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

Ki Rekhayen (Memory Lines), Mahadevi describes her encounters with poor villagers and children, some of whom she met through her participation in these bathing rites.⁹ But all of this would come much later in her life, when she had matured both as a woman and as a writer.

When Mahadevi arrived in Allahabad in 1918 to attend Crosthwaite Girls College, she was a young girl of sixteen years. Even at this young age, Mahadevi began writing poetry in Braj Bhasha, a language to which she was personally drawn, in part because of her mother’s love for the songs of Mirabai, a female poet-saint of the sixteenth century. She later experimented with Khari Boli Hindi, due largely to the influence of her poet friend and college roommate, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan (1904–1948). Of the three other Chhayavad poets, Mahadevi was most familiar with the poetry of Sumitranandan Pant because he was a resident of Allahabad and was gaining popularity as a poet in student circles.¹⁰ With the publication of Prasad’s Ansu (Tears, 1926), Pant’s Pallav (Leaves, 1926), and Nirala’s Parimal (Fragrance, 1930), each of these writers marked their place in the literary public sphere of Hindi; it was only later that they became identified collectively as leaders of the Chhayavad movement. Mahadevi, being the only woman in the Chhayavad group, brought to it a new voice and poetic sensibility. She found resonances within this movement insofar as she was able to see within it—although I do not believe it was intentional at first—possible spaces for the articulation of women’s subjectivities and experiences, something that had not hitherto happened in so personal a way in Hindi literature.

Mahadevi’s five anthologies of poetry were published between 1930 and 1942, beginning with Nihar (Mist) in 1930. The poems in this collection, written mostly between 1927 and 1930, reflect her subjective mental state, that of a young woman trying to find a balance between following her heart and meeting her social and familial responsibilities at the same time. After all, she was supposed to fulfil her marital commitment by moving in with her husband when her education was completed. When her second collection of poetry, Rashmi (A Ray of Light), appeared in 1932, she was compared to the sixteenth-century poet-saint Mirabai by those who thought that Mahadevi’s poetry explored the