Rani Padmini of Chittor

Rani Padmini of Chittor is a queen of the Mewar kingdom in medieval India whose historical existence is disputed among historians. She is associated in later tradition with the 1303 siege of the fortress of Chittorgarh by the Delhi Sultanate ruler Alauddin Khalji, which is itself a confirmed historical event, and with the practice of jauhar, in which women of the besieged fortress are said to have taken their own lives by fire rather than face capture. However, the earliest surviving literary account naming her, the Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi's Padmavat, dates from around 1540, more than two centuries after the siege it describes, and most modern historians consider the romanticized story of Alauddin Khalji's obsession with her to have little grounding in contemporary historical sources. She remains an important figure in later Rajasthani and Indian cultural memory even though her status as a documented historical person, as opposed to a legendary or literary one, is not settled.