A Legend Still Contested: Padmini and the 2018 Film

The Padmini legend has carried a great deal of political weight in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The clearest recent instance is a matter of public and press record rather than of any closed tradition. In 2017, production of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film Padmaavat, an adaptation of Jayasi's 1540 poem, drew sustained protest from groups asserting that the film would misrepresent the Rajput queen, including vandalism at filming locations and threats against the director and lead actress; the release was delayed several months amid the controversy. The Supreme Court of India ultimately ruled that the film, having been cleared by the national film certification board, could not be blocked from release by state governments, and it opened in cinemas in January 2018 under heightened security in several regions. The episode did not settle any question about who Padmini was or was not historically; it demonstrated instead that a figure with no contemporary source from 1303 still commands enough contemporary meaning, seven hundred years later, to bring a national film industry, state governments and the country's highest court into a single dispute over how her story may be told.