Prithviraj Raso

01The friend who sang

In the Raso, Chand Bardai is born in Lahore on the same day as Prithviraj, rises to be his poet, counsellor and companion in arms, and dies on the same day as his king, far away in Ghazni. He calls himself a devotee of Mata Saraswati and of the goddess of the Chauhans, and speaks through the poem as an eyewitness: he rides on campaigns, carries messages, and argues with the king when the king is wrong. Bards of Rajasthan, the Bhats and Charans, have claimed descent from him or from his school for centuries, and recited his name with the king’s.

02A museum of metres

The language of the Raso is Pingal, the literary Brajbhasha of the Rajasthani bards, mixed with Apabhramsha endings, Prakrit gathas and Persian words for the enemy camp. Its staple metre is the chhappay, six lines that thunder like a war drum, alternating with doha, kavitt, paddhari, totak and dozens more, so that Hindi critics have called it a museum of metres. The poem shifts metre with the mood: a quick metre for a cavalry charge, a slow one for a lament or a description of a garden. Read aloud, as it was meant to be, it moves like the performance of a bard before a court.

03Born of the fire

The Raso opens its account of the Chauhans with the Agnikula katha. On Mount Abu, the rishis’ yajnas were being defiled by daityas, and Maharshi Vasishtha raised from the sacred fire-pit four warriors to protect them: the ancestors of the Parmar, Chalukya, Pratihara and Chauhan clans. The katha became the proud origin story of these four houses across Rajasthan and Malwa, and is still told at Abu. The Chauhans’ own twelfth-century records, such as Jayanaka’s Sanskrit Prithvirajavijaya, trace the line to the Surya vamsha instead, and both accounts are honoured in Rajput tradition.

04Ajmer and Delhi

In the Raso, Prithviraj is the son of Someshvar of Ajmer and of Kamala, daughter of Anangpal Tomar of Delhi. Anangpal, having no son, adopts his grandson and hands him Delhi, and the poem has Prithviraj rule from both cities. The young king is a hunter and a warrior from boyhood; the Revatat samay, one of the best-known cantos, takes him south to hunt elephants in the forests on the Narmada and brings Shahabuddin Ghori against him there. Inscriptions tell the Delhi story differently: the Chauhans had taken Delhi from the Tomars a generation earlier, under Vigraharaja IV, whose inscription of 1164 is cut on the Ashokan pillar now at Feroz Shah Kotla.

05Wars with the neighbours

Much of the Raso is war with fellow Rajput kings. Against Bhima of Gujarat the poem has Prithviraj avenge his father, though the Chaulukya Bhima II in fact outlived him by decades. Against Paramardi, the Chandela king of Mahoba, it tells a long campaign in which the brothers Alha and Udal fight for Mahoba; their deeds became a separate epic, the Alha-khand, still sung in Bundelkhand and Awadh in the rainy season. Here the record agrees in part, for Prithviraj’s own inscriptions at Madanpur, dated 1182, say he laid waste the Chandela land of Jejakabhukti.

06Samyogita

Jaichand of Kannauj, the Gahadavala king, holds a rajasuya and a svayamvara for his daughter Samyogita, and because Prithviraj will not come and bow, sets up a golden image of him as doorkeeper. Samyogita, who has heard of Prithviraj and given him her heart, walks past the assembled princes and garlands the image. Prithviraj, in disguise among Chand’s attendants, rides into Kannauj, takes her up on his horse and makes for Delhi. The Kannauj samay is the poem’s great set piece: a running fight over days in which his samantas fall one by one at the river crossings to buy the king time. Rajasthan remembers the cost of that ride.

07Ghori and the arrow by sound

In the Raso, Prithviraj defeats Shahabuddin Ghori again and again and each time lets him go, as a Rajput spares a beaten foe. At the last battle, his best samantas lost at Kannauj, he is defeated, taken to Ghazni and blinded. Chand follows him there, wins the Sultan’s confidence and arranges a display of the king’s famous skill, the shabdabhedi, the arrow aimed by sound. When the Sultan gives the order to begin, Chand recites a doha that tells the king where the throne stands, and Prithviraj looses his arrow and kills Ghori. Then poet and king take each other’s lives. The doha naming the Sultan’s distance is sung across Rajasthan to this day.

08Poem and record

The Raso is a poem, and its history must be read beside other sources. Persian chronicles and inscriptions record that Prithviraj defeated Ghori at the first battle of Tarain in 1191, lost the second in 1192 and was put to death; Muhammad Ghori was killed in 1206 on the Jhelum. Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha showed that many names and dates in the long recension cannot stand, and much of it was added in later centuries. Whether any core goes back to a poet of Prithviraj’s court is still argued. Dasharatha Sharma and others held that the shortest recension keeps the oldest form, and lines in Apabhramsha attributed to Chand turn up in a Jain anthology of the fifteenth century.

09In Rajput memory

Whatever its date, the Raso shaped how Rajasthan remembered its kings. Bards recited its episodes at courts for centuries, and the later khyats drew on it. The Nagari Pracharini Sabha of Kashi printed the long recension in the early twentieth century, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi and Namvar Singh later edited a shorter text, and Vipin Bihari Trivedi edited the Revatat samay on its own. Hindi literary histories begin the Adikal with it. Schoolchildren in Rajasthan still learn the shabdabhedi episode, and the fort of Taragarh at Ajmer and the ruins of Qila Rai Pithora in Delhi carry Prithviraj’s name.

What it contains

1. 1
   Brihat (long) recension

   The great version of 69 samays, preserved in manuscripts from Mewar and printed by the Nagari Pracharini Sabha. It holds every episode of the cycle, and most of the later additions.

2. 2
   Madhyam (middle) recension

   A shorter version found in manuscripts in Rajasthan. It keeps the main wars and the Samyogita episode while dropping many of the long recension’s side stories.

3. 3
   Laghu (short) recension

   A compact version that leaves out many episodes of the long text. Scholars use it to test which parts of the cycle are older.

4. 4
   Laghutam (shortest) recension

   The briefest version, which Dasharatha Sharma and others took to be closest to the earliest form. Much of the cycle’s later material is simply absent from it.

5. 5
   Opening samays: the gods and the Chauhans

   Invocations, the poet’s own account of himself, and the Agnikula origin of the Chauhans at Mount Abu, followed by the line of kings down to Someshvar.

6. 6
   Delhi and the hunt

   Prithviraj’s birth and youth, Anangpal’s gift of Delhi, and hunting and border wars. The Revatat samay, the 27th, belongs here, with the first clash with Shahabuddin by the Narmada.

7. 7
   The Mahoba and Gujarat wars

   Campaigns against Paramardi Chandela, with the brothers Alha and Udal, and against Bhima of Gujarat. These samays are full of single combats and roll-calls of the fallen.

8. 8
   The Kannauj samay

   The longest single canto: Jaichand’s rajasuya, Samyogita’s choice of the image, the abduction, and the days-long running battle back to Delhi.

9. 9
   The last battle and Ghazni

   The final war with Shahabuddin, the king’s capture and blinding, Chand’s road to Ghazni and the shabdabhedi arrow. The poem closes with the deaths of king and poet together.