Shrimati Ratnavati

"Tell me, why do you say it again and again? What is that name you keep repeating? You have caught hold of my heart and you will not let it go." It was Ratnavati, queen of the Kachhwaha house of Amber, speaking to her own serving-woman on an ordinary evening, in an ordinary room, where nothing should have been happening at all. The lamps had just been lit. The queen's hair had just been dressed. And yet the attendant who was meant only to fan her mistress and keep the night air cool sat instead with her eyes streaming, murmuring names into the dark as though she could not stop herself: Navalkishor, Nandkishor, Brindavanchand, tender titles for the same beloved boy of Braj. Ratnavati did not know yet who these names belonged to. But something in her own chest had already answered them, before her mind had caught up with her heart, and she found she wanted, quite suddenly and quite helplessly, to know what could make a grown woman weep with such sweetness.

The maid tried to wave the question away. "Do not trouble over this," she said. "Stay in your royal comforts day and night. An undeserved grace has fallen on me from a soul in love with Hari, and it is only my own body and mind that must carry the strange, mixed weight of that joy and that grief." But Ratnavati would not be refused. She pressed until the tears in her own eyes matched the ones she was asking about, until her body itself seemed to forget its ease. Seeing such real longing and not mere curiosity, the maid finally relented and told her what she herself had learned from wandering lovers of Hari she had once overheard on the road: that everyone in this world talks of prem, prem, love, love, but let no one actually dare attempt it, for the lover united with the Beloved suffers, and the lover parted from the Beloved suffers, and a lover who is ever at ease was never a lover at all.

Ratnavati was not an ordinary listener for words like these. She had married into the ruling house of Amber at the very height of its power, becoming the wife of Madho Singh, second son of Raja Bhagwant Das and full brother to Man Singh, the same Man Singh who by then commanded armies for the Mughal emperor Akbar across half of Hindustan, sat among the emperor's most trusted nobles, and who in these very years was raising a towering new temple to Govind Dev in Vrindavan, its red sandstone shikhara said to have once climbed seven storeys into the Braj sky. Madho Singh himself had ridden hard to his brother's side during the Haldighati campaign and would later be given the fort town of Bhangarh as his own seat. It was, in other words, a house of soldiers and courtiers, glittering with Mughal favor. But it was not new to Krishna either: two generations before Ratnavati arrived, an earlier king of Amber named Prithviraj, into whose remembered line the Bhaktamal itself says she married, had taken a Vaishnav renunciant named Krishnadas Payohari as his guide and had received from him two sacred images to guard, a Sitaram and a Narasimha, the man-lion form of Vishnu, still worshipped in a temple at Amber to this day. Into a household that wore its bhakti quietly beneath its armor, this restless new love had now come looking for a door. Beyond what the Bhaktamal itself preserves of her, no outside chronicle names Ratnavati; what is remembered of her life comes down only through this devotional retelling and the household she married into, whose men are otherwise well attested in the record of the age.

What Ratnavati wanted next was simple and impossible: she wanted to see him, not just hear of him. The maid warned her how hard a wish that was. Even kings, she said, leave their thrones and roll in the dust of pilgrim roads seeking one glimpse of that ocean of beauty, and still they do not receive it; there is only one net fine enough to hold him, and that net is prem, love itself, nothing bought and nothing bargained. Let the queen turn her whole heart toward Hari's worship, then, offering food and flowers and her own devotion without holding anything back. Ratnavati took this counsel and did not let it go. Then the maid, watching her mistress's hunger grow rather than fade, gave her a plan more daring than either of them expected: build a rest house for wandering sadhus at the edge of the palace grounds, station gatekeepers with standing orders to bring in with honor any devotee of Hari who passed, wash their feet, feed them the richest food the kitchens could prepare, and then watch from behind a curtain, unseen. In the shining faces of Hari's own lovers, the maid promised, Shyamsundar himself would look back at her.

Ratnavati did exactly this, and kept doing it. She built her sant-seva-shala, and she served in it herself rather than only ordering it done: garlanding guests with her own hands, offering betel and sandalwood paste, standing behind the screen at first as instructed, watching. She had already decided, in her own mind, that she would drink this cup no matter what it cost her, modesty or reputation included, though she did not yet know how soon that cost would be asked of her.

