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

While Mahadevi valorises Tulsidas, Surdas, Kalidas, and other such writers from the “Hindu” literary canon, her concluding remarks on “unity” and “harmony” for the new generation makes clear that her vision for the future of India and her definition of culture cannot be interpreted through the present-day rhetoric of the religious right but rather must be seen as part of her broader universalist vision—something that she cultivated and explored with sensitivity in her poetry as well.

In her poetry, Mahadevi explores issues of female sexual desire and women’s emancipation through the strategic use of both traditional Sanskrit and Persian–Arabic poetic tropes. Even if her choice of language for writing is Hindi, she draws freely from the Vedas and the Upanishads as well as from Urdu poetic tropes, but reconfigures them in order to express her own engagement with these traditions. Archetypal tropes from Urdu poetry, such as the “moth and the flame” and “the nightingale and the rose” (to name just two of the most popular ones), are deployed but are recast in a new form in her poems, just as she plays with the trope of the virahini.³⁶ In her critical essays, in particular the ones that she wrote for the journal Chand between 1932 and 1936, Mahadevi struck against established traditions of gender oppression, while drawing support for her arguments from an imagined and deliberately constructed past. This lack of historic specificity and the fluidity of time in Mahadevi’s essays confound the modern-day reader precisely because her commitment to women’s emancipation (as seen in her Gandhian “constructive work” with village women) was based on historically specific, sociological strategies for the erasure of women’s subjugation. In her writings, however, time remains a fluid concept.

The past, the present, and the future blend together in her poetry without the slightest hint of incongruity or awkwardness. This is possible because she builds on “tradition” and established literary conventions to make her point. In prose, on the other hand, a nostalgic harking back to the past, to tradition, and to times gone by creates problems of