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Kalidas:- VidyaPati:-Vidyapati
was born in the village of Bisapi in
King Manu:-In ancient culture the king Manu wrote a Granth called Manu Smriti. In this book Manu says that "Sari Prithvi Ke Savi Manusya Apni Utpati Or Achar Vihar Iss Desh Ke Brahmino Se Sikhe" i.e All the people of earth learn her culture from Brahmin of this country. Nagaarjun:-The
People's poet Vaidyanath Mishra, popularly known as 'Nagarjun', died on 5th Despite its apparent openness and transparency,
the life and oeuvre of the pseudonymous Nagarjun is complex, problematic and
ever fascinating. The ambiguities begin with the date of his birth, which
remain unknown--bio graphical entries and blurbs, record it as 1911 and he
himself supported it but, on the other hand, insisted that he was 18 or 19
in 1931 when he was tricked and inveigled into marrying his 12-year-old
bride. His father, Gokul Mishra, an orthodox Brahmin from the
culturally-rich Mithila region of North Bihar, whose family had seen better
and prouder days, was comparatively unlearned in his community but revelled
in compensating this lack with his pietistic
pilgrimagery, lechery and brutality. The son, named Vaidyanath, had seen
Gokul Mishra threaten his terminally tubercular wife with beheading by an
axe when the bed-ridden woman begged him to curb his adulterous
debaucheries. Vaidyanath lost his mother when he was only six. He also
witnessed his poor, maternally affectionate, widowed aunt nearly lose her
life in aborting an illegitimate child by his father. Gokul Mishra was
extremely cruel and callous to his only son, denying him proper schooling
and compelling him to traditional, rudimentary learning of Sanskrit in the
ancestral village of Tarauni and neighbouring areas. Fellow-poets and
millions of his admirers affectionately called Nagarjun 'Janakavi'--the
People's Poet. Though there are poems in which he remembers his wife and
children, poems of friendships and surrogate family ties, of travel and
nature, Nagarjun remains predominantly a poet of politics and people, of the
peasantry and of the proletariat. He was angrier than any angry young poet
but also possessed a typically robust Maithil-Bihari sense of humour and
savage satire The hostility between the loveless teenager, now a married-
and-rebellious son, and his unredeemable father came to such a flashpoint
that Vaidyanath left his uncomprehending child-bride in her own father's
household and forsook his home and village for Varanasi, the ultimate
destination of all would -be Sanskrit scholars which also had a sizeable
Maithil Brahmin enclave. Thus began his wanderlust. Before he arrived in
Varanasi, then the centre of Hindi language, literature and
journalism--though Calcutta and Allahabad were close rivals--Vaidyanath was
barely comfortable in any other language other than his mother-tongue,
Maithili. It is not known under which poetic and emotional influences the
adolescent Vaidyanath began writing poetry in Maithili, acquiring the
nom-de-plume of "Vaideh", the Bodiless, but one of his first poems from his
self-exile is a nostalgic paean to Mother(land) Mithila. Soon, the prolonged
stay in Varanasi, coupled with journeys in the Hindi heartland and visits to
the Hindi-speaking areas of Calcutta, and a near-insatiable hunger for
poetry, fiction and socio-political information, available only through
Hindi-- Vaidyanath hardly knew any English and would be exposed to Bengali
much later--made him a bi-lingual. It is difficult to say what was greater,
the force of the lingua franca or the nascent genius of the restless young
poet but the year 1935 saw the publication of the first Hindi poem in the
weekly Vishvabandhu from Lahore by "Vaidyanath Mishra". Under the influence
of the Arya Samaj, the Hindus in Punjab were adopting Hindi and there was a
literary-cultural vacuum. Next, one finds "Acharya Vaidyanath Mishra" as the
editor of the Hindi monthly Dipak published from Abohar, district Ferozepur,
Punjab in 1935-36. Already in double self-exile, the restless wanderer would
soon impose a third upon himself. The stay in Varanasi had taken him away
from Vedic ritualistic Sanskrit and mysteriously and inexplicably, placed
him under the benign Sarnath gaze of the Compassionate One. Vaidyanath now
craved to become a Buddhist in the company of none other than the
communist-agitator-Tibetologist-Buddhologist monk Mahapandit Rahul
Sankrityayan, a kindred wanderer-explorer- author. Bidding his "Last
Obeisance" to the Mother Mithila in Maithili from Varanasi in November 1936,
Vaidyanath, now a young man, left for Ceylon, the only true abode of
Buddhism in South Asia, via Calcutta and South India. This remains the most
crucial decision taken by Nagarjun in his life, as he was known thereafter,
having taken the vows of a Bhikkhu in the Vidyalankar Parivena of Kelaniya.
