Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and Nation
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Chapter :  Editor’s Introduction
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different issues, the latter being the sole criterion on which to evaluate the merits of a poet. In other words, what marked poetry as “good” had little to do with whether or not the poem harboured a political agenda, but depended on the talent of the poet in playing with language, meaning, and tropes to express subjective experience.42 In the introductory essay to her collection of poetry in the series entitled Adhunik Kavi (Modern Poet), Mahadevi suggested that the ideals of progressivism were not incompatible with the aesthetics of Chhayavad.43 She explores the contours of artistic expression in the following manner:

Today’s rational age demands that the poet depict reality without colouring it with his feelings, but there is no place for this kind of realism within the realm of art…[It is the realm of] the mediocre artist, who, carefully setting down every line in just the right place, exerts himself to reproduce on paper an exact replica of the object he is drawing, and ends up creating a fully realistic picture that is devoid of any power to move us…The great artist, however, is one who can grasp at once what is most poignant about his subject and, in a few bold lines,…reveal its very soul.44

According to Mahadevi, the artist’s task is not to spell out in detail the problems of society in his or her creative expression, but rather to come to terms with the relationship of the individual’s transformation within the ever-changing landscape of society. Her critique of the PWA position with respect to Chhayavad, then, remained grounded in her belief about poetry’s ability to be subtle.

Mahadevi was not alone in her views about Chhayavad and its place in the Hindi poetic tradition. According to David Rubin, the move towards the subjective (inward, reflective) from the conventional descriptions of nature and landscape typical of Braj Bhasha poetry was in and of itself a marked shift in Hindi literature. This shift, according to Rubin, was:

extremely significant because for the first time in Hindi literature high value was attributed to the individual experience, to purely personal emotions, to the assertion of individuality for its own sake as a basis of art. The individual was to be important not only