Adikaal
What does Adikaal mean in poetry? Adikaal explained: the first period of Hindi literature, its dates and rival names, raso epics, Siddha and Nath poets, Amir Khusrau and Vidyapati, exam notes.
Try it in your own poem: Memorise the five names and their coiners: Shukla, Grierson, Mishrabandhu, Rahul Sankrityayan, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi; it is the single most asked Adikaal question.
Adikaal is the first period of Hindi literature, conventionally running from the mid tenth century to the mid fourteenth. The name means simply the early era, and it covers an astonishing spread: tantric songs of Buddhist Siddhas, yogic verse of the Nath sect, Jain narrative poetry, courtly war epics of Rajput bards, the bilingual wit of Amir Khusrau and the love padas of Vidyapati, all composed while Hindi itself was still separating from Apabhramsha. Acharya Ramchandra Shukla, the founding historian of Hindi literature, fixed the period at Vikram Samvat 1050 to 1375, roughly 993 to 1318 CE, and those dates still anchor every syllabus.
Students meet Adikaal chiefly through two famous controversies, what to call the period and whether its most celebrated epic is genuine, and both are reliable exam questions. Poets should meet it for a better reason: this is literature from before print, built for the human voice, memory and a listening crowd, and it knows things about rhythm and audience that a page-trained writer has usually forgotten.
One Period, Many Names
No other stretch of Hindi literary history has been renamed so often, because no single label fits its variety. The standard list, asked in exams year after year, runs as follows.
- Veergatha Kaal, the age of heroic ballads: Ramchandra Shukla's name, built on the raso war epics he treated as the era's representative work.
- Charan Kaal, the age of bards: George Grierson's label, from the charans, the hereditary court bards of Rajputana.
- Prarambhik Kaal, the initial period: the plain choice of the Mishra brothers, the Mishrabandhu literary historians.
- Siddha Samant Kaal, the age of Siddhas and feudal lords: Rahul Sankrityayan's name, honouring the religious poets Shukla had sidelined.
- Adikaal, the early era: Hazari Prasad Dwivedi's deliberately neutral coinage, arguing that a period containing mystics, moralists and war poets should not be named after any one of them. His term won, and it is the one you will see on syllabi today.
The Raso Epics
The glamour of the period belongs to the rasos, long martial poems composed at Rajput courts to celebrate a patron's wars, loves and lineage. The most famous is Prithviraj Raso, attributed to Chand Bardai, court poet and companion of Prithviraj Chauhan, the ruler of Delhi and Ajmer defeated in 1192. Others include Parmal Raso, attributed to Jagnik and standing behind the great oral epic of Alha and Udal; Bisaldev Raso by Narpati Nalha; and Khuman Raso celebrating the house of Mewar. The style is high heroic: rolling metres, thundering catalogues of armies, numbers inflated far beyond arithmetic, and praise laid on with a trowel.
Honesty requires the caveat every good teacher gives. The rasos survive in late manuscripts that differ wildly in length and language, and historians have long questioned how much of Prithviraj Raso, if any, dates from the poet it names. Treat the epics as literature shaped by centuries of performance and courtly addition rather than as war reporting, and say exactly that in an exam; the doubt is part of the required knowledge.
Siddhas, Naths and Jains
The period's religious verse ran on entirely different fuel. The Buddhist Siddhas composed songs of tantric instruction in a deliberately riddling idiom scholars call twilight language; Sarahapa, whom Rahul Sankrityayan placed as early as the eighth century and provocatively called the first Hindi poet, heads the line, though both the dating and the claim remain contested and you should present them as such. The Nath yogis, with Gorakhnath as the towering name, wrote blunt verse of bodily discipline and inner alchemy whose plain speaking style visibly prepares the ground for Kabir two centuries later.
Jain poets, chiefly in Gujarat and Rajasthan, contributed narrative and didactic works in Apabhramsha and its late forms, including versions of the Rama story such as Svayambhu's Paumachariu. Whether these Apabhramsha works count as Hindi at all is itself a live scholarly question, which is precisely why histories of the period spend so much time on language boundaries. The safest formulation: they belong to the immediate ancestry of Hindi literature, and no account of Adikaal is complete without them.