He had known enough sorrow in his youth and was only just becoming aware of
its causes in Varanasi but it was in this campus in Sri Lanka that he
discovered the heady brew of Buddhism mixed with socialism. Nagarjun was
exposed to the writings and precepts of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. He hasn't
written much about his experiences in Kelaniya and one doesn't know much of
what happened to him there besides the initiation into Buddhism and Marxism
but suddenly he decided to return to Bihar to join the Sonepur camp of the
so-called Summer School of Politics run by his new political mentor, the
redoubtable kisan leader, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati. The latter was
assisted by committed Socialists, Communists and Congressmen in running
politico - ideological classes for workers and activists. Nagarjun took part
in the Ambari farmers' struggle and was arrested and jailed on 20 February
1939. Earlier, in what is perhaps his first poem in Hindi, published in
1937, he wistfully salutes all those who had died unsung, unwept and
unfulfilled. The language is shorn of all ostentation, the grip of rhyme and
metre is near-perfect. A new, young Hindi poet had finally arrived--one who
was apparently at home with the ancient and medieval lyric traditions but
was bold enough to experiment with blank and free verse as well. Nagarjun
was ambidextrous in many ways. He returned to his homeland and his wife and
led an intermittent conjugal life between 1941-52, the couple moving from
place to place in search of livelihood and the wife compelled to return to
their Tarauni base from time to time. In 1941 he published two of his longer
Maithili poems, Boorh Var (The Aged Bridegroom) and Vilap (Lament) as
pamphlets and sold them himself on passenger trains quite successfully. 1943
saw Nagarjun return to his interest in Tibetology and Rahul Sankrityayan. He
left for Tibet, fully aware that his ailing father would not survive till he
returned--neither had forgiven the other. Equally peremptorily, Nagarjun was
to lose nearly all interest in practising Buddhism, Buddhology and mass
movements. But he never returned to formal Hinduism and never renounced
Marxism. He abhorred his father for his inhuman treatment of his wife, his
sister-in-law and his own progeny and he never forgot those unfortunate
creatures but he himself never settled down to a life of home and hearth,
wife and children and chose to wander the length and breadth of the country,
sporadically returning as a prodigal husband-and-father to Tarauni. He
continued to write both in Maithili and Hindi and while only two Hindi
pamphlet-poems, Shapath (Vow) and Chana Jor Garam ('Mighty' Hot Grams) were
circulated in 1948 and 1952 respectively, his first, compact yet
comprehensive (28 poems) Maithili collection Chitra appeared in 1949 and
became perhaps the first modern classic and a standard university textbook
in the language. It is a microcosm with poems on the Mithila region and
Gandhi and the state-of-the-nation jostling with nature- poems, nostalgia,
love and social reform and commitment. Romantic lyricism gradually
surrenders to a resolute realism. The longest (169 lines) poem of the
collection, Dwandwa (The Duel Within), is uniquely central to the
understanding of the poet's painfully chosen way of life and his awareness
of the irrevocable, dynamic dialectics of human history. It is uncannily
like the testament of a modern Buddha after the renunciation, vulnerable to
accusation of heartlessness, selfishness and escapism, yet resolute and
unapologetic in its larger decision. If his first collection, in Maithili,
was admittedly "an album", Yudhara, the first one in Hindi, was "the Stream
of the Age." By 1953, the year of its publication, Nagarjun had long freed
himself of his Meghaduta-Kalidasa Sanskritic lyrical romanticism, declared
himself a human being and a proud athiest and wrote on the leftist rebellion
in Telangana, Eisenhower, Mother India and famine. He discovered new poetic
