Teejan Bai: Pandavani, the Kapalik Style and the Padma Vibhushan

Teejan Bai (1956 to 2026) was a singer of Pandavani, the Chhattisgarhi tradition of narrating the Mahabharata in song, from Durg district in present-day Chhattisgarh. She was the first woman to perform in the vigorous Kapalik style, took the form from village stages to Paris and Fukuoka, and received the Padma Vibhushan in 2019. She died in Raipur on 5 July 2026, and her career is the clearest modern case of a folk form reaching the highest national honors.

Most readers learn one line about her: she sang standing, in the Kapalik style, while women before her sat in the Vedamati style. The line is useful but thin. The two labels also describe two kinds of content, one built on oral village lore and one built on a written Hindi Mahabharata, and the labels carry a history of their own. This note keeps the record of her career separate from the simplified version and explains what the styles really mean.

Who Was Teejan Bai?

Teejan Bai was a professional performing artist from a tribal family of the Durg region who made Pandavani a stage art known across India and abroad. Accounts differ on her birth: the Fukuoka Prize biography gives 8 August 1956 at Atari village in Patan, with her childhood at Ganiyari, while other accounts give 24 April 1956 at Ganiyari, near Bhilai. The table gives the facts the record supports.

What Is Pandavani?

Pandavani, literally ‘the story of the Pandavas’, is a sung narration of episodes from the Mahabharata, performed in Chhattisgarhi by a lead singer with a small group of accompanists. The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts describes it as the narrative tradition of the Pardhan, Gond and Devar communities spread across Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. A single performer leads the story after invoking the deities.

Three features define a performance:

• The tambura as a prop. The lead singer holds a tambura, a stringed drone instrument, and turns it into whatever the story needs: a bow, a mace or a chariot.
• The exchange with accompanists. The Fukuoka Prize citation stresses the short spoken exchanges between singer and accompanists, which keep the story moving and give the audience a voice in the room.
• The local language. It is sung in Chhattisgarhi rather than Sanskrit or standard Hindi, which is why, in the Fukuoka citation’s words, it won popularity among ordinary people.

Episodes run long. One battle or one humiliation scene can fill an evening, so a singer chooses episodes for the occasion rather than telling the whole epic.

A Japanese comparison helps. At a public forum in Fukuoka on 22 September 2018, held for her prize, the Hindi scholar Murayama Kazuyuki likened Pandavani to Naniwa-bushi, a Japanese form of sung storytelling accompanied by the shamisen. The comparison holds for the format, one narrator singing and speaking a long tale with a single instrument. It breaks on content and setting: Pandavani tells one epic, and it isn’t a religious rite, so it can be performed freely anywhere.

IGNCA has also documented the form on film. Its documentary Pandavani Chhattisgarh, directed by Manohar Aashi and just under an hour long, records both styles and is one of the few archival records of the tradition beyond its star performers.

What Is the Difference Between Vedamati and Kapalik?

The short answer is that Vedamati is the text-based style and Kapalik the oral, more dramatic style, and the standing-versus-seated contrast follows from that. The longer answer explains why the labels themselves are argued over.

IGNCA’s documentation names the two styles and their exponents. Vedamati was initiated by Jhaduram Devangan and his family of performers; Kapalika is ‘livelier than Vedamati’, and its famous singers are Teejan Bai, Mina Sahu and Shanti Devi.

Sahapedia’s study of the tradition fills in the history. Around 1940, the weaver Jhaduram Devangan received a copy of Sabal Singh Chauhan’s Hindi Mahabharata in lieu of payment for a sari and memorized it. His Pandavani drew on that written text and dropped regional stories he considered unauthentic. By the 1980s, local usage called singing from regional oral lore ‘kapalik’, or imaginary, and singing from the text ‘vedamati’. The study notes that a pejorative ring still clings to the word kapalik.

Put the two together and the standard summary needs one correction. The labels first sorted content, written text against oral lore, and only later came to mark performance styles, with the Kapalik singer standing and acting out the characters. When Teejan Bai sang Kapalik, she chose both the dramatic style and the older village stories.

How Did Teejan Bai’s Career Unfold?

