(Chandidasa)
(ca. 1375–ca. 1450, or 16th century)
Chandidas is the name of one of the most important saint-poets of the Vaisnava sect (those devoted to worship of Vishnu as god), who wrote lyric poetry in the early Bangali dialect of northeastern India. He is presumed to have written his Shrikrsnakirtan in the late 14th or early 15th century, though some scholars have placed him as late as the 16th century.
One of the difficulties of saying anything definitive about Chandidas is that there may well be more than one poet by that name. The bhanita (poetic lines mentioning the poet’s name) of a number of poems give four different names: Baru Chandidas, Dwija Chandidas, Dina Chandidas, and simply Chandidas. Scholars have debated whether these names reflect four different poets or are different names for the same poet—a dilemma known among scholars as the “Chandidas mystery.” Tradition says that Baru Chandidas was born in the small village of Nannur in the Birbhum district, some 24 miles east of Suri. He was, according to the same tradition, the son of the Brahman Durgadas Bagchi, and he ultimately renounced Brahmanism, some say because of a love affair with a woman of a lower caste—though this latter is most likely a fictionalized detail borrowed from his own poetry.Whatever the details of his life, he became much admired, and certainly a good number of poets tried to exploit his name by attaching it to their own compositions, so that now more than 1,000 extant poems are attributed to him.
What is certain about Chandidas is his association with bhakto (i.e., “sharing [in god]”), the spiritual movement that swept India between the 12th and 18th centuries. The movement stressed a passionate devotion to god, but a devotion independent of traditional Hindu rituals or social values.In some ways, bhakti literature might serve as a way of expressing social or economic discontent, though in a way that urged its audience to recognize the unreality of the physical world rather than to protest. The movement produced a large number of poems composed in local dialects rather than in classical Sanskrit, so that Chandidas’s lyrics are among the earliest composed in the Bangali dialect. The poems might take the form of fervent devotion to a particular god or sometimes of an expression of zeal for an abstract divine principle whose attributes are inexpressible.
In the case of Chandidas, the poems focused on devotion to the god Vishnu, particularly in his most popular incarnation as Krishna. Chandidas’s Shrikrsnakirtan (meaning “the dalliance of Krishna”) consists of 412 songs in the meter of Bangali folk songs. These are divided into 13 separate sections. The poems concern an incident in the mythology surrounding Krishna that involves his love affair with a gopi (or herdswoman) named Rādhā. The incident itself is mentioned as early as the sixth century in the Tamil region of India, but becomes in the bhakti songs of Chandidas a metaphor for the love and longing of the soul for god, and of god for the soul.
The manuscript of Chandidas’s Shrikrsnakirtan was discovered by the scholar Basantaranjan Vidvadvallabh at Bankura early in the 20th century, and was published in 1916. A classic Indian film entitled Chandidas was made in 1932, focused on protesting the caste system and celebrating the bhakti movement through the legendary biography of the poet. His songs remain popular to this day, and his traditional birthplace at Nannur is a popular tourist destination for thousands of admirers annually.
Bibliography
■ Dimock, Edward C., and Denise Levertov, trans. In Praise of Krishna. Edited by Edward C. Dimock. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967.