‘The Chandayan’ | Decoding the 14th century epic’s relevance

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In the 1,000 years that constituted the Dark Ages in Europe (500-1500 CE), India enjoyed a period that produced some of the most beautiful temples, sculptures, literature, and religious syncretism in the world. Chandayan (The Story of Chanda) is an epic that rose from folklore during this period — a little after Italian poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri penned his Divine Comedy.

One of India’s earliest Sufi premakhyans composed in Hindavi (an old Hindi dialect of Jaunpuri Avadhi, linked to Ayodhya) by poet Maulana Da’ud in 1379, it is little known today, outside of the scholarly community. Once recited at silsilas held at the dargahs of Chistiyan Sufi saints, only five copies of its early illustrated manuscripts (and two unillustrated ones) — a racy yarn that recounts the romance of Lorik and Chanda — survive from the 15th and 16th centuries.

The Chandayan’s cover

Earlier this year, The Marg Foundation brought out an English translation and linguistic analysis of the epic by U.S.-based philologist and academic Richard Cohen, along with 530 known paintings based on it. Titled The Chandayan, after the original, it is supplemented by essays by art historians such as Vivek Gupta, Qamar Adamjee, who did her Ph.D on the epic’s illustrated manuscripts, and Naman Ahuja, general editor of art magazine Marg, on the literary traditions and art prevalent at the time.

“I can think of three reasons why the Chandayan is important today,” Cohen says, when I state that the epic should have been as well-known as Divine Comedy. “First, it was written at a time when the politics of caste and religion were not drawn so starkly... [and] the felt boundaries were negotiated more peacefully than they are today. Thus, there are lessons to be learned when considering the social, political, and cultural context of Da’ud’s times in contrast to today. Secondly, it heralds the rising importance of regional dialects for literature. Language use, on many levels, is an indicator of social and political change. Thirdly, it demonstrates how important the interconnection is between literature and other forms of art, in this case, painting.”

Richard Cohen

Power of the vernacular

Like the Ramayana, which traditionally had three names, Chandayan was known by various names, such as the Loriki, Chanaini, and Lorikayan. Lorik is considered a great ancestor of the pastoral Ahir caste, and a folkloric dance-drama under the name Lorik-Chanda is performed even today. There are versions of the story in Bhojpuri, Mirzapuri, Maithili, Chhattisgarhi, Santhali and Bhagalpuri dialects.

In the Tughlaq period, Da’ud translated the story into 52 episodes in Avadhi. The first to be written in the Perso-Arabic script, Chandayan is a tool to understand the evolution of Hindi and the assimilation of the Persian script into Hindustan. “With the rise of the use of vernaculars, we are witnessing important social changes that indicate the political rise of certain regions, such as Avadh, the deployment of the local dialect, and its acceptance as a vehicle for formally composed literature, as compared to strictly oral literature,” Cohen asserts. “It appears to me and other scholars that as the Tughlaq control over its territories weakened in the second half of the 14th century, regional dialects and their politics, such as that of Avadhi, began to assert their own socio-political influence. Such is the case of Chandayan.”

Since the manuscripts have Persian headers along with the verses, plus illustrations, they were also used to teach people Avadhi. The paintings provided an entry point into the flow of the text and its direction, even if the reader was unfamiliar with the language.

Matching the text and paintings

Gathering all the known paintings of the various versions of Chandayan was difficult. Cohen, Ahuja and Adamjee had each worked separately on the painted folios for decades. Ahuja began to photograph them in the 90s; many of his originals were shot on 35mm slides and had to be replaced. Adamjee collected paintings for her Ph.D., while Cohen tracked down the existing folios over two decades (between 2002 and 2020), all executed in distinct styles of painting.

Naman Ahuja

The first, painted in the Chaurapanchasika miniature style, is shared between the Lahore and Chandigarh museums. Six folios of a Jain style lie in Varanasi’s Bhartiya Kala Bhavan. Another with a similar palette and style is at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Sixty-eight folios in the Mandu style were discovered in Bhopal in 1957, most of which are now at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. And 318 folios in a similar style are at John Rylands Research Institute and Library in Manchester.

It was the U.K. version that first sparked Cohen’s interest in the late 90s. His work till then had been around Indian manuscripts inscribed in Devanagari; a photocopy of a microfilm from the Manchester manuscript got him fascinated with an Islamic manuscript and nastaliq (calligraphy used to write the Perso-Arabic script).

Paintings from The Chandayan

As Cohen explains, art historians and philologists who focus on language and text, like himself, rarely work together. So, Chandayan is a rare tome in which art and textual history come together. He used digitised images to identify the paintings and read the text, so that he could match them to individual cantos and sequence them in the correct order. This also allowed him to link the many similar-looking illustrations more accurately with the precise location in the text they should be placed in.

“The story, pictures, script, and history of Chandayan’s proliferation tell us a very different version of the place that religion occupied in the lives of people,” adds Ahuja. “It shows us the lives of Hindus who were not Brahmins. Its language and calligraphy tell us about how Persian writers and speakers, who were coming to Hindustan, wanted to learn the culture and language of India. It reveals a version of Sufism that assimilated people who worshipped at temples. Its very presumption is not of a syncretic society [of two distinct communities: Hindus and Muslims], but of a pluralistic one with many diverse castes and communities within each religious group that intersect with each other in ways that lay bare their interdependence in making up the culture of this land. It certainly bears retelling in today’s climate.”

The writer is an expert on South Asian art and culture.