icons in Bharatendu Harishchandra and Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala'. He is
perhaps the only Hindi poet who saw and wrote about the mighty Indus during
one of his wanderings in pre-Partition India. His 1O-line, 1950 poem about
"the five worthy sons of Mother India" is a piece of classic satire, which
he used to recite like a dancing Baul. The still shorter, 8-line poem on
"The Famine and After" remains a masterpiece of tragedy and resurgence,
hunger and satiety, gloom and cheer, establishing him as a major talent in
Hindi poetry. Nobody seems to know and, characteristically, Nagarjun never
revealed why he took to novel-writing. But the memories of his poor yet
picturesque Mithila, the tradition-bound social and family-life, his own
household and his traumatic childhood, adolescent rebellion, lehre-and -Wanderjahre
and the experiences during his variegated Ausbildung could not perhaps find
space enough even in his bi-lingual poetry and demanded expression in
creative prose. Added to this artistic urge must have been the impact of the
Bengali romantic-realist Saratchandra Chatterji whom Nagarjun had translated
into Hindi and the ultimate compulsion--a novel still fetches much more
money than several poetry collections put together. Ratinath Ki Chachi (Ratinath's
Aunt)--the echo of Saratchandra in the title unmistakable but there the
resemblance ends--was published in 1948. It is a novella running into 113
pages--Nagarjun never had the time, patience and ambition to write a
full-scale novel--but remains till date one of the most realistic--and
feminist--novels in Hindi. Uninhibitedly autobiographical, the young
protagonist, Ratinath, is none other than Vaidyanath and the eponymous aunt
is his hapless widowed aunt who had to abort his father's illegitimate
child, leading to her social and spiritual ruin. Even Jainendra Kumar, the
first male feminist Hindi novelist, could not touch the stark, non-
prurient, deeply moving realism of Nagarjun's Ratinath. The theme is still
so taboo that the academic guardians of curricular morality have firmly
outlawed it from university syllabi. But the novel is not only about
adulterous carnality and foeticide, it is a rich conjuring - up of Maithil
society, culture and ecology, interspersed with irony and humour so
characteristic of the region. That world of Mithila may not exist any more
but in Ratinath Ki Chachi lives forever. Balchanma his second novella in
Hindi, was published as a book in 1952. This, again, is perhaps the first
piece of fiction of its kind in Hindi--a first-person account of the life of
the eponymous protagonist, a teenage backward Yadav bonded labourer. A
harrowing tale of abject poverty and naked exploitation, it promises
liberation to such rebellious youngster as Balchanma only to end in his
brutal murder by the mercenaries hired by the upper-caste kulaks and
landowners. Varun ke Bete (The Sons of the Water-God Varuna), written in
1954 and published in 1956, is yet another unconventional work. It is a
story of the (low-caste) village fishermen fighting for their fishing rights
and trying to form a fishermen's cooperative. Nagarjun wrote 13 novels, 11
in Hindi and two in Maithili, and each of them centres around a
socio-economic-political theme, making him one of the most 'programmatic'
novelists in Indian literature. His stories are invariably set in rural or
semi-urban Bihar and tell the story of the downtrodden and the exploited,
amongst them women and children. Quite unselfconsciously, Nagarjun became
the precursor of the so-called Annchalik Upanyas--the Regional Novel--in
Hindi, preceding Maila Annchal, the path-breaking classic written by the
fellow- regional Phanishwarnath 'Renu' in 1954, by six years. It is
impossible to separate Nagarjun from Bihar--it pervades his poetry and
fiction and is indeed the nest to which the aging falcon returned after each
short or wide gyre. His Hindi has just the right kind of Bihar flavour to it
and his poems are replete with the geography, culture and politics of Bihar.
