| Chapter : | Editor’s Introduction |
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move that other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers were also making.
In her poems, beginning with her very first collection, Nihar (Mist), Mahadevi brings to light what women’s emancipation would look like if they were truly free to choose their own destinies. As for women’s sexual autonomy, Mahadevi explored its multiple possibilities in the pages of her poems. While her earlier books of poetry sought to bring to light either her own subjective experiences of love and longing or the relationship between two lovers, her later works (with notable exceptions) delve into more abstract depictions of the nature of love. As such, over time her metaphors became more universal in their vision and scope. But this is not to say that the passion that fuelled her poetic vision for thirty some years diminished over time. Rather, as she matured as a woman and as a poet, her social commitment to the nation became a more pressing need, and as such she had to cast that passion into a new mould, that of prose.
The themes with which Mahadevi engaged in her prose works are diverse and range from the question of women’s education to socio-literary criticism. One essay in particular, “Mere Bachpan Ke Din” (My Childhood Days), synthesizes many of these themes. “Mere Bachpan Ke Din” describes a deep sense of loss—of community, history, and childhood innocence—and is written in a self-reflective tone and voice. As she traces the contours of how Hindi came into her family and how cross cultural her childhood experiences seemed, Mahadevi reflects on the impossibility of such visions in her present environment and social circumstances in post-independence India. Mahadevi suggests that her memories of her childhood seem particularly strange to her when she recounts them as they appear to have taken place in a dream world.15
The two key features of this essay that strike the reader are, first, the manner in which Mahadevi is able to first, re-create and make palpable the emotions associated with teenage naïveté, and, second, the discretion and ease with which she traverses the difficult questions of language and religio-ethnic politics, emotions that are impossible to convey in a nonpatronising tone unless one is confident and comfortable that