It came on the day a group of premis from Vraj arrived, singing of Yugalkishor, the divine pair of Radha and Krishna together, their own eyes wet as they sang. Ratnavati, listening from behind her curtain, could not stay behind it. She turned to her maid and asked, with a kind of wonder at herself, which part of her body it was that still held her back from her own joy, since surely no single limb was worth this much delay. Then she rose, went out in full sight of the household, and threw herself at the feet of those wandering singers, blind now to every rule of a queen's public modesty. The maid caught at her hand and tried to hold her back. Ratnavati only said that modesty is a small, frightened thing next to the grief of standing apart from the feet of true sants even one moment longer, and that whatever happened after, she would not be stopped from this. She fed them from a golden thali with her own hands, marked their foreheads with sandalwood, offered betel leaf folded and sweet, and sat late into the night simply listening to them speak of Shyam, her eyes never leaving their faces.

Word of a queen who had left her own purdah to sit among wandering ascetics ran through Amber like fire through dry grass, and it did not take long to reach the officials who wrote everything down for the king. It also reached, more happily, her own son. Hearing that his mother had at last become what she had long only pretended to be, a true and open bhakta, Prem Singh ordered music and sweets distributed at his gate. When people asked what the celebration was for, he told them plainly: our mother has taken on the true dress of a renunciate devotee, and so we too are truly sons of a beggar-servant of God now; that is worth every drum in the house.

The letter that reached Madho Singh, away with his troops, told the story with none of that joy. It said his queen had thrown in her lot with shaven mendicants, forgotten her place, forgotten her shame. Rage and grief tore through him together, and by chance it was at that very hour that Prem Singh came before him, tilak fresh on his forehead, a string of beads at his throat, to make his bow. Madho Singh looked at his own son and spat out that here came the beggar-woman's brood. He meant it as the worst insult a father could give. Prem Singh took it instead as the finest word anyone had ever said of him, and wrote at once to his mother that she must never let go of her vow now, whatever it cost her, even if it meant giving up body, mind, wealth, and her very head, since he too now wore his father's contempt like an ornament.

Madho Singh did not stay away long after that. He marched home with soldiers, meaning first to kill his own son for the shame of it, until wiser men at court reminded him what it would do to his name to strike down a prince over piety, and coaxed him back from that edge. His fury did not cool, though; it only turned toward the queen. He wanted her dead, but dead in a way that would leave no mark of blame on his own house, and it was a clever, cold-blooded courtier who found the way: release the palace's caged tiger into her rooms at night, then let it be said afterward that the beast had simply broken free.

So the tiger was let loose, and it was the maid, keeping watch as always, who cried out that it had come. Ratnavati was at her worship when she heard. She did not run. She said, with something like delight in her voice, that today by great good fortune Lord Nrisingh himself had come to her door, and that he must be received properly. She rose with the puja thali still in her hands, walked toward the animal without a tremor, and did what she would have done for any honored guest: touched sandalwood to its brow, hung a garland at its neck, waved the arati lamp before it as though before an image in a shrine. And in front of the men who had crept in behind the beast to watch her die, the creature's fury did not touch her at all. It turned instead on them, and struck them down exactly as the old story tells that Narasimha once tore apart Hiranyakashyap, while Ratnavati, by every account that has come down of that night, never once lowered her eyes from her worship to notice her own danger passing.

When Madho Singh heard what had happened in his own house, something in him broke open. He came back undone, threw himself flat on the ground before her again and again, and begged her to look at him. She answered only that her eyes were fixed elsewhere now and could not be turned another way. He told her the kingdom and every rupee in his treasury were hers to command as she pleased. She wanted none of it; she said only that she was already content in the joy she had found, and asked nothing more of him than to be allowed to stay in it. Some time later, when Man Singh and Madho Singh were crossing a swollen river together by boat and the boat began to founder in the current, it was Madho Singh, in his terror, who cried out that his own wife at home was a great bhakta of Hari, and the two brothers shut their eyes and held her in their thoughts as the water rose. The boat found the far bank whole. Both men came to her afterward as though granted a second life, to bow at feet they had once mocked.

What has kept Ratnavati's story alive, more than the astonishment of the tiger that turned into Narasimha, is the quieter miracle that came before it: that she found Hari already living in the eyes and the hunger of his devotees long before she ever demanded to see him for herself, and that seva offered to a sant, freely and without calculation, turned out to be its own darshan. The old couplet that closes her tale in the Bhaktamal is still repeated by those who tell it: prem, love of the Infinite, is a hard road in this world, and no one should set out on it unless they mean to lay down body, mind, wealth, and even their own head to walk it.