About NAGARJUN
This year Hindi writers, their organisations, cultural activists and poetry lovers are celebrating the centenary year of Nagarun, a progressive Hindi poet who wrote poems and novels in Hindi, Maithili Sanskrit and Bangla. He is known as Baba Nagarjun and peoples’ poet.
Nagarjun, whose real name was Vaidyanath Mishra was born at Tarauni, a small village in Darbhanga (Bihar) in 1911, according to Vikram calendar on the full moon of Jyeshtha month, that falls on the June 15 this year. .He studied Sanskrit and Budhdhist literature, travelled far and wide, adopted Budhdhist religion for some time and used Nagarjun as his nom de plume. In Maithili he wrote under the pen-name, Yatri (Traveller). He wrote more than six novels in Hindi, more than a dozen collections of poems, two epic poems, two collections of poems in Maithili, one novel in Maithili, one epic poem in Sanskrit and some poems in Bangla. He was awarded by Sahitya Akademi for his collection of poems in Maithili. He died on November 5, 1998..
He began writing poems in Maithili at an early age, but he wrote in Hindi when he came in contact with Hindi writers at Varanasi where he stayed for learning Sanskrit. After that he wandered from one place to another. In the words of Vishnu Khare, 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 appreciataed for its pictorial quality, Yugdhara, the first one in Hindi, was considered as "the Stream of the Age." By 1953, the year of its publication, Nagarjun had left behind the nostalgic association with his Meghaduta-Kalidasa Sanskritic lyrical romanticism. He became the forerunner of a new wave of writing in Hindi of progressive content and satirical form. To quote Vishnu Khare again, “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.”.
He did not confine himself to the genre of poetry to depict the reality of his land. He took to novel writing and wrote novels in Hindi in the rich tradition of Premchand.
Ratinath Ki Chachi (Ratinath's Aunt), his novel in Hindi is considered by critics as ‘one of the most realistic--and feminist--novels in Hindi.’ This novel depicts adulterous carnality and foeticide, but it is a rich conjuring - up of Maithil society, culture and ecology, interspersed with irony and humour so characteristic of the region.
Balchanma his second novel in Hindi, was published in 1952. This novel also depicts the social reality telling the 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.
Vishnu Khare while writing on his death wrote, “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… 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…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.”