01What the record says
Alauddin Khalji set out for Chittor on 28 January 1303 and camped between the Gambhiri and Berach rivers. Amir Khusrau rode with him and wrote it down in the Khazain-ul-Futuh: the fort held for about eight months and fell on 26 August 1303. Khusrau says that after it fell some thirty thousand people were put to death on the Sultan’s order, and that Chittor was given to the prince Khizr Khan and renamed Khizrabad. The ruler of Chittor then was Ratnasimha, Rawal Ratan Singh, whose name is on the Dariba inscription of 1302. Khusrau does not name a queen.
02What tradition tells
In 1540 the Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi wrote Padmavat in Awadhi. In it Padmavati, a princess of Singhal, marries Ratan Sen of Chittor; Alauddin hears of her beauty and lays siege to win her. Ratan Sen is taken by a trick and freed by the courage of Gora and Badal. When the fort is lost, Padmavati and the women of Chittor go into the fire rather than be taken. Mewar’s bards told the same jauhar in their own songs, and Rajput families have kept it as the first of Chittor’s three jauhars. The siege is fact; the queen’s name and words are carried by poetry and memory.
