‘The Chandayan’: The 14th-century Sufi romance brought to life by a new translation and essays

Four major Hindavi Sufi romances were written from the 14th to 16th century: Chandayan (1379) by Mulla Daud, Mrigvati (1503), Padmavat (1540) by Malik Jayasi, and Madhumalti (1545) by Syed Manjhan Shattari. Called “premakhyas”, they aimed to translate Sufi beliefs into stories in a local language and were stories or narratives centred around themes of love, often romantic tales or love stories which used the trope of mortal love to convey the striving for and attainment of divine love.

A divine love

Chandayan, written by Mulla Daud, a follower of Sheikh Zainuddin, khalifa and nephew of the Chisti saint, Chiragh-e-Dehli, was based on popular folklore in Awadh, Bundelkhand, Chhattisgarh and Western Bihar, which had been popularised by followers of Chiragh-e-Dehli in the second half of 14th century. The story is about Chanda, the daughter of a prominent landlord of Govar and an incomparable beauty, who is married off very young into another Rao family.

Chanda returns to her home after a miserable year in her one-eyed husband Bavan’s house, realising that he is impotent. She is seen by a wandering bard who is so struck by her beauty that he begins to compose songs about it. He reaches Rajpur, where the local Rao Rupchand is enchanted by his descriptions and decides to march to Govar with a huge army to attain Chanda. A battle ensues in which Rupchand has the upper hand till Rao Mahar Sahdev, Chanda’s father employs the services of Lorik, a local hero.

The story is about how they fall passionately in love with each other, and how they overcome all obstacles, including their respective spouses, to be together. In the course of the story, Lorik becomes a yogi, living in a temple, chanting Chanda’s name, a metaphor for divine love. Maina, his wife's agony at separation when he elopes with Chanda becomes the Indic virah and the Sufi yearning for visal or union with the divine, while Chanda is a symbol of divine love. The elopement can be the struggle of shedding the material world for divine love. Lorik’s many deaths in the book symbolically depict the shedding of ego, an essential part of Sufi initiation.

The end is missing in all five existing manuscripts of Chandayan, but in keeping with Sufi traditions, the story should have ended in death, leading to the annihilation of self or fana.

It’s an important text for the study of the Hindi language and of the nature of society of those days. In fact, it is “the first inscribed text of its kind” in Awadhi. It is also the first text that uses Indic characters to tell a tale in the Awadhi dialect (a dialect of Hindavi), written in the Perso-Arabic script based on the tradition of Persian masnavis.

“I became aware of the written word’s power –
sang a Hinduki song in Turki script.”
— Canto 9, translation by Cohen from the book.

The rhymed couplets of masnavis become chaupai-dohas in Daud’s Chandayan. In what is probably a later addition, there are Persian headings for the various cantos, making it easy for the reader to follow.

Daud situated the story in the cultural background of the milieu where he, himself lived and created a story that mixes folktales and Sufi beliefs to talk about human desires, both worldly and spiritual. In that tradition he begins with hamd or praise God, adapting it to Hindavi and Bhakha (the spoken language).

The heroine, a symbol of the Divine, was described in passages known as nakh-sikh varanana (head to toe descriptions), with the object’s loveliness symbolising divine beauty.

It is evocatively translated by Richard Cohen in the book:

Like a lamp’s light in a garden at night, that’s how
her red parting appears in her black hair.
Emerging from inside her parting rays of the rising
sun can be seen. When pearls are strung in her
parting, the world shimmers with light.

It is this nakh-sikh varnana by the minstrel that captivated Rupchand.

That it caught the attention of not just the Ahir/Rajput community but also the Sufis and religious preachers is obvious from the fact that these texts were used in sama mehfils for the inner circle of the Chisti order as well as for oral recitations by bards in that geographical area. The Sufi saints elicited spiritual meanings from it, for their congregation.

A prominent 15th-century Sufi saint, Abdul Quddus Gangohi, translated it into Persian and has cited passages from it in his correspondence to another contemporary Sufi saint, Sheikh Jalal Thaneswari. Not just that, there is also a reference by Abdul Qadir Badayuni, a historian of Akbar’s court to it being used by Makhdum Sheikh Tajuddin (late 14th-early 15th centuries) in his sermons, from the pulpit.

