The Pandavani of Chhattisgarh: One Voice, One Epic, and the Storytelling Tradition That Keeps the Mahabharata Alive

One Voice, One Epic

The Mahabharata is one of the longest poems in the world — a text of approximately 100,000 verses in its Sanskrit form, covering eighteen books and a supplement, encompassing wars, dynasties, philosophy, cosmology, and some of the most searching moral questions in world literature. In written form, complete editions run to multiple large volumes.

In the Pandavani tradition of Chhattisgarh, a single performer renders this epic alone. Standing or seated before an audience, accompanied by a small musical ensemble and the rhythmic punctuation of a one-stringed instrument called the ektara or sometimes the tambura, the Pandavani singer narrates, enacts, voices multiple characters, sings, speaks, moves, and holds the entire emotional and narrative arc of the story in one body and one voice.

This is not a summary or a highlight reel. It is a complete performance tradition with its own aesthetic conventions, its own characterisations, its own relationship to the text. And it has been practised in the villages and towns of the Chhattisgarh region — in what was previously part of Madhya Pradesh and is now a separate state — for generations by communities of performers who have inherited it through a specific lineage of transmission.

Two Styles, One Tradition

Within the Pandavani tradition, scholars and practitioners distinguish two main performance styles: Vedamati and Kapalik.

The Vedamati style is the older and more restrained form. The performer sits throughout the performance, narrating and singing in a more contemplative register, drawing on a style that emphasises the devotional and philosophical dimensions of the Mahabharata. The Vedamati style places particular emphasis on Bhima — the second Pandava brother, known for his physical strength, his appetite, and his fiercely protective love — as the central hero of the narrative.

The Kapalik style is more energetic and theatrical. The performer stands and moves, acting out battles and confrontations with physical gestures, raising and lowering the voice dramatically, and creating a more viscerally engaging performance that emphasises the action and conflict of the epic. The Kapalik style has become more widely visible outside Chhattisgarh, partly through the work of Teejan Bai, its most celebrated contemporary practitioner.

The distinction between the two styles is not merely aesthetic. It reflects different lineages of transmission, different relationships to the source text, and different understandings of what the Mahabharata is fundamentally about — whether it is a devotional and philosophical text to be contemplated, or a narrative of human conflict and courage to be enacted.

Teejan Bai: The Artist Who Brought Pandavani to the World

No account of the Pandavani tradition can omit Teejan Bai, the Chhattisgarhi artist who is among the most celebrated folk performers in India and one of the very few traditional oral performers to achieve international recognition in her own right.

Teejan Bai was born in 1956 in a village in the Durg district of Chhattisgarh. She learned Pandavani from her grandfather as a child and began performing publicly at a young age — at a time when women performing this tradition in the Kapalik standing style was itself an innovation, as the standing performance style had been conventionally associated with male performers.

Her performances — characterised by extraordinary physical presence, vocal range, and the capacity to embody multiple characters while maintaining her own performer identity — brought Pandavani to audiences across India and eventually internationally. She has received the Padma Bhushan (2003) and the Padma Vibhushan (2019), the latter being one of India's highest civilian honours. She has performed at major international folk and arts festivals.

It is important to note that while Teejan Bai is the most internationally visible figure associated with Pandavani, she is one practitioner within a tradition that has many practitioners — some well-known within Chhattisgarh, others known only within their communities. The tradition's vitality does not depend on any single performer, however celebrated.

What the Pandavani Tradition Does With the Mahabharata

The Pandavani tradition does not simply reproduce the Sanskrit Mahabharata in performance. Like all living oral traditions in relationship with foundational texts, it is an active, interpretive, creative relationship — one in which the performer brings specific regional, community, and individual perspectives to the story.

The Chhattisgarhi Pandavani draws on versions of the Mahabharata that circulate in the oral tradition of the region, which differ in emphasis and in specific episodes from the critical edition of the Sanskrit text. Bhima, rather than Arjuna or Yudhishthira, is typically the central figure — a choice that reflects specific Chhattisgarhi traditions of valuing and identifying with Bhima's particular qualities.

The language is not Sanskrit but Chhattisgarhi — a language spoken by approximately 18 million people in Chhattisgarh and adjoining areas, closely related to Hindi but distinct in vocabulary, phonology, and idiom. The Pandavani tradition is therefore also a vehicle for Chhattisgarhi language and cultural identity — a way of inhabiting the great Indian epic in the specific voice of a specific regional community.

This regional appropriation of the Mahabharata is not an anomaly. It is characteristic of how the Indian epics have functioned across the subcontinent: as shared narrative resources that each community and each tradition reshapes in its own image, adding new emphases, new characters, new episodes, new interpretations. The Pandavani tradition is one form of this ongoing, living relationship between India's oral traditions and its foundational narratives.

Why This Matters on Independence Day

On the 15th of August, India marks its independence from British colonial rule. It is a day for reflecting on what India is — what it has been and what it aspires to be.

One of the things India is, and has been for millennia before any modern nation-state came into existence, is a civilisation of stories. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Panchatantra and the Jataka Tales, the regional epics and the folk traditions, the oral histories of tribal communities and the devotional songs of wandering mystics — these stories are not decorations on the edge of Indian culture. They are its connective tissue. They are how communities have understood themselves, transmitted their values, grieved their losses, celebrated their joys, and imagined their futures.

The Pandavani tradition of Chhattisgarh represents something precious: a living, breathing, practised relationship with one of the world's great narratives, maintained not in libraries or universities but in the bodies and voices of performers who have learned it through decades of practice and who perform it for audiences who receive it not as historical curiosity but as living story.

Spin A Yarn India exists in part because this form of cultural continuity is neither automatic nor guaranteed. It requires attention, documentation, education, and the kind of deliberate transmission across generations that does not happen by itself. If you want to bring India's living storytelling traditions into your school — not as museum exhibits but as genuinely living educational resources — Spin A Yarn India would like to hear from you. On Independence Day and every other day.