"Sreenivasan has produced a nuanced and inventive work of South Asian history combining disciplined textual and archival research with compelling historical arguments. Her book places literary production and changes in literary form firmly into a social history framework that enlivens the South Asian historical field. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen, given its range, detail, and originality, is destined to occupy a familiar place on the bookshelves of not only South Asian historians, but scholars of literary culture, early modern literary history, and the sociology of literature."
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Itinerario
"[A]n important contribution to cultural and social history. Sreenivasan's analysis of the mutations of the Padmini legend reveals the changing gender relations over the centuries. . . . A comprehensive bibliography and summaries of selected versions of the legend included as an appendix add to the value of the book."
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Sixteenth Century Journal
"A welcome contribution. . . . Meticulously researched, Many Lives of a Rajput Queen is located within the context of the very real and often politically-charged debates over the relationship between any historical event and the multiple perspectives on it that are subsequently generated."
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Canadian Journal of History
"This wide-ranging monograph effortlessly traverses regions and genres to study the evolution of a historical memory . . . . Sreenivasan analyzes Padmini's story through its entire narrative trajectory, deploying at once the skills of a historian who combines an understanding of religious thought and social history and those of a literary scholar deeply familiar with gendered tropes in narrative and discourse."
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Association for Asian Studies Coomaraswamy prize committee
"A masterful and admirable scholarly achievement. . . .Sreenivasan's singular accomplishment in this meticulously researched account is to demonstrate more convincingly and thoroughly than I have ever seen done before the wonderfully complex entanglements of literature and politics, of history and legend."
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Journal of Asian Studies