The English translation

The Chandayan, translated by Richard Cohen, accompanied by essays by Naman Ahuja, Richard Cohen, Vivek Gupta and Qamar Adamjee is a sumptuously produced book by The Marg Publications.

Though the focus of the book is on the translation of 426 cantos of the premakhyan, the essays provide historical significance and context for the reader to understand the verses and illustrations that follow. The illustrations taken from the five extant manuscripts have been used alongside to give “visual concordance” to the Hindavi verses making them a visual and intellectual delight.

The book was composed in Dalamau near Lucknow, which was under the authority of Malik Mubarak, during Firoz Shah Tughlaq's reign. It is an important milestone as far as converting oral into textual and thus ensuring the tale's immortality. It was first illustrated in the fifteenth century.

In the introductory essay, titled “Ishq Between Languages, Culture and People”, Ahuja sets the tone for the rest of the book. In a section of his essay titled “A Genre of Literature that Bridges Cultures and Communities”, art historian, Ahuja writes, “The Chandayan manuscripts form the most remarkable bridge between the world of the desi and the margi, between Ahir and Muslim, Sufi bhakti, agrarian and courtly and, in art, from the world of iconographic conventions as seen in Indian temple art now to manuscript painting."

Cohen, an Indologist and translator of The Chandayan, in “Stylistics of Language and its Translation”, describes how the text offers insights into “the evolution of the language of that time; the spoken word vis-a-vis the written; and the transmission of an allegorical subtext on the sacredness and all-encompassing nature of love through a love story”.

Cohen explains the linguistic and literary style chosen by Daud. Daud opted for a format similar to Apabhramsha literature, known for transmitting oral tradition since the ninth century, while adopting the premakhyan/masnavi style, keeping in the Hindavi tradition of using Old Hindi as the base while incorporating several Persian words. Thus, making it the precursor of Hindustani and Urdu in the Sultanate period.

In his fascinating essay, “Inscribing Orality: Calligraphy, Layout and the Vernacular Anxieties of the Chandayan Manuscripts”, Vivek Gupta describes with examples how calligraphy transformed one culture’s language into another's script and how “the scripts of Chandayan reveal a remarkable multi-layered history of adapting performative genres for new audiences, which transformed societies across Sultanate India”. The comparison of the manuscripts and discussion on two lesser-known styles of Indian sultanate scrips, namely Bihari and naskhi-divani “provokes speculations about the function of writing in these manuscripts”.

Was the Chandayan meant to be an oral text, with the written words being a “mnemonic device to jog an orator’s memory of the entire verse”? Perhaps we will never know but we can speculate whether the written word here carried “talismanic and divinatory properties”.

Historians are increasingly using paintings and illustrations to explore the material culture of specific periods. The Chandayan offers a wealth of insight into material history, detailing 14th-century life in Awadh, including food, utensils, and market scenes.

In her essay “The Artists’ Versions of Daud’s Story: Illustrated Manuscripts of the Chandayan”, art historian Qamar Adamjee, describes how the illustrations “convey information necessary for contextualising the story, shaping the reader’s imagination and setting the mood”.

The nakh-sikha descriptions of Chanda would have been very difficult to paint, considering her famed beauty. Adamjee discusses the “picture-making choices” of the painters who instead focus on “the framing action” of Rupchand and the minstrel, leaving a blank canvas for the readers to imagine Chanda.

Adamjee describes the painters of the five different manuscripts, as “unique storytellers who stand alongside the poet and give a fresh and individualised interpretation to the story while using recognisable visual tropes”. Though the paintings are in the “Chaurapanchashika” style popular before the Mughal atelier started functioning, each painter imbues the scene with his own reading of the verses. Thus, in Adamjee’s words, “An illustrated manuscript reaffirms that the writer, artist, and reader are co-creators in visual storytelling. The writer creates images with words, the artist with pictures and building on both, the reader builds a personalised story world with the imagination.”

In today’s fraught times, when syncretism and pluralism are being questioned, it is epics such as these which celebrate the diversity of India, and show the interaction of Islam and Sufism with existing religious culture in medieval India.

To end, my favourite verse from the nakh-sikha description: