The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India, c. 1500 to 1900

Ramya Sreenivasan's The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen, published by the University of Washington Press in 2007, is a scholarly study tracing how the Padmini narrative, the legendary Rajput queen, was refashioned by successive regional elites, caste groups and monastic communities in India between roughly 1500 and 1900. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed academic monograph treating the legend explicitly as a legend with a documented history of retelling, rather than adjudicating whether Padmini was a historical figure. Its limit is that its close focus is the narrative's reception history specifically, so a claim needing an assessment of Padmini's historicity itself needs a source addressing that separate question.