5 - Legacy: Self-Fashioning and Its Limits

Summary

Chapter 5 traces the legacy of Bani Thani’s contribution to Kishangarhi artistic and literary production. First, it explores whether her poetry inspired Kishangarhi paintings, presenting correlations between the two. Next is presented her “spiritual testament” on the basis of newly discovered manuscript material. Its autobiographical posing in Sita style hints at her agreement with the prince’s inclusion of Rama-devotional attitudes after he lost his throne. This is picked up by the inscription on her memorial. The location of her cenotaph close to his in Vrindaban perpetuates the story of their love beyond death. The literary exchange of the pair lived on in manuscript as well as in liturgical singing, as evidenced to this day by combined performance of their songs, though over time, the memory that she was the composer has become blurred. Chronicles document the court’s choice to remember the devout stepmother queen, and the exiled prince, rather than the concubine. Some of her songs made it in a court-sanctioned lithograph edition of the prince’s devotional output, but only as a coda. By the end of the nineteenth century Kishangarh’s inspirational muse herself had practically fallen silent. The amnesia of her authorship endured, even as her features were immortalized.