Literary history: Maulana Daud’s ‘Candayan’ and the beginnings of writing and literature in Hindi

A growing number of historians of Hindi literature believe that the Hindi literary tradition begins with the invention of the Sufi romance and its first known example, the Candāyan (1379 CE) of Maulana Daud. There are multiple reasons for giving Daud’s work and the genre that it inaugurates this distinction. First, it is the earliest known work in a register of the vernacular that continued to be used for literary composition over the next five hundred years. Second, it employs meters and verse forms like the caupaī and dohā that would come to be closely associated with bhāṣā literature. Third, it is the first work of a genre that would come to occupy a central place in the vernacular literary imagination until well into the nineteenth century.

Not all scholars agree; some locate Hindi literature’s beginnings in other centuries and in other genres. Yet if we take seriously Sheldon Pollock’s contention that writing and the self-conscious identification of poetry or belles lettres as such (whether Indic kāvya or Arabic-Persian adab) are essential to the constitution of literature proper, then the Candāyan stands out sharply as the first work in a north Indian vernacular to have been consciously written as literature.

Practices of inscribing the vernacular had already existed for some time when Maulana Daud picked up the pen toward the end of the fourteenth century. Much of this activity took place in the hundred years preceding the composition of the Candāyan, in the context of Persian works containing what Francesca Orsini has characterised as “traces of oral practices in writing.”

For example, there are scattered inscriptions of vernacular utterance in malfuẕāt, dialogic memoirs dedicated to recording the conversations and sermons of Sufi pīrs. Two such malfuẕāt, the Nafāʾis al-Anfās (“Delicacies of Speech,” 1331–1337 CE) of Rukn al-Din and the Shamāʾil al-Atqiyā (“Virtues of Devout Men,” 1330s CE) of Rukn al-Din Kabir record some of the “Hinduī” verses recited by the Chishti pīr Shaikh Fariduddin Ganj-i Shakar (1175–1266 CE) in the context of conversations that ostensibly took place, or were at least transcribed, in Persian. The Hidāyat al-Qulūb wa ʿInāyat ʿAllām al-Ghuyūb (Guidance of Hearts and Favor of the Knower of the Hidden), composed by Mir Hasan in the Deccan from 1344 to 1367 CE, claims to record the discourses of another Chishti saint, Zayn al-Din Shirazi, including several verses in Hindi.

Although it is difficult to ascertain whether all of the discourses and deeds recorded are historically accurate, there is no question that the malfuẕāt themselves were composed in the four decades immediately preceding the composition of the Candāyan. Available copies of these works date only to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the orthographic and other writing conventions give us a sense of how vernacular utterance may have been recorded in this period.

Meanwhile, in the realm of courtly literature, Amir Khusrau (1253–1385 CE), a poet at the courts of three consecutive sultans of Delhi and of several nobles, composed macaronic verses that included snippets of the vernacular and is credited with composing several lyrics in Hindavi that have since become standards of the Sufi musical repertoire. Here again, the lack of early manuscript copies makes it difficult to say how much of what has come down to us is the “original” compositions and what they looked like on paper (i.e., in the orthographic practices of Khusrau’s time), yet the significance of Khusrau’s reḵẖtah (Persian, “mixed”) verses in Hindavi and Persian is clear: they had likely been circulating in written form for decades when Maulana Daud began to compose the Candāyan.

All of these developments took place in the shadow of the sultanate court of the Tughlaq dynasty of Persianized Afghan lords, and Daud was at the centre of their politics beginning in the 1360s. Though the Persian-literate Daud was writing in the town of Dalmau in Avadh, at the provincial court of a warlord (himself a vassal of the sultan), he was connected to both the world of professional poets at court and the world of Sufi pīrs (preceptors) at khānqāhs (Sufi hospices). It is likely that he was aware of the aforementioned forays into entextualising the vernacular.

