Chand Bardai

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chand Bardai (circa 1200) was the court poet of the Indian king Prithviraj III Chauhan, who ruled Ajmer and Delhi from 1165 to 1192. A native of Lahore, Chand Bardai composed the Prithviraj Raso, an epic poem in Hindi about the life of Prithviraj. Chand Bardai belonged to the community of Charan who accompanied Rajputs in war and peace.

The Prithviraj Raso was embellished with time and quite a few authors added to it. Only parts of the original manuscript are still intact. There are many versions of Raso but scholars agree that a small 1400 stanza poem is the real "Prithivraj Raso". In its longest form the poem comprises upwords of 10,000 stanzas. The Prithviraj Raso is a source of information on the social and clan structure of the Kshatriya communities of northern India. It is valuable not only as historical material but as the earliest monument of the Western Hindi language, and the first of the long series of bardic chronicles for which Rajputana is celebrated. It is written in ballad form, and portions of it are still sung by itinerant bards throughout north-western India and Rajputana.

[edit] References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.