This would be natural in his Maithil oeuvre but it is in Hindi that Nagarjun
introduces and establishes the people's Bihar for the first time closely
followed by 'Renu' and, later, by many other younger talents. Ramdhari Singh
'Dinkar,' Nagarjun's senior from Bihar, was cast in a pan-Indian,
high-culture, patriotic mould and flattered himself with the sobriquet 'Rashtrakavi'--the
National Poet--but fellow-poets and millions of his admirers affectionately
called Nagarjun 'Janakavi'--the People's Poet. Though there are poems in
which he remembers his wife and children, poems of friendships and surrogate
family ties, of travel and nature, Nagarjun remains predominantly a poet of
politics and people, of the peasantry and of the proletariat. He was angrier
than any angry young poet but also possessed a typically robust
Maithil-Bihari sense of humour and savage satire. In his last published
collection of Hindi poems Apne Khet mein... (In My Own Field, 1997), he
comes out with such personal poems as Na Sahi (If Not So What) and Aur Phir
Dhikai Nahin Di (And She Was Not Seen Again) but also lampoons the Madhuri-crazy
M.F. Husain and the tall-talking Laloo Yadav. Hua Gittiyon Men Ras ka
Sanchar (Sap Ran Down the Ballast) is a harshly moving poem on the
de-humanized rickshaw pullers of Calcutta but in ironically, Sanskritized
language and metre, reestablishing him as the committed 'il miglior fabbro'
of Indian poetry. But there is nothing Poundian about him; he can be
compared only to Walt Whitman abroad and Kabir nearer home. Though he was a
card-holder decades ago, Nagarjun soon realised that allegiance even to the
Communist Party was a curbing factor to a committed artist, whose first
obligation was to the people. Hair-splitting party diktats ill-suited his
leftist yet free spirit. He remained popular among all shades of Communists,
Socialists and even radical Congressmen. The popular movement led by
Jaiprakash Narayan so fired his spirits in 1974 that he joined the
"reaction-led" upsurge and was jailed on 1 June 1975, before the Emergency
was imposed by Indira Gandhi, and was released only when a habeas corpus
application was moved in the Patna High Court on 26 March 1976. Interaction
with fellow-prisoners, especially those belonging to the RSS and Jan Sangh,
left him totally disillusioned with JP's proposed "total revolution". He
didn't stop writing anti-Indira poems, but added anti JP-movement poems to
them. He continued to embarrass many of his admirers by such free-thinking
volte-face. When he accepted the Uttar Pradesh government's Bharat Bharati
Award for his literary contribution from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in
1983, the smiles the two exchanged were full of mutual irony. Much earlier,
in 1968, he accepted the Sahitya Akademi award for his collection of poems
Patraheer Nagna Gaachh (The Leaf- denuded Tree) Maithili, largely due to the
friendly manipulations and persuasion by an old crony, Prabhakar Machwe, who
was then the deputy secretary administering the prestigious awards in the
August literary institution. This deprived him of the Akademi Award in Hindi
but Machwe knew that with the kind of poems Nagarjun was writing in Hindi he
stood no chance of getting that in the near future. This second collection
in Maithili is not without its anti- orthodoxy, anti-establishment barbs but
it is certainly true that after he discovered it as a vehicle of literary
expression, it was only to Hindi that he gave his creative and rebellious
best. Both in Maithili and Hindi he is better-known as a poet than a
novelist, though one can ignore his novels only at one's peril; while at the
national level he is more recognised as Hindi poet than a Maithili one, but
his assessment as a poet remains flawed if his Maithili poems are ignored.
He wrote in Sanskrit as well, more as Kavya-kautuk, poetic sport, but his
Bengali poems, far less numerous than his Hindi-Maithili output, are
significant all the same and not merely for his amazing felicity in the
language but for their poetic content as well. There are some unique poems
in the Bengali-Hindi collection Mein Militri Ka Burha Ghora (I, an Old
Cavalry Horse, 1997) which are sensual, pensive, lyrical and
ironical--products of a strange burst of creativity in Bengali during the 17
months between February 1978 and September 1979, whose ultimate judge can
only be a native Bengali reader of poetry, though they sound extraordinary
in Hindi translation. For the last 30 years at least, Nagarjun has been the
most popular, loved and respected senior poet for the younger poets. His
moral and poetic influence is discernible in the works of Kunwar Narain to
Katyayani. Along with Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh and Raghuvir Sahay, it is
Nagarjun, older than the two, who inspires the young poets in Hindi today
the most; yet he remains a difficult poet to emulate, for few can ever hope
for his vast experiences with people, his deep human sympathy, the deceptive
simplicity of his language and complete mastery over the poetic craft. His
output is awe-inspiring---6 poem-pamphlets and 14 collections in Hindi along
with a pot-boiling textbook Khandakavya, 2 poem-pamphlets, 2 collections and
2 bi-lingual collections in Maithili and one bi-lingual collection of
Bengali poems. A small Sanskrit collection also lurks somewhere and scores
of poems lie scattered in periodicals and notebooks and manuscripts. During
his travels spread over more than 60 years, Nagarjun visited scores of
places all over India and made thousands of writer and non-writer friends.
