appropriation by colonial administrators and nationalist intellectuals, for varying different political ends. Using Padmini as a means of illustrating the power of gender norms in constructing heroic memory, she shows how such narratives about virtuous women changed as they circulated across particular communities in South Asia between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book will interest historians of memory, gender, community, culture, and historywriting in South Asia. Illustrating how enduring legends emerged out of particular precolonial repositories of "tradition," the book also addresses the nature of colonial transitions and precolonial historical consciousness.

Winner of the 2009 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies The medieval Rajput queen Padmini - believed to have been pursued by Alauddin Khalji, the Sultan of Delhi - has been the focus of numerous South Asian narratives, ranging from a Sufi mystical romance in the sixteenth century to nationalist histories in the late nineteenth century. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen explores how early modern regional elites, caste groups, and mystical and monastic communities shaped their distinctive versions of the past through the repeated refashioning of the legend of Padmini. Ramya Sreenivasan investigates these legends and traces their subsequent appropriation by colonial administrators and nationalist intellectuals, for varying different political ends. Using Padmini as a means of illustrating the power of gender norms in constructing heroic memory, she shows how such narratives about virtuous women changed as they circulated across particular communities in South Asia between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book will interest historians of memory, gender, community, culture, and historywriting in South Asia. Illustrating how enduring legends emerged out of particular precolonial repositories of "tradition," the book also addresses the nature of colonial transitions and precolonial historical consciousness.

The two volumes of James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, first published in 1829–32, remain to this day the first port of call for anyone interested in the history and culture of Rajasthan and the early colonial encounter in India. Written by the first East India Company official to the region, the text was also seminal for the early figures in India’s independence movement who reworked Tod’s imagined ancient Rajput national identities into a call for India’s national liberation from British colonial rule.   Now available in a numbered limited edition of 750 copies, this re-issue of the original text including over 80 original copperplate engravings, woodblock prints, and lithographs returns the text to its original state, while the accompanying companion volume critically reframes this monumental, but often misunderstood, work. The new volume shows how Tod’s Annals is not merely the product of the singular voice of a Western “orientalist� imagination, instead revealing a richly complex work in which Rajasthani voices provide a “multi-authored� heterogeneity to the text which is often discordant and unpredictable. Re-articulating the variety of voices that simultaneously inhabit Tod’s Annals, the revised volume argues for a more conjunctural, contingent, and open-ended reading of colonial history. Distributed for the Royal Asiatic Society