Her career moved from village performances in the late 1960s to national stages in the 1980s and international honors after 2000. The Fukuoka Prize biography gives the dated sequence.

Learning and the 1969 Debut

She learned Pandavani as a child from her maternal grandfather and later received informal training from Umed Singh Deshmukh. In 1969 she gave her first public performance at Chandrakhuri, a neighbouring village in Durg, singing in the Kapalik style, the first time a woman had done so. Invitations to festivals and special occasions followed in nearby villages.

A woman singing Pandavani in public met resistance. The Fukuoka biography records that her community expelled her in 1970 for singing as a woman. The prize citation reads her persistence as the reason her career gave courage to women and to people facing repression.

Bharat Bhavan and the National Stage

The turning point came in 1982. She performed at a concert organized by Bharat Bhavan, the arts center in Bhopal, and performed for Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the same year. In 1985-86 she sang at an Indian festival in Poland, her first performance abroad. Tours followed to France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, Malta, Cyprus, Turkey, Yemen, Bangladesh and Mauritius.

Fame didn’t end her working life outside the arts. From 1986 she worked at the Bhilai Steel Plant, and the Fukuoka citation notes that she kept working at the ironworks when she wasn’t performing.

Teaching and the Later Years

From 2001 she ran a troupe that performed and trained pupils, which is how a solo star tries to turn into a tradition. In 2003 she received honorary doctorates from Guru Ghasidas University in Bilaspur, Raipur University and Jabalpur University. In her Fukuoka acceptance speech in 2018 she spoke of supporting children’s education, since she had missed school herself.

Which Awards Did Teejan Bai Receive?

She received all three Padma awards, a rare run for a folk artist, along with the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and Japan’s Fukuoka Prize. The sequence, with the dates the official records give:

• 1988: Padma Shri, listed as ‘Smt. Teejan Bai (Folk Music), Drug, Madhya Pradesh’, since Durg was then in Madhya Pradesh.
• 1995 or 1996: Sangeet Natak Akademi Award; Indian reports give 1995 and the Fukuoka biography 1996.
• 2003: Padma Bhushan, now listed from Durg, Chhattisgarh, after the state was formed in 2000.
• 2016: the M.S. Subbulakshmi National Centenary Award.
• 2018: Fukuoka Prize, Arts and Culture Prize, given by the city of Fukuoka for contributions to Asian culture.
• 2019: Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award, by the notification of 16 March 2019.

The Padma Vibhushan is the one to remember, because the notification lists her under ‘Art’ from Chhattisgarh, the state’s recognition at the second-highest civilian tier. Her run from Padma Shri to Padma Vibhushan took 31 years. The Padma awards note explains how the three tiers differ, and the broader awards and honors note places them beside the other national honors.

What Is Debated About Teejan Bai and Pandavani?

Two questions are argued about: whether the Kapalik label belittles the oral tradition, and whether a star performer helps or flattens a community art. Neither touches her artistry, which nobody disputes.

The first is about words. As the Sahapedia study shows, ‘kapalik’ began as a slighting term for stories that weren’t in the written text. Her success turned the label into a badge, but it also hid how much of Pandavani’s content comes from regional lore that the text-based style set aside. A careful answer uses the style names and notes their origin.

The second is about representation. Folk forms reach national audiences through a few celebrated names, and Pandavani came to be known through hers. IGNCA’s own list of Kapalika singers names others, Mina Sahu and Shanti Devi, and the Vedamati line of Jhaduram Devangan’s family. The fair reading is that she widened the audience for the whole tradition while the tradition itself stayed larger than any one singer.

Teejan Bai Today

Teejan Bai died on 5 July 2026 in Raipur. The President, the Vice President and the Prime Minister expressed grief the same day; the Prime Minister said she had earned global recognition for this folk art form of Chhattisgarh and called her death an irreparable loss to art and culture. The Fukuoka Prize Committee published an obituary on 8 July 2026.

Her death leaves Pandavani with the question every folk form with one famous name faces: whether pupils and troupes can carry it. The troupe she founded in 2001 and the singers IGNCA lists are where that answer lies. Pandavani belongs with other community performance traditions such as Gavari of Rajasthan, and the note on puppetry and traditional theater forms covers the wider family. For Chhattisgarh’s place among the folk dance and music traditions of each state, the note on the states and their dance forms is a quick map.

