Literary history: Maulana Daud’s ‘Candayan’ and the beginnings of writing and literature in Hindi

A growing number of historians of Hindi literature believe that the Hindi literary tradition begins with the invention of the Sufi romance and its first known example, the Candāyan (1379 CE) of Maulana Daud. There are multiple reasons for giving Daud’s work and the genre that it inaugurates this distinction. First, it is the earliest known work in a register of the vernacular that continued to be used for literary composition over the next five hundred years. Second, it employs meters and verse forms like the caupaī and dohā that would come to be closely associated with bhāṣā literature. Third, it is the first work of a genre that would come to occupy a central place in the vernacular literary imagination until well into the nineteenth century.

Not all scholars agree; some locate Hindi