Chandi Purana- A Goddess Goes to War

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Adikabi Sarala Das Chair of Odia Studies started its activities at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) with the financial help of Government of Odisha from 26 December 2017 in the Centre of Indian Languages (CIL), School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies (SLL&CS). The Chair intends to represent Odisha, its language, literature and culture in all its multilingual and pluralistic manifestations. The Chair encourages comparative studies across a wide range of domains and also aims at disseminating knowledge of Odia language, literature and culture both at the national and international levels.

After the successful launch of the translation of Bichitra Ramayana, a fifteenth-century classic, in 2020, we are now bringing out our second ambitious project in print, the English version of the Chandi Purana, composed by Adikabi Sarala Das in Odia language. It retells one of the greatest themes of Indian mythology dealing with the heroic exploits of Goddess Durga - how she outwitted and eliminated the demon king Mahisasura and his powerful commanders. The battle between Durga and Mahishasura is considered to be more violent and more destructive than those of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which is elaborately narrated in texts such as the Durga Saptasati, the Kalika Purana, the Markandeya Purana, Devi Bhagavata, the Vishnu Purana, etc. Referring to the source of his work, Sarala proclaims: I'm narrating to you the Vishnu Purana which is the essence of the Bhagavata.

Sarala's literary excellence, however, does not lie in producing the Odia version of a story of the long past written in Sanskrit. His objective is three-fold: (1) to create a habitation of knowledge by converting, rather subverting the subject to accommodate the local religious beliefs and customs, (2) to transmit the new knowledge system to the common folk whom he is writing for by using legends and folklore and (3) to break free from the Sanskrit - Prakrit tradition and reset it into an indigenous literary culture.

The young modern reader of the Odia Chandi Purana (ChP henceforth) is far removed from the empirical, social and imaginative realm of its author Sarala Das, so much so that the distance might lead to a catastrophic misunderstanding of the actual nature of the text. What kind of modern reader do we wish to imply? A brilliantly creative reader who looks for stories to retell and wants to be read? Is it a scholar whose preoccupation is the study of the five identifiers (pancalaksana) of the Puranic genre of literature and the incongruences in this body of literature? Such scholarly work has yielded one important observation though, that although the subject of Purana is ancient, it is still new. Is it a scholar whose preoccupation is the study of Puranas as sectarian manifestos of religion and rituals? Such approach makes us think of a casing as Sakta literature for ChPalongside other texts such as Bana's Candisataka, Devi Mahatmya, Devi Bhagavata Purana and Kalika Purana. Yet others, inspired by methods of textual criticism, have sought to focus on the historicity of the Puranas, a debate yet to be settled with any degree of finality. And, of course, given the title of the text, there has been enough stretching to emphasize its feminist or anti-feminist implications. It would be worthwhile, then, to draw the young modern reader to the evocative power of ChP actualized through imagery, meaning and emotion. However, it would not be easy to get such a reader interested in the text unless it speaks to individual concerns about the scope and possibility of making life choices under specific conditions.

ChP is an original abridgement by Sarala Das who, in full awareness of the 'Puranic spirit', rearranges and adapts the most popular story of the devi's killing of Mahisasura, which is part of the traditional subject matter of Sakta literature, within a Vaishnava framework as is clear from its structure as a dialogue between the great sage, Shuka, and King Parikshit.