| Chapter : | Editor’s Introduction |
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one is indeed unbiased. In a series of vignettes about her hostel days at Crosthwaite College, Mahadevi grapples with many of the same questions of language politics with which modern South Asian literary historians have begun to engage only recently.
Further, Mahadevi makes explicit in this essay the marked shift between life as she knew it in the 1920s and the sociopolitical circumstances of her present day that no longer facilitate her childhood impressions and dreams. Her essay centres this shift in her experiences of the interlocking concepts of language and communal politics that led to the eventual partition of the subcontinent in 1947. While it is unclear exactly when this essay was written,16 its tone reflects a sense of community and history that transcends binary divisions of “Hindi” versus “Urdu” and “Hindu” against “Muslim”, something that Mahadevi feels is now irretrievably in the past.
In another essay, “Hamara Desh Aur Rashtrabhasha” (Our Nation and National Language), Mahadevi describes clearly the implication of adopting Hindi and its status as the national language. Hindi in its present form, known as Khari Boli, was not contrived, she suggests, but rather “developed from the heart of the people, from Prakrit and Braj-Avadhi”.17 She likens its development to “the seed and the earth”, each giving to and taking from the other in order to thrive.18 Hindi has thus grown from the hearts of the people, “not only as the profound voice of saints and seekers, but also as the language of practical communication in the bazaars and marketplaces”.19 Mahadevi thus sees Hindi as a language that cuts across class and caste boundaries. She is able to reflect such a politics in her poetry in an unpretentious manner precisely because, as Kailashchandra Bhatiya, a noted Hindi scholar, suggests, “She did not live apart from the common folk (lok)”.20 As such, “village (gramin) vocabulary has found its way [in her writings] in an unaffected and unforced manner”.21 For these very reasons, and also because of her nonpolemical stance with respect to Muslims and Urdu, words like bandikhana (prison) and dagh (wound)—words explicitly of the Persian–Arabic lexis—find their way with equal ease into her poems like “Naka-pyar” from Nihar.22