The Chandayan

Abount the Book: "One of the greats of Hindi literature, the Chandayan is an epic, presented here in English translation along with 530 famous paintings used to illustrate it in the sultanate period. The 16-th century historian Badayuni tells us that the Chandayan was selected for religious instruction by the Sufi, maulana Daud in the Tughlaq period. A racy yarn recounting the romance Lorik and Chanda, it was, equally, an allegory about Ishq-love for the Divine. Of singular importance in the history of Indian art, the Chandogan's illustrations inform us about the diversity of painting traditions before the Mughals. Composed in Hindavi (using the Old Hindi dialect of Jaunpuri Avadhi), the poem points to how the ""vernacular"" is an invaluable source of social history and literature, It allows us to learn about the use of the Perso-Arabic script in India and the impact of writing on language. The manuscripts and story also reveal much about the evolution of regional identities and the shifting nature of patronage in the Hindi heartland between the late 14th and the early 16th centuries."

About the Author: Richard Cohen is the author of By the Sword, Chasing the Sun, and How to Write Like Tolstoy. The former publishing director of two leading London publishing houses, he has edited books that have won the Pulitzer, Booker, and Whitbread/Costa prizes, while twenty-one have been #1 bestsellers. He has written for most UK quality newspapers as well as for The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.