Illustrated Laur Chanda (Chandayana), Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay

The Laur Chanda or Chandayana (The Story of Chanda) is a romance composed in the Avadhi dialect of Hindi in 1377-78 by Mulla Da'ud, who dedicated it to Jahan Shah, vizier of Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq of Delhi. ¹ Its popularity shows in the survival of parts of at least five illustrated pre-Mughal copies, in a field noted for scarcity. ¹ The Prince of Wales Museum of Western India in Bombay acquired sixty-eight miniatures from this copy from Bhopal in 1957. ¹

One picture shows the hero Laur and his beloved Chanda resting beneath a tree on which Laur has hung his buckler, when a gang of soldiers attacks them. ¹ For Welch, violence has rarely been painted more lyrically: the action unfolds beneath a sky of arabesques and a tree flowering with songbirds, the flowers are scattered as rhythmically as drumbeats, and the artist seems even more oblivious to the everyday world than the Iranian painters whose style his grew from. ¹

Opinions on its date vary; Welch thinks it cannot be far from 1535-40. ¹ Its Iranian elements, such as the curved tree trunk that looks back to Turkman precursors, are only vestigial, and the women are painted in a style related to the Chaurapanchasika series of the mid-sixteenth century. ² Mandu, Malwa, Delhi and Jaunpur have all been proposed as its place of origin; wherever it was made, it implies a patron devoted to illustrated books and to other artistic pleasures. ²