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 R¯ adh¯ a. 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.