NEW DELHI: Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s “Padmavat” is a first-rate poetry not a regressive Bollywood extravaganza, says writer and literary historian Purushottam Agrawal, noting that the Sufi poet’s masterpiece is an imaginative literature woven around an episode in history.
Agrawal presents his case in a new book “Padmavat – An Epic Love Story”, months after the release of the controversial Bollywood epic “Padmaavat”, which had prompted months of protests across the country by Hindu Rajputs over queen Padmini’s portrayal.
“Jayasi’s sympathies are clearly with Ratansen, not because he is a Hindu warrior, but because is a ‘love-yogi’. Jayasi’s Alauddin is cunning and unfair to Padmavati and Ratansen, yet he is not a monster. Jayasi’s characters are not just good guys or bad guys,” he says.
“His Padmavat is first-rate poetry, not an opulent, regressive Bollywood extravaganza.”
The author believes Jayasi never meant to write history and his poem is amalgamation of imagination and history.
“He transforms that episode and its legend into a rich, intricate tapestry of love, desire, struggle and sacrifice. He places a local episode into a much wider cultural perspective and makes it the basis of a classic through his vast knowledge of mythology and folklore. He constantly alludes to Hindu and Islamic mythology and legends, in particular to Hindu ones.
“His knowledge of Hindu mythology in its various tellings is deep and his deployment of the same so appropriate that you cannot but feel awe for the unique combination of poetic and scholarly excellence in his epic,” says the author.
Agrawal, who has also written a book on Kabir – the 15th century mystic poet and saint, also seeks to debunk a popular perception that Jayasi’s “Padmavat” is a Sufi allegorical tale.
“It is not aimed at luring the reader in the name of a love story and then giving her a tutorial in Sufism. The stanza that supposedly provides the ‘key’ to understanding the Sufi allegory nature of Padmavat was inserted into it centuries after its composition,” he says.
“This fact has been known for decades; no serious scholar takes Padmavat as an allegory any more.”
The author believes Jayasi was not the kind of poet who would reduce human beings into lifeless symbols and the story to a dry religious discourse; or a call to arms.
“He was, of course, a revered Sufi, but his Padmavat is not Sufi propaganda. In this poignant epic, far from suffering a dose of dry discourses, you come across people trying to come to terms with the vagaries of love and life in general,” he says.
Agrawal’s insightful commentary on the epic is coupled with popular mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik’s illustrations in the 193-page non-fiction brought out by Rupa Publications. (AGENCIES)
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