1. The original version of this introduction appeared in my doctoral dissertation titled “One Day the Girl Will Return: Feminism, Nation, and Poetry in South Asia”. A revised version of this essay will appear in my forthcoming book Bodies that Remember: Women’s Indigenous Knowledge and Cosmopolitanism in South Asian Poetry, Syracuse University Press.

2. Mahadevi Varma, “Priya! Main Hun Ek Paheli Bhi!” in Mahadevi Sahitya Samagra Vol. 1, ed. Nirmala Jain (Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2000), 214.

3. “The Art of Living”, in Varma, The Links in Our Chain, 144.

4. Varma, “Mere Bachpan Ke Din”, in Mahadevi Sahitya Samagra Vol. 3, ed. Nirmala Jain (Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2000), 418. All translations in the introduction are mine, unless otherwise cited.

5. Karine Schomer, Mahadevi Varma and the Chhayavad Age of Modern Hindi Poetry (Delhi: Oxford University, 1998), 167. Chhayavad period (1918–1938) has been referred to as the Romantic Movement in Hindi literature.

6. Ibid., 23–26.

7. Schomer, Mahadevi Varma and the Chhayavad Age of Modern Hindi Poetry, 206.

8. Ibid., 209. Schomer cites an anecdote about how Varma’s housekeeper protested quite rigorously at the idea of a woman of Varma’s status and position spending one month with villagers on the bank of the Ganga. I would like to add here that the months of January and February, when most of these bathing rituals are held, are the coldest months of the year in northern India, where the state of Uttar Pradesh is situated.

9. Both of these works have been translated into English under the following titles: Mahadevi Varma, Sketches from My Past: Encounters with India’s Oppressed, trans. Neera K. Sohoni (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994) and Mahadevi Varma, A Pilgrimage to the Himalayas and Other Silhouettes from Memory, trans. Radhika Prasad Srivastava and Margaret B. Lillian (London: Peter Owen, 1975).

10. Jayshankar Prasad was then living and writing in Banaras. Nirala resided at first in Calcutta, and later in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.

11. Schomer, Mahadevi Varma and the Chhayavad Age of Modern Hindi Poetry, 241.

12. The Khilafat movement was also very much Gandhi’s child as he managed to win its leadership in 1920. For a detailed analysis of this movement, see