Chand Bardai

Who was Chand Bardai?

Chand Bardai was a Hindu brahambhatt and the court poet of the Indian king Prithviraj III Chauhan, who ruled Ajmer and Delhi from 1165 to 1192. Chand Bardai composed the Prithviraj Raso, an epic poem in Hindi about the life of Prithviraj. A barot of Jagati gotra, he was a worshiper of the goddess Saraswati, who gave him the boon of Bardai.

The Prithviraj Raso was embellished with time and quite a few authors added to it. Only parts of the original manuscript are still intact. There are many versions of Raso but scholars agree that a 1400 stanza poem is the real "Prithivraj Raso". In its longest form the poem comprises upwords of 10,000 stanzas.

The Prithviraj Raso is a source of information on the social and clan structure of the Kshatriya communities of northern India. The historicity of Prithviraj Raso was proved unreliable by historical writers like Buhler, Morrison, GH Ojha and Munshi Devi Prasad.