| Chapter : | Editor’s Introduction |
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historicity. The difference in voice between her prose and poetry is that in her poetry, the radicalness of her message is couched in the language of metaphor and tradition. But she complicates matters further through her experimentation with prose-sketches, a new phenomenon for the Hindi literature of her time, because it is in these sketches that she explores the psychological and social aspects of women’s experience—the abuses they suffer at the hands of mothers-in-law and stepmothers, widowhood, child marriage, and so forth. There is no room for this type of “realism” in her poetry.37
However, I suggest that Mahadevi as virahini takes pleasure in distancing herself from wifehood and familial confines, not because she is fundamentally opposed to the institution of marriage, but because she realizes her individual longings best in the projection of a desired, absolute union with her lover. As she puts it in her essay “Ghar Aur Bahar” (Home and World):
What Mahadevi sets up here is the space outside of marriage for women to be self-sufficient, namely education. The isolation she felt as a writer, her longing for companionship, and her profound commitment to women’s empowerment, all aspects of her own experience as a woman in the early twentieth century, find grounding in her virahini trope.