They became his surrogate family, though he fathered six children in Tarauni,
visiting his wife from time to time. This long-suffering woman, Aparajita,
who really lived up to her name, the unvanquished, raised her children
single-handedly, educating them, getting them married and settled in life
while Nagarjun would intermittently appear as an uninvolved guest--as a
Yatri as he liked to call himself--with some money and gifts only to
re-embark on his journeys to distant towns and cities where devoted,
affectionate individuals and families would greet him with the appellation
"Baba", the mendicant father-figure. Whether this was on account of his
being a Buddhist Monk--"Baba" being a natural suffix to "Naga"--or whether
it was attributed to his sadhu-like untrimmed beard and greying hair, is not
clear, but he soon came to be universally accepted and addressed as a
grand-father who united the family of authors and non-literary families in
shared, collective affection. Ironically, this has had a deleterious effect
on his reception as a poet. No major professionally-run publishing house
accepted his poetry before 1980, though he had made his reputation as a poet
much before that, and he is now not read and respected as a poet but is
loved and revered as "Baba'. Thus, most of the 10 collections and the three
volumes of his selected works in Hindi, one bilingual Maithili- Hindi
collection and the sole bilingual Bengali-Hindi collection, all published
after 1980, have gone largely unread and unreviewed. While the publishers
are happy that the very name Nagarjun now sells, most Hindi poets and
critics hardly read him for he is already a 'modern classic' and a "Baba",
the great parent-persona, beyond all analysis and critical appraisal, fit
only for sainthood, deification and adoration. Everybody has a real or
imaginary personal reminiscence, anecdote or memory of "Baba", hardly anyone
has seen his recent collections. Those of his novels that are easily
available are largely neglected, which is something of a pity, for Nagarjun,
along with 'Nirala', Muktibodh and Raghuvir Sahay, remains a poet whose
significance seems to grow with each passing day. Bihar is India and India
is Bihar and the poems of Nagarjun mirror and critique the exasperating
contradictions, daunting challenges, perpetual tragedy and sundry triumphs
of this synonymous duality. His poetry and fiction are polyphonic; they have
more than one sub-text and can be read as subaltern sociology and history
but there is nothing subordinate about them--they belong to the real,
dominant mainstream of Hindi literature. On the other hand, he is at core a
vulnerable individual, with love, yearning, guilt and tenderness, tormenting
and ennobling his soul. Its inner demons turned him into a tireless
traveller--he was no profligate philanderer. His widow and children and
thousands of admirers forgave him his trespasses. To those who read him, he
is a deeply committed humanist with a rare mastery over language(s), style
and craft. Now that the canonised and mobbed "Baba" is gone, one hopes that
his devotees will turn to his works where he lives as the ever- readable,
relevant and breathless Nagarjun. (Source freeindia.com) Composed by Nagendra Jha Khelubhai@mithilalive.com Send your feedback at info@mithilalive.com |
| © INFONET New Delhi 2007 |
There
are hundreds of languages in the world. However, great and classical
literature which people in all countries need to read is found only in a few
languages. One such great language is Sanskrit. It is one of the oldest
languages. It is the mother of several Indianlanguages such as Hindi,
Bengali and Marathi in the North. Kannada, Telugu and other languages in the
South have also been nourished by it.
Madhubani,
on the 
November, 1998. Vishnu Khare