By today’s yardstick, that was the original, unadulterated case of “Love Jihad”. If Jaisi’s flight of fancy can create so much mayhem, I shudder to contemplate the fate of the 1960 classic, Mughal-e-Azam, in a similar circumstance. It always puzzled me how a man of such catholic interests - knew Jaisi as well as Akbar Allahabadi backwards - had actually emerged from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) stable. The source happened to be Vishnu Kant Shastri, former Vice Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University. To a most unexpected source I owed my acquaintance with the fact that Rahim, known for his dohas, wrote devotional poetry on Lord Rama in Sanskrit. So was Tulsidas, whose correspondence with emperor Akbar’s premier courtier, Abdul Rahim Khan e Khana, on meter and structure of poetry, one heard about later and which is something one would have expected more scholarship on. Jaisi, who preceded Tulsidas, in the list of great poets of Awadhi, was an endless source of quotations. From nearby Salon, Naeem Ata Shah in his flowing orange robes and headgear, often visited Mustafabad.
Jaisi would faint at the controversy surrounding his masterpiece. My village, Mustafabad, happens to be in Rae Bareli, which embraces numerous Chishtiya Sufi shrines or places where the saints spent some time, including Khwaja Ashraf Jehangir Semnani, the saint Malik Mohammad Jaisi, the author of “Padmavat”, was devoted to. “Padmavati”, in a sense, is a neighbourhood story.
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