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

and 1938. While they did not intend to do so at first, these poets began to define and create a new aesthetic in Hindi poetry that was influenced by (although not solely based on) the poetic style of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose softness of language and melodious diction found a willing reading public when his Nobel Prize–winning poem Gitanjali (Offerings of Songs, 1913) was translated into Hindi. Tagore’s Gitanjali addressed the theme of love in a tender manner and was infused with compassion. Public debates between Pant and Nirala (two founding poets of Chhayavad) considered the feasibility of applying a Bengali model of diction and metre to Hindi poetry.⁶ As Schomer notes in her study, Nirala was particularly drawn to the ideals of nondualistic Vedantic philosophy as taught by the Ramakrishna Mission of Calcutta, an organization with which he had a long association, much more so than with the devotional spirit of Gitanjali. This was the Allahabad to which Mahadevi came as a young girl.

Reading Mahadevi

In her biography of Mahadevi Varma, Karine Schomer describes Mahadevi’s experiences at the Kumbh Mela in 1966 and her subsequent participation in smaller village bathing festivals. Gatherings like these marked for Mahadevi a concept of India that transcended divisions of class and caste. All the pilgrims lived in tents, and although some tents were fancier than others, one could not escape day-to-day physical and spiritual contact with members of nearby camps. Mahadevi’s speech made during the Kumbh Mela on the platform of the Arya Samaj, an important reformist and nationalist organization, is telling of how she regarded her experience of the Kumbh as a representation of the nation. In her words, “Today, the whole of India is present as a concept on the bank of the Ganges”.⁷ Mahadevi went as far as to set up her own tent on the bank of the river in one of the smaller village bathing festivals (Magh Mela), living there for a little over a month, much to the shock and disgust of her extended family.⁸ In her two collections of prose-sketches, Atit Ke Chalchitra (Moving Pictures of My Past) and Smriti