Tradition · sung epic tradition
Ālhā-Khaṇḍ
Also known as Alha-Khand, Alha-Udal, Bundelkhand ballad, The Bundelkhand ballad memory, Ālhā-Khaṇḍ — the Bundelkhand epic
A Bundelkhandi ballad cycle of some fifty episodes about the Banaphar brothers Alha and Udal, retainers of the twelfth-century Chandela king Parmal, and their war with Prithviraj Chauhan. It is sung competitively in the monsoon, in a loud open-throated style, by specialist ālhaits, and it is the standard case of a defeat remembered as heroism.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Patron dynasty
- Chandela
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 25.292, 79.872
Worth knowing
The earliest written version is a collection made in the 1860s by Charles Elliot, a British collector of Farrukhabad, who had the singers dictate to him. The epic had been oral for seven centuries and its text is still not fixed: singers expand or drop episodes to fit the night and the village.
Connections (3)
- Devotional corpus onKhajuraho
The Ālhā cycle is Bundelkhand's own memory of the Chandelas, and its king Parmal is Paramardideva, the last effective ruler of the dynasty that built Khajuraho, defeated by Prithviraj Chauhan at Mahoba in 1182. The temples and the ballad are the two things the dynasty left: the first is a state monument visited by foreigners, the second is still sung in the villages around it, and they almost never meet.
- Legend set atMahoba
Mahoba is where the Ālhā cycle is set and where it is still sung hardest: the Chandela capital of Parmal, the tank and the temples the brothers are said to have defended, and the annual Alha singing that fills the town. The epic's Banaphar brothers were Mahoba's marshals, and the defeat it commemorates — Prithviraj Chauhan's sack of the city in 1182 — is the event the whole cycle exists to refuse to forget.
- Devotional corpus onTarain
The Ālhā cycle ends with Prithviraj Chauhan, and the Rajasthani Prithviraj Raso tells the same decade from the other side — two vernacular epics about one war, each making its own losers into heroes. Prithviraj then lost at Tarain in 1192 to Muhammad of Ghor, which the Ālhā singers treat as the judgement on him. Both poems are sung and neither is history, and between them they are how north India remembers the twelfth century.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Alha”. Sangeet Natak Akademi documentation; and the standard field studies of each tradition named in the entry.
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