Amir Khusrau and Vidyapati
Two individual voices outshine whole genres. Amir Khusrau of Delhi, who lived from 1253 to 1325, was a Persian court poet of the Delhi Sultanate who also played, brilliantly, in the spoken tongue he called Hindavi: riddles, mukris or trick verses with double meanings, and songs still sung by qawwals today. His importance for the period is symbolic as much as literary, proof that the everyday speech of North India could carry wit, music and literature while Sanskrit and Persian held the prestige.
Vidyapati of Mithila, active around the turn of the fifteenth century, wrote learned works in Sanskrit and Avahatta, including the Kirtilata, but his fame rests on padas in Maithili singing the love of Radha and Krishna with a sensuous directness that enchanted later Vaishnava tradition, above all in Bengal. Historians place him at the border of Adikaal and the Bhakti era, and he is best remembered as the hinge between them: courtly craft turning, line by line, into devotion.
A Language Being Born
Underneath all this literature runs the period's real drama: the slow birth of Hindi from Apabhramsha, the last common literary stage of the North Indian Prakrits. Adikaal texts sit at every point on that slope, some essentially Apabhramsha, some recognisably old Hindi, many disputed. The bardic tradition itself split into two stylistic streams, Dingal, the rugged Rajasthani manner of the war poets, and Pingal, the softer Braj-inflected register, a distinction examiners like.
Dating anything in the period is correspondingly hard. Manuscripts are late, scribes modernised freely, and performers added verses for centuries; a poem's language may be newer than its story and older than its paper. This is why responsible histories of Adikaal bristle with words like attributed, contested and circa, and why you should use those words too rather than reciting dates as certainties.
Why This Era Rewards a Modern Poet
Everything in Adikaal was built to survive without paper: heavy rhythm, formulaic epithets, numbered lists, refrains, rhyme as a memory device, and address aimed at a hall rather than a reader. Composing one poem under those conditions, even once, rewires your sense of what lines are for. If a stanza cannot be remembered, the old bards would say, it does not exist.
There is also a subject lesson. The rasos teach momentum and spectacle; the Siddha and Nath poets teach compression and shock; Khusrau teaches play; Vidyapati teaches sweetness with craft behind it. A single early period holding all four is a reminder that no poetic register is off limits in one lifetime, or even one notebook.
What poets can take from this
- Memorise the five names and their coiners: Shukla, Grierson, Mishrabandhu, Rahul Sankrityayan, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi; it is the single most asked Adikaal question.
- Keep Shukla's dates handy: Vikram Samvat 1050 to 1375, roughly 993 to 1318 CE.
- Pair each raso with its poet: Prithviraj Raso with Chand Bardai, Parmal Raso with Jagnik, Bisaldev Raso with Narpati Nalha.
- Always flag the authenticity debate around Prithviraj Raso; certainty here reads as ignorance.
- Know Dingal versus Pingal as the two bardic styles, Rajasthani heroic against Braj-inflected sweetness.
- Try composing one short poem entirely for memory, no writing until it is finished; it is the fastest lesson in what Adikaal verse was for.
Try it yourself
Compose a short praise poem for someone unglamorous you genuinely admire, a nurse, a bus driver, a grandmother, in the manner of a court bard: grand epithets, a catalogue of their victories, one boast stretched far beyond the literal truth. Build it aloud and commit it to memory before you write anything down.
Questions
Why did Ramchandra Shukla call Adikaal the Veergatha Kaal?
Shukla judged the raso war epics, heroic ballads composed for Rajput courts, to be the period's most representative literature, so he named the whole era the age of heroic ballads. Later scholars, especially Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, objected that this ignored the period's rich religious and Jain writing, and the neutral name Adikaal prevailed.
Is Prithviraj Raso historically authentic?
Its authenticity is seriously disputed. The epic survives in manuscript versions that differ enormously, the earliest copies are centuries later than the events, and historians have shown conflicts with the documented record. Most scholars treat it as a text that grew through long performance and courtly addition, with at best an old core.
Who is considered the first poet of Hindi?
There is no agreed answer. Rahul Sankrityayan championed the Siddha poet Sarahapa, placing him in the eighth century, while others point to later figures depending on where they draw the line between Apabhramsha and Hindi. A good answer names Sarahapa, gives the reasoning, and states plainly that the matter is contested.
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