Bodies That Remember: Women's Indigenous Knowledge and Cosmopolitanism in South Asian Poetry

1. Through the Looking Glass of Poetry: Grounding Metaphor and Illuminating Women’s History

38 Through the Looking Glass of Poetry Grounding Metaphor and Illuminating Women’s History Silence is a sign not of my defeat but of victory. —Mahadevi Varma1 Of the four poets this book seeks to situate in their respective historical periods and locales, Mahadevi Varma is the most well known. A household name in India even today, she has secured her legacy in the world of Hindi poetry. Born in 1902 in Farrukhabad, a small town near Allahabad, to parents of Kayastha caste, Mahadevi Varma grew to become one of the most prominent poets of modern Hindi. Her Western-educated father received a graduate degree in English literature from the University of Allahabad and worked in the colonial government as an English schoolteacher. He was also a culturally liberal man who pursued an education in both Urdu and English. His involvement with the Arya Samaj (an important reformist and nationalist organization founded in 1875, in pre-Independence India) was brief, as his own reformist sentiments were far too progressive to readily embrace the organization. Being an agnostic, he was drawn to the Arya Samaj and its reformist views about religion and nationalism, but his own This essay, with modifications, is reprinted, with permission, from Anita Anantharam, 2010, Mahadevi Varma (1902–1987): Between Tradition and Feminist Emancipation. In Mahadevi Varma Reader: Essays on Women, Culture, and Society. New York: Cambria Press. 1. Cited in Orsini (2000, 18). T H ROUG H T H E L OOK I NG G L A S S OF P OET R Y | 39 beliefs about Hindu society moved beyond that of the group; for example, he believed that the traditional Hindu marriage was a dying institution and therefore did not object when his eldest daughter, Mahadevi, refused to fulfill her marital commitment. Mahadevi’s mother, on the other hand, came from a traditional Hindu family, and her influence on Mahadevi cannot be understated. As Mahadevi recounts in an essay titled “Mere Bachpan Ke Din” (“My Childhood Days”), her mother’s influence eventually won out over her father’s desires in Mahadevi’s choice of Sanskrit and Hindi over Persian and Urdu (Varma 2000j, 418). In the 1920s, Mahadevi moved to Allahabad to begin her education in English at Crosthwaite College, and she has been associated with that city ever since. At the tender age of eleven, Mahadevi was married off to Svarupnarayan Varma, a boy from a well-to-do land-owning family from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh (Schomer 1998, 167). As was customary in child marriages, the final departure of the bride to gauna (her husband’s home) was delayed until both the bride and groom had come of age and completed their education. When the time finally came for Mahadevi to join her husband in Lucknow, she simply refused and he, surprisingly, acquiesced. She was allowed to remain in Allahabad to pursue her education and literary career. Meanwhile, in Allahabad, Hindi was struggling to gain literary and poetic acceptance and break away from the hegemony of Braj Bhasha. The first generation of poets in modern-standard Hindi, commonly known as the Dvivedi poets, had already begun to establish themselves in the city. A fledgling Hindi Department was founded at the University of Allahabad, and the city was on the way to becoming the “other” literary center of Hindi literature, second only to Banaras at the time. In her intellectual biography of Mahadevi Varma, Karine Schomer has described the shifts in poetic aesthetics from the Dvivedi period to Chhayavad (Romanticism),2 2. Chhayavad is often translated as romanticism—literally, it means reflection-ism (Chhaya-vad). Chhayavad suggested poetry of subjective experiences. The four poets associated with the Chhayavad school are Jayshanker Prasad, Sumitranandan Pant, Suryakant Tripathi (Nirala), and Mahadevi Varma. All four were most active between 1910 and 1940. 40 | BODI E S T H AT R E M E M BE R During the course of this one poetic generation, the content of poetry became the individual’s subjectivity [characteristic of the Chhayavad age] rather than the ideals of society [poetry of the Dvivedi eras]; the language of poetry was transformed from something functional but unappealing into something sensuous and entrancing to the ear; form and content were harmoniously integrated; and the nature of the poetic experience came to be understood in terms of the poet’s vision and intent rather than objectively defined canons of poetic excellence [Sanskrit and Braj Bhasha...