The Rousing Voice of Baba Nagarjun: Charting New Territories for The Hindi Novel

Indu Prakash Pandey has written and published prolifically about Hindi literature, language and folklore in Hindi, German, and English through his long and distinguished academic career. He taught Hindi at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany for over two decades. Previous to this, he lectured on Hindi literature and Indian culture and philosophy at the esteemed South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, Germany, the University of California, Berkeley, USA, the University of Beijing, China, and the University of Bucharest, Romania. Through his travels, Professor Pandey produced a Hindi textbook for Romanian students. He has been awarded degrees at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, and the University of Allahabad. In his early life, he served as Head of the Hindi Department at Elphinstone College, Mumbai from 1949-63. Professor Pandey's recent works include 3 volumes on Awadhi folk literature (2010), and an edited anthology of Hindi short stories, which he translated into German together with his wife Heidemarie Pandey as Der Alte und die Affen (2012). His other activities have included founding and leading the Indian Cultural Institute Frankfurt, where he established classes in music, dance and several Indian languages. He has also been deeply involved in the world of cinema, having served formerly on the selection committee of the President's award for the best Indian film, and on the Censor Board. Born in the town Shivpuri in present-day Uttar Pradesh, as a youth he immersed himself in the freedom struggle, and was jailed in Gandhi's "Quit India" Movement in 1942. Professor Pandey currently divides his time between his home in Haridwar and in Germany, and continues to teach Hindi and lecture on Hindi literature at the ripe age of 90. Malini Roy works as a freelance editor and writer in Frankfurt, Germany. She has published academic essays on late 18-early 19 century cultures of childhood, fairy tales in translation, British women writers, political theory. and carly paediatric literature, developed from her doctoral research in English Literature at Oxford University (2008).

I am sincerely grateful to my wonderful wife, Heidemarie, who helped, assisted and supported me in all my wild ventures, academic pursuits and social activities. It is great to have her on my side, wherever I go and in whatever I do. Sincere words of gratitude are due to Kamal Kumar for having introduced me to Nitin Garg of Radha Publication, New Delhi. We are thankful to Nitin Garg for having brought out a book on Nagarjun for English readers, and for having published this book in a very short time. Jed Vijay K. Malhotra deserves many thanks for reading the manu script and for having made some very useful suggestions. For reading and for making useful corrections I owe a special cbligation to Malini Roy for doing the most tedious job of digging out and preparing a presentable manuscript for a book in English on Nagarjun. Also I wish to thank Frank Kuhnel and Matthias Rosenkranz for the digitisation of the old typed text.

In order to set the importance of the present study in perspective, interested readers may wish to go through the following text, reproduced with slight modifications from the main body of the "Introduction" of Dr. Indu Prakash Pandey's former monograph, Regionalism in Hindi Novels (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1974). These passages help outline the historical background and the emergent modern Hindi literary traditions that Nagarjun's novels engaged in and remapped for future generations of readers. ...in the city of Lucknow, at the same time in April 1936 as Nehru was proclaiming a new age on the basis of socialist goals in his presidential address to the Indian National Congress, that Premchand was inaugurating the first conference of the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA). In fact, the PWA had already been founded in London in November 1935. A number of Indian students and intellectuals, with political views ranging from the radical socialist nationalism of which Nehru was the main representative, to the Communism of Sajjad Zaheer, Jyoti Ghosh, Pramod Sengupta and M. D. Taseer were prominent. On his return to India Sajjad Zaheer tried to solicit support for the PWA, and a number of top writers and intellectuals expressed their willingness to collaborate. After these preparations the first conference of the Indian Progressive Writers' association was held in April 1936 at Lucknow under the chairmanship of Premchand; it was attended by writers and thinkers such as Yashpal, Sumitranandan Pant, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and a number of others, and the manifesto, prepared in London only a few months previously, was adopted with slight modifications. Progressive thinkers felt that in spite of radical changes in Indian society, literature was lagging behind. According to them literature had become beset with escapism, ignored the hard facts of life, and baseless spirituality and idealism were on the increase. It had become formalistic and adopted a negative outlook, encouraging ideas of reaction and nourish revivalism. The progressives, therefore, found it necessary to commit themselves to writing literature that would deal with the basic problems of life, such as hunger, poverty, social degradation, foreign domination, idleness, blind faith, communalism, caste, etc. Their modified manifesto ended with the following resolution: "All that drags us down to passivity, inaction and unreason we reject as reactionary. All that arouses critical spirit, which examines institutions and customs in the light of reason, which helps us to organise ourselves to transform, we accept as progressive." An organisation adopting the manifesto referred to above was naturally inspired by the doctrine of socialist realism enunciated by Maxim Gorky. At the first All-Union Congress of Soviet writers (1934), a national union of Soviet writers was organised and the new doctrine of socialist realism was propounded to guide creative efforts. Literature became identified with politics and the Party's political objectives. Following this lead communists and communist-minded writers started working for the success of the movement and liberal-minded writers found a new impetus. Such was the atmosphere at that time, when writers accepted certain social, political and cultural goals to be realised through their writings, and a platform on which to agitate for social justice.

Under such influences Suryakant Tripathi Nirala (1896-1961), Sumitranandan Pant (1900), Narendra Sharma (1913), Balkrishna Sharma Navin (1897-1960), Bhagwati Charan Verma (1903), Ramdhari Singh Dinkar (1909) and a number of others abandoned romantic and idealistic literature for a more progressive type of writing. In March 1937 Shivadan Singh Chauhan published a long article entitled "Bharat mein pragativadi sahitya ki avashyakta" (The need of progressive literature in India) in Vishal Bharat, a well-known Hindi journal. In this article he discussed Marxism, class war, dialectical materialism and the decadence of the capitalist society, and he made a fervent appeal to the writers of Hindi to write for the proletariat. In 1938 from Kalakankar, Sumitra nandan Pant and Narendra Sharma published a monthly journal, Rupabh, which became a forum for progressive Hindi writers. Sivadan Singh Chauhan, after the death of Prem chand (1936), became the editor of Hans, which discussed and popularised progressivism in Hindi. It became a common practice among intellectuals to present their ideas about socialism, Marxism and progressivism, and to interpret life in the light of these newly-gained ideas. Formerly the most romantic poet, Sumitranandan Pant wrote in Rupabh what amounts to an echo of the manifesto: "In this age the realities of life have assumed such an aggressive form that the roots of our feelings and faiths, established in the old beliefs, have been shaken. Therefore the poetry of this age cannot be reared in dreams. Its roots, in order to draw its nourishment, will have to dig the hard land."

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