How to Study Teejan Bai for Exams

She sits in General Studies Paper I under Indian culture, specifically folk music and narrative traditions, and she is a strong Prelims candidate through the 2019 Padma Vibhushan and the Pandavani styles. Art and Culture accounts for 94 of the 1,403 questions in the Prelims question bank from 2013 to 2026, and a folk form matched to its state is one of its most frequent shapes.

Mains asks about heritage and its survival, not about single artists. Mains 2018 GS Paper I asked “Safeguarding the Indian art heritage is the need of the moment. Discuss.”, and an oral epic form that depends on living performers is the clearest example of heritage that can’t be safeguarded in a museum.

The revision facts worth fixing:

• Pandavani: sung Mahabharata narration in Chhattisgarhi; tambura used as a prop.
• Two styles: Vedamati (text-based, Jhaduram Devangan) and Kapalik (oral lore, more dramatic).
• Teejan Bai: first woman to sing Kapalik in public, at Chandrakhuri in 1969.
• Padma Shri 1988, Padma Bhushan 2003, Padma Vibhushan 2019.
• Fukuoka Prize, Arts and Culture, 2018.
• Died 5 July 2026, Raipur.

Three confusions cost marks:

• Vedamati is not simply ‘seated’ and Kapalik ‘standing’. The deeper difference is text against oral lore.
• Pandavani narrates the Mahabharata, not the Ramayana; the name itself comes from the Pandavas.
• Her 1988 award lists Madhya Pradesh because Chhattisgarh was carved out only in 2000, so an exam statement placing her early award in Chhattisgarh is technically wrong on the record.

The sibling narrative forms an examiner can pair:

Teejan Bai turns a list entry into a person with dates, and that makes the folk-music section of the syllabus much easier to hold. The aspirant who knows why Kapalik was once a slighting word has understood something the one-line summary leaves out, and that understanding is what separates a balanced heritage answer from a list.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Consider the following statements about Pandavani: 1. It is a narrative singing tradition based on the Mahabharata. 2. Teejan Bai was the leading exponent of its Vedamati style. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) Pandavani narrates the Mahabharata; Teejan Bai sang the Kapalik style, while Vedamati is associated with Jhaduram Devangan.

2. Pandavani is a folk tradition mainly associated with which state?

• (a) Odisha
• (b) Chhattisgarh
• (c) Jharkhand
• (d) Rajasthan

Answer: (b) Pandavani is sung in Chhattisgarhi and centred in Chhattisgarh.

3. Consider the following statements about Teejan Bai: 1. She received the Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan. 2. She received the Fukuoka Prize. 3. She received the Bharat Ratna. Which of the statements given above are correct?

• (a) 1 and 2 only
• (b) 2 and 3 only
• (c) 1 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (a) She held all three Padma awards and the 2018 Fukuoka Prize but not the Bharat Ratna.

4. In Pandavani performances, which instrument does the lead singer also use as a prop?

• (a) Ektara
• (b) Dhol
• (c) Tambura
• (d) Shehnai

Answer: (c) The tambura stands in for a bow, a mace or a chariot as the story needs.

5. Which written text shaped the Vedamati style of Pandavani?

• (a) Kamba Ramayanam
• (b) Sabal Singh Chauhan’s Mahabharata
• (c) Ramcharitmanas
• (d) Jaimini Bharata

Answer: (b) Jhaduram Devangan built the Vedamati style on Sabal Singh Chauhan’s Hindi Mahabharata.

Mains

1. What makes the Indian society unique in sustaining its culture? Discuss. (10 marks, 150 words) Previous year: Mains 2019, GS Paper I.
2. What is Pandavani? Distinguish between its Vedamati and Kapalik styles. (10 marks, 150 words)
3. Oral narrative traditions depend on living performers rather than texts or monuments. Discuss the challenges of safeguarding them, with reference to Pandavani. (15 marks, 250 words)
4. How have women performers changed India’s folk traditions? Illustrate with the career of Teejan Bai. (15 marks, 250 words)
5. Examine the role of national honors and state institutions in sustaining folk performing arts in India. (15 marks, 250 words)