Yet Daud’s literary project was of a wholly different nature. As Aditya Behl has argued, the Candāyan represents the self-conscious inauguration of a new genre. The source of the narrative, the romance of Prince Laur and Princess Chanda, was an “oral” epic sung by folk performers in the region of Avadh. Daud gave the story an altogether different form, incorporating literary and rhetorical devices from Persian and Indic traditions, such as densely poetic descriptions of cities (Sanskrit nagara-varṇana, Persian shahr-āshob), characters (Sanskrit nakha-śikha, Persian sarāpā), and seasons (Sanskrit tu-varṇana, Hindi bārahmāsā). He introduced Sufi symbolism into the narrative so that his poem could be enjoyed simultaneously as an erotic romance and as an esoteric allegory of Sufi mystical practice. In contrast to earlier written instantiations of bhāṣā (like those in the malfuẕāt), Daud’s version was not simply a transcription of song (gīt, gāthā) but a written literary work (“kavi,” in the poet’s own words) from the very moment of its conception, and its identity as such demanded a different kind of inscriptional program and material form.

Daud was acutely aware of the significance of bringing bhāṣā from the realm of orality into the domain of writing and made vividly present the performative and literate contexts in which he composed. In the opening section of the Candāyan, modelled on the panegyric openings of the Persian masnavī genre, Daud praises his patron, Juna Shah, an iqṭāʿ-dār or noble of the Tughlaq court, comparing him to the legendary polyglot of Sanskrit antiquity, Vararuchi. Daud emphasises Junah Shah’s linguistic and literary proficiency:

“The Khān-jahān comes from a house of nobles dating back ages,
he is exceedingly cultivated, intellectual, and knowledgeable.
Clever and learned, he knows all languages.
He is handsome and a good minister.
God has fashioned him with great wisdom;
he studied the fourteen [arts] until he could read (or recite) them
by heart.
He elucidates books (pothi) and purānas,
[such that] not a word comes out of the pandits’ mouths.

[Thus] another Vararuchi appeared in the kingdom,
who produces readings of endless depth [from texts.]
There is no other person,
so virtuous as this master.”

However hyperbolic this may be – Daud similarly praises the reigning Sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq as being an all-knowing pandit – the verse reflects the ideal of a highly literate and multilingual ruler that found at least some realisation in the multilingual literary culture of sultanate courts.

Daud’s language and lexicon reflect the beginnings of a movement that would reinscribe the semiotic world of the vernacular in terms of this culture. The multivalence of the verb paḍh- (to read, recite, study) means that we can translate the second half of the third couplet (caudaha paḍhatu hiye pai paḍhā) alternatively as “he studied the fourteen arts [until] he recited them by heart” or more literally, “he studied the fourteen arts [until] he read them on his heart.” Though the latter rendering may sound awkward in English, it hews closer to the sense of the original: in the Islamicate and specifically Sufi intellectual culture in which Daud composed, the Neoplatonic concept of memory as writing on the tablet of the heart was a well-known convention. Daud’s use of the term pothī is also remarkable, as it collapses the concepts of a text, a scripture, and a material manuscript into one term that signifies Islamic scriptural and juridical texts as well as Indic scriptures and śāstras. In precolonial Hindi, pothī most often refers to an unbound group of loose folios made of palm leaf or paper; this was the predominant format for written texts in Indic languages at the dawn of the north Indian sultanates.

Daud does not write that his patron performs exegesis of pothīs in order to make the sultan’s piety or authority intelligible to a non-Muslim audience or for the purpose of proselytisation, as some twentieth-century scholars have suggested. Instead, Daud’s use of Indic terms like pothī pulls notions of written textuality from the Indic context into the realm of Persianate, Islamicate literary culture while simultaneously reimagining that culture in the exotic and dream-like world of the romance narrative itself. For Daud and his audience, not only the tale of Lorik and Chanda but also the language in which Daud recounted it was grounded in the exotic landscape of northern “Hindustan”: this was, as Surdas later put it, the “language of the east,” in which Daud was living and writing, the language of love (pem). Thus, Daud re-presented to the Persianised, polyethnic elites the modes, practices, and material objects of their own literacy through the fantastic prism of the Indian vernacular.

Excerpted with permission from If All The World Were Paper: A History Of Writing In Hindi, Tyler W Williams, Speaking Tiger Books.