Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and Nation B ...

What Mahadevi longed for is not merely a union with her lover, but also a coming together of her public and private experiences—her aspirations for doing social service with a personal longing for fulfilment as a woman. In her poetry, she developed her idea of woman’s pleasure and links it to an explicit sexuality that is rooted in the debates of her sociopolitical context. Dissatisfaction, detachment, and suffering become, on the one hand, the wellspring of her creativity, but, on the other hand, they are also expressions of the real consequences of living life alone as a woman and as a writer in a rapidly modernising Allahabad.

In 1942, when she finished the collection of poetry, Dip-shikha (The Lamp-Flame), Mahadevi gave up writing poetry.³⁹ Soon after that, she began to devote herself exclusively to educating young women.

Between Tradition and Feminist Emancipation

By the time Mahadevi moved to Allahabad in 1918, the city was on the threshold of becoming an important literary centre for Hindi. Noted scholars, writers, and poets frequented Allahabad for literary gatherings and meetings where the future of Hindi literature was debated at kavi sammelans (gatherings of poets). Institutional support for Hindi literature was provided by the various literary magazines published in Allahabad, like Saraswati and Chand (two of the better-known journals), and university boarding houses housed and encouraged both poets and their craft.⁴⁰ The popularity of the women’s journals Stri Darpan and Chand, speaks to the manner in which women from middle-class families with close ties to the nationalist movement actively carved out a space in which women’s opinions and voices found a forum—by women and for women. Women’s morality (what would come to stand for the prototypical Indian woman, how she would raise her children) was regulated and mediated by the rhetoric of nationalism in the pages of these journals.⁴¹

While serving as the literary editor for Chand, Mahadevi intervened in the debate between the Progressives and the Chhayavadis by arguing that the subject matter of poetry and the craft of poetry were two