Tradition · sung epic tradition
Pāṇḍavānī
Also known as Pandwani, Teejan Bai, Pāṇḍavānī — the Chhattisgarh Mahabharata
A Chhattisgarhi telling of the Mahabharata sung by a single performer with a tambura, standing rather than seated, who plays every character in turn and uses the instrument as sword, mace and chariot. Bhima, not Arjuna or Yudhishthira, is the hero of this version, which is a Chhattisgarh judgement on the epic.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 21.250, 81.630
Worth knowing
Teejan Bai, born into a Pardhi family at Ganiyari in 1956, was the first woman to perform Pandavani standing and in the kapalik style, which had been closed to women; she was thrown out of her village for it before she was taken up by state cultural bodies and eventually given a Padma Vibhushan.
Connections (2)
- Devotional corpus onMahabharata
Pandavani is the Mahabharata retold from the floor of a Chhattisgarh village, and its choices are arguments: Bhima rather than Arjuna is the hero, the Pandavas' forest years matter more than the court intrigue, and episodes unknown to the Sanskrit text are sung as though canonical. The epic has never had one version, and the regional tellings are not corruptions of Vyasa but parallel works with their own logic.
- AnalogueBastar
Chhattisgarh and Bastar carry a dense set of performance and craft traditions that have almost no presence in the national account of Indian culture — Pandavani, Nacha, the Bastar Dussehra with its rath and its tribal assemblies, and the dhokra casting of the same districts. What they share is a patronage base that was never courtly: these are village and Adivasi forms whose survival depended on nobody in particular, which is also why they nearly vanished in the twentieth century.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pandavani”. Sangeet Natak Akademi documentation; and the standard field studies of each tradition named in the entry.
Open Pāṇḍavānī in the repository →