Rajput: Chandel
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From The Tribes And Castes Of The Central Provinces Of India
By R. V. Russell
Of The Indian Civil Service
Superintendent Of Ethnography, Central Provinces
Assisted By Rai Bahadur Hira Lal, Extra Assistant Commissioner
Macmillan And Co., Limited, London, 1916.
NOTE 1: The 'Central Provinces' have since been renamed Madhya Pradesh.
NOTE 2: While reading please keep in mind that all articles in this series have been scanned from a book. During scanning some errors are bound to occur. Some letters get garbled. Footnotes get inserted into the main text of the article, interrupting the flow. Readers who spot errors might like to correct them, and shift footnotes gone astray to their rightful place.
Rajput: Chandel
An important clan of Rajputs, of which a small number reside in the northern Districts of Saugor, Damoh and Jubbulpore, and also in Chhattisgarh. The name is derived by Mr. Crooke from the Sanskrit cJiandra, the moon. The Chandel are not included in the thirty-six royal races, and are supposed to have been a section of one of the indigenous tribes which rose to power.
Mr. V. A. Smith states that the Chandels, like several other dynasties, first came into history early in the ninth century, when Nannuka Chandel about A.D. 831 overthrew a Parihar chieftain and became lord of the southern parts of Jejakabhukti or Bundelkhand. Their chief towns were Mahoba and Kalanjar in Bundelkhand, and they gradually advanced northwards till the Jumna became the frontier between their dominions and those of Kanauj. They fought with the Gujar- Parihar kings of Kanauj and the Kalachuris of Chedi, who had their capital at Tewar in Jubbulpore, and joined in resisting the incursions of the Muhammadans. In A.D. 11 82 Parmal, the Chandel king, was defeated by Prithwi Raja, the
Chauhan king of Delhi, after the latter had abducted the Chandel's daughter. This was the war in which Alha and Udal, the famous Banaphar heroes, fought for the Chandels, and it is commemorated in the Chand-Raisa, a poem still well known to the people of Bundelkhand. In A.D. 1203 Kalanjar was taken by the Muhammadan Kutb-ud-Din Ibak, and the importance of the Chandel rulers came to an end, though they lingered on as purely local chiefs until the sixteenth century.
The Chandel princes were great builders, and beautified their chief towns, Mahoba, Kalanjar and Khajuraho with many magnificent temples and lovely lakes, formed by throwing massive dams across the openings between the hills/ Among these were great irrigation works in the Hamirpur District, the forts of Kalanjar and Ajaighar, and the noble temples at Khajuraho and Mahoba.^ Even now the ruins of old forts and temples in the Saugor and Damoh Districts are attributed by the people to the Chandels, though many were in fact probably constructed by the Kalachuris of Chedi.
Mr. Smith derives the Chandels either from the Gonds
or Bhars, but inclines to the view that they were Gonds.
The following considerations tend, I venture to think, to
favour the hypothesis of their origin from the lihars. According
to the best traditions, the Gonds came from the south,
and practically did not penetrate to Bundelkhand. Though
Saugor and Damoh contain a fair number of Gonds they
have never been of importance there, and this is almost their
farthest limit to the north-west.
The Gond States in the Central Provinces did not come into existence for several centuries after the commencement of the Chandel dynasty, and while there are authentic records of all these states, the Gonds have no tradition of their dominance in Bundelkhand. The Gonds have nowhere else built such temples as are attributed to the Chandels at Khajuraho, whilst the Bhars were famous builders. " In Mirzapur traces of the Bhars abound on all sides in the shape of old tanks and village forts. The bricks found in the Bhar-dlhs or forts are of enormous dimensions, and frequently measure 1 9 by 11 inches, and ' Early History of hidia, 3rcl cdi- - Mr. Crooke's Tribes ami Castes, tion, pp. 390-394. ait. Chandel.
are 2^ inches thick. In quality and size they are similar to bricks often seen in ancient Buddhist buildings. The old capital of the Bhars, five miles from Mirzapur, is said to have had 150 temples."^ Elliot remarks ^ that " common tradition assigns to the Bhars the possession of the whole tract from Gorakhpur to Bundelkhand and Saugor, and many old stone forts, embankments and subterranean caverns in Gorakhpur, Azamgarh, Jaunpur, Mirzapur and x^llahabad, which are ascribed to them, would seem to indicate no inconsiderable advance in civilisation." Though there are few or no Bhars now in Bundelkhand, there are a large number of Basis in Allahabad which partly belongs to it, and small numbers in Bundelkhand ; and the Pasi caste is mainly derived from the Bhars ;
^ while a Gaharwar dynasty, which
is held to be derived from the Bhars, was dominant in
Bundelkhand and Central India before the rise of the
Chandels. According to one legend, the ancestor of the
Chandels was born with the moon as a father from the
daughter of the high priest of the Gaharwar Raja Indrajit of
Benares or of Indrajit himself.* As will be seen, the Gaharwars
were an aristocratic section of the Bhars.
Another legend states that the first Chandel was the offspring of the moon by the daughter of a Brahman Pandit of Kalanjar.^ In his Notes on the Bhars of Bundelkhand^ Mr. Smith argues that the Bhars adopted the Jain religion, and also states that several of the temples at Khajuraho and Mahoba, erected in the eleventh century, are Jain. These were presumably erected by the Chandels, but I have never seen it suggested that the Gonds were Jains or were capable of building Jain temples in the eleventh century. Mr. Smith also states that Maniya Deo, to whom a temple exists at Mahoba, was the tutelary deity of the Chandels ; and that the only other shrine of Maniya Deo discovered by him in the Hamlrpur District was in a village reputed formerly to have been held by the Bhars.'^ Two instances of intercourse between the Chandels and Gonds are given, but ' Shcrring's Castes and Tribes, i. * Crooke's Tribes and Castes, art. PP- 359> 360. Chandel.
2 Supplemental Glossary, art. lihar. r r < o *r> 1 1
" -^' • i,q^^\ " J.A.S.B. vol. xlvi. (1577), p. 232.
2 See art. ITisi. 7 Jhjdcm, p. 233.
the second of them, that the Rani Durgavati of Mandla was a Chandel princess, belongs to the sixteenth century, and has no bearing on the origin of the Chandels. The first instance, that of the Chandel Raja Kirat Singh hunting at Maniagarh with the Gond Raja of Garha-Mandla, cannot either be said to furnish any real evidence in favour of a Gond origin for the Chandels ; it may be doubted whether there was any Gond Raja of Garha-Mandla till after the fall of the Kalachuri dynasty of Tewar, which is quite close to Garha-Mandla, in the twelfth century ; and a reference so late as this would not affect the question/ Finally, the Chandels are numerous in Mirzapur, which was formerly the chief seat of the Bhars, while the Gonds have never been either numerous or important in Mirzapur.
These considerations seem to point to the possibility of the derivation of the Chandels from the Bhars rather than from the Gonds ; and the point is perhaps of some interest in view of the suggestion in the article on Kol that the Gonds did not arrive in the Central Provinces for some centuries after the rise of the Chandel dynasty ot Khajuraho and Mahoba. The Chandels may have simply been a local branch of the Gaharwars, who obtained a territorial designation from Chanderi, or in some other manner, as has continually happened in the case of other clans. The Gaharwars were probably derived from the Bhars. The Chandels now rank as a good Rajput clan, and intermarry